Things you never knew that nobody knows

 "Before Donald Rumsfeld talked about known unknowns, and Disney’s Pocahontas sang about the things you never knew you never knew, there was Confucius.

Quoting the ancient Chinese philosopher in his book Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote “To know that we know what we know and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”

Enter William Hartston, a British chess champion-cum-newspaper columnist, who highlights his own true knowledge in The Things that Nobody Knows: 501 Mysteries of Life, the Universe and Everything, a guide to today’s known unknowns. Written in alphabetical order, it begins with Aardvarks (are they the closest living relative of a creature from which all mammals evolved?) and ends in Zymology, the study of fermentation."
via CultureLab By Wendy Zukerman /continue reading