Constable Colgan's Connectoscope

For many years we've known about Six Degrees of Separation: the idea that every person on the planet can be linked by a chain of just six individuals. Now, former Scotland Yard criminal intelligence officer Stevyn Colgan has designed a paper-based wireless device to do the same thing with facts – a kind of Six Degrees of Information.

Called the Connectoscope, it will teach you, among many other things, what humans taste like to robots, why there were bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover, how a tree became the New York Stock Exchange, why Bob the Builder has more fingers In Japan than in the UK, who the patron saint of medical records is, and how to make Superman gay.

Colgan sets out to prove that everything can be connected. As this dizzyingly fact-filled book shows, the fun lies in figuring out how.

Stevyn Colgan joined the police after a drunken bet with his father (also a policeman) on his 18th birthday that he couldn't stay in the force for 6 months. He stayed 30 years. He currently works as a writer on the popular BBC TV series QI and its sister show, The Museum of Curiosity, for BBC Radio 4.

He's written briefing notes for two prime ministers, TV scripts for Gerry Anderson and Doctor Who, helped build dinosaur skeletons for the Natural History Museum and movie monsters for Bruce Willis to shoot at. He's also been set on fire twice, been kissed by Princess Diana once, and Freddie Mercury once wore his helmet.

He is a creative consultant for Left/Field London, a visiting lecturer at a number of UK universities, and has given hundreds of talks across the UK and USA. He was a judge for the 2014 Transmission Awards for the Communication of Ideas.

He stops inordinately frequently for tea.