While Reddit is a website whose users are often torn between their best intentions and worst impulses — with the latter often winning out — one of the site's more charming subreddits is r/todayilearned. On TIL, redditors share . . . wait for it . . . things that they've newly discovered that day, and these can range from the highbrow to the lowbrow, serious to frivolous. A few from today's front page:
- TIL Steve Buscemi adamantly refuses to have his famously misaligned teeth fixed and claims he won't work again if they are altered.
- TIL in a private cemetery in small-town Arkansas, a woman single-handedly buried and gave funerals to more than 40 gay men during the height of the AIDS epidemic, when their families wouldn't claim them.
- TIL The original Super Mario Bros game had 256 "Hidden" levels that were only accessible by swapping the game cartridge with a copy of "Tennis" while the game was running.
While this is largely about the joy of trivial knowledge I think there's an important idea underscoring the practice: namely being mindful of our own processes of learning (and specifically, what and where we learn).
Towards that end, and in preparation for the work we'll be doing in the semester's second half, I'd like all of you to log one thing that you learn daily from Monday to Friday of next week. I'll put up a post on our Facebook group and you'll all comment on that post with what you learned. Take note you don't need to go into great detail — basically a headline-style summary is fine — but you need to cite your source (either as a link or just stating what it is). As an example, here's something I learned this morning:
TIL that the US Postal Service Creed ("Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds") is taken from Greek historian Herodotus [source: X-Factor #31 (1988)]
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