For many years we've known about Six Degrees of
Separation: the idea that every person on the planet can
be linked by a chain of just six individuals. Now,
former Scotland Yard criminal intelligence officer
Stevyn Colgan has designed a paper-based wireless device
to do the same thing with facts - a kind of Six Degrees
of Information. Called the Connectoscope, it contains 32
'Investigations' that find a way of linking three
apparently unconnected things, like Elvis, fingerprints
and leprosy. Or dolphins, Dutch courage and the White
Cliffs of Dover. Over the course of these journeys, the
reader will learn what humans taste like to robots, how
a tree became the New York Stock Exchange, why Bob the
Builder has more fingers In Japan than in the UK, who
the patron saint of medical records is, how to make
Superman gay and why the internet weighs the same as a
large strawberry. Colgan sets out to prove that
everything and anything can be connected if you look
hard enough. As this dizzyingly fact-filled book shows,
the fun lies in figuring out how. - Sir Bruce Forsyth
was born before Anne Frank. - Opening credits for The
Sweeney were made by one of the Dambusters aircrew. -
84% of people think they have more friends than they do.
- A third of all marsupial species live in Central and
South America. - In Ecuador in 1967, a brand of foot
powder was elected mayor. - The most complex word in
English language is 'set'. It has 194 different uses. -
Evidence suggests that it may rain diamonds on the
planets Uranus and Neptune. - Hitler really did only
have one ball.
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