The Second Book of General Ignorance (2 page)
Read The Second Book of General Ignorance Online
Authors: John Lloyd,John Mitchinson
‘But surely, Stephen,’ you say, in that
way
of yours, ‘QI and General Ignorance and all that they are or hope to be represent nothing more than the triumphant distillation of Gradgrindery, fact-dweebiness, trivia-hoarding and information-hugging. The world of noble ideas falls before your world of grinding facts. Facts are the abrasive touchstones on which we test the validity of concepts! Surely, Stephen. Surely, surely, surely! I’m right, aren’t I? Aren’t I? Oh
do
say I am!’
Well now, bless you and shush and oh you dear things. Calm yourselves and sit down in a semicircle on the play mat while we think about this.
I know it must seem sometimes that QI is a nerd’s charter that encourages boring dorks to vomit undigested boluses of fibrous factoid. QI and its volumes of General Ignorance might appear to some to be nothing more than provisioners of ammunition for tiresome gainsaying did-you-knowers and tedious trotters out of turgid trivia. But look beneath the surface and I hope you will agree that the volume that you hold in your delicate hands is in truth a
celebration
, a celebration of the greatest human quality there is. Curiosity. Curiosity has wrongly, by those with a vested interest in ignorance and their own revealed truths, been traduced and eternally characterised as a dangerous felicide, but you, dearest of dear, dear readers, know that Curiosity lights the way to glory.
Let us put it another way: the
lack
of curiosity is the Dementor that sucks all hope, joy, possibility and beauty out of the world. The dull torpid acedia that does not care to find out, that has no hunger and thirst for input, understanding and connection will desertify the human landscape and land our descendants squarely in the soup.
Do we want our species to make its way, foreheads thrust out, knuckles grazing the ground, into a barren of tedium and brutish unquestioning blindness, or do we want to skip through the world filled with wonder, curiosity and an appetite for discovery?
This screamingly overwrought preface that is even now embarrassing you to the encrimsoning roots of your scalp, is called
Forethought
in honour of Prometheus, the greatest of the Titans of Greek mythology. Prometheus, whose brother Atlas was busy holding up the world, looked at us poor newly made humans and loved us and felt sorry that we were animals so close to gods yet still lacking …
something …
Prometheus climbed up Olympus and stole that something from the gods, bringing it down carefully preserved in a fennel stalk. It was fire. Fire that gave us technology, but more than that, it was
iskra,
the spark, the divine fire, the quality that drove us to
know
. The fire that allowed us to rise up on a level with the gods.
The Greeks rightly understood that if there
were
such creatures as gods, they were (it is self-evident) capricious, inconsistent, unjust, jealous and mean. And indeed Zeus, their king, was outraged that Prometheus, one of their own, had given humans great creating fire. He punished the Titan by chaining him to the Caucasus mountains. Every day an eagle (or vultures depending on your source) came to peck out his liver, which (Prometheus being an immortal) grew back each night. This eternal torture he underwent for humans, that we might, each one of us, have the divine spark, the immortal fire that drives us to ask Why? Who? When? What? Where? and How?
The name Prometheus means Forethought. We can repay him his daily agony by being, every day, curious, wondering and entirely on fire.
I adore you widely.
John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
When we compiled the original Book of General Ignorance in 2006 – aided by the doughty and indefatigable QI Elves – we laboured under the misconception that we might have mined the Mountain of Ignorance to exhaustion, depleting its resources forever.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Four years on, four series later, there is so much more ignorance available that we’ve had to deliberately cull it in order to make this
Second Book of General Ignorance
tolerably portable.
We hope you’ll have as much fun reading it as we’ve had putting it together.
It is a wonderful thing that we, ‘The Two Johnnies’ (aged 58 and 47 respectively) can honestly say that we genuinely do ‘learn something new every day’.
Thank you for allowing us to do that.
OF
GENERAL IGNORANCE
Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.
Will Rogers (1879–1935)
We don’t know his name but he beat the Wright Brothers to it by fifty years.
He worked for Sir George Cayley (1773–1857), an aristocratic Yorkshireman and pioneer of aeronautics, who carried out the first truly scientific study of how birds fly. Cayley correctly described the principles of ‘lift, drag and thrust’ that govern flight and this led him to build a series of prototype flying machines. His early attempts with flapping wings (powered by steam and gunpowder engines) failed, so he turned his attention to gliders instead.
In 1804 he demonstrated the world’s first model glider and, five years later, tested a full-sized version – but without a pilot. More than three decades passed before he finally felt ready to trust his ‘governable parachute’ with a human passenger. In 1853, at Brompton Dale near Scarborough, the intrepid baronet persuaded his reluctant coachman to steer the contraption across the valley. It was this anonymous employee who became the first human ever to fly in a heavier-than-air machine.
The coachman, so the story goes, was not impressed. He handed in his notice as soon as he landed, saying, ‘I was hired to drive, not to fly.’ A modern replica of Cayley’s glider, now on show at the Yorkshire Air Museum, successfully repeated the flight across Brompton Dale in 1974.
But wings weren’t Sir George’s only legacy. With his work on the glider’s landing gear, he literally reinvented the wheel. Needing something light but strong to absorb the aircraft’s impact on landing, he came up with the idea of using wheels
whose spokes were held at tension, rather than being carved from solid wood. These went on to transform the development of the bicycle and the car and are still widely used today.
And that wasn’t all. Cayley was a remarkably prolific inventor, developing self-righting lifeboats, caterpillar tracks for bulldozers, automatic signals for railway crossings and seat belts. Even more remarkably, he offered all these inventions for the public good, without expecting any financial reward.
The Wright Brothers made their famous flights half a century later, in 1903. They were inspired by Cayley and by another unsung hero of aviation, Otto Lilienthal (1848–96), a Prussian known as the ‘Glider King’. He was the first person to fly consistently: in the decade before the Wright Brothers, he made over 2,000 glider flights before falling to his death in 1896. His last words were humble and poignant: ‘Small sacrifices must be made.’
STEPHEN
Who invented the aeroplane?RICH HALL
It’s Orville and Wilbur Wright.**
KLAXON
**
‘The Wright Brothers’PETER SERAFINOWICZ
Is it the Wrong Brothers?
Two.
Octopuses have eight limbs protruding from their bodies, but recent research into how they use them has redefined what they should be called. Octopuses (from the Greek for ‘eight
feet’) are
cephalopods
(Greek for ‘head foot’). They use their back two tentacles to propel themselves along the seabed, leaving the remaining six to be used for feeding. As result, marine biologists now tend to refer to them as animals with two legs and six arms.
An octopus’s tentacles are miraculous organs. They can stiffen to create a temporary elbow joint, or fold up to disguise their owner as a coconut rolling along the sea floor. They also contain two-thirds of the octopus’s brain – about 50 million neurons – the remaining third of which is shaped like a doughnut and located inside its head, or mantle.
Because so much of an octopus’s nervous system is in its extremities, each limb has a high degree of independence. A severed tentacle can continue to crawl around and, in some species, will live for several months. An octopus’s arm (or leg) quite genuinely has a mind of its own.
Each arm on an octopus has two rows of suckers, equipped with taste-buds for identifying food. An octopus tastes everything that it touches. Male octopuses also have a specialised arm in which they keep their sperm. It’s called the hectocotylus and is used for mating. To transfer the sperm, the male puts his arm into a hole in the female’s head. During copulation the hectocotylus usually breaks off, but the male grows a new one the following year.
The way octopuses mate was first described by Aristotle (384–322
BC
) but for over 2,000 years no one believed him. The French zoologist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) rediscovered the process in the nineteenth century and gave the hectocotylus its name. It means ‘a hundred tiny cups’ in Greek.
Genetic variations sometimes cause octopuses to grow more than eight limbs. In 1998 the Shima Marineland Aquarium in Japan had a common octopus on display that had 96 tentacles. It was captured in nearby Matoya Bay in December 1998 but died five months later. The multi-armed
cephalopod managed to lay a batch of eggs before its death. All the offspring hatched with the normal number of arms and legs, but none survived longer than a month.
Octopuses occasionally eat their own arms. This used to be blamed on stress, but is now thought to be caused by a virus that attacks their nervous system.
MEERA SYAL
Do you know how octopuses mate?STEPHEN
Tell, tell.ALAN
With difficulty.MEERA
They mate with their third right arm.ALAN
Do they?MEERA
Yes!CLIVE ANDERSON
We all do that.
That depends.
In many countries, oranges are green – even when ripe – and are sold that way in the shops. The same goes for lemons, mangoes, tangerines and grapefruit.
Oranges are unknown in the wild. They are a cross between tangerines and the pomelo or ‘Chinese grapefruit’ (which is pale green or yellow), and were first grown in South-East Asia. They were green there then, and today they still are. Vietnamese oranges and Thai tangerines are bright green on the outside, and only orange on the inside.
Oranges are subtropical fruit, not tropical ones. The colour of an orange depends on where it grows. In more temperate climes, its green skin turns orange when the weather cools; but
in countries where it’s always hot the chlorophyll is not destroyed and the fruits stay green. Oranges in Honduras, for example, are eaten green at home but artificially ‘oranged’ for export.
To achieve this, they are blasted with ethylene gas, a by-product of the oil industry, whose main use is in the manufacture of plastic. Ethylene is the most widely produced organic compound in the world: 100 million tons of it are made every year. It removes the natural outer green layer of an orange allowing the more familiar colour to show through.
Far and away the world’s largest producer of oranges is Brazil (18 million tons a year), followed by the USA, which grows fewer than half as many. American oranges come from California, Texas and Florida. They were often synthetically dyed until the Food and Drug Administration banned the practice in 1955.
You can’t tell the ripeness of an orange by its colour, no matter where it’s from. If an orange goes unpicked, it can stay on the tree till the next season, during which time fluctuations in temperature can make it turn from green to orange and back to green again without the quality or flavour being affected.
The oranges you see on display in your supermarket certainly
appear
to be completely orange, but you may now start to worry they’ve been gassed. Don’t.
Ethylene is odourless, tasteless and harmless, and many fruits and vegetables give it off naturally after they’re picked. Ethylene producers include apples, melons, tomatoes, avocados and bananas. The gas isn’t bad for you, but it can affect other kinds of fruit and veg – which is why you should keep apples and bananas separate from, say, lemons or carrots (and, of course, oranges).
Ethylene has other uses apart from making plastics (and
detergents and antifreeze) and altering the colour of an orange. If you want to speed up the ripening process of an unripe mango, keep it in a bag with a banana.