QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (5 page)

They don’t change colour to match the background.

Never have; never will. Complete myth. Utter fabrication. Total lie.

They change colour as a result of different emotional states. If they happen to match the background it’s entirely coincidental.

Chameleons change colour when frightened or picked up or when they beat another chameleon in a fight. They change colour when a member of the opposite sex steps into view and they sometimes change colour due to fluctuations in either light or temperature.

A chameleon’s skin contains several layers of specialised cells called
chromataphores
(from Greek
chroma,
colour, and
pherein
, to carry), each with different coloured pigments. Altering the balance between these layers causes the skin to reflect different kinds of light, making chameleons a kind of walking colour-wheel.

It’s odd how persistent the belief that they change colour to match the background is. The myth first appears in the work of a minor Greek writer of entertaining stories and potted biographies called Antigonus of Carystus in about 240
BC
. Aristotle, far more influential and writing a century earlier, had already, quite correctly, linked the colour-change to fear and, by the Renaissance, the ‘background’ theory had, once again, been almost entirely abandoned. But it’s come back with a vengeance since and to this day is perhaps the only thing most people think they ‘know’ about chameleons.

Chameleons can remain completely motionless for several hours at a time. Because of this, and the fact that they eat very little, they were, for many centuries, believed to live on air. This, of course, isn’t true either.

The word chameleon is Greek for ‘ground-lion’. The smallest species is the
Brookesia minima,
which is 25 mm (1 inch) long; the largest is the
Chaemaeleo parsonnii,
which is more than 610 mm (2 feet) long. The Common Chameleon glories in the Latin name
Chamaeleo chamaeleon,
which sounds like the opening to a song.

Chameleons can rotate and focus either eye independently to look in two completely different directions at once, but they are stone deaf.

The Bible forbids the eating of chameleons.

 

They cover their black nose with their white paw, don’t they?

Adorable but unfounded, unfortunately. And they’re not left-handed either. Naturalists have observed polar bears for many hundreds of hours and have never seen any evidence of discreet nose-covering or of left-handedness.

They like toothpaste, though. There are regular reports of polar bears wreaking havoc in Arctic tourist camps, knocking over tents and trampling equipment, all in order to suck on a tube of Pepsodent.

This may be one of the reasons the town of Churchill in Manitoba has a large concrete ‘polar-bear jail’. Any bear moseying into town is apprehended and incarcerated there. Some serve sentences of several months before being released back into the community, embittered, institutionalised and jobless. Formerly the morgue for a military base, it is officially designated Building D-20. It can hold twenty-three bears at a time. Polar bears don’t eat during the summer, so some of the inmates aren’t fed for months at a time. They’re held until spring or the autumn – their hunting seasons – so that when they’re released they go off fishing and don’t just wander back to Churchill.

The earliest-known captive polar bear belonged to Ptolemy II of Egypt (308–246
BC
), and was kept in his private zoo in Alexandria. In
AD
57, the Roman writer Calpurnius Siculus wrote of polar bears pitted against seals in a flooded amphitheatre. Viking hunters captured polar bear cubs by killing and skinning the mother, spreading her pelt on the snow, and nabbing the cubs when they came to lie on it.

The scientific names can be a bit misleading.
Ursus arctos
isn’t the polar bear, it’s the Brown Bear.
Ursus
means ‘bear’ in Latin and
arctos
means ‘bear’ in Greek. The Arctic is named after the bear, not the other way around; it was ‘the region of the bear’, where bears lived and where the great bear in the sky, the constellation Ursa Major, pointed. The polar bear is
Ursus maritimus
– the sea bear.

The constellation Ursa Major has been identified as a bear by a number of cultures including the Ainu of Japan in the east, the American Indians in the west and ourselves in the middle. Even though all polar bears are born, literally, under the constellation of the Great Bear, astrologically they are all Capricorns, born in late December or early January.

The Brown Bear is the same species as the Grizzly, which is the term applied to Brown Bears living in inland North America. Male and female bears are known as boars and sows, despite being about as closely related to pigs as koalas are to seals. Bears’ closest relatives are actually dogs.

Five thousand? Two million? Ten billion?

The answer is four – although from where you are sitting, you can only see two; and one of those is the Milky Way (the one we’re in).

Given that there are estimated to be more than 100 billion
galaxies in the universe, each containing between 10 and 100 billion stars, it’s a bit disappointing. In total, only four galaxies are visible from Earth with the naked eye, only half of which can be seen at once (two from each hemisphere). In the Northern Hemisphere, you can see the Milky Way and Andromeda (M31), while in the Southern Hemisphere you can see the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.

Some people with exceptional eyesight claim to be able to see three more: M33 in Triangulum, M81 in Ursa Major and M83 in Hydra, but it’s very hard to prove.

The number of stars supposedly visible to the naked eye varies wildly, but everyone agrees that the total is substantially less than 10,000. Most amateur-astronomy computer software uses the same database: it lists 9,600 stars as ‘naked-eye visible’. But no one really believes this figure. Other estimates vary from around 8,000 down to fewer than 3,000.

It used to be said that there were more cinemas (around 5,200) in the former Soviet Union than there are stars visible in the night sky.

At the Canadian web-site www.starregistry.ca you can have a star named after yourself or a friend for $98 CDN (or $175 CDN with a framed certificate). They list 2,873 stars as being visible to the naked eye. None of these are available as they already have historical or scientific names.

Deduct ten points if you said the Great Wall of China.

No human artefacts at all can be seen from the moon with the naked eye.

The idea that the Great Wall is the ‘only man-made object that can be seen from the moon’ is all-pervasive, but it confuses ‘the moon’ with space.

‘Space’ is quite close. It starts about 100 km (60 miles) from the Earth’s surface. From there, many artificial objects are visible: motorways, ships on the sea, railways, cities, fields of crops, and even some individual buildings.

However, at an altitude of only a few thousand miles after leaving the Earth’s orbit, no man-made objects are visible at all. From the moon – over 400,000 km (some 250,000 miles) away – even the continents are barely visible.

And, despite
Trivial Pursuit
telling you otherwise, there is no point in between the two where ‘only’ the Great Wall of China is visible.

Chop suey. There are many fanciful stories about its American origin but it is a Chinese dish.

In E. N. Anderson’s definitive
The Food of China
(1988), chop suey is named as a dish local to Toisan in southern Canton. They called it
tsap seui,
which means ‘miscellaneous scraps’ in Cantonese. Most of the early immigrants to California came from this region, hence its early appearance in America.

Glass isn’t Chinese: the earliest-known glass artefacts are
from ancient Egypt in 1350
BC
. The earliest Chinese porcelain dates from the Han dynasty (206
BC
–
AD
220). Ancient China built a whole culture on porcelain, but they never got to grips with transparent glass. This is sometimes used to explain the fact that they never had a scientific revolution comparable with the one in the West, which was made possible by the development of lenses and transparent glassware.

The rickshaw was invented by an American missionary, Jonathan Scobie, who first used it to wheel his invalid wife through the streets of Yokohama in Japan in 1869.

Fortune cookies are also American, though they were probably invented by a Japanese immigrant, Makato Hagiwara, a landscape designer who created the Golden Gate tearoom in San Francisco. He served small, sweet Japanese buns with thank-you notes inside from about 1907 onwards. Restaurant owners in the city’s Chinatown copied them and the notes soon started to tell fortunes.

But who’s complaining? Chinese resourcefulness has given us: the abacus, bells, brandy, the calendar, the compass, the crossbow, the decimal system, drilling for oil, fireworks, the fishing reel, the flamethrower, the flush toilet, gunpowder, the helicopter, the horse collar, the iron plough, the kite, lacquer, magic mirrors, matches, the mechanical clock, miniature hot-air balloons, negative numbers, paper, parachutes, porcelain, printmaking, relief maps, rudders, seismographs, silk, stirrups, the suspension bridge, the umbrella, the water pump and the wheelbarrow.

Croatia.

Marco Polo (or ‘Mark Chicken’ in English) was born Marko Pilić in Korcula, Dalmatia, in 1254, then a protectorate of Venice.

We shall probably never know whether he really went to the Far East as a seventeen-year-old with his merchant uncles or if he simply recorded the tales of Silk Road traders who stopped off at their Black Sea trading post.

What is certain is that his famous book of travels was largely the work of a romance writer called Rustichello da Pisa with whom he shared a cell after being captured by the Genoans in 1296. Polo dictated it; Rustichello wrote it in French, a language Polo didn’t speak.

The result, which appeared in 1306, was designed to entertain, and it became a best-seller in the era before printing. As an accurate history its status is less secure.

Its original title was
Il Milione
– ‘the Million’ – for reasons that are now obscure, although it quickly became nicknamed ‘the million lies’, and Polo – now a rich and successful merchant – was known as ‘Mr Million’. It was probably just a catchy thirteenth-century version of a title like ‘Wonder Book of Wonders’. No original manuscripts survive.

Marco Polo is also supposed to have brought pasta and ice cream to Italy.

In fact, pasta was known in Arab countries in the ninth century and dried macaroni is mentioned in Genoa in 1279, twenty-five years before Polo claimed to have returned. According to the food historian Alan Davidson, the myth itself only dates back as far as 1929 when it was mentioned in an American pasta-trade journal.

Ice cream may well be a Chinese invention but it seems unlikely to have been introduced to the West by Polo, as it
doesn’t get mentioned again until the middle of the seventeenth century.