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TIL that the Dutch government once enforced a tax in new buildings based on their width, which led to the tall and narrow houses throughout the Netherlands.

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neVdW TIL Ray Bradbury took 9 days to write his novella, The Firemen, in the basement of a UCLA library on a typewriter rented for 10¢/30 minutes. After being urged by his publisher, he returned to the basement, got to work, and expanded his novella into Fahrenheit 451, which also took 9 days to write
Y7yMZ TIL at the Battle of Peleliu in the Pacific during WW2, of the 8 men awarded the Medal of Honor, 6 of them were for throwing themselves atop grenades to save nearby comrades
jNVrn TIL that Roger Boisjoly was an engineer working at NASA in 1986 that predicted that the O-rings on the Challenger would fail and tried to abort the mission but nobody listened to him
XEm7k TIL At Harvard, Native Americans make up almost 2 percent of the student body. Only 67 percent of Native Americans graduate from high school but there are also "more Native American students applying to 12, 15 colleges, including top institutions, and that was never done before”
wodVM TIL of "Kentucky's Most Hated Man" atheist Charles Moore. He was imprisoned for his outspoken opposition to religion and the Bible and for mailing obscene literature about "Free Love", a social movement that accepts all forms of love.