What's the point?........

Someone sent me this so I thought I'd share.

What's the Point?
A list of ten things the world could do without.


1. Male Nipples
Beating off stiff competition from underarm hair and wisdom teeth, male nipples sit proudly at the top of our most useless body parts list. We know why men have nipples (find out here), but that doesn’t negate the fact that they serve no practical purpose—they do not, ordinarily, produce milk.

2. Unicycle
As its name suggests, a unicycle is similar to a bicycle but it only has one wheel. The effects of removing a wheel are all negative. Balancing on a unicycle requires much more effort and leads to a much greater likelihood of falling off. Taking away a wheel is also much slower. The maximum speed reached on a unicycle is approximately 35 km/h (22 mph), while Chris Hoy (pictured above) has reached speeds of 70 km/h (40 mph) on his bicycle.

3. Spam
The chances of someone responding to spam is approximately one in 12.5 million. It may be extremely cheap to market a product by sending out junk e-mails, but surely such an enormous failure rate should deter even the most persistent person... Please?

4. Denton railway station
As dead as a station in the Australian outback, the unstaffed railway station in Denton, Manchester has got to be Britain’s most redundant railway stop. One train per week stops at Denton on Saturday mornings. But be warned: Denton is a request stop, so it may be necessary to flag the train down using your arms. To make matters worse, there are no return tickets to Denton—the weekly service runs only in one direction. You can leave, but you won’t be coming back again in a hurry.

5. Four-poster beds
Bedrooms are a relatively modern concept: before the eighteenth century, beds simply stood in the living room, being used as couches by day. Four-poster beds were by-products of this dual function, for they allowed curtains to hang around the bed during the night to keep out draughts and to offer privacy.Needless to say, 21st-century houses come equipped with both bedrooms and insulation, making the four-post element of these beds redundant. Yet they remain popular, with almost all furniture shops offering various forms of curtained, elaborate and ornate four-poster beds.

6. Capital letters
We all know that capital letters indicate the start of each sentence. But why do we need to mark the start of a sentence when the humble full stop has already marked the end? The limited use of capital letters in text speak or in casual emails indicates that capitals are a superfluity to the language, rather than a necessity. In fact, the majority of writing systems—including Georgian, Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese—do not have an upper and lower case system.

7. All the varieties of pasta shapes
Various shapes of pasta have different flavours, textures, cooking times, and each must be used in the appropriate context. Obviously, it’s important to get the right pasta for the right sauce. After all, lasagne wouldn’t be lasagne if it weren’t for those thin layers of baked pasta nestled between the sauce and cheese.However, is there really any point to lasagnette (a narrower version of lasagne) or lasagnotte (a longer version of lasagna)? Or does the average person really care whether they’re eating penne rigate (penne with ridged sides), penne lisce (penne with smooth sides), penne zita (penne with a slightly wider hole), or pennette (penne that is slightly shorter and thinner)? I would hazard a guess at no.

8. The word inflammable
The in- prefix of inflammable means ‘into’, rather than ‘not’, leaving us with two words—flammable and inflammable—with exactly the same meaning. But not only is the word inflammable needless, it is also dangerous. When labelling commercial and industrial products, ‘flammable’ is considered to be the safer choice because of the potentially disastrous consequences of misinterpreting ‘inflammable’. To add to the confusion, the word most frequently used to convey the opposite meaning to flammable is nonflammable, but noninflammable also exists.

9. The SysRq key on your keyboard
The system request key (SysRq), which now shares its place with the Print Screen button, has sat on the top row of keyboards since the very first PCs were made. Way back then, it was included on the keyboard in case anyone wanted to reach the main operating system without interrupting the running software. Nobody ever did. It is a redundant fixture, serving no purpose in Windows or any other operating system.

10. Ties
Ties once served a sociological purpose: archaeological evidence in China suggests that the ancient elite hung fabric around their necks as a means of marking their elevated status. But now that mankind has invented other ways of exhibiting wealth—the Ferrari parked in the driveway, or the penthouse in Park Lane—ties no longer serve such a function. So dangling coloured material from around the neck does what, exactly?
The pointlessness of the tie is perhaps beaten only by that sixteenth-century folly: the neck ruff. At their most extreme, starched ruffs could reach a foot or more in diameter and had to be propped by specially made wires. Fortunately, they fell out of fashion as quickly as they entered it.

Are there any more things you think 'what's the point' of?