x6Zrg TIL about lump-sum taxation in Switzerland: around 4,500 rich foreigners are taxed on their living costs instead of income — bringing in CHF 821 million in 2018. Their global wealth stays private, though rates follow normal Swiss taxes. Seen as unfair, some cantons abolished it.
ep9j5 Today I learned that the country name Bhutan is drived from Bod, endonym of Tibet. The people there call their country Druk yul ("Land of the Thunder Dragon"), the king Druk Gyalpo ("Dragon King"), and the people Drukpa("Dragon People").
VBZj4 TIL that Don LaFontaine, the voice behind the iconic movie trailers, died in 2008. He was best remembered by his now meme worth catchphrase "In a world..."
X0Kjj TIL your bones aren’t just rigid sticks holding you up—they’re alive, constantly reshaping to your habits. Lift weights, they thicken. Sit around, they thin. Wolff’s law proves your skeleton quietly adapts to every stress you put on it, like a biological blacksmith at work.
OGNj7 TIL Boris Becker, Oscar Wilde, James Earl Ray and Gary Glitter all used to live at the same location, although at different times
69Kbm TIL Bruce Lee was so dedicated in his craft as an actor and martial arts star that he had an operation to remove the sweat glands from his armpits because he believed underarm sweat looked unphotogenic on film.
wo7N6 TIL that in 1780, an enslaved woman known as Mum Bet overheard the newly-enacted Massachusetts Constitution being read out, which said "all men are born free and equal". She sued her master as a result. The court ruled this meant slavery was now illegal and awarded her 30 shillings in compensation.
R5Yj9 TIL that the record for snowfall in a single season is held by the Mount Baker Ski Area in Washington, USA. In 1999, it recorded 1,140 inches of snow (95 ft or 29 m)
W7ajd TIL that Diana Ross, although being nominated 13 times, has never won a Grammy award
9w1b7 TIL about the Xi'an Stele. A Chinese-Christian artifact that documents the rise of christianity in china in the VII century
nWPwB TIL that Nobel laureates Richard Kuhn and Wolfgang Pauli were schoolmates from 1910-1918. Kuhn would later win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1938 and Pauli was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1945.
4kZbo TIL that many countries used to divide their currency into sub-units that weren’t powers of 10. Most European countries converted to a decimal system in the 1800s, but many former British colonies didn’t do so until the 1960s and 1970s. The UK and Ireland didn’t decimalize until 1971.