› added 10 years ago

144

TIL in 1998 someone pulled an April Fools claiming Alabama had redefined pi to 3.0 to bring it in line with biblical values. Politicians got calls complaining

Read more content.time.com

via reddit.com

6AjX TIL that the U.S. Secret Service cracked down on fake money being used as movie props after an incident in which $1 billion in prop money was blown up during the filming of “Rush Hour 2” in Las Vegas. Some of the bills fluttered into the hands of people who later spent them.
EeGp TIL: When launched in the 1950’s Betty Crocker’s cake mix sales were dismal when first launched, until psychologist Ernest Dichter suggested they remove ‘the barrier of guilt’ of the ease of the recipes, by adding a sense of participation. This was remedied by the instructions to 'add an egg’.
WkJBN TIL for several years a company that kept a database of US IP address locations used a point near the geographical center of the US as the default location when the IP address locations were hidden. As a result a farm in Kansas had been targeted by the FBI, IRS, and angry vigilantes.
LkA7r TIL the Vatican has Astronomical Observatories in Italy and Arizona and were involved with a project to map the stars in the late 1890s
grPa4 TIL that Antarctica used to be a rainforest