pointless statistics
The american amazon site (www.amazon.com) now provides a series of pointless statistics about books. Just look at a books page, if they have analysed it there will be a list of SIPS (statistically improbable phrases) at the top and a "Concordance" and "Text Stats" links under the "Inside This Book" section.
So for instance I now know that Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle has more references to "bad chemicals" than any other book. That 98% of books are easier to read the Faulkner's Absalom Absalom, and that it contains over 132,000 words but only 3000 sentences. That some of the most popular words in Moby Dick are (unsurprisingly) "Ahab", and "whale". And that War and Peace apparently contains more words than any other book (baring in mind they haven't analysed them all yet) and that you get a massive 51,707 words per dollar.
I have no idea what possible use any of this is, but I like that it is there.