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

by John Lloyd

  There is a freshwater flatworm called a planaria or ‘cross-eyed worm’ which also has an extraordinary ability to regenerate itself when damaged. The American geneticist and Nobel laureate T. H. Morgan (1866–1945) found that a piece of planaria 1/279th of its original size could regenerate into a full-sized planaria, and a planaria split lengthwise or crosswise will regenerate into two separate individuals.

  What’s the loudest thing in the ocean?

  Shrimps.

  Though the blue whale produces the loudest noise of any individual animal in the sea or on land, the loudest natural noise of all is made by shrimps.

  The sound of the ‘shrimp layer’ is the only natural noise that can ‘white out’ a submarine’s sonar, deafening the operators through their headphones.

  Below the layer they can hear nothing above it and vice versa. Hearing from below can only be accomplished by raising a mast up through it.

  The noise of the collected shrimps amounts to an ear-splitting 246 decibels, which even adjusting for the fact that sound travels five times faster in water, equates to about 160 decibels in air: considerably louder than a jet taking off (140 dB) or the human threshold of pain. Some observers have compared it to everyone in the world frying bacon at the same time.

  The noise is caused by trillions of shrimps snapping their single oversized claw all at once. Snapping shrimps, members of the various Alpheus and Synalpheus species, are found in shallow tropical and subtropical waters.

  But it’s even more interesting than it sounds. Video shot at 40,000 frames per second shows clearly that the noise occurs 700 microseconds after the claw has snapped shut. The noise comes from burst bubbles – not the shutting of the claw itself – an effect known as ‘cavitation’.

  It works like this. A small bump on one side of the claw fits neatly into a groove on the other side. The claw is shut so rapidly that a jet of water travelling at 100 kilometres (62 miles) per hour squirts out, fast enough to create expanding bubbles of water vapour. When the water slows down and normal pressure is restored the bubbles collapse creating intense heat (as high as 20,000 °C), a loud pop and light – this last being a very rare phenomenon called sonoluminescence, where sound generates light.

  Shrimps use this noise to stun prey, communicate and find mates. As well as ruining sonar, the sharp, hot intense noise makes dents in ships’ propellers.

  Why are flamingos pink?

  Because they eat a lot of blue-green algae.

  Flamingos do eat shrimps, but the colour of the birds comes from the algae. Despite their name, blue-green algae can be red, violet, brown, yellow or even orange.

  Flamingos are named for their bright colour. Like flamenco, the word comes from the Latin for ‘flame’. The red and white flag of Peru was inspired by them.

  There are four species of flamingo. They are at least ten million years old and once ranged over Europe, America and Australia. Now they live in isolated pockets of Africa, India, South America and southern Europe.

  All species are monogamous. They lay only one egg a year which is balanced on a mound of soil. Both parents take turns to incubate it and both produce bright red, highly nutritious ‘milk’ from their throats, which the chicks feed on for their first two months. Flamingos are one of only two kinds of bird to produce milk: the other is pigeons. In captivity, flamingos that are not parents will spontaneously produce milk if they hear the cries of chicks.

  After leaving the nest, flamingos live in vast crèches. Though these may contain more than 30,000 birds, the young flamingo is fed only by its parents, who recognise it by its cry. A family of flamingos is called a ‘pat’.

  Flamingos eat with their heads upside down. Unlike other birds, they filter their food in the same way as whales and oysters. Their beaks are lined with rows of plates that sift items from the water. The lesser flamingo (Phoeniconaias minor) has such a dense filter it can strain single-celled plants less than 0.05 mm ( inch) in diameter. The flamingo’s tongue acts as a pump, pushing water through its beak four times a second.

  Pliny the Elder recommended eating flamingo tongue as a tasty delicacy.

  Flamingos sleep on one leg, with one half of their body at a time – like dolphins – while the other remains alert for predators. Flamingos can live for fifty years. They inhabit inhospitable lakes that have high levels of salt and soda, where the water is undrinkable by other animals and nothing grows. Their main predators are zookeepers.

  What colour is a panther?

  There is no such thing as ‘a’ panther.

  The word probably comes from the Sanskrit for whitish-yellow, pandarah, which was originally applied to the tiger.

  The Greeks borrowed the word and adapted it as panthera, meaning ‘all beasts’. They used it to describe mythological as well as real animals

  In medieval heraldry, the panther was portrayed as a gentle, multicoloured beast that had a very sweet smell.

  Scientifically speaking, all four of the largest species of big cat are panthers.

  The lion is Panthera leo; the tiger, Panthera tigris, the leopard, Panthera pardus and the jaguar Panthera onca. They are the only cats that can roar.

  The animals that most people think of as panthers are, in fact, either black leopards (in Africa or Asia), or black jaguars (in South America).

  Neither animal is completely black. Close examination shows that their spots are still faintly visible on their skin. They carry a genetic mutation that means the black pigment in their fur dominates the orange.

  Rare ‘white panthers’ are in fact albino leopards or jaguars.

  In the USA, when people say ‘panther’ they mean a black puma. Despite many unproven reports and supposed sightings, no one has ever found one.

  What makes an animal see red?

  The myth that bulls are infuriated by the colour red has been around since at least 1580, when the best-selling writer of the time, John Lyly, noted that: ‘He that commeth before an Elephant will not wear bright colors, nor he that commeth to a Bul, red.’

  The fact is that, like rats, hippos, owls and aardvarks, bulls are colour-blind. It is the movements of the bullfighter’s cape that cause the bull to charge; the colour is merely for the benefit of the crowd.

  Dogs can distinguish between blue and yellow, but can’t tell green from red. At traffic lights, guide dogs decide whether it is safe to cross by listening to the traffic. Hence the peeping sounds on modern pedestrian crossings.

  The creatures that have really strong views on red are chickens.

  Poultry farmers know only too well the practical problems of a chicken ‘seeing red’. When one of them bleeds, the others peck at it obsessively.

  This cannibalistic behaviour, if unchecked, can lead to a killing spree and a rapid reduction in the farmer’s flock.

  The traditional solution is to trim the chickens’ beaks with a hot knife so they are blunt and cause less damage. However, in 1989 a company called Animalens launched red-tinted contact lenses for egg-laying chickens. The early results were promising – because everything looked red, the chickens fought less and needed less feed because they weren’t so active, but still laid the same number of eggs.

  The egg industry operates on a tiny profit margin of about 1.6 per cent. There are 250 million egg-layers in the USA, 150 million of them on just fifty farms. Red contact lenses for chickens promised a tripling in profits.

  Unfortunately, fitting the lenses was fiddly and labour-intensive. Deprived of oxygen, the chickens’ eyes degenerated rapidly, causing pain and distress. Falling foul of the animal rights lobby, Animalens withdrew the product.

  What colour were the original Oompa-Loompas?

  a) Black

  b) Gold

  c) Multi-coloured

  d) Orange

  In the first edition of Roald Dahl’s classic 1964 children’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the tireless, loyal Oompa-Loompas were black, not orange.

  Dahl described them as a tribe of 3,000 black
pygmies imported by Mr Wonka from ‘the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before’, to replace the sacked white workers in his factory. They lived on chocolate, whereas before they had only eaten ‘beetles, eucalyptus leaves, caterpillars and the bark of the bong-bong tree.’

  Although it was well received at the time, Dahl’s description of the Oompa-Loompas, with its overtones of slavery, veered dangerously close to racism and, by the early 1970s, his US publishers Knopf insisted on changes. In 1972, a revised edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory appeared. Out went the black pygmies, in came Oompa-Loompas looking like small hippies with long ‘golden-brown hair’ and ‘rosy-white skin’.

  Later, Dahl’s illustrator Quentin Blake depicted them as multicoloured futuristic punks with Mohawk hairdos. The two Hollywood films in 1971 and 2005 made the Oompa-Loompas look like orange elves.

  Dahl hated the 1971 film, not least because the (uncredited) screenwriter David Seltzer (later to write The Omen) had Wonka spouting poetic quotations that weren’t in the book.

  The film’s title was changed to Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory allegedly because ‘Charlie’ had become US street slang for an African American.

  JONATHAN Aren’t they from Africa?

  STEPHEN Yes, his [Dahl’s] publishers, Knopf, made them orange, because they felt black pygmies slaving away in a factory was a slightly kind of unfortunate –

  ALAN So now they’re all orange like Girls Aloud.

  What colour were Robin Hood’s tights?

  Red.

  The earliest Robin Hood stories were ballads dating from the fifteenth century.

  In the longest and most important of these, A Gest of Robyn Hode, Robin and his ‘mery men’ wear ‘a good mantell of scarlet and raye’, a kind of striped bright red wrap.

  In other ballads, Robin wears red or scarlet while his men wear green. This reflects his status as leader – ‘scarlet’ was the most expensive cloth in medieval England, dyed using kermes, the dried bodies of the female shield louse (Kermes ilicis).

  This also explains the name Robin – associated with the robin redbreast – and that of one of his closest associates: Will Scarlet.

  It is only in later versions that ‘Lincoln Green’ becomes the colour for the outlaws’ gear but even this may not have been green.

  Lincoln was the capital of the medieval English dyeing industry. ‘Lincoln Green’ was green (blue dye made from woad was over-dyed with yellow) but ‘Lincoln Grain’ was scarlet, dyed with kermes, known as ‘graine’.

  The early Robin Hood stories are obsessed by clothing. As well as Robin being named after his headgear, mantles, kirtles, coats, breeches, shirts and six different colours of cloth are mentioned in the Gest, and at one point Robin plays at being a draper, selling the King 123 feet of green cloth.

  This has prompted the idea that the ballads may have been written for the Livery Guilds, companies of merchants involved in manufacturing. Many of them were founded at the time the Gest was written (c.1460); their preferred style of uniform was a coloured hood.

  At least one historian has suggested that the real point of the Robin Hood stories is not the traditional ‘forest versus town’ or ‘rich versus poor’ battle, but the victory of the merchant adventurer over the failing, corrupt nobility.

  Robin Hood, dressed in expensive red cloth, was really the champion of the emerging middle classes rather than the poor.

  STEPHEN Now, what’s quite interesting about Robin Hood’s tights?

  JO Did he lend them to Friar Tuck and then, when he put them back on, he looked like Nora Batty …

  What rhymes with orange?

  There are two rhymes for orange in English, although both are proper nouns: Blorenge and Gorringe.

  The Blorenge is a hill outside Abergavenny in Wales, and Gorringe is a splendid English surname

  The best view of Abergavenny is from the top of the Blorenge, a 1,833-foot hill owned by the South East Wales Hang-gliding and Paragliding Club, who bought it from the Coal Authority in 1998.

  Distinguished Gorringes include: General George Frederick Gorringe (1865–1945), the unpopular British First World War commander; Harry Gorringe, the first-class Australian cricketer; and Henry Honeychurch Gorringe, the man who brought Cleopatra’s Needle from Egypt to New York’s Central Park.

  In 1673, New York was called New Orange (so the New Orange became the Big Apple). The city was founded by the Dutch in 1653 as New Amsterdam, taken by the English in 1664 and renamed New York, and retaken by the Dutch in 1673 and named New Orange. It lasted less than a year. Under the Treaty of Westminster in 1674 the city was ceded to the English, and New York became its permanent name.

  The word ‘orange’ is a good example of what linguists call wrong word division. It derives from the Arabic naranj and arrived in English as ‘narange’ in the fourteenth century, gradually losing the initial ‘n’. The same process left us with apron (from naperon) and umpire (from noumpere).

  Sometimes it works the other way round, as in nickname (from an eke-name, meaning ‘also-name’) or newt (from an ewt).

  Orange was first used as the name for a colour in 1542.

  What colour are carrots?

  Carrots didn’t reveal their inner orangeness for almost 5,000 years.

  The earliest evidence of carrots being used by humans dates from 3,000 BC in Afghanistan. These original carrots were purple on the outside and yellow on the inside.

  The ancient Greeks and Romans cultivated the vegetable, but mostly for medicinal purposes: the carrot was considered a powerful aphrodisiac.

  Galen, the famous second-century Roman physician, on the other hand, recommended carrots for expelling wind. He was the first to identify them as separate from their close relative the parsnip.

  As Arab traders spread carrot seed through Asia, Africa and Arabia carrots blossomed into different shades of purple, white, yellow, red, green and even black.

  The very first orange carrot was grown in sixteenth-century Holland, patriotically bred to match the colour of the Dutch Royal House of Orange.

  By the seventeenth century, the Dutch were the main European producers of carrots and all modern varieties are descended from their four orange ones: Early Half Long, Late Half Long, Scarlet and Long Orange.

  There is currently a vogue for non-orange carrots: white, yellow, dark red and purple varieties are available in the shops. In 1997, Iceland developed a chocolate-flavoured carrot as part of their child-focused Wacky Veg range. It was withdrawn after eight months.

  According to the United Nations in 1903 there were 287 varieties of carrot but these now number just twenty-one, a fall of 93 per cent.

  Some breeds of carrot contain a protein that stops ice crystals growing. This natural carrot ‘anti-freeze’ can be extracted and used to preserve body tissues for medical use and improve the shelf-life of frozen food.

  Do carrots help us see in the dark?

  Not really.

  Carrots are a good source of vitamin A, a deficiency of which can lead to night blindness, where the eye adapts very slowly to changes in light.

  The retina of the eye is made up of light-sensitive cells called rods and cones. Cones pick up detail and colour, but need plenty of light to function (like a ‘slow’ film emulsion). The rods can’t distinguish colour at all but need less light (like a ‘fast’ emulsion) so are used for night vision. They contain a light-sensitive chemical called rhodopsin, the key ingredient of which is vitamin A.

  The easiest way to treat night blindness is to increase the intake of vitamin A, most commonly found in carotene. Carrots contain carotene, but even better are apricots, dark-leaved vegetables such as spinach, and bilberries.

  But improving defective night vision is very different from making normal night vision better. Eating lots of carrots won’t help you see any better in the dark – all it will do, over time, is to turn your skin orange.

  During the Second World War, Group Ca
ptain John Cunningham (1917–2002) gained the nickname ‘Cats Eyes Cunningham’. His 604 squadron operated at night. The British government encouraged rumours that he was able see in the dark because he ate so many carrots.

  This was deliberate disinformation designed to cover up the fact that he was testing the newly developed (and top secret) airborne radar system.

  It seems highly unlikely the Germans were taken in, but it helped persuade a generation of British children to eat the one vegetable that remained in constant supply through the war.

  The Government started to overdo the carrot propaganda. Carrots became ‘these bright treasures dug from the good British earth’. A 1941 recipe for Carrot Flan – ‘reminds you of Apricot Flan – but has a deliciousness all of its own’ – fooled no one. And carrot jam and marmalade failed to find their way on to the British breakfast table.

  The Portuguese are fond of carrot jam, though. In 2002 this led to the European Union redefining the carrot as a fruit.

  What do bananas grow on?

  There is no such thing as a banana tree.

  The banana plant is actually a giant herb and the bananas are its berries.

  A herb is defined as ‘a plant with a fleshy not a woody stem, which, after the plant has bloomed and set seed, dies down to the ground’. This is not always true: sage, thyme and rosemary have woody stems (though they are not covered with true bark).