were distributed equally,
each Finn would have 14% more space
than Heathrow Airport’s shopping area.
Human saliva
contains a painkiller called opiorphin
that is six times more powerful
than morphine.
The average American produces
10,000 gallons of saliva in a lifetime:
about the same amount of water as leaks
from the average American home
in a year.
The platypus and the echidna
are the only mammals
that could make their own custard:
they both lay eggs
and produce milk.
The Chupa Chups logo
was designed by
Salvador Dalí.
4,000 McDonald’s hamburgers
(as many as you could get from one cow)
are eaten every minute.
Every year,
4 million cats
are eaten in Asia.
In 2011, Chinese billionaire Long Liyuan
was murdered at a business lunch
by means of poison in his
slow-boiled
cat-meat
casserole.
When eating jelly babies,
nearly eight out of ten people
bite off the heads first.
More gold is recoverable
from a tonne of personal computers
than from 17 tonnes
of gold ore.
The gold dissolved in the world’s oceans
is estimated to be worth $475 trillion:
about 30 times
the US public debt.
In 1917, John D. Rockefeller
could have paid off
the whole US public debt on his own.
Today, Bill Gates’s entire fortune
would barely cover two months’ interest.
Tyrannosaurus rex (65 million years ago)
is closer in time to us than to
Diplodocus (150 million years ago).
There are about 6,900 languages
in existence but more than
half the world’s population
uses only 20 of them.
In English, the name of every number
shares a letter with each neighbour.
One shares an O with two, which shares a
T with three, which shares an R with four,
which shares an F with five, which shares
an I with six – and so on indefinitely.
Archimedes’ number myriakis-myriostas
periodu myriakis-myriston
arithmon myriai myriades
is one followed by 80 quadrillion zeroes.
In 2010, YouTube was watched
700 billion times, but 99% of the views
were of only 30% of the videos.
In 1900, all the world’s mathematical
knowledge could be written in about
80 books; today it would fill
more than 100,000.
In 2005, the 54 billionaires in Britain
paid only £14.7 million in income tax
between them. Of this,
£9 million came from
James Dyson.
In 2011, only nine of the 62 owners
of apartments in One Hyde Park, London,
the world’s most expensive block of flats,
paid any council tax.
Over 600,000 companies
(including 25 with flats in One Hyde Park)
are registered in the British Virgin Islands
(population 28,882).
In the first month of its life,
a silkworm puts on
10,000 times its birth weight.
A female ferret
will die
if she doesn’t have sex for a year.
A six-inch catfish has
more than
250,000 taste buds.
A full Kindle
weighs a billionth of a billionth
of a gram
more than a brand-new one.
There are over 1,200 species
of bat in the world
and not one of them is blind.
There are 4,800 species
of frog in the world
Eight times as many people belong to
the National Trust
as to the
Conservative, Labour and
Liberal Democrat parties
combined.
Every human being
starts out life as an arsehole:
it’s the first part of the body
to form in the womb.
51% of British women under 50
have never been married:
twice as many as in 1980.
Kanye North and Kanye South
(but not Kanye West)
are parliamentary constituencies
in Botswana.
The animal rights group PETA
claims that cows can suffer humiliation
if people laugh at them.
Wagamama
is Japanese for ‘selfish’.
In 2009, Exxon made $19 billion profit
but received a $156 million
federal tax rebate.
Only 2% of women
describe themselves
as beautiful.
In the 1950s,
3-D films
were known as
‘deepies’.
Loch Ness
is deep enough
and long enough
to contain the entire
population of the world
ten times over.
40% of the electricity in Pakistan
goes missing, half of it stolen:
if there’s a power cut
(which is often),
they just steal the wires.
In 2011, British trains were delayed
by 16,000 hours because of people
stealing metal parts from the railways.
After Einstein died,
his brain was pickled,
sliced into 240 cubes and
left in a box marked ‘Costa Cider’
for 20 years.
Sir Walter Raleigh’s devoted widow
Elizabeth kept his decapitated head
with her in a velvet bag
for 29 years.
Forflitten adj.
Overwhelmed
by unreasonable
and out-of-proportion
scolding.
Forwallowed adj.
Weary with being
tossed about.
Rhinorrhea n.
The medical condition
otherwise known as
‘a runny nose’.
Subitise vb
To perceive the number
of objects in a group
without actually
counting them.
An acrocomic is someone with long hair.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary,
the word hasn’t been used
since it was coined in 1626.
Until now, that is.
The word ‘unfriend’
first appeared in print in 1659.
Berk and charlie (as in ‘a proper charlie’)
are rhyming slang for
‘Berkshire Hunt’ and ‘Charlie Hunt’.
The most popular beers
in Turkmenistan are called
‘Berk’ and ‘Zip’.
As a reward
for winning the part of Harry Potter,
the 11-year-old Daniel Radcliffe
was allowed to stay up
and watch Fawlty Towers.
Durham University
offers a Harry Potter module.
It includes the topic
‘Gryffindor and Slytherin:
prejudice and intolerance in the classroom’.
The word ‘school’
comes from the ancient Greek for
‘free time’.
In particle physics, a ‘barn’ is an area
that covers a billionth of the cross-section
of a silk fibre. It’s called a barn because
In 2010, twice as many Britons died
in accidents in their own homes
as in traffic accidents.
The names Honda and Toyota
derive from Japanese words for
different kinds of rice field.
In French, Hungarian, Spanish,
Irish, Italian, Portuguese,
Latvian, Serbian, Croatian,
Bosnian, Montenegrin and Tagalog,
the words for ‘time’ and ‘weather’
are the same.
Britain
is the windiest country
in Europe.
The Inuit use the same word,
sila, to mean both
‘weather’ and ‘consciousness’.
There are five categories of hurricane.
The slowest outpaces a cheetah;
the fastest beats the world’s
fastest roller coaster
(149 mph).
There are at least 300
earthquakes a year in the UK,
but only 11 people have ever died in one.
There is no known scientific way
of predicting earthquakes.
The most reliable method is
to count the number of missing cats
in the local paper: if it trebles,
an earthquake is imminent.
The amount of water on Earth is constant,
and continually recycled over time:
some of the water you drink
will have passed through
a dinosaur.
95% of the lead
in British army bullets
comes from recycled materials.
A squishop
is a squire
who is also a bishop.
Muammar
is Arabic for ‘long-lived’.
A newborn giant panda weighs
less than a cup of tea.
The CIA reads
up to 5 million tweets a day.
85% of the clicking on web ads
is done by 8% of the people.
Since 2008,
the number of clicks has halved.
The 6-trillionth, 8-trillionth,
9-trillionth and 10-trillionth
digits of pi
are all fives.
Under Chairman Mao,
every Chinese family
was obliged to kill a sparrow a week
to stop them eating all the rice.
The project was ineffective because
sparrows don’t eat rice.
Barley
has twice as many genes as
people.
Scotland
has twice as many giant pandas as
Conservative MPs.
Statistically speaking,
the Vatican has two popes
per square kilometre.
Sending a man to the Moon
and finding Osama Bin Laden
cost the US government
about the same amount of time and money:
ten years and $100 billion.
IMAX projectors weigh as much as hippos.
Their bulbs cost $5 million each
and are bright enough to be seen
from the International Space Station.
The International Space Station
has cost more than 30 times
its own weight in gold.
In 2005,
Americans spent 6 billion hours
filling in tax forms,
at an estimated cost of $265 billion.
Between 1948 and 1998,
20,362 Israelis were killed in wars
and 20,852 were killed on the roads.
The American TV sex therapist
Dr Ruth Westheimer
trained as an Israeli sniper.
Snipur
is Icelandic for ‘clitoris’.
Taking cocaine
increases the chance
of having a heart attack
within the hour
by 2,400%.
Oystercatchers
don’t catch oysters.
Cows carry cowpox
but chickens
don’t carry chickenpox.
Cocks don’t have cocks.
In 97% of bird species,
the males don’t have penises.
The rooster on the Corn Flakes box
is called Cornelius.
They chose a rooster
because the word ceiliog,
Welsh for cockerel,
sounds a bit like Kellogg.
Welsh
has no single words for
‘yes’ or ‘no’.
Russian
has no word for
‘bigot’.
French
has no word for
‘awkward’.
Latin
has no word for
‘interesting’.
Uranium
is 40 times more common
than silver
and 500 times more common
than gold.
In Spanish,
the word esposas
means both
‘wives’ and ‘handcuffs’.
Boghandler
is Danish for
‘bookseller’.
Serbia
is the world’s leading exporter
of raspberries.
In 1956,
there were only 12 cars
on Ibiza.
About half a million mice
live in the London Underground.
The Companies Act (2006)
is the longest act in history;
it is so complex that
most British companies
unwittingly break the law
six times a day.
Per head of population,
Britain has 13 times
as many accountants
as Germany.
The average pencil can write
45,000 words,
or a single line 35 miles long.
Venus rotates so slowly on its axis
that its day is longer than its year.
Until the 1960s,
the only reliable pregnancy test
was to inject a woman’s urine
into a female African clawed frog.
If the woman was pregnant,
the frog would ovulate within 12 hours.
Chemotherapy
is a by-product of the mustard gas
used in the First World War.
The year after
the American Civil War ended,
a fifth of Mississippi’s state budget
was spent on artificial limbs
for wounded soldiers.
More than 90%
of all the blackcurrants
grown in Britain
go into Ribena.
Nutmeg is illegal in Saudi Arabia
because it is hallucinogenic
if consumed in large quantities.
Mushrooms
are more closely related to humans
than to plants.
The first holiday
organised by Thomas Cook
was a temperance outing
in the East Midlands.
Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo
all mean ‘capital’
in their respective languages.
Athens is the only capital city in Europe
where the air is more polluted
outside than inside.
Skoda
is Czech for
‘shame’, ‘damage’ or ‘pity’.
At least 109 journeys
between adjacent London Tube stations
are quicker to walk.