Most Interesting: The Best of the QI App as Chosen by Users PDF
Preview Most Interesting: The Best of the QI App as Chosen by Users
Most Interesting: The Best of the QI App as Chosen by Users John Lloyd and John Mitchinson Table of Contents Title Page Introduction 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Anglerfish Beaver Catfish Comb Jelly Coral Dolphin Eel Lobster Octopus Pearl Oyster Sea Cow Sea Cucumber Seal Shark Starfish Tardigrade Walrus Whale 2010 A Space Odyssey How many galaxies are visible to the naked eye? What man-made artefacts can be seen from the moon? What does the Moon smell like? Does the Earth go round the Moon or the Moon round the Earth? How many moons does the Earth have? How many planets are there in the solar system? How would you fly through an asteroid belt? Where’s the coolest place in the universe? What was the first animal in space? Chewing the Cud Bison Cow Donkey Elephant Giraffe Goat Hoatzin Horse Moose Pig Sheep Doctor Doctor Is a virus a germ? What causes stomach ulcers? What is the worst thing to eat for tooth decay? What will be the biggest killer in the world by 2030? What illness do British doctors treat most often? Is the answer to depression just to ‘walk it off’? Which country has the world’s highest suicide rate? Driven Introduction Genghis Khan Robert E. Peary Mary Kingsley Alexander von Humboldt Francis Galton William Morris Happy Go Lucky Introduction Epicurus Benjamin Franklin Edward Jenner Mary Seacole Mary Frith Richard Feynman Is That All There Is? Introduction St Cuthbert Ann Lee William Blake Jeremy Bentham Richard Buckminster Fuller Just So Stories Where did Marco Polo come from? When does ‘ring-a-ring o’ roses’ date from? Where does the word ‘assassin’ come from? Where do camels come from? What did human beings evolve from? Where does the equals sign come from? Where do tulips come from? How long have the Celts lived in Britain? Who was the first man to circumnavigate the globe? Where do loofahs come from? Where did Stone Age people live? What was the first animal to be domesticated? Where do turkeys come from? Where do Panama hats come from? Can you name an Irish saint? What nationality was the Duke of Wellington? Who was Britain’s first Prime Minister? There’s Nothing Like a Bad Start in Life Introduction Leonardo da Vinci Sigmund Freud Isaac Newton Oliver Heaviside Byron Ada Lovelace Hans Christian Andersen Salvador Dalí Who Do You Think You Are? Introduction Titus Oates Alessandro, Count Cagliostro George Psalmanazar Princess Caraboo Louis de Rougemont James Barry Ignácz Trebitsch Lincoln Tuesday Lobsang Rampa Archibald Belaney About the Authors By the Same Authors Copyright Introduction It’s easy to get blasé about the Internet. It’s something two billion of us now take almost entirely for granted, living our lives online as though it were the most natural thing in the world. But think about it – if you’re reading this, you’re about to discover two things. The first is that you can get an unimaginable amount of information into a very small space (the whole Internet – books, music, photographs, emails, orders, spam – weighs just 2 millionths of an ounce, about the same as a tiny grain of sand). The second is that we can now share our preferences, our whims, our considered choices with everybody else, without having to arrange tea, phone them or send a round-robin letter containing a stamped addressed envelope. That feels like progress to us. You are reading an electronic book which we have written but you (or people like you) have edited. It contains the ten most popular selections from the QI App we released last year. These selected titles have been opened almost 200,000 times and collectively you have spent nine and a half years reading them. Thank you. (By coincidence, it’s exactly nine and a half years since the first QI series was aired on BBC2.) The most popular title of the lot – 20,000 Leagues under the Sea – is all about aquatic animals and has been read for 110 weeks. As writers, it’s always fascinating to know what piques a reader’s curiosity. Was it the bizarre sex life of the anglerfish that took it to the top of the list? Or that starfish eat by pushing their stomachs out of their mouths? The dark side of dolphins? The extraordinariness of the much-misunderstood shark? A quick browse through the other titles reveals they are mostly about people, other animals and space. Maybe this is as it should be. If you think about it, what else is there? The great Victorian naturalist Thomas Huxley once said that we should try to learn something about everything and everything about something. So, dive in. You’ll find out what the moon smells like, why cows are fed magnets, and what Sigmund Freud did before he invented psychoanalysis. You’ll realise why Hans Christian Andersen wrote such sad fairy tales and how stress has nothing to do with causing stomach ulcers. It’s not really meant to be read from beginning to end, but be our guests. In a way that would once have seemed as improbable as the existence of a second moon or fitting all human knowledge into a grain of sand, this really is your book, not ours. JOHN LLOYD & JOHN MITCHINSON 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Anglerfish
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