John Lloyd - 1,411 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock You Sideways

by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson & James Harkin 1,227 QUITE INTERESTING FACTS TO BLOW YOUR SOCKS OFF
1,339 QUITE INTERESTING FACTS TO MAKE YOUR JAW DROP by John Lloyd & John Mitchinson THE BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE THE SECOND BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE THE BOOK OF ANIMAL IGNORANCE ADVANCED BANTER: THE QI BOOK OF QUOTATIONS THE QI BOOK OF THE DEAD edited by John Lloyd & John Mitchinson THE QI E ANNUAL THE QI F ANNUAL THE QI G ANNUAL THE QI H ANNUAL by John Lloyd & Douglas Adams THE MEANING OF LIFF THE DEEPER MEANING OF LIFF by John Lloyd & Jon Canter AFTERLIFF 1,411
QUITE
INTERESTING
FACTS TO KNOCK YOU SIDEWAYS Compiled by
John Lloyd, John Mitchinson,
and James Harkin with the QI Elves
Anne Miller, Andrew Hunter Murray,
Anna Ptaszynski, and Alex Bell W. W. NORTON & COMPANY Independent Publishers Since 1923 NEW YORK LONDON 1,411 Quite Interesting Facts Copyright 2015, 2014 by QI Ltd First American Edition 2015 First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Faber and Faber Ltd under the
title 1,411 QI Facts to Knock You Sideways All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce
selections from this book, write to Permissions,
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 For information about special discounts for bulk
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Norton Special Sales at specialsales@
wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830 Production manager: Julia Druskin The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Lloyd, John, 1951
1,411 quite interesting facts to knock you sideways / compiled by John
Lloyd, John Mitchinson, and James Harkin ; with the QI elves Anne
Miller, Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Ptaszynski, and Alex Bell.
First American edition. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-0-393-24987-3 (hardcover) 1. Curiosities and wonders. 2. Handbooks, vade-mecums, etc.
3.

HistoryMiscellanea. 4. ScienceMiscellanea. I. Mitchinson,
John, 1963 II. Harkin, James, 1971 III.

Lloyd, John, 1951 1,339 quite
interesting facts to make your jaw drop. IV. Title. V. Title: One thousand
four hundred and eleven quite interesting facts to knock you sideways.
VI. VII. VII.

Title: Fourteen hundred eleven quite
interesting facts to knock you sideways. AG243.L58 2015 031.02dc23 2015025687 ISBN 978-0-393-24988-0 (e-book) W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. W. W.

Norton & Company Ltd. Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these
boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts
alone are wanted in life. CHARLES DICKENS, Hard Times (1854) Weve taken the opening lines of Dickenss shortest novel to heart. Here are facts, facts, facts, 1,411 times over.

If you dont believe any of them, or want to explore the background detail, go to our website, qi.com/US1411, and type the page number into the search box. Because, much as we love them, we know that facts dont tell the whole story. They also dont last. Unlike buildings, facts arent set in stone. Like milk or meat, they have a sell-by date. In 2013, a Harvard mathematician called Samuel Arbesman wrote a book called The Half-Life of Facts, in which he compares facts to uranium atoms.

Individually, their lifespan is unpredictable, but when they are lumped together we can accurately predict that half the atoms will decay within 4.47 billion yearsthe so-called half-life of uranium 238. Facts, it turns out, also have a half-life, and most of them dont last nearly as long. For example, its only a few hundred years since everybody agreed that the Sun went around the Earth. Only half a century ago, doctors thought smoking was good for you. Less than ten years ago, it was a fact that Pluto was a planet, until it was downgraded by the International Astronomical Union in 2006. Arbesman is an expert in scientometricsthe science of scienceand he has shown that the time it takes to overturn half of any given body of knowledge can be measured.

The subject with the longest half-life is mathematics, much of which, alone among human knowledge, appears to be immortal. Alarmingly, one of the shortest-lived disciplines is medicinewhere it can be shown that half of what doctors believe to be true will be proven wrong within 45 years. The problem is, of course, they dont know which half. Information is fleeting. Human records are broken; new particles are discovered; fresh historical documents come to light. Dinosaurs turn out not to be giant gray iguanas after all, but multicolored feathery proto-birds of all shapes and sizes.

Right now, even the daddy of all facts, the Big Bang theory, is looking wobbly. Almost all that is now obvious will one day be seen as ludicrous. So what you hold in your hands isnt really a fact book at all; its a situation report on what we think we know at this particular moment in time. And thats fine with us. We like facts not so we can boast about them, but because they make us think. Because they challenge our preconceptions, not reinforce them.

So we hope you enjoy reading these facts as much as weve enjoyed finding them. But dont dawdleyou dont know how long they have left to live. JOHN LLOYD, JOHN MITCHINSON, AND JAMES HARKIN Those who love wisdom must
investigate many things.
HERACLITUS (c. 535c. 475 BC) There are 1,411 tigers left in India. The Greek for left-handed also means better.

The Heil Hitler salute is legal in Switzerland as long as its an expression of personal opinion. Qatar is the only country that begins with a Q, and Iraq is the only country that ends with one. The letter Q was illegal in Turkey for 85 years. Dildos are illegal in Texas. Snake-charming is illegal in India. In New Zealand, snakes of any kind are illegal.

In the Second World War, the Allies had a plan to drop boxes of poisonous snakes on enemy troops. On D-Day, J. D. Salinger fought with six chapters of The Catcher in the Rye in his backpack. Charles Darwin let his children use the original manuscript of On the Origin of Species as drawing paper. Charles Dickenss family had a cat, seven dogs, two ravens, a canary called Dick, and a pony called Newman Noggs.

Theodore Roosevelt had guinea pigs called Admiral Dewey, Bishop Doane, Dr. Johnson, Father OGrady, and Fighting Bob Evans, and a small bear called Jonathan Edwards. Anton Chekhov had a pet mongoose. In 1849, the Viceroy of Egypt gave London Zoo a hippo in exchange for a greyhound. There are more plastic flamingos in the USA than real flamingos. There are more statues of lions in the world than there are real lions.

Two-thirds of the worlds polar bears live in Canada. When Canada held a competition to design its national flag, more than 10% of the entries featured a beaver. The biggest dam built by beavers is twice as long as the Hoover Dam. There is enough concrete in the Hoover Dam to build a road across the USA from coast to coast. The first motor insurance policy issued by Lloyds of London described the car as a ship navigating on land. 6% of drivers deliberately swerve to kill animals. 6% of drivers deliberately swerve to kill animals.

The worlds fastest lawnmower can travel at 116 mph. In 2007, 210,000 Americans were injured by lawnmowers. The lawnmower is the most dangerous item in the garden. The second most dangerous is the flowerpot. When Edwin Beard Budding invented the lawnmower, he tested it at night so no one would think he was mad. Using a gasoline-driven lawnmower for one hour produces as much air pollution as a 100-mile car trip.