QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance

by John Lloyd

  Ignore the shape of their mouth – a true smile is in the eyes.

  French physician Guillaume Duchenne (1806–75) discovered the secret of the smile in 1862 by applying electric shocks to the faces of his subjects and photographing the results. He found that an artificial smile used only the large muscle on each side of the face, known as the zygomatic major, while a true smile, induced by a funny joke, involved the muscles running through the eyes, or orbicularis oculi, as well. The effect is a visible wrinkling around the corners of the eyes that is outside voluntary control. In smile research circles, a genuine smile is still known as a ‘Duchenne Smile’, while a fake smile is a ‘Pan Am Smile’ – after the air hostesses in the defunct airline’s adverts.

  According to Duchenne, a fake smile can express mere politeness, or it can be used in more sinister ways ‘as a cover for treason’. He described it as ‘the smile that plays upon just the lips when our soul is sad’.

  Research has borne out his thesis. In the late 1950s 141 female students at Mills College in California agreed to a long-term psychological study. Over the next fifty years they provided reports on their health, marriage, family life, careers and happiness. In 2001 two psychologists at Berkeley examined their college yearbook photos and noticed a rough fifty–fifty split between those showing a Duchenne or a Pan Am smile. On revisiting the data it was found that those with a Duchenne smile were significantly more likely to have married and stayed married and been both happier and healthier through their lives.

  This was reinforced by a 2010 study of 1950s US baseball players. Those with honest grins lived an average of five years longer than players who smiled unconvincingly, and seven years longer than players who didn’t smile for the camera at all.

  The importance of the eyes in indicating genuine emotions is reflected in the ‘emoticons’ used in Japan and China. Western emoticons have a pair of fixed dots for eyes but change the mouth shape, like this:

  :) meaning ‘happy’ and :(meaning ‘sad’.

  Far Eastern emoticons concentrate on changes in the eyes, but leave the mouth the same, like this:

  ^_^ (happy) and ;_; (sad).

  This suggests that the supposedly inscrutable East is better at knowing (and telling) who’s pleased to see whom than we are.

  STEPHEN What’s the best way to tell if someone is lying?

  SEAN LOCK What they’ve said turns out not to be true.

  What’s the best way to get to sleep?

  Whatever you do, don’t count sheep.

  In 2002 the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University took a group of fifty insomniacs and got them to try different ways to fall asleep. Those using the traditional sheep-counting method took slightly longer than average. What worked best was imagining a tranquil scene such as a beach or a waterfall: this relaxes people and engages their imagination. Counting sheep is too boring or irritating to take your mind off whatever’s keeping you awake.

  The same study found that ‘thought suppression’ – trying to block anxious thoughts as soon as they appear – was equally ineffective. This is because of what psychologists call the ‘polar bear effect’. Told not to think of polar bears, your mind can think of nothing else. Even the ‘the’ method many insomniacs swear by – repeating a simple word like ‘the’ over and over – only works if the repetitions are at irregular intervals, so that the brain is forced to concentrate. As soon you lose focus, the anxiety re-emerges.

  The ancient Romans recommended that insomniacs massaged their feet with dormouse fat, or rubbed the earwax of a dog on their teeth. Benjamin Franklin proposed that people finding themselves awake on hot nights should lift up the bedclothes with one arm and one leg and flap them twenty times. Even better, he suggested, was to have two beds, so that one was always cool.

  More recently, clinical research has supported Progressive Muscle Relaxation: tensing each group of muscles in turn until they hurt, and then relaxing them. The idea is that an ‘unwound’ body will eventually lead to an ‘unwound’ mind.

  TATT (‘tired all the time’) syndrome is one of the most common reasons for visiting a GP – one in five people in the UK report some kind of sleep disorder and a third suffer from insomnia. Sleep deprivation is linked to a quarter of all traffic accidents and to rises in obesity, diabetes, depression and heart disease.

  Some sleep research seems to suggest that punctuating long working hours with brief ‘power naps’ of just a few minutes may actually be good for you. Or you could consider extending your working hours with new eugeroic drugs. (Eugeroic means ‘well awake’, from Greek eu, ‘well’, and egeirein, to awaken.) These are powerful stimulants that double the time people stay awake with no apparent side effects – as well as boosting concentration and memory.

  They are unlikely to catch on in Japan at any time soon. The business of inemuri – ‘to be asleep while present’ – is a sign of high status, and Japanese politicians and industrial leaders will openly nod off in important meetings. Their visible need to nap in public indicates how hard they have to work.

  STEPHEN Do you know about Yan Tan Tethera? It’s for counting sheep. It actually goes: Yan, Tyan, Tethera, Methera, Pimp, Sethera, Lethera, Hovera, Dovera, Dick, Yan-a-dick, Tyan-a-dick, Tethera-dik, Methera-dick … Bumfit suddenly appears, which is fifteen. And it goes all the way up to Giggot, which is twenty.

  ALAN So one in every fifteen will …

  STEPHEN Will be a bumfit.

  PHILL JUPITUS Are the last three sheep Cuthbert, Dibble and Grub?

  What happens if you eat cheese before bedtime?

  Sweet dreams, it seems.

  In 2005 the British Cheese Board organised a study in an attempt to nail the malicious rumour that eating cheese before sleep gives you nightmares. The results were conclusive. More than three-quarters of the 200 volunteers who took part, each of whom ate 20 grams (0.7 ounces) of cheese before retiring, reported undisturbed sleep. They didn’t have nightmares (though most of them found they could remember their dreams).

  Interestingly, different varieties of cheese produced different kinds of dream. Cheddar generated dreams about celebrities and Red Leicester summoned childhood memories. People who ate Lancashire dreamed about work, while Cheshire inspired no dreams at all. There also seemed to be a division between the sexes: 85 per cent of women who ate Stilton recalled bizarre dreams involving such things as talking soft toys, vegetarian crocodiles and dinner-party guests being traded for camels.

  The overall conclusion was that cheese is a perfectly safe late-night snack. In addition, because it contains high levels of the serotonin-producing amino acid trytophan, it is likely to reduce stress and so encourage peaceful sleep.

  It may come as a surprise to find that the British Cheese Board now lists over 700 varieties of British cheese – almost twice as many as are made in France. Having said that, 55 per cent of the £2.4 billion UK cheese market is cornered by just one variety: cheddar. Plus, the definition of ‘cheese’ has been stretched a bit to include such ‘varieties’ as Lancashire Christmas Pudding and Cheddar with Mint Choc Chips and Cherries.

  The ninth most popular variety of cheese in Britain, Cornish Yarg, may sound ancient, but it only dates back to the 1960s when Allan and Jenny Gray started producing it on their farm near Bodmin Moor. ‘Yarg’ is ‘gray’ spelled backwards.

  Despite the profusion of new British cheeses, the French still eat twice as much cheese per head as the British, and they sleep well on it, too. No one in France thinks that eating cheese before bed gives you nightmares.

  What did ploughmen have for lunch?

  Beer, bread, cheese and pickle. Yes, they really did.

  The British movie The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983), written by Ian McEwan and directed by Richard Eyre, claimed that ‘the ploughman’s lunch’ was the spurious invention of an advertising man in the 1960s to encourage people to eat in pubs, and this has become common wisdom. It’s since been alleged that the term first appeared in 1970, in The Cheese
Handbook by one B. H. Axler. In the preface, Sir Richard Trehane, chairman of the English Country Cheese Council & Milk Marketing Board, wrote: ‘English cheese and beer have for centuries formed a perfect combination enjoyed as the Ploughman’s Lunch.’

  Recent research by the BBC TV show Balderdash & Piffle found documentary proof that the Cheese Council started using the term ‘ploughman’s lunch’ to publicise cheese in 1960. But there is also evidence that the term ploughman’s (or ploughboy’s) lunch was used in the 1950s. There’s also photographic evidence of ploughmen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sitting in their fields lunching on what certainly looks like bread, cheese and beer.

  What seems most likely is that post-war cheese marketers were determined to remind the public of the long-standing practice of eating bread and cheese in pubs, which had been interrupted by rationing in the Second World War.

  So, if ad men didn’t invent the lunch, did they invent the phrase? Apparently not: there are anecdotal accounts of the name being used by pubs as early as the 1940s, and there is even a mention in an 1837 Life of Walter Scott of ‘an extemporised sandwich, that looked like a ploughman’s lunch’.

  The cheese men certainly popularised the phrase as a marketing device, and perhaps on pub menus as well. In doing so, they helped turn a traditional, local name for bread, cheese, beer and pickles into a kind of non-copyrighted super-brand, universally recognised throughout the British Isles.

  In the long term, though, only the cheese has benefited. Cheese sales have continued to grow strongly (up 2.8 per cent year on year in 2010), but Britain’s last pickled-onion processor, Sheffield Foods, recently described the market as ‘flat’. But not as flat as the sales of traditional beer which, despite the efforts of the Campaign for Real Ale, have declined by 40 per cent in the past thirty years.

  Iconic though the ploughman’s lunch may be, it hasn’t saved the institution that most relies on it. Over a hundred traditional British pubs close every month.

  Where is Stilton cheese made?

  It’s not made in Stilton. That would be illegal.

  Under European law, Stilton cheese – like Gorgonzola, Camembert and Parmesan – has Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status. This makes it unlawful to sell it unless it’s made in specified areas. In the case of Stilton, this means the counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire or Nottinghamshire.

  The village of Stilton, near Peterborough, is now in Cambridgeshire and was historically part of Huntingdonshire. In 1724, Daniel Defoe noted in his Tour Through the Villages of England and Wales that Stilton was ‘famous for cheese’ and modern cheese historians have shown that a hard cream cheese was certainly made in the village – but no one knows what it was like.

  In 1743 the landlord of The Bell, a coaching inn on the Great North Road between London and Edinburgh (now the A1), started to serve an interesting blue-veined cheese. Because The Bell was in Stilton, travellers took to calling this popular new item ‘Stilton cheese’. In fact, the publican, Cooper Thornhill, had discovered it on a farm at Wymondham nearly 50 kilometres (about 30 miles) away, near Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire.

  So today Melton Mowbray, not Stilton, is the official capital of the Stilton industry, and has been since 1996. Oddly enough, it wasn’t until 2009 that the town was granted protection for its most obvious local product: Melton Mowbray pork pies, under the slightly less stringent Protected Geographical Indication (PGI). In the past, the local pigs that went into the pies were fed on liquid whey, separated out from the milk curd that went into making Stilton. Today, the pork meat in the pie is allowed to come from anywhere in England – but the pies have to be made in Melton Mowbray to a particular recipe.

  Melton Mowbray pork pies are among thirty-six British regional PDO or PGI products, along with Cornish Clotted Cream, Whitstable Oysters, Jersey Royal Potatoes and twelve other British cheeses apart from Stilton. But not everybody wants one. In 2004 Newcastle Brown Ale became the first product to apply to be de-designated by the EU, so that it could move its brewery out of Newcastle across the river to Gateshead. In 2010 it moved out of Tyneside altogether – to the John Smith Brewery in Tadcaster, North Yorkshire. So much for tradition.

  One of the British film industry’s earliest hits starred a piece of Stilton. Cheese Mites (1903) outraged cheese manufacturers and caused screams of terrified delight among audiences. The film was considered the first-ever science documentary and it had been commissioned by its producer, Charles Urban (1867–1942) for a series of popular educational shows running at the Alhambra Theatre in London that were called ‘The Unseen World’. It featured a scientist inspecting a piece of ripe Stilton under a microscope – only to discover hundreds of mites ‘crawling and creeping about in all directions’ (as the film catalogue put it) ‘looking like great uncanny crabs, bristling with long spiny hairs and legs’.

  Whether this had any effect on sales of Stilton is not recorded – but it did lead to a craze for cheap microscopes. These often came with a free packet of mites.

  DAVID MITCHELL It’s basically cheese that’s gone off already, hasn’t it?

  STEPHEN Well, that’s its point, exactly. It is the celebration of what happens when milk goes off big time stylie.

  SEAN LOCK You should work for the Milk Marketing Board. ‘Get some lovely English milk gone off big time stylie’ … I’ll have a milk gone off big time stylie and tomato sandwich, please.

  Where does the name Milton Keynes come from?

  It isn’t, as some people think, a combination of the names of the poet John Milton (1608–74) and the economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946). The town was built around a village whose name dates back to the thirteenth century.

  The original ‘Milton Keynes’, with its traditional cottages, thatched pub and church, was in the centre of the area designated for development as a new town in 1967. Today it has renamed itself Middleton, after its first mention in the Domesday Book (1067), when it was Mideltone (Old English for ‘middle farmstead’). By the thirteenth century this had be come Mideltone Kaynes, after the village’s feudal masters, the de Cahaignes. Since all Keynes’s are descended from this family, you could say John Maynard Keynes is named after the place, not vice versa. John Milton has no connection with the area at all.

  Only two of the twenty-one ‘new towns’ built in England between 1946 and 1970 take their names from people. Peterlee in County Durham was named after the miner’s union leader Peter Lee (1864–1935), and Telford in Shropshire after the Scottish engineer Thomas Telford (1757–1834). Perhaps because of this, when Milton Keynes was founded, a junior minister joked that the name ‘combined the poetic with the economic’ and an urban myth was born.

  The supposedly boring image of Milton Keynes is the butt of many jokes from outsiders, but not from the 235,000 people who live there. The experiment to create a new town on the scale of a city has been a resounding success.

  By 1983 34,000 new jobs had been created and 32,000 houses built. At that point, more than 5 per cent of all houses under construction in south-east England were in Milton Keynes. Today the local economy, driven by the rapid expansion of service industries, is one of the strongest in the country and the per capita income is 47 per cent higher than the national average.

  Environmentally, the city is one of the greenest in Europe. There are 4,500 acres of parks and woodland containing more than 40 million trees – with a hundred more planted every day. The road grid and roundabout system may confuse visitors but they mean there is almost no congestion for people who live there.

  MK (as residents call it) hosted the UK’s first multiplex cinema, the first modern hospital to be built from scratch and Europe’s first purpose-built indoor skydiving centre. It’s also home to Britain’s most popular theatre outside London and the Open University.

  There’s nothing dull about MK’s past either. An archaeological survey carried out in advance of building the town uncovered the 150 million-year-old skeleton of an ichthyosauru
s, the tusks of a woolly mammoth and Britain’s largest collection of Bronze Age gold jewellery, the Middleton Keynes Hoard.

  In other countries all this might be a cause for celebration, but not in England.

  As Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman put it in their novel Good Omens (1990): ‘Milton Keynes was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.’

  BILL BAILEY Satellite navigation, in cars … when I was on tour … it was useless. You get to Milton Keynes, it just goes, ‘Turn left. Turn left. Turn left. Turn left. Turn left. Turn left.’

  Which kind of ball bounces highest: steel, glass or rubber?

  It’s the glass one. Steel balls are the next bounciest and rubber balls come last.

  When a ball hits the ground, some of the energy of its downward motion is lost on impact. This energy is either absorbed by the surface of the ball as it compresses, or is released as heat. In general, the harder the ball, the less energy it loses (soft balls squash).

  This assumes a hard surface. ‘Bounciness’ isn’t just about the thing bouncing, but also about what it is bouncing off. Drop a marble, or a ball bearing, on to soft sand and neither will bounce at all. All the energy passes into the sand. Drop either of them on to a steel anvil and they will comfortably out-bounce a rubber ball dropped from the same height.

  The scientific term for the bounciness of an object is its ‘coefficient of restitution’ or COR. This is a scale measuring the energy that a material loses on impact. It runs from 0 for all energy lost, to 1 for no energy lost. Hard rubber has a COR of 0.8, but a glass ball can have a COR of up to 0.95.