Download or read book The Perfectly Useless Book of Useless Information written by Don Voorhees and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-05-04 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It doesn't get any more useless than this! The most inconsequential entry yet in the #1 New York Times bestselling series proves that information is overrated. Your life won't be improved by knowing that... ? Frank Sinatra's mother was a convicted felon. ? Bugs Bunny was born in Brooklyn. ? The average American home contains $90 in loose change. ? It is illegal to use the American flag in advertising. And there's no good reason to also discover... ? Which game show host previously worked as a garbageman. ? Which day of week is the most popular to rob a bank. ? Which millionaire loaned his kidnapped grandson ransom money at 4 percent interest. ? Which country once had a dog for a king.

Download or read book The Essential Book of Useless Information written by Don Voorhees and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-10-27 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More facts! Less substance! The newest entry in the #1 New York Times bestselling Useless Information series. The useless information never ends in the newest, most crucially meaningless entry in the Useless Information series. This latest cornucopia of amazingly pointless facts and figures will have trivia buffs marveling at all the things they never needed to know.

Download or read book The Super Book of Useless Information written by Don Voorhees and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faster than a speeding bullet, more useless than ever before. The #1 New York Times bestselling series reaches new heights of irrelevance with this powerfully pointless, all-new collection of the things you never need to know. Do you actually care that... there are three feet of DNA in every cell? Saturn has 47 moons? March is National Frozen Foods Month? in 2010 a traffic jam in China lasted ten days? Would it improve your life to know... which movie star wanted to be a funeral director? which state has the most horses per square mile? which dictator was obsessed with Cheetos? what day of the year the most cars are stolen in the United States?

Download or read book The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge written by Abraham Flexner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A short, provocative book about why "useless" science often leads to humanity's greatest technological breakthroughs A forty-year tightening of funding for scientific research has meant that resources are increasingly directed toward applied or practical outcomes, with the intent of creating products of immediate value. In such a scenario, it makes sense to focus on the most identifiable and urgent problems, right? Actually, it doesn't. In his classic essay "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge," Abraham Flexner, the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the man who helped bring Albert Einstein to the United States, describes a great paradox of scientific research. The search for answers to deep questions, motivated solely by curiosity and without concern for applications, often leads not only to the greatest scientific discoveries but also to the most revolutionary technological breakthroughs. In short, no quantum mechanics, no computer chips. This brief book includes Flexner's timeless 1939 essay alongside a new companion essay by Robbert Dijkgraaf, the Institute's current director, in which he shows that Flexner's defense of the value of "the unobstructed pursuit of useless knowledge" may be even more relevant today than it was in the early twentieth century. Dijkgraaf describes how basic research has led to major transformations in the past century and explains why it is an essential precondition of innovation and the first step in social and cultural change. He makes the case that society can achieve deeper understanding and practical progress today and tomorrow only by truly valuing and substantially funding the curiosity-driven "pursuit of useless knowledge" in both the sciences and the humanities.

Download or read book Children s Miscellany written by Samantha Borges and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2012-07-06 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do you know . . . . . . how to milk a cow? . . . the symptoms of a venomous spider's bite? . . . where to find the fastest rollercoasters? You won't find such an eclectic collection of fascinating facts anywhere else. Whether you want to know how to beat an alligator in a fight, ways to speak in secret code, which insects are edible, or what the heck scolionophobia means, this is the book for readers both young and old.

Download or read book The Incredible Book of Useless Information written by Don Voorhees and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times bestselling series continues to delight and astound with an all-new collection of surprisingly unnecessary facts and figures. Would it surprise you to learn… •it takes a sloth about a month to digest a meal? •more tourists visit France than any other nation in the world? •the United States still has debt from the Revolutionary War? Do you think you ever need to know… •what type of trees are most frequently struck by lightning? •how much a clerk was paid for penning the U.S. Constitution? •which celebrity uses the pseudonym Slappy White?

Download or read book The Children s Miscellany written by and published by . This book was released on 1788 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Children s Miscellany Too written by Matthew Morgan and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2012-07-06 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do you know... ...how to hypnotize a chicken? ...why the sky is blue? ...which animals are most commonly named "Jaws"? ...how to make invisible ink? ...where to find the town of Ding Dong? ...how to turn your watch into a compass? ...what you get when you cross a vampire and a snowman? Find out, in this essential collection of the smart, the silly, and the strange. You won't find such a collection of bizarre knowledge and fascinating facts anywhere else. Whether you want to know how to talk to foreign animals, what to do if zombies attack, when to eat jellyfish, what a cryptid is, or how to be a phrenologist, this book is for you.

Download or read book The Indispensable Book of Useless Information written by Don Voorhees and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-05-03 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nothing you'll ever need to know is in this book The #1 New York Times bestselling series continues to prove that there are plenty of things in this world no one needs to know about. Why bother learning that... *Poland sells a drink called Fart Juice? *ATMs in Vatican City are in Latin? *a two-year-old learns about ten new words a day? *President George Washington checked out two library books that are now 220 years overdue? Do you really need to know... *how many clocks are in the Pentagon? *which state has towns called Intercourse and Virginville? *what WD-40 stands for? *the state with the fastest drivers?

Download or read book Read This Before Our Next Meeting written by Al Pittampalli and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional meetings are a weapon of mass interruption. Long live the Modern Meeting! The average American office worker spends eleven hours in meetings every week. Yet all that time sitting around a conference table hasn’t made us more productive. If anything, meetings have made work worse. Traditional meetings reduce efficiency, kill urgency, and breed compromise and complacency. Worst of all, our dysfunctional meeting culture changes how we focus, what we focus on, and what decisions we make. But there is a solution, a way to have fewer, shorter, more purposeful meetings. It’s called the Modern Meeting Standard. By following its eight simple but radical principles you may never have to attend a useless meeting again. Read This Before Our Next Meeting is the call to action you (and your boss) need.

Download or read book The Usefulness of the Useless written by Nuccio Ordine and published by Paul Dry Books. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A little masterpiece of originality and clarity.”—George Steiner “A necessary book.”—Roberto Saviano “A wonderful little book that will delight you.”—François Busnel International Best Seller / Now in English for the First Time In this thought-provoking and extremely timely work, Nuccio Ordine convincingly argues for the utility of useless knowledge and against the contemporary fixation on utilitarianism—for the fundamental importance of the liberal arts and against the damage caused by their neglect. Inspired by the reflections of great philosophers and writers (e.g., Plato, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Borges, and Calvino), Ordine reveals how the obsession for material goods and the cult of utility ultimately wither the spirit, jeopardizing not only schools and universities, art, and creativity, but also our most fundamental values—human dignity, love, and truth. Also included is Abraham Flexner’s 1939 essay “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge,” which originally prompted Ordine to write this book. Flexner—a founder and the first director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton—offers an impassioned defense of curiosity-driven research and learning.

Download or read book The Best Book of Useless Information Ever written by Noel Botham and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the creators of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Book of Useless Information comes another enlightening, entertaining, and ultimately useless assortment of trivia. If you find yourself transfixed by the most trivial of trivia, or mesmerized by the most minor of minutiae, The Useless Information Society's latest findings can satisfy your every need. This wide-ranging collection will fill every nook and cranny of your brain with information you'll surely never need, but will enjoy learning anyway! Did you know... - that penguins can jump six feet out of the water? - that everyone is color-blind at birth? Would you care to know... - what the first meal eaten on the moon was? - what country drinks the most Coca-Cola? (Hint: It's not the United States.) In 1995, a secret society was formed comprising Britain's foremost thinkers, writers, and artists to trade and share in useless information (or, as founding member Keith Waterhouse, playwright and journalist, would have it, "totally bloody useless").

Download or read book What Will Be written by Michael L. Dertouzos and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Dertouzos has been an insightful commentator and an active participant in the creation of the Information Age.Now, in What Will Be, he offers a thought-provoking and entertaining vision of the world of the next decade -- and of the next century. Dertouzos examines the impact that the following new technologies and challenges will have on our lives as the Information Revolution progresses: all the music, film and text ever produced will be available on-demand in our own homes your "bodynet" will let you make phone calls, check email and pay bills as you walk down the street advances in telecommunication will radically alter the role of face-to-face contact in our lives global disparities in infrastructure will widen the gap between rich and poor surgical mini-robots and online care will change the practice of medicine as we know it. Detailed, accessible and visionary, What Will Be is essential for Information Age revolutionaries and technological neophytes alike.

Download or read book The Last House on Needless Street written by Catriona Ward and published by Tor Nightfire. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The buzz...is real. I've read it and was blown away. It's a true nerve-shredder that keeps its mind-blowing secrets to the very end." —Stephen King Winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel! A World Fantasy Award Finalist! An Indie Next Pick! A LibraryReads Top 10 Pick! A Library Journal Editors' Pick! STARRED reviews from Library Journal and Publishers Weekly! Named one of the "50 Best Horror Books of All Time" by Esquire! "Brilliant....[a] deeply frightening deconstruction of the illusion of the self." —The New York Times Catriona Ward's The Last House on Needless Street is a shocking and immersive read perfect for fans of Gone Girl and The Haunting of Hill House. In a boarded-up house on a dead-end street at the edge of the wild Washington woods lives a family of three. A teenage girl who isn’t allowed outside, not after last time. A man who drinks alone in front of his TV, trying to ignore the gaps in his memory. And a house cat who loves napping and reading the Bible. An unspeakable secret binds them together, but when a new neighbor moves in next door, what is buried out among the birch trees may come back to haunt them all. “The new face of literary dark fiction.” —Sarah Pinborough At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Download or read book The Book of Royal Useless Information written by Noel BothaM & Bruce Montague and published by Kings Road Publishing. This book was released on 2012-02-23 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Continuing the sensational success of the Useless Information Series, the Official Useless Information Society brings you another essential compendium of everything you never needed but always wanted to know. A celebration of the Queens Diamond Jubilee this amazing volume contains all things royal such as: The popular misconception that the royal family cannot vote in political elections. It is only the Queen, herself, who is not allowed to vote. Other members of the family merely choose not to; • The Queen learned to drive in 1945 when she joined the wartime army but has never held a driving license; On the occasion of the Duke of Edinburgh's birthday, a Royal gun salute is fired, and the Union Jack is flown on government buildings from 8am until sunset; Lord Mountbatten, Prince Charles's uncle, tried to arrange a betrothal between his own grand-daughter, Amanda Knatchbull and Charles. Amanda's father and Prince Philip did not approve and put a stop to it; Harry has two secretaries to handle his fan-mail, which invariably comes from teenage girls asking him for a date. Hopefuls should be made aware that no royal contender may be adopted, divorced, Catholic or born of unmarried parents. In Tudor times Catholics were forbidden from living within 10 miles of the throne.

Download or read book The Dangerous Book for Boys written by Conn Iggulden and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2007-05-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling book for every boy from eight to eighty, covering essential boyhood skills such as building tree houses*, learning how to fish, finding true north, and even answering the age old question of what the big deal with girls is. In this digital age there is still a place for knots, skimming stones and stories of incredible courage. This book recaptures Sunday afternoons, stimulates curiosity, and makes for great father-son activities. The brothers Conn and Hal have put together a wonderful collection of all things that make being young or young at heart fun—building go-carts and electromagnets, identifying insects and spiders, and flying the world's best paper airplanes. The completely revised American Edition includes: The Greatest Paper Airplane in the World The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World The Five Knots Every Boy Should Know Stickball Slingshots Fossils Building a Treehouse* Making a Bow and Arrow Fishing (revised with US Fish) Timers and Tripwires Baseball's "Most Valuable Players" Famous Battles-Including Lexington and Concord, The Alamo, and Gettysburg Spies-Codes and Ciphers Making a Go-Cart Navajo Code Talkers' Dictionary Girls Cloud Formations The States of the U.S. Mountains of the U.S. Navigation The Declaration of Independence Skimming Stones Making a Periscope The Ten Commandments Common US Trees Timeline of American History * For more information on building treehouses, visit www.treehouse-books.com and www.stilesdesigns.com or see "Treehouses You Can Actually Build" by David Stiles

Download or read book Why I Write written by George Orwell and published by Renard Press Ltd. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times