It's a strange thing, but one that seems universally true: offer people a good fact, joke or story and they'll press it on the next 10 people they meet. In evolutionary terms, this is rather encouraging. It suggests that we have survived as a species by sharing our precious resources rather than hoarding them like Rolos or old phone chargers. Because although facts don't fill our bellies or pay our bills, they do remind us just how strange and unlikely the world is, and in so doing, operate as an alternative currency, a sort of black market of wonder.
With that in mind the team at QI have taken to gathering our favourites together annually. The latest offering, 1,339 QI Facts to Make Your Jaw Drop, offers an unbeatable 9.12% uplift on last year's volume, with enough polished nuggets of unlikely information to fill 130 boxes of crackers. There are the straight-down-the-line "wow!" statistics (A pint of milk in a supermarket can contain milk from more than 1,000 cows; only 5% of the world's population has ever been on an aeroplane; in the first quarter of 2012, Apple sold more iPhones than there were babies born in the world), some unlikely connections (Mo Farah, Sir Roger Bannister, Sir Chris Hoy, Jason Kenny and Sir Steve Redgrave were all born on 23 March; JRR Tolkien and Adolf Hitler both fought at the battle of the Somme; the first private detective agency was started by a criminal), and some wonderful walk-on parts by humans (Enid Blyton played tennis in the nude) and animals (fruit bats enjoy fellatio).
These are good, but they aren't my favourites. The real pleasure in compiling a book like this is the cumulative effect of facts arranged in close proximity. It's shocking to learn that a "heart attack" is a modern phenomenon not recorded until 1925. But add to that the fact that the human heart is not on the left-hand side of the body, but in the middle, and we're in a familiar QI no-man's land where nothing we were taught at school seems to stand up to scrutiny. And even more extraordinary is the next revelation on page 43: each time a fertile man's heart beats, he makes 1,500 new sperm. Yes, gentlemen, if it takes you 10 minutes to read this article, you'll end it 1.2 million sperm to the good. Use them wisely.
Other favourite segues include the leap from this improbable statistic: after just four moves in a game of chess, there are 318,979,564,000 possibilities for the layout of the board, to this unlikely meeting: the 1978 chess final at HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs was between Moors murderer Ian Brady and disgraced MP John Stonehouse. And what about the discovery that cockroaches first appeared appeared 120 million years before the dinosaurs, whereas the Himalayas were formed 25 million years after the last dinosaur died out. That puts geological and biological time into a new and revealing perspective – but isn't as unnerving as the discovery that if a cockroach touches a person, it immediately runs away and washes itself. I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here must be almost as unwatchable for cockroaches as it is for sentient humans.
As well as astonishments, the book is full of surprises. Who knew "dogging" meant "jogging with a dog" in German, that Vikings had a word for "uneasiness after debauchery" (kvweis) or that according to the official Velcro website there is no such thing as Velcro (its name is "hook and eye fastener" and its one of many Velcro™ products, thank you very much)?
And from surprise it's a small leap to frivolity. Such as the revelation that in the 2009 Star Trek film, Zachary Quinto could only manage the Vulcan salute after his fingers were glued together. Or that the craggy Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl once spent hours waiting for a taxi at the BBC only to find that the driver had been there all along, waiting for "four Airedales".
If you think this is just one more manifestation of a modern obsession with trivia, or an inability to deal with the deep seriousness of life, bear in mind that such list-making has a long and noble pedigree. As Galileo himself once wrote: "Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty."
John Mitchinson is head of research for the quiz show QI and co-author of 1,339 QI Facts to Make Your Jaw Drop, published by Faber
