QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance

by John Lloyd

  In 2010 Florida finally passed a law banning the importation of Burmese pythons, but too late. They thrive in the hot, wet climate of the local swamps (along with dozens of other non-native species like monitor lizards and vervet monkeys). Fights between alligators and Burmese pythons are a not uncommon sight and are a popular tourist attraction. The result is quite often a draw.

  ARTHUR SMITH Do you know what you should drink with the beating heart of a cobra? This is a dish in China where you get a cobra, and it’s brought to the table alive; they then slice it open, rip the heart out and it’s beating on the plate there. You have to chase it round the plate and then you drink the blood of the snake as the wine.

  CLIVE ANDER ‘Actually, I ordered the lasagne!’

  Where does a snake’s tail begin?

  You might think a snake is just one long tail with a head at one end, but in fact only about 20 per cent of a snake is tail.

  The word vertebra is Latin for ‘joint’. Human beings have thirty-three vertebrae, which form the spinal column and the bones in the neck. Depending on the species, snakes can have over ten times as many. The great majority of these sprout a pair of ribs. Just as with people, snakes don’t have ribs in their head. And, at the other end (also as with people), where the ribs stop, the tail begins. The human ‘tail’ is called the coccyx; in a snake, its tail starts after its cloaca.

  All reptiles, birds and amphibians have a cloaca. It’s named after the Cloaca Maxima, an early sewage system that ran through the Forum in ancient Rome. In snakes the cloaca is a small, flexible vent on its underside: the reptilian equivalent of a bottom. So a snake’s tail starts, just like a lizard’s or a pheasant’s, behind its behind.

  Although controlled by a sphincter muscle, as in mammals, it differs from a mammal’s anus by providing a common passage for the removal of both urine and faeces. It’s also used for mating and egg laying. Stored inside a male snake’s tail are his two penises (known as hemipenes or ‘half-penises’). To mate, he turns each one inside out, so that they poke out of his cloaca. They look rather like exotic varieties of mollusc, adorned with various knobs, spines and protuberances. Each is inserted, in turn, into the female’s cloaca, which is of a matching design to deter interlopers from other snake species.

  Recent studies have shown that, while a snake can’t be referred to as ‘right-handed’, they are definitely ‘right-penised’: the hemipenis on the right side tends to be larger and is the one inserted first. Another use for the cloaca in some snake species is ‘popping’. This is where air is expelled from it in a series of sharp bursts, indistinguishable in timbre and volume from high-pitched human farts. The foul smell (and surprise value) helps keep predators at bay.

  If a snake is kept in too small a space, it may attack and eat its own tail, thinking it’s a rival. Some snakes have been known to choke on their own tails.

  The Ouroboros (Greek for ‘tail-eater’) is an ancient symbol of a snake swallowing its own tail. It appears in Egyptian, Greek, Norse, Hindu and Aztec mythology and represents the cyclical nature of things. In the Timaeus (360 BC), Plato credited the origin of life in the universe to such a circular, self-consuming creature and the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875–1961) believed it was an archetype, a concept hard-wired into our unconscious.

  The Ouroboros unlocked one of the great scientific puzzles of the nineteenth century: the chemical structure of benzene. Found in crude oil, benzene is a powerful solvent used in the manufacture of dyes and plastics. First isolated in 1825, it was used as paint stripper, aftershave and to decaffeinate coffee before it was discovered to be dangerously toxic. Though its chemical formula, C6H6, was known, its atomic structure baffled everyone until the German chemist August Kekulé (1829–96), after years of work, had the sudden insight that it was a ring of six carbon atoms. These were attached to each hydrogen atom with a single bond, but to each other with alternating single and double bonds.

  Kekulé’s solution transformed organic chemistry. The breakthrough came to him in a daydream, when the image of a snake with its tail in its mouth suddenly came to mind.

  ALAN When I was a kid, there was a rattlesnake on TV, every week. It was, like, a big thing in the ’70s. Every week, in something, there was always a rattlesnake. And nowadays, there’s never a rattlesnake on TV.

  What are the chances of a coin landing on heads?

  It isn’t fifty–fifty.

  If the coin is heads up to begin with, it’s more likely to land on heads. Students at Stanford University recorded thousands of coin tosses with high-speed cameras and discovered the chances are approximately fifty-one–forty-nine.

  The researchers showed that coin tossing is not a strictly random procedure, but a measurable event that obeys the laws of physics. If each coin is subject to exactly the same initial conditions and exactly the same initial force, then its spin will produce an even chance of landing on heads or tails.

  However, the slightest difference in the conditions – speed and angle of spin, height of the coin from the ground, which side is facing up to start with – will affect the result. The Stanford research showed that, averaged over many tosses, these changes were significant enough to prevent a fifty–fifty probability.

  The toss of a coin can be a serious matter. In the third European Football Championships in 1968, Italy and Russia drew 0–0 in the semi-final. There were no penalty shoot-outs in those days (and there was no time in the schedule to fit in a replay), so the result was decided by the toss of a coin. Russia lost and Italy went through to the final and won the Championship.

  In cricket, although winning the toss doesn’t seem to affect the results of daytime cricket matches, statistical analysis from University College London suggests that, in day–night games, winning the toss and batting first (during daylight) increases the chances of victory by almost 10 per cent.

  Under British electoral law, if a vote finishes in a dead heat, the result is determined by lot.

  In the 2010 UK council elections, there were tied votes in Great Yarmouth and Bristol. In one, the victory went to the candidate who drew the highest card from a pack; in the other, the returning officer drew the name from a hat.

  Perhaps they’d seen the Stanford research and decided to give the coin-toss a miss …

  SEAN LOCK I still can’t get my head round the notion that it’s just as likely to be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 on the lottery – and I still go ‘it just wouldn’t happen’. You know why? You know why? Because it’s a lottery. I mean, the clue’s in the title.

  What does biting a coin prove?

  If you can leave teeth marks in a gold coin, it’s almost certainly a fake.

  People who’ve watched too many old pirate movies think that, because gold is a soft metal, the way to prove a gold coin is genuine is by biting into it. While this theoretically works with a pure gold coin, it ignores the fact that all ‘gold’ coins minted for circulation in the UK and America since Tudor times have contained copper. This made them more durable (and hard to the bite).

  In 1538 Henry VIII set the levels of purity and weight for the gold sovereign. By law, the coin had to contain 91.6 per cent gold – the rest being copper – and weigh half a troy ounce. (‘Troy weight’ was a French system of measurement named after the famous Troyes fair, the medieval version of an international trade convention.) Each coin was minted to a standard diameter and thickness.

  Gold is very difficult to counterfeit, but its high value made it worth trying. The simplest method was to mix lead with gold, or to gild lead coins.

  But, though gold is relatively soft, it’s also denser than almost all other metals – almost twice as dense as lead. To test a coin, all a merchant or banker had to do was weigh and measure it and compare it to the royal standard. Because gold is so heavy, a fake coin would either be too light or too big. A lead coin of the same thickness and diameter as a sovereign would be only a third as heavy. A lead coin of the right weight and diameter would be twice as thick.

&nb
sp; A much more successful ploy for forgers was adulteration. The trick was to remove small amounts of metal from legal coinage, melt down the scraps and recast new coins. There were three ways of doing this: ‘clipping’ (filing tiny fragments from the coin’s edges); ‘drilling’ (taking the coin and punching small holes in it, which were then hammered shut); and ‘sweating’ (shaking a bag of coins for long enough to create a dust of gold and copper).

  Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) became obsessed with the underworld of counterfeiting gangs after he was made Warden of the Royal Mint in 1696. His secret career as an alchemist had made him something on an expert at assessing the purity of metals. By his reckoning, one in five coins in circulation in England were false. He took on the criminal networks, collecting evidence by frequenting taverns and brothels in disguise. In 1699 he ensnared the master forger William Chaloner, who once boasted he had ‘coined’ 30,000 guineas of false gold (the equivalent of £50 million today). Chaloner was convicted of treason and publicly hanged, drawn and quartered.

  About 40,000 gold sovereigns are still minted in the UK every year, to the same purity standard laid down under Henry VIII. Sovereigns are no longer legal tender but are kept as gold bullion, which is a tradable commodity. The average world market price of gold in 2009 was about £20,500 per kilogram.

  Who invented the catflap?

  It wasn’t Sir Isaac Newton.

  It’s an appealing idea that the father of gravitation, the leading theoretical scientist of his day and arguably the most famous celebrity in Europe at the start of the eighteenth century, invented something as mundane as the cat flap. Sadly, the evidence doesn’t stack up.

  To this day, students at Cambridge are told that, while an undergraduate at Trinity College, Isaac Newton cut two holes in the door of his lodgings – a large one for his pet cat and a smaller one for its kittens. The story plays on a classic stereotype, the genius with no common sense – because there’s no need for the smaller door. But we know it never happened. Newton’s secretary and distant relative, Humphrey Newton, was explicit: his master ‘kept neither dog nor cat in his chamber’. Also, the doorways of most Cambridge lodgings of the period had a system of double doors. The outer doors were thick and heavy, and usually carved from a large piece of oak. The inner door acted as a draught excluder. Sawing holes through both would have been a major DIY project. And a self-defeating one – turning Newton’s rooms into a wind tunnel.

  Nobody knows where the catflap myth started, but we do have a source for the legend of the apple tree: Newton himself. Never one for self-deprecation, he likened his discovery of gravity to Adam being expelled from the Garden of Eden, as both featured the sudden acquisition of knowledge through an apple.

  Newton often told the story during his lifetime, but, over a century later, the German mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) offered his own version of events. ‘Undoubtedly,’ he said, ‘the occurrence was something of this sort: There comes to Newton a stupid importunate man, who asks him how he made his great discovery. Newton wanted to get rid of the man, told him that an apple fell on his nose; and this made the matter quite clear to the man, and he went away satisfied.’

  Newton certainly had a reputation for grumpiness. He didn’t suffer fools (or anyone else) gladly, and preferred solitary study to human company. At times his eccentricities seem to have shaded into genuine mental illness, particularly in 1692, when he complained of ‘great disturbance of mind’. Historians have variously ascribed the other symptoms he exhibited – insomnia, obsessive behaviour, lack of appetite and the delusion that his friends were turning on him – to depression, Asperger’s syndrome and even mercury poisoning. Recent tests on a lock of his hair showed abnormally high levels of mercury, perhaps caused by decades of secret alchemical experimentation.

  Whatever afflicted him, it didn’t prevent Newton from producing Principia Mathematica (1687), the most influential scientific book of all time, or from building a successful second career as a civil servant and administrator. He lived until he was eighty-four and died a very wealthy man, leaving assets worth £31,821 (equivalent to £49 million in today’s money).

  STEPHEN There are people in history who were said to be agelastic, including Isaac Newton, who was supposed to have laughed only once in his life.

  CLIVE ANDERSON When an apple fell on his head.

  STEPHEN No, when someone asked him what was the point of studying Euclid, and he burst out laughing.

  JIMMY CARR Yeah, that is a good one, though.

  What did Molotov invent?

  Molotov didn’t invent his ‘cocktails’. They were named after him as an insult.

  Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Skriabin (1890–1986) took the pen name ‘Molotov’ (molot means ‘hammer’ in Russian) as a young Bolshevik party organiser and underground journalist in pre-Revolutionary Russia. He became Stalin’s most loyal deputy, and was one of only four members of the 1917 revolutionary government to survive Stalin’s purges of the 1930s.

  The story of the Molotov cocktail begins in 1939 when, as Soviet foreign minister, Molotov secretly authorised the illegal invasion of Finland, weeks after the Second World War had started. In the early phases of the invasion, he claimed in radio broadcasts that the cluster bombs Soviet planes were dropping were actually food parcels for starving Finns.

  The Finnish resistance was stronger than the Soviets had anticipated and the invasion lasted through the bitter winter of 1940. The Finns’ secret weapon was a handmade incendiary device made from a bottle filled with flammable liquid and stoppered with a wick. They had borrowed the idea from General Franco’s Fascist troops, who had recently emerged as victors in the Spanish Civil War. The Fascists had produced these hand-held bombs to disable the Soviet-built tanks used by the left-wing Republican government forces. The Finns christened them ‘Molotov’s cocktails’, the joke being that they were ‘a drink to go with his food parcels’. They used a government vodka distillery to produce more than 450,000 of them. Their fame spread and, by the end of the War, combatants on all sides knew them as ‘Molotov cocktails’.

  The disinformation about food parcels was typical of Molotov. He wasn’t a soldier; he was a bureaucrat, skilled in the use of propaganda. The Finnish war resulted from the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact that he had signed with the Nazis in August 1939. (Von Ribbentrop was Molotov’s opposite number, the German foreign minister.) This was a secret agreement for the USSR and Germany to carve up Poland and the Baltic states between them. It wasn’t made public until after war had ended – Molotov went to his grave denying it had ever existed – but it made possible the German invasion of Poland (which began the Second World War) as well as the Soviet invasion of Finland. It also allowed Molotov to destroy Polish resistance by authorising the murder of all 22,000 members of the Polish officer corps at Katyn forest in March 1940.

  The short-lived pact with Germany wasn’t Molotov’s only legacy. During the Soviet purges of the 1930s, it had been his idea to use lists to sentence people to death, greatly speeding up the process. In 1937–8, he personally signed 372 orders for mass executions – more than Stalin himself – leading to the murder of more than 43,000 people.

  Vegetarian, teetotal and a studious collector of first editions (many were dedicated to him by authors he later sent to the Gulag), Molotov was the last surviving Bolshevik. He died, an unrepentant Stalinist, in 1986, just after Mikhail Gorbachev announced the perestroika (restructuring) reforms that would lead, five years later, to the dissolution of the USSR.

  Why was the speed camera invented?

  It was designed to speed cars up, not slow them down.

  A Dutch engineer called Maurice Gatsonides (1911–98) devised the first speed camera. Far from being a road-safety campaigner, Gatsonides was Europe’s first professional rally driver. The pinnacle of his career came in 1953 when he won the Monte Carlo Rally in a Ford Zephyr by just three seconds.

  His world-famous invention was driven by a desire to improve his speed ro
und corners. The first ‘Gatsometer’ consisted of two pressure-sensitive rubber strips stretched across the road. Driving over the first strip started a stopwatch; crossing the second stopped it. This was the world’s first reliable speed-measuring device. Gatsonides then added a flash camera which made it even more accurate. It enabled him to see just how much extra speed he could squeeze out of a corner by approaching it along a different line.

  Gatso soon realised that his camera could also be used to catch speeding motorists. He founded Gatsometer BV in 1958 and over the next twenty years gradually refined his invention, introducing a radar beam to replace the rubber pressure strips in 1971. The ‘Gatso 24’ is now installed in more than forty countries. In many languages, speed cameras of any kind are simply known as ‘Gatsos’.

  The first Gatsos in the UK were installed in Nottingham in 1988, after a triple fatality at a traffic-light-controlled junction. Having been slow to adopt the new technology, the UK now leads Europe in the use of speed cameras. In 2007 the UK had 4,309 of them (compared with 1,571 in 2001), more than France and Italy combined.

  Do they work? The evidence suggests that they do. A four-year survey by the UK Department for Transport, published in 2006, reported that the overall speed past camera sites was reduced by an average of 6 per cent, and the number of people killed or seriously injured by 42 per cent. While the motoring lobby points out that driving too fast is the main cause in only 14 per cent of fatal accidents – compared with ‘driver distraction’ which accounts for 68 per cent – the enforcement of speed limits has had a massive impact on the number of collisions. In the ten years since 32 kilometres per hour (20 miles per hour) limits were introduced in London, the number of accidents has halved.