QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition

by John Lloyd

  W is the width of the paper, L is the length, t is the thickness, and n is the number of folds. The first equation describes folding a piece of paper in half in one direction and then the other, alternately; the second one describes folding it in one direction only.

  The number of possible folds depends on both the length and the thickness of the paper, so you need either a very, very long or a very, very thin piece of it.

  Britney tested her first equation by folding an extremely thin, square sheet of gold foil in half (in alternate directions) twelve times. She then took a single piece of toilet paper 1,200 metres (4,000 feet) long and folded it lengthways, breaking the world records for nine, ten, eleven and twelve folds one after another.

  This doesn’t work for an ordinary A4 sheet of paper. You won’t be able to fold it more than five times, after which it becomes thicker than it is long. With, say, a 3-metre (10-foot) length of loo paper, though, seven folds is easy and eight just about possible, but you won’t be able to do it with your bare hands. Using the alternate folding method, the American TV show Mythbusters managed to fold a piece of paper eleven times, but after eight folds they needed the help of an industrial tarmac roller and a fork lift truck.

  If it were possible to fold a very large piece of paper of standard thickness without restriction, because the thickness of the paper would double each time it was folded, after just fifty-one folds you would have a tower of paper more than 100 million miles high – tall enough to reach from here to the sun.

  Where’s the coolest place in the universe?

  It’s in Finland.

  In 2000, a team from Helsinki University of Technology cooled a piece of rhodium to a tenth of a billionth of a degree above absolute zero (–273°C).

  Rhodium is a rare metal, whose main use is in catalytic converters for cars.

  The next coldest spot is in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003, a team led by Wolfgang Ketterle produced extremely cool sodium gas.

  Ketterle won the Nobel Physics Prize in 2001 for his work on Bose-Einstein condensate, a new state of matter that only exists close to absolute zero. As a child, his interest in science was sparked by playing with Lego.

  These extremely cold temperatures produced in laboratories are remarkable. Even in deep space, the temperature rarely falls below –245 °C.

  The only known exception to this is the Boomerang Nebula, identified by Australian astronomers in 1979. It looks like a boomerang (or possibly a bow tie). At its core is a dying star, three times heavier than our own sun.

  The Boomerang Nebula has been spraying out gas at a speed of 500,000 kph (over 300,000 mph) for the last 1,500 years. Just as our breath cools when we force it through the narrow hole of our mouths, the gas squeezed out of the nebula is two degrees lower than the space it is expanding into. It reaches –271 °C, the lowest natural temperature so far recorded.

  The coldest temperature in the solar system, –235 °C, measured in 1989 by Voyager II on the surface of Triton, one of Neptune’s moons – is barely chilly by comparison; and the coldest temperature ever recorded on earth, –89.2 °C in Antarctica in 1983, is positively tropical.

  Low temperature research is important in the study of superconductors, materials which have zero electrical resistance but which so far have only been found to work at very low temperatures.

  If superconductors can be harnessed they will totally transform the world.

  They will massively increase the power of computers, while hugely reducing the cost of electricity and the emission of greenhouse gases. They will provide fuel-free transport, an alternative way of seeing inside the human body without the use of dangerous X-rays, and the E-bomb – a weapon which destroys the enemy’s electronics without the need to kill anyone.

  PHILL There’s bound to be one scientist … Goes in with the big iron bar one day … [looks around furtively and sticks his tongue to the desk].

  When did the most recent Ice Age end?

  We’re still in it.

  Geographers define an ice age as a period in the Earth’s history when there are polar ice caps. Our current climate is an ‘interglacial’ period. This doesn’t mean ‘between ice ages’. It is used to describe the period within an ice age when the ice retreats because of warmer temperatures.

  ‘Our’ interglacial started 10,000 years ago, in what we think is the Fourth Ice Age.

  When it will end is anyone’s guess; ideas about the duration of the interglacial period range from 12,000 to 50,000 years (without allowing for man-made influences).

  The causes of the fluctuations are not well understood. Possible factors include the position that the land masses happen to be in, the composition of the atmosphere, changes in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun and possibly even the Sun’s own orbit around the galaxy.

  The ‘Little Ice Age’, which began in 1500 and lasted for 300 years, saw the average temperature in northern Europe drop by 1 °C. It also coincided with a period of extremely low sunspot activity, though whether the two were linked is still being argued over.

  During this period, the Arctic ice sheet extended so far south that Eskimos are recorded as reaching Scotland in kayaks on six different occasions and the inhabitants of Orkney had to fight off a disorientated polar bear.

  Recent research at Utrecht University has linked the Little Ice Age with the Black Death.

  The catastrophic decline in population across Europe meant that abandoned farmland was gradually covered by millions of trees. This would have led to a significant absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, forcing the average temperature down in an ‘anti-greenhouse effect’.

  Who lives in igloos?

  Probably no one any more.

  The word ‘igloo’ (or iglu) means ‘house’ in Inuit. Most igloos are made of stone or hide.

  Snow-block igloos were part of the lifestyle of the Thule, the precursors of the Inuit, and were used until fairly recent history in central and eastern Canada.

  But only Canadian Eskimos build igloos from snow. They are completely unknown in Alaska and, according to a 1920s census of 14,000 Eskimos living in Greenland, only 300 had ever seen one. Few remain anywhere today.

  The first igloos seen by Europeans were encountered by Martin Frobisher on Baffin Island in 1576 during his search for the North-West Passage. He was shot in the bottom by an Eskimo. In return, Frobisher’s men killed a few Inuit, captured one of them and took him to London where he was exhibited like an animal.

  In the 1920s, a newspaper in Denver, Colorado erected a snow igloo at the municipal buildings near where some reindeer were kept, and hired an Alaskan Eskimo to explain to visitors that he and the other reindeer herders of Alaska lived in that type of house when they were at home. In fact, he had never seen one before except in the movies.

  In Thule, in north-eastern Greenland, by contrast, the locals were such expert igloo-builders that they built vast halls of ice for dancing, singing and wrestling competitions during the long dark winters.

  The community was so remote that, until the start of the nineteenth century, they believed themselves to be the only people in the world…

  Would you call someone an Eskimo?

  The term ‘Eskimo’ covers a range of distinct groups and is not necessarily (as is sometimes asserted) insulting.

  Eskimo describes those who live in the high Arctic regions of Canada, Alaska and Greenland. Bestowed by Cree and Algonquin Indians, the name has several possible meanings, including ‘one who speaks another language’, ‘one who is from another country’ or ‘one who eats raw meat’.

  In Canada (where the politically correct term is ‘Inuit’), it is regarded as rude to describe someone as an ‘Eskimo’ but Alaskan Eskimos are perfectly happy about it. In fact, many prefer ‘Eskimo’ because they are emphatically not Inuit, a people who live mainly in northern Canada and parts of Greenland.

  To call the Kalaallit in Greenland, the Inuvialuit in Canada and the Inupiat, Yupiget, Yuplit a
nd Alutiit in Alaska ‘Inuit’ is like calling all black people ‘Nigerians’, or all white people ‘German’. The Yupik of south-western Alaska and Siberia don’t even know what the word Inuit means. As it happens, Inuit means ‘the people’; Yupik goes one better: it means ‘real person’.

  The languages of the Eskimo-Aleut family are related to each other but to no other languages on earth.

  Inuit, which is thriving, is spoken in northern Alaska and Canada as well as in Greenland, where it is now the official language and the one used in schools. Also known as Inupiaq or Inuktitut, it has only three vowels and no adjectives. The Inuit language was banned in the USA for seventy years.

  Eskimos buy refrigerators to stop their food from getting too cold and if they need to count to more than twelve, they have to do it in Danish.

  They do not ‘rub noses’ when greeting each other. Most get annoyed at this suggestion. The kunik is a sort of affectionate (rather than sexual) snuffling, mostly practised between mothers and infants but also between spouses.

  In some Eskimo languages the words for ‘kiss’ and ‘smell’ are the same.

  In 1999, Canadian Eskimos were given one-fifth of the land of Canada (the second largest country in the world) as their own territory. Nunavut is one of the world’s newest nation states: it means ‘our land’ in Inuit.

  At five to a car, all the Eskimos in the world could park at Los Angeles International Airport. More people use computers in Iqualuit, capital of Nunavut, than in any other town in Canada. It also has the highest suicide rate of any town in North America.

  The average Eskimo is 1.62 m (5 feet 4 inches) tall with a life expectancy of thirty-nine.

  How many words do Eskimos have for snow?

  No more than four.

  It’s often said that Eskimos have 50, 100 or even 400 words for snow, compared to English’s one, but this is not so. In the first place, there is more than one English word for snow in various states (ice, slush, crust, sleet, hail, snowflakes, powder, etc.).

  Second, most Eskimo groups will admit to only two words equivalent to ‘snow’. It seems that out of all of the languages of Eskimo groups, there are no more than four root-words for snow all together.

  Eskimo-Aleut tongues are agglutinative languages, in which the word ‘word’ itself is virtually meaningless. Adjectival and verbal bits are added in strings on to basic stems, so that many ‘word-clumps’ are more like our equivalent of sentences. In Inupiaq, tikit-qaag-mina-it-ni-ga-a means ‘he (A) said that he (B) would not be able to arrive first’ (literally ‘to arrive first be able would not said him he’).

  The number of basic word stems is relatively small but the number of ways of qualifying them is virtually unlimited. Inuit has more than 400 affixes (bits added at the end or in the middle of stems) but only one prefix. Thus, it has many ‘derived words’ as in the English ‘anti-dis-establish-ment-ari-an-ism’.

  Sometimes these appear to be unnecessarily complicated renderings of what is a simple concept in English. Nalunaarasuar-ta-at (‘that by which one communicates habitually in a hurry’) is an 1880s Greenlandic coinage for ‘telegraph’.

  If you were looking beyond the ‘words for snow’ for something which really sets Eskimo-Aleut languages apart it is demonstrative pronouns.

  English has only four (this, that, these and those). Eskimo-Aleut languages – notably Inupiaq, Yupik and Aleut – have more than thirty such words. Each of the words for ‘this’ and ‘that’ can take eight different cases and there is a wealth of ways of expressing distance, direction, height, visibility and context in a single such demonstrative pronoun.

  For example, in Aleut, hakan means ‘that one high up there’ (as in a bird in the air), qakun is ‘that one in there’ (as in another room) and uman means ‘this one unseen’ (i.e. smelled, heard, felt).

  What did human beings evolve from?

  Not apes. And certainly not monkeys.

  Homo sapiens sapiens and apes both evolved from a common ancestor, though this elusive chappie has not been found yet. He lived in the Pliocene era more than five million years ago.

  This creature descended from squirrel-like tree-shrews, which in turn evolved from hedgehogs, and before that, starfish.

  The latest comparison of genomes of humans and our closest relative, the chimpanzee, shows that we split much later than was previously assumed. This means we quite possibly interbred to produce unrecorded and now extinct hybrid species before the final separation 5.4 million years ago.

  Stephen Jay Gould once remarked that Homo sapiens sapiens is a recent African twig on the bushy tree of human evolution. While none of the evidence completely rules out the evolution of humans in other locations, the spread of humans from Africa remains the most plausible theory.

  Genetic evidence suggests that one of the first populations outside Africa were the Andaman islanders, off the coast of India. They have been isolated for 60,000 years – longer even than the Australian aborigines.

  There are fewer than 400 Andamanese left. Half of these belong to two tribes: the Jarawa and the Sentinelese, who have almost no contact with the outside world. So isolated are the 100 or so Sentinelese that no one has ever studied their language. The other Andamanese languages have no known relatives. They have five numbers: ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘one more’, ‘some more’ and ‘all’. On the other hand, they have twelve words to describe the different stages of ripeness of fruit, two of which are impossible to translate into English.

  The Andamanese are one of only two tribal groups in the world who are not able to make fire (the other are the Ake pygmies of central Africa). Instead they have elaborate procedures for keeping and transporting embers and smouldering logs in clay containers. These have been kept alight for millennia, probably having originated in lightning strikes.

  Though this seems strange to us, they have a rather familiar idea of God. Their supreme deity, Puluga, is invisible, eternal, immortal, all-knowing, the creator of everything except evil; he is angered by sin and offers comfort to those in distress. To punish men for their wrongdoing he sent a great flood.

  The tsunami of 2004 hit the Andamans with its full force but, as far as we are able to tell, it left its ancient tribes unharmed.

  BILL So what was the potato then, before it was a potato? What did it evolve from? The … the … the … the chickpea?

  Who coined the phrase ‘the survival of the fittest’?

  Herbert Spencer

  Spencer was an engineer, philosopher and psychologist, who in his day was as famous as Darwin.

  He first coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ in his Principles of Biology (1864), having been inspired by Darwin’s theory of ‘natural selection’.

  Darwin paid him the compliment of using it himself in the 5th edition of The Origin of Species in 1869, commenting: ‘I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term natural selection, in order to mark its relation to man’s power of selection. But the expression often used by Mr Herbert Spencer, of the Survival of the Fittest, is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.’

  Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was the eldest of nine children, all the rest of whom died in infancy. Trained as a civil engineer, he became a philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, economist and inventor. He sold more than a million books in his lifetime and was the first to apply evolutionary theory to psychology, philosophy and the study of society.

  He also invented the paperclip. The device was called Spencer’s Binding Pin and was produced on a modified hook-and-eye machine by a manufacturer called Ackermann whose offices were on the Strand in London.

  It did well in its first year, making Spencer £70, but demand dried up, Ackermann shot himself and the invention had entirely disappeared by 1899 when the Norwegian engineer Johann Vaaler filed his patent for the modern paperclip in Germany.

  During the Second World War, paperclips were an emotive symbol of Norwegian resistance to the Germ
an occupation, worn on the lapel in place of the forbidden badges of the exiled King Haakon VII. A giant paperclip was later erected in Oslo in Johann Vaaler’s memory.

  Today, more than 11 billion paperclips are sold annually, but a recent survey claimed that of every 100,000 sold, only five are actually used to hold papers together. Most are adapted as poker-chips, pipe-cleaners, safety pins and toothpicks. The rest are dropped and lost, or bent out of shape during dull or awkward phone calls.

  Who invented the ball-point pen?

  a) Mr Biro

  b) Mr Bich

  c) Mr Quiet

  d) Mr Loud

  Writing was a hazardous activity before the advent of the ballpoint pen. Fountain pens had to be regularly dipped into an ink pot and were prone to leakages, and Indian ink (invented in China) was slow to dry on the page.

  These problems were first recognised in a patent registered on 30 October 1888 by a leather tanner called John J. Loud. He created a pen with a small rotating ball for a nib that was constantly fed by an ink reservoir. Although the pen still leaked, it was much more effective for writing on leather than a fountain pen. Loud failed to exploit his patent. If he had, we might be talking about disposable ‘louds’ instead of ‘biros’.

  The Hungarian László Biró (1899–1985) originally trained as a doctor but never graduated. He had brief stints as a hypnotist and a racing driver before taking up journalism.