1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off (5 page)

Gold has its own E number.

E175

is officially suitable for consumption

by vegetarians, vegans and members

of all religious groups.

The Victorians

made tiepins

out of badgers’ penis bones.

Some parts of Tasmania

are so fertile that

the topsoil is 70 feet deep.

Trinity College, Cambridge,

has won more Nobel Prizes

than the whole of Italy.

The human body has 100 trillion cells,

each one a 10,000th the size of a pinhead

but containing enough DNA instructions

to fill 1,000 600-page books.

Every three seconds,

the Sun emits more neutrinos

than the number of atoms

in all the humans who have ever lived.

Neutrinos are 100,000 times

smaller than electrons,

but there are so many of them

that they may outweigh

all the visible matter in the universe.

If an atom were the size

of the Solar System,

a neutrino would be the size

of a golf ball.

The man who sees to the needs of VIPs

in the official presidential guest house

in Washington
DC

is called Randy Bumgardner.

The founder of Pan American Airlines

was called

Juan Trippe.

The Archbishop of Manila

from 1974–2003

was called Cardinal Sin.

Robert Burns was never called

Rabbie or Robbie – though he did

occasionally call himself Spunkie.

The film
Jaws
was based on a novel

by Peter Benchley.

When he couldn’t think of a title,

his father, Nathaniel, suggested

What’s That Noshin’ On Ma Leg.

As soon as tiger shark embryos

develop teeth

they attack and eat each other

in the womb.

If the three quarks in a hydrogen atom

were scaled up to the size of garden peas,

the hydrogen atom

would be 1,000 miles across.

If all the land in Finland

were distributed equally,

each Finn would have 14% more space

than Heathrow Airport’s shopping area.

Human saliva

contains a painkiller called
opiorphin

that is six times more powerful

than morphine.

The average American produces

10,000 gallons of saliva in a lifetime:

about the same amount of water as leaks

from the average American home

in a year.

The platypus and the echidna

are the only mammals

that could make their own custard:

they both lay eggs

and produce milk.

The Chupa Chups logo

was designed by

Salvador Dalí.

4,000 McDonald’s hamburgers

(as many as you could get from one cow)

are eaten every minute.

Every year,

4 million cats

are eaten in Asia.

In 2011, Chinese billionaire Long Liyuan

was murdered at a business lunch

by means of poison in his

slow-boiled

cat-meat

casserole.

When eating jelly babies,

nearly eight out of ten people

bite off the heads first.

More gold is recoverable

from a tonne of personal computers

than from 17 tonnes

of gold ore.

The gold dissolved in the world’s oceans

is estimated to be worth $475 trillion:

about 30 times

the US public debt.

In 1917, John D. Rockefeller

could have paid off

the whole US public debt on his own.

Today, Bill Gates’s entire fortune

would barely cover two months’ interest.

Tyrannosaurus rex
(65 million years ago)

is closer in time to us than to

Diplodocus
(150 million years ago).

There are about 6,900 languages

in existence but more than

half the world’s population

uses only 20 of them.

In English, the name of every number

shares a letter with each neighbour.

One shares an O with two, which shares a

T with three, which shares an R with four,

which shares an F with five, which shares

an I with six – and so on indefinitely.

Archimedes’ number
myriakis-myriostas

periodu myriakis-myriston

arithmon myriai myriades

is one followed by 80 quadrillion zeroes.

In 2010, YouTube was watched

700 billion times, but 99% of the views

were of only 30% of the videos.

In 1900, all the world’s mathematical

knowledge could be written in about

80 books; today it would fill

more than 100,000.

In 2005, the 54 billionaires in Britain

paid only
£
14.7 million in income tax

between them. Of this,

£
9 million came from

James Dyson.

In 2011, only nine of the 62 owners

of apartments in One Hyde Park, London,

the world’s most expensive block of flats,

paid any council tax.

Over 600,000 companies

(including 25 with flats in One Hyde Park)

are registered in the British Virgin Islands

(population 28,882).

In the first month of its life,

a silkworm puts on

10,000 times its birth weight.

A female ferret

will die

if she doesn’t have sex for a year.

A six-inch catfish has

more than

250,000 taste buds.

A full Kindle

weighs a billionth of a billionth

of a gram

more than a brand-new one.

There are over 1,200 species

of bat in the world

and not one of them is blind.

There are 4,800 species

of frog in the world

but only one of them goes ‘ribbit’.

Eight times as many people belong to

the National Trust

as to the

Conservative, Labour and

Liberal Democrat parties

combined.

Every human being

starts out life as an arsehole:

it’s the first part of the body

to form in the womb.

51% of British women under 50

have never been married:

twice as many as in 1980.

Kanye North and Kanye South

(but not Kanye West)

are parliamentary constituencies

in Botswana.

The animal rights group PETA

claims that cows can suffer humiliation

if people laugh at them.

Wagamama

is Japanese for ‘selfish’.

In 2009, Exxon made $19 billion profit

but received a $156 million

federal tax rebate.

Only 2% of women

describe themselves

as beautiful.

In the 1950s,

3-D films

were known as

‘deepies’.

Loch Ness

is deep enough

and long enough

to contain the entire

population of the world

ten times over.

40% of the electricity in Pakistan

goes missing, half of it stolen:

if there’s a power cut

(which is often),

they just steal the wires.

In 2011, British trains were delayed

by 16,000 hours because of people

stealing metal parts from the railways.

After Einstein died,

his brain was pickled,

sliced into 240 cubes and

left in a box marked ‘Costa Cider’

for 20 years.

Sir Walter Raleigh’s devoted widow

Elizabeth kept his decapitated head

with her in a velvet bag

for 29 years.

Forflitten
adj.

Overwhelmed

by unreasonable

and out-of-proportion

scolding.

Forwallowed
adj.

Weary with being

tossed about.

Rhinorrhea
n.

The medical condition

otherwise known as

‘a runny nose’.

Subitise
vb

To perceive the number

of objects in a group

without actually

counting them.

An
acrocomic
is someone with long hair.

According to the
Oxford English Dictionary
,

the word hasn’t been used

since it was coined in 1626.

Until now, that is.

The word ‘unfriend’

first appeared in print in 1659.

Berk
and
charlie
(as in ‘a proper charlie’)

are rhyming slang for

‘Berkshire Hunt’ and ‘Charlie Hunt’.

The most popular beers

in Turkmenistan are called

‘Berk’ and ‘Zip’.

As a reward

for winning the part of Harry Potter,

the 11-year-old Daniel Radcliffe

was allowed to stay up

and watch
Fawlty Towers
.

Durham University

offers a Harry Potter module.

It includes the topic

‘Gryffindor and Slytherin:

prejudice and intolerance in the classroom’.

The word ‘school’

comes from the ancient Greek for

‘free time’.

In particle physics, a ‘barn’ is an area

that covers a billionth of the cross-section

of a silk fibre. It’s called a barn because

(in subatomic terms) it’s so huge.

In 2010, twice as many Britons died

in accidents in their own homes

as in traffic accidents.

The names Honda and Toyota

derive from Japanese words for

different kinds of rice field.

In French, Hungarian, Spanish,

Irish, Italian, Portuguese,

Latvian, Serbian, Croatian,

Bosnian, Montenegrin and Tagalog,

the words for ‘time’ and ‘weather’

are the same.

Britain

is the windiest country

in Europe.

The Inuit use the same word,

sila
, to mean both

‘weather’ and ‘consciousness’.

There are five categories of hurricane.

The slowest outpaces a cheetah;

the fastest beats the world’s

fastest roller coaster

(149 mph).

There are at least 300

earthquakes a year in the UK,

but only 11 people have ever died in one.

There is no known scientific way

of predicting earthquakes.

The most reliable method is

to count the number of missing cats

in the local paper: if it trebles,

an earthquake is imminent.

The amount of water on Earth is constant,

and continually recycled over time:

some of the water you drink

will have passed through

a dinosaur.

95% of the lead

in British army bullets

comes from recycled materials.

A
squishop

is a squire

who is also a bishop.

Muammar

is Arabic for ‘long-lived’.

A newborn giant panda weighs

less than a cup of tea.

The CIA reads

up to 5 million tweets a day.

85% of the clicking on web ads

is done by 8% of the people.

Since 2008,

the number of clicks has halved.

The 6-trillionth, 8-trillionth,

9-trillionth and 10-trillionth

digits of pi

are all fives.

Under Chairman Mao,

every Chinese family

was obliged to kill a sparrow a week

to stop them eating all the rice.

The project was ineffective because

sparrows don’t eat rice.

Barley

has twice as many genes as

people.