In fact

On average, London's commuters get wet just 12 times a year. [Transport for London]

Asians make up 35 per cent of the undergraduate body at MIT, but only 4 per cent of the US population. [New York Review of Books, 3rd November 2005]

The human spine flexes 100m times in 50-60 years. [Sydney Morning Herald, 13th October 2005]

America's prison population is higher than China's. [Crooked Timber]

In the 1930s, the Inland Revenue investigated Yeats's tax returns because they could not believe a poet of his stature had sales that were so small. [John Banville, interviewed in The Guardian, 13th October 2005]

Protestants make up 15 per cent of the population of Latin America—up from 3 per cent in just ten years. The Catholic proportion has dropped from 80 to 70 per cent. [The Economist, 29th October 2005]

The annual budget of the World Health Organisation is $1.65bn. Since 2000, the (Bill and Melinda) Gates Foundation has spent $6bn on health issues in the third world. [New Yorker, 24th October 2005]

Tate Modern attracts over three times as many visitors as the Pompidou Centre. [The Guardian, 18th October 2005]

Lauren Bacall and Shimon Peres are first cousins. [Jewish Bulletin, 16th May 2003]

In his first five years as president, George W Bush has increased federal spending by 35.2 per cent. This beats LBJ (25.2 per cent), Reagan (11.9), Clinton (8.2) and Nixon (16.5). [Reason, 12th October 2005]

An average 68 American troops have died each month in Iraq since the invasion in 2003. This death rate is lower than any other major conflict in American history, other than the 18th-century revolutionary war. [Andrew Sullivan]