Really Interesting Stuff You Don't Need to Know Volume 2: 1,200 Fascinating Facts

by David Fickes

Do you love trivia and interesting facts? This book has 1,200 of the most fascinating facts you will find anywhere across a wide range of topics. It also includes the who, what, when, where, and why behind them. For example:

There are so many possible sequences when you shuffle a deck of 52 cards that it is statistically likely that a well shuffled deck is in a sequence that has never occurred before and will never occur again. There are 8.07 x 1067 possible sequences for a deck of 52 cards; there are only about 1024 stars in the observable universe.
If you could fold an average thickness (0.004 inch) paper in half 42 times, it would be thick enough to reach the Moon; if you could fold it 103 times, it would be 109 billion light-years thick, thicker than the observable universe is wide.
Camels store water in their bloodstream not in their hump. They can drink up to 20 gallons at a time; the hump is almost all fat and serves as an alternative energy source and helps regulate body temperature. By concentrating fat in the hump as opposed to being spread over their body, they are better able to handle hot climates.
About 12% of people dream entirely in black and white. The exposure to color television seems to have had a significant impact on whether people dream in color; people who grew up with little access to color television dream in black and white about 25% of the time. In the 1940s before color television, the numbers were reversed with about 75% of people reporting they dreamed in black and white.
Mushrooms are more closely related to humans than they are to plants. Animals and fungi branched off from plants about 1.1 billion years ago; later, animals and fungi separated genealogically making mushrooms closer to humans than to plants.
Venus rotates so slowly that you could watch a sunset forever just by walking towards it. At the equator, Venus rotates 4 mph; the Earth rotates 1,038 mph at the equator.
To avoid dating relatives, Iceland has a phone app that lets users bump phones to see if they are related. Iceland has a relatively small population of over 300,000 people and is somewhat insular, so most people are distantly related. The app emits a warning alarm if people are closely related, so they know not to date.
When you read to yourself, your tongue and vocal cords still get movement signals from the brain. The process is known as subvocal speech and is characterized by minuscule movements in the larynx and other muscles involved in the articulation of speech; the movements are undetectable without the aid of machines.
All the gold ever mined in the history of the world would fit in a 67-foot cube.
In traditional vampire folklore, one of their weaknesses is arithmomania, a compulsion to count things. This weakness can be used to defend against them by placing grains of rice or sand out which they will be compelled to count. Therefore, Sesame Street's Count von Count's love of counting is part of being a vampire.

This is book 2 of my Really Interesting Stuff series; I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, look for other books in the series.

138 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 25, 2019

Reviews

[Dan Stern · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, had a hard time putting it down. I see that someone remarked that he had found incorrect information in the book. Truthfully, I did NOT fact check any of it.

I'm a "Jeopardy junkie" and cannot get enough trivia. I love learning about a wide scope of subjects, and, as a result, possess an eclectic range of information. I can talk to anyone about just about every subject on the face of the earth. It makes for many interesting conversations. Try it, you might like it!