1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off (4 page)

Wombats

have cubic faeces.

Harvard University

has the largest ant collection

in the world.

It takes a photon 40,000

years to get from the centre of the Sun

to its surface, but only 8.3 minutes

to get from there to the Earth.

For water to flow 100 metres

through the ground down a 1° slope takes

5 days through gravel,

13.7 years through sand and

137,000 years through clay.

In 1969,

Apollo 11
returned from the Moon

in half the time it took to get from

Boston to New York by stagecoach

in 1769.

New York City drifts about one inch away

from Europe every year.

Between 1960 and 1977, the secret number

authorising US presidents

to launch nuclear missiles was

00000000.

Jimmy Carter once

sent a jacket to the dry-cleaner’s

with the nuclear detonation codes

still in the pocket.

Worried about his grades at law school,

Richard Nixon broke into the Dean’s

office – only to discover that he was

top of his class.

The highest scoring word in Scrabble

is
oxyphenbutazone
, potentially earning

1,178 points.

(It’s a drug used to treat arthritis.)

A coal-fired power station

puts 100 times more radiation into the air

than a nuclear power plant

producing the same amount of energy.

Treasure Island in Lake Mindemoya

on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron

is the largest island in a lake on an island

in a lake in the world.

The strongest creatures on Earth are

gonorrhoea bacteria.

They can pull 100,000 times

their own body weight.

A dog has the same ecological footprint as

two Toyota Landcruisers;

a cat the same environmental effect as a

Volkswagen Golf;

two hamsters the same as a plasma TV.

Humans

have the same number

of hair follicles

as chimpanzees.

Gorillas and potatoes

have two more chromosomes

than people.

The average person who lives to be 75

will have spent six years

dreaming.

The word
ambisinistrous
is the

opposite of ambidextrous;

it means

‘no good with either hand’.

James Garfield,

20th president of the USA,

could write Greek with one hand

while writing Latin with the other.

Young Neanderthal girls

had bigger biceps

than an adult male human.

The second man to go over

Niagara Falls in a barrel,

Bobby Leach, survived the fall

but later died as a result of

slipping on a piece

of orange peel.

An orange is a berry but

a strawberry isn’t.

Vatican City has

the highest crime rate in the world.

Though the resident population

is only just over 800,

more than 600 crimes

are committed there each year.

90% of the crime

in Helmand province

is committed

by the Afghan police.

50% more US soldiers committed suicide

in Afghanistan in 2012

than were killed in action.

In 117
AD
, Emperor Hadrian declared

attempted suicide by soldiers

a form of desertion

and made it a capital offence.

Jack Bauer,

the lead character in the TV series 24,

killed 112 people

in the first five seasons of the show.

The longest hangover

in medical literature

lasted four weeks.

It belonged to a 37-year-old man

from Glasgow.

In 1715, a group of Jacobite rebels

failed to take Edinburgh Castle

because their rope ladders

were six feet too short.

The first manager

of the first McDonald’s franchise

was called Ed MacLuckie.

Coca-Cola in the Maldives

is made from seawater.

A ‘riot’ in England and Wales

must legally involve

a minimum of 12 people.

Under US federal law

it’s only three people

and in Nevada

only two.

More than 1 in 20 football injuries

are caused by

celebrating goals on the pitch.

Slavery was not made

a statutory offence in the UK

until 6th April 2010.

Diagnosed with pleurisy,

Sir Robert Chesebrough, the inventor of

Vaseline, decided to coat himself

in his product from head to foot.

He survived and lived to be 96.

In 1915, Charlie Chaplin entered

a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest

in San Francisco. Not only did he not win,

he failed even to make the final.

Male fruit flies rejected by females

drink significantly more alcohol than

those that have had a successful encounter.

In Inuktitut,

iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga

means

‘I should try not to become an alcoholic’.

2,520 is the smallest number

that can be exactly divided

by all the numbers

1 to 10.

2.5 million Mills & Boon novels

were pulped and added to the tarmac

of the UK’s M6 toll motorway

to make it more absorbent.

In 1999, more than 3,000 people

were hospitalised after

tripping over a

laundry basket.

In 1997, 39 people in the UK

found themselves in

hospital with

tea-cosy-related

injuries.

Deipnophobia
n.

The fear of

dinner party conversations.

Nomophobia
n.

The fear of being

out of mobile phone contact.

Metrophobia
n.

Fear of poetry.

Lachanophobia
n.

Fear of vegetables.

Since 1990, the number of people

living in poverty in China

has fallen from

85% to 15%.

A ‘knot’ is something

tied in a single piece of rope or line.

Something that joins two ropes

together is a ‘bend’.

A baby oyster

is called a ‘spat’.

More chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos

are eaten by people every year

than there are in

all the zoos in the world.

In the 19th century,

sausages were marketed as

‘bags of mystery’.

If a vampire were to feed once a day

and turn each of his victims

into a vampire,

the entire human population of the planet

would become vampires

in just over a month.

Relative to our galaxy,

the Earth is travelling through space

at more than 500,000 mph.

The Sun takes 220 million years

to orbit the galaxy,

a journey it has made

20 times so far.

Abbey-lubber
n.

A lazy monk.

Acrochordon
n.

A wart that hangs down

like a string.

Apport
n.

Something that appears out of thin air:

the opposite of a vanishing.

Autotelic
adj.

Worth doing for its own sake.

Although Shakespeare’s works run to

more than a million words,

only 14 exist in his own handwriting:

12 of them are his signatures

and the other two are ‘by’ and ‘me’.

George W. Bush named

The Very Hungry Caterpillar
by Eric Carle

as his favourite childhood book. It was

published when he was 23 years old.

In 2012, Britain’s Eurovision entrant,

Englebert Humperdinck (76), was

not only the oldest of the contestants,

he was older than more than 20

of the countries they represented.

Swans do not sing (before dying or

otherwise), although one species, the

Whistling Swan, whistles a bit.

There are ten times as many stars

in the known universe

as there are

grains of sand in the world.

The ties bought in America

for Father’s Day each year

would stretch from New York to Rome.

There are thought to be 100,000

uncharted mountains under the sea.

Only 1,000 or so have ever been mapped.

Aborigines, whose culture reaches back

to the last Ice Age, have names for

(and can locate) mountains

that have been under the sea

for 8,000 years.

Just like humans,

British cows moo in accents

specific to their region.

95% of all data in the world

is still stored on paper.

Most of it is never looked at again.

The common shrew

protects itself from predators

by dying of fright.

The next person to walk on the Moon

will almost certainly be

Chinese.

Almost half of all babies in China

are born by Caesarean section.

The half a million tonnes of chocolate

eaten each year in Britain

represent 87% of the entire

annual cocoa production

of Latin America.

A single zinc mine in Namibia

uses a fifth of the country’s

electricity supply.

Per gram per second, more energy

runs through a sunflower

than through the Sun itself.

It takes ten times

as much energy to heat water

as it does to heat iron.

It takes ten times

as much energy to turn water into steam

as it does to bring it to the boil.

It takes an hour

to soft-boil an ostrich egg

and an hour and a half

to hard-boil one.

It takes between 70,000 and 150,000

crocuses to make

a kilo of saffron.

Alexander the Great

washed his hair in saffron

to keep it shiny and orange.

In 1999, a four-year-old girl

turned yellow

after drinking too much

Sunny Delight.

Russian has no word for ‘blue’,

only two different words for

‘light blue’ and ‘dark blue’.

Andy Warhol always wore

green underpants.

25 million Bibles were printed in 2011,

compared to 208 million IKEA catalogues.

The English version of Wikipedia

has 50 times more words than

the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
.

Up to 2010, Wikipedia had taken

100 million person-hours to write:

about the same amount of time

that the population of the USA

spends watching TV ad breaks

in a single weekend.

There is more information

in one edition of the
New York Times
than

the average person

in 17th-century England

would have come across in a lifetime.

When Einstein published his

Theory of General Relativity,

the
New York Times
sent their

golfing correspondent

to interview him.

The historic news of the

first manned powered flight

by the Wright Brothers

first appeared in the magazine

Gleanings in Bee Culture
.

Dune
, by Frank Herbert, the world’s best-selling

science fiction novel, was rejected

over 20 times before being accepted

by a publisher of car manuals.