› added 4 years ago

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TIL Massachusetts has an optional tax rate when you file taxes (so you can pay more taxes if you wish), and it was originally proposed as a joke. “We were just being sarcastic. The next thing we knew, the legislature seemed to find our sarcasm relevant and so they passed the idea we had."

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7pJb TIL Will Wright, designer of SimCity 2000, said that the game does not actually reticulate splines when generating terrain, and he just inserted the phrase because it “sounded cool.”
XEoB6 TIL John Hathorne was the only judge in the Salem Witch Trials never to apologize for his actions. His great-great grandson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, added a W to his last name to distance himself from him.
7rjZL TIL Jack Foley was so successful in the art of creating sounds for movies that he gave a name to the whole new profession: a foley artist. They specialize in creating sounds that are hard to record during filming.
kOLm4 TIL Klystron (linear beam vacuum tubes used in particle accelerators) comes from the Greek verb klyzo - referring to the action of waves breaking against a shore.
0lAL TIL a Canada couple engaged in a neighbor feud dumped massive piles of fresh cow manure along their property line. A judge found them guilty of using the poop as a tool of harassment and fined them $15,000.