Every second, 200 times more new computers are created than new human beings. Ford has patented a technology to detect bad smells in cars. Until 1873, a daylight hour in Japan was longer in the summer than in the winter.

These are just a few morsels from the 2021 edition of a smorgasbord of trivia that has become an annual end-of-year tradition. It began in 2014, when Tom Whitwell left his high-pressured job in journalism and found himself with more time to indulge his curiosity. At the end of that year he produced a list of "52 things I learned". The list went viral and, seven years on, the tradition is still going strong.

Whitwell's fact foraging has inspired others to produce similar compilations of trivia, from bloggers to the New York Times. Here are fifteen of The Day's favourites:

Why do lists of trivia like this provoke such delight that they are shared all over the internet? According to psychologist John Kounios, the answer lies partly in the pleasure of knowing the answer to challenging questions: "You get a rush or a neurorewardThe prefix neuro means that something relates to the brain. Psychologists describe the pathways in the brain that encourage learning as its reward system. signal or a dopamineA hormone and neurotransmitter that plays several important roles in the brain and body, providing us with positive sensations, rewarding us for evolutionarily good behaviours like eating food. burst."

This is probably the reason why trivia is such big business. The board game Trivial Pursuit has sold roughly 100 million copies worldwide, and quiz games have been a staple of television since the 1950s.

But as the name "trivia" suggests, such facts are generally seen as essentially frivolous fun. Knowing that Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise is not likely to pay the bills or give you profound insights.

On the other hand, some point out, knowledge accumulated for its own sake can turn out to have momentous impacts. The theory of general relativityA theory that was developed by Albert Einstein between 1907 and 1915, which explains gravity and the effect of objects on one another. According to general relativity, the observed gravitational effect between masses results from their warping of spacetime. is used every day in our GPS systems, points out scientist Robert Dijkgraaf, "but it was not the reason Einstein solved it".

Yes: Gathering seemingly useless facts is what leads us to real discovery. Each fact alone might seem useless, but piece by piece, this scattered knowledge builds a better picture of how the world works.

No: There's nothing wrong with enjoying a factoid, some say, but let's not pretend it's anything other than a distraction. Knowledge only really matters when it is helping us answer important questions or solve practical problems.

Or... Not everything we do has to have to be important. Learning for the sake of learning is part of what makes us human. It does not matter if that knowledge has a specific purpose.