BY STEWART SLATER

The internet has not, let us be honest, been an unalloyed blessing. Being able to communicate with almost any individual on the planet is marvellous. Being the target of a Twitter storm is not. Being able to buy almost anything at the click of a button is a boon, but many things are available which should not be, no matter how many buttons one presses. It is, however, Christmas, the season of good cheer. Let us, therefore, focus on one of the internet’s great gifts: the instant access it offers to almost the entirety of human knowledge.

Whereas our ancestors might (if they were literate) have faced the prospect of a long and possibly arduous trip to a library (think The Name of the Rose), we merely need to turn on the screen. Unlike a library, however, which sits there, silently waiting for us to go to it, the internet comes to us, constantly broadcasting information to a greedy if not always receptive public. And so, as a tribute to this transformational achievement, herewith a list of 52 strange, surprising or entertaining things I have learned from a year in front of the fact-spewing fire hydrant that is the world wide web. Who knows, some of them may even be true. It is the internet, after all…

^{(This is not, to be honest, an original idea. I nicked it from here. Consider this, therefore, the very epitome of a 21st century Christmas – a BOGOF deal).}

1. The pyramids were over 500 years old by the time the chicken was domesticated.
2. The “Ship of Theseus” is the posh name for the question, “How many planks on a ship can you change before you have a different boat?” The Wikipedia entry on it has been edited so often since its creation that no phrase from the original version survives, rendering it both an explanation and a demonstration of the phenomenon. (via @depths of wiki)
3. Javier Milei, Argentina’s new President, believes that he first met his late dog, Conan, (whom he had cloned) 2000 years ago when he was a gladiator and it was a lion.
4. Halley’s Comet reached its furthest distance from the sun on December 8 and is now on its way back.
5. With an eye on 2024, the four American states with the most votes in the Electoral College are also the four states with the lowest literacy rates.
6. The population of Monaco (the city) is 104% of the population of Monaco (the country).
7. Some moons have moons themselves. Which are called “moon-moons”.
8. Britain has 4x as many “life coaches” as ambulance drivers.
9. The average turkey in America has grown from 13lbs in 1929 to 30.5lbs in 2019
10. The last 7 Home Secretaries (assuming James Cleverly is still in post when you read this) are, in reverse, order atheist, Buddhist, Jewish, Buddhist (same person), Hindu, Muslim and Christian.
11. At their peak, there were only 52,000 Neanderthals, roughly the population of Reigate.
12. When Yuri Gargarin returned to Earth, he landed in a field hundreds of miles off course, rather surprising the two people farming it. They offered him a horse and cart to get to the nearest phone.
13. Due to the distribution of its residents and the shape of the country, the population centre of Vietnam is in Laos.
14. Before Charles, the last man to deliver a King’s Speech was Gavin Simonds, who as Lord Chancellor gave the final one of George VI’s reign, the king being too ill to do so himself.
15. The only country in the world where men cook more than women is Italy. Italians, therefore, really want to eat like papa used to make it.
16. The “wrap-around” spider (dolophones conifera) can flatten its body to wrap itself around a branch. Fortunately, it is only found in Western Australia.
17. 4% of deaths in Canada in 2022 were a result of euthanasia, making it a bigger cause of death than diabetes and Alzheimer’s combined.
18. In France, you can marry a dead person.
19. One of the main contributors to the reconstruction of Notre Dame is the games company, Ubisoft. Having spent 5,000 hours digitally mapping the old structure for Assassin’s Creed Unity, they had the most detailed understanding of how it had looked.
20. Take any number and, if it is odd, multiply it by three and add one, and if even, divide it by two. If you keep repeating this process, you will eventually reach one. No-one knows why (it is called the Collatz Conjecture) but we know it works for every number with fewer than 186bn digits.
21. The Cricket World Cup took so long you could have run the football World Cup and the Olympics in the same time. Back to back.
22. Accion Ortographica Quito is a vigilante group who roam the streets of Ecuador’s capital correcting the grammar in graffiti.
23. The BBC has not created a new “flagship show” for 17 years.
24. Drug cartels are Mexico’s fifth biggest employer.
25. Oskar Speck was an unemployed electrician in Depression-era Hamburg. Hearing there were jobs available in Cyprus, he resolved to travel there, despite having no money for the fare. Choosing to go by kayak (he was, incidentally, unable to swim), he discovered that he rather enjoyed it, so carried on and, seven years later, got to Australia. Sadly, war had broken out, so he was arrested on the beach as a potential spy.
26. There is no written mention of pasta carbonara before 1950.
27. Alcohol was only banned in shooting competitions in 1965 when Austria’s Herbert Polzhuber turned up at the pistol stage of the pentathlon having consumed 10 beers and a bottle of brandy. He fired all his bullets into the ground and passed out.
28. Michelangelo’s maid was illiterate, so he would draw sketches for her of the things he wanted her to buy at the market.
29. This year, Sepp Kuss became the first man to complete all three of cycling’s Grand Tours and win the last one. For context, he won the equivalent of a race from London to Algeria, having already ridden from Cuba to London.
30. At the end of the Battle of Britain, the RAF had more planes and aircrews than it did at the beginning.
31. The oldest surviving depiction of the crucifixion is thought to be on a gem dating to 170 A.D., currently in the British Museum.
32. Kim Jong Un’s train is so heavily armoured that its top speed is lower than that of a racehorse. Albeit not a racehorse with him on its back.
33. Until 1991, the Paris Metro had a First Class.
34. Precision is impossible but Rome probably lost about 8% of its manpower in a single day at the Battle of Cannae, the equivalent of 1.7mn Brits dying in a single engagement today. It still won the war.
35. Due to its popularity as a language of science, commerce and diplomacy, over 99% of the surviving works in Latin were written in the last millennium.
36. 2023 was the first year since 2001 when none of the top three films at the global box office was a sequel. Two of them were, however, based on toys.
37. The couple in Grant Woods’ American Gothic are father/daughter not husband/wife. (via Wikipedia’s List of Common Misconceptions which, if you’ve read this far, you’ll love).
38. In perhaps the most French death ever, the chef Francois Vatel, who is credited with the invention of creme Chantilly, ran himself through with his sword when a delivery of fish was late. His body was discovered by a servant coming to tell him it had arrived.
39. In 2022, OnlyFans (don’t pretend you don’t know what it is) had gross revenues of $5.55bn. TV rights for the NBA brought in $2.6bn. Some types of bouncing balls are more popular than others…
40. In July, a spotless giraffe, thought to be the only one in the world, was born in a zoo in Tennessee.
41. Tigers are, if you think about it, an odd colour for a jungle-dwelling predator. This is because many animals are red/green colour blind so while they appear orange to us, they are green to their prey.
42. The tiles in the mosaics at the Moorish mosque in Cordoba were made by Christians in Byzantium.
43. Vera Atkins is thought to be the inspiration for Miss Moneypenny. Working for SOE during the war, she dispatched 400 agents to France, losing contact with over 25% of them. After 1945, she dedicated her life to finding out what had happened, tracing 117 out of 118. All had been killed.
44. The clubbing anthem Freed from Desire was written as a Daoist/Buddhist critique of Western consumerism.
45. Britain has twice as much paved road as Brazil.
46. The empty space in the middle of the eight of diamonds forms an eight.
47. Rats are the second most populous mammal on Earth.
48. There is a bonsai tree in the U.S. National Arboretum which was planted in Hiroshima in 1625 and survived the atom bomb.
49. It is a mere stripling compared to the Totteridge Yew which is thought to date to Roman times.
50. Miss Dior was named after Christian’s sister, Catherine, a Resistance heroine who was caught, sent to a concentration camp, tortured and survived.
51. The world’s highest paid parliamentarians (defined as multiples of the median income) are in Brazil, Russia and Italy. None of which is notably well governed.
52. Koalas have fingerprints which are both unique to the individual and almost indistinguishable from humans’.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.