› added 8 years ago

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TIL Edison offered Tesla a salary of $50,000 if he successfully improved DC generation plants. After Tesla succeeded, Edison replied “When you become a full-fledged American you will appreciate an American joke,” and refused to pay him.

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1YnV TIL the bad grammar and spelling errors found in scam emails & phishing attempts from Nigerian princes (etc) is done on purpose; spell checkers are intentionally not used: Research from Microsoft suggests that email scammers maximise profits by entrapping only the most gullible who overlook spelling
e0Jnb TIL that comedian Sid Caesar picked a writers' room of young unknown comics for his hit TV shows in the 50s- including Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon and Woody Allen
aGRJ TIL: If you wrote on your resume or a job application that you were Time magazine’s 2006 person of the year, you would not be lying.
xV9Go TIL that in Kuwait in 1991, ten Iraqi soldiers surrendered to two American journalists that they came across. They were cold and underfed and had buried their guns. They wanted to be taken prisoner so they could get food and water. The journalists obliged and then took them to a Saudi army unit.
PYMQn TIL we have three types of tears - basal, reflex and psychic. Psychic tears, the ones we produce when we are sad, have a different chemical make up than the other two and contain a natural painkiller, leucine enkephalin, which is perhaps why we feel better after we cry.