About book The World's Greatest Book Of Useless Information: If You Thought You Knew All The Things You Didn't Need To Know - Think Again (2009)
The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information is basically a list of disjointed trivia spanning a wide variety of topics. The book seems designed for folks that read on the toilet (60% of the population does this according to the book) since you can pick it up and put it down without losing continuity (since there is no continuity to lose). Some of this useless information is fascinating, some of it is surprising and a surprising amount of it is completely wrong. Unfortunately, the fact checkers were not particularly careful and so we are treated to such old wives tales as water going down the drain counterclockwise in Australia. This is supposed to be due to the coriolis effect, but it’s complete nonsense. The direction water spins down the drain depends on the shape of your sink or toilet and nothing else. That’s just one of many falsehoods found in the book. Here are a few more found within a few pages of one another:A shrimp’s heart is located in its head. False – it’s located in the thorax.Sharks and rays are the only animals known to man that cannot succumb to cancer. False – sharks get cancer (I don't know about rays, but I suspect anything with DNA is subject to the disease).The book is not even internally consistent. On one page we find:The longest fish is the oarfish, which is shaped like an eel. On average, it grows to more than twenty feet in length, but oarfish of forty-six feet have been found. A few pages later:The harmless whale shark holds the title of largest fish with the record being a fifty-nine-footer captured in Thailand in 1919.You’d think a book of information would spend some effort actually getting the facts right, but no, I guess that wasn’t a priority.
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