General Ignorance

[Scotland]

I've just bought The Book of General Ignorance, from the makers of QI. Like the TV show, it is full of information - most of it disproving what we already think we know.

 

Heres's an example;

 

What’s the most dangerous animal that has ever lived?

 

What would you say?

 

Grizzly Bear, Great White Shark, Tyrannosaurus Rex?

 

Nope. It is infact;

 

 

 

The Female Mosquito

 

Half the human beings who have ever died, perhaps as many as 45 billion people, have been killed by female mosquitoes (the males only bite plants).

Mosquitoes carry more than a hundred potentially fatal diseases, including malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, encephalitis, filariasis,and elephantiasis. Even today, they kill one person every twelve seconds.

 

Amazingly, nobody had any idea that mosquitoes were dangerous until the end of the nineteenth century. In 1877 the British doctor Sir Patrick Manson—known as “Mosquito” Manson—proved that elephantiasis was caused by mosquito bites.

 

Seventeen years later, in 1894, it occurred to him that malaria might also be caused by mosquitoes. He encouraged his pupil Ronald Ross, then a young doctor based in India, to test the hypothesis.

 

Ross was the first person to show how female mosquitoes transmit the Plasmodium parasite through their saliva. He tested his theory using birds. Manson went one better. To show that the theory worked for humans, he infected his own son, using mosquitoes carried in the diplomatic bag from Rome. (Fortunately, after an immediate dose of quinine, the boy recovered.)

Ross won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1902. Manson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, knighted, and founded the London School of Tropical Medicine.

 

There are 2,500 known species of mosquito; 400 of them aremembers of the Anopheles family, and, of these, 40 species are able to transmit malaria.

The females use the blood they suck to mature their eggs, which are laid on water. The eggs hatch into aquatic larvae, or wrigglers. Unlike most insects, the pupae of mosquitoes, known as tumblers, are active and swim about.

Male mosquitoes hum at a higher pitch than females: they can be sexually enticed by the note of a B-natural tuning fork.

 

Female mosquitoes are attracted to their hosts by moisture, milk, carbon dioxide, body heat, and movement. Sweaty people and pregnant women have a higher chance of being bitten.

Mosquito means “small fly” in Spanish and Portuguese.

 

 

 

 

I'll post some more of these, in question form, if people would like me to.

 

 

.

[Scotland]

Question 1

 

Where do kilts, bagpipes, haggis, porridge, whisky, and tartan come from?

 

.

[Dave Spacey]

Question 1

 

Where do kilts, bagpipes, haggis, porridge, whisky, and tartan come from?

 

.

This is so obvious that the obvious can't be the right answer. So i'm going to say India

[neave]

Question 1

 

Where do kilts, bagpipes, haggis, porridge, whisky, and tartan come from?

 

.

Greece.

[scott_jambo]

turkey.

[Carl Fredrickson]

What?s the most dangerous animal that has ever lived?

What would you say?

 

Grizzly Bear, Great White Shark, Tyrannosaurus Rex?

 

Nope. It is infact;

 

 

 

The Female Mosquito

 

 

 

 

.

 

 

I know the answer to that one - Alan Davies got it right on QI.

 

One (of many) that impressed me was regarding the well known "fact" that all bees die when they sting us.

 

O no they dont. More wasps die from stinging us than bees.

[Dean Winchester]

Question 1

 

Where do kilts, bagpipes, haggis, porridge, whisky, and tartan come from?

 

.

 

All different places. None of which are from Scotland?

[Brian Whittaker's Tache]

Egypt

[The Gasman]

Question 1

 

Where do kilts, bagpipes, haggis, porridge, whisky, and tartan come from?

 

.

 

A shop on the Royal Mile... ...hope this helps.

[speedbump]

All different places. None of which are from Scotland?

 

Correct.

[Scotland]

Question 1

 

Where do kilts, bagpipes, haggis, porridge, whisky, and tartan come from?

 

.

 

Answer

 

All different places. None of which are from Scotland?

 

Correct.

 

In fact, not even 'Scotland' is Scottish. Scotland is named after the Scoti, a Celtic tribe from Ireland, who arrived in what the Romans called Caledonia in the fifth or sixth century A.D. By the eleventh century they dominated the whole of mainland Scotland. Scots Gaelic is actually a dialect of Irish.

 

Kilts were invented by the Irish, but the word kilt is Danish (kilte op, ?tuck up?).

 

The bagpipes are ancient and were probably invented in Central Asia. They are mentioned in the Old Testament (Daniel 3:5?15) and in Greek poetry of the fourth century B.C. The Romans probably brought them to Britain but the earliest Pictish carvings date from the eighth century A.D.

 

Greece.

 

Haggis was an ancient Greek sausage (Aristophanes mentions one exploding in The Clouds in 423 B.C.).

 

Oat porridge has been found in the stomachs of five-thousand-year-old Neolithic bog bodies in central Europe and Scandinavia.

 

Whisky was invented in ancient China. It arrived in Ireland before Scotland, first distilled by monks. The word derives from the Irish uisge beatha, from the Latin aqua vitae (water of life).

 

The elaborate system of clan tartans is a complete myth stemming from the early nineteenth century. All Highland dress, including what tartan or plaid there was, was banned after the 1745 rebellion. The English garrison regiments started designing their own tartans as an affectation, and to mark the state visit of King George IV to Edinburgh in 1822. Queen Victoria encouraged the trend, and it soon became a Victorian craze.

[Scotland]

Question 2

 

What?s the largest living thing on Earth?

 

PS, you've got a wee while on this one, as I have a few wee things to do.

 

Good Luck

[Sheriff Fatman]

Question 2

 

What?s the largest living thing on Earth?

 

PS, you've got a wee while on this one, as I have a few wee things to do.

 

Good Luck

 

It's a fungus

[Guest King]

Question 2

 

What’s the largest living thing on Earth?

 

PS, you've got a wee while on this one, as I have a few wee things to do.

 

Good Luck

 

LOL NADE LOL

 

Ehm no idea, some sort of massive plant or tree?

[I P Knightley]

Answer

 

Kilts were invented by the Irish, but the word kilt is Danish (kilte op, ?tuck up?).

 

 

I had a wee "tuck up" a ciouple of nights ago. Too much boozze before the birthday bonk.

[Boof]

Question 2

 

What?s the largest living thing on Earth?

 

 

Great Barrier Reef?

[Ulysses]

Question 2

 

What?s the largest living thing on Earth?

 

PS, you've got a wee while on this one, as I have a few wee things to do.

 

Good Luck

 

There's more than one right answer to this, IIRC.

[I P Knightley]

There's more than one right answer to this, IIRC.

 

The QI answer, when it was on telly, was the previously mentioned fungus somewhere in the North-West of North America.

[Scotland]

Question 2

 

What’s the largest living thing on Earth?

 

 

Answer

 

Well there are a few correct answers here:

 

It’s a mushroom.

And it’s not even a particularly rare one. You’ve probably got the honey fungus (Armillaria ostoyae) in your garden, growing on a dead tree stump.

For your sake, let’s hope it doesn’t reach the size of the largest recorded specimen, in Malheur National Forest in Oregon. It covers 2,200 acres and is between two thousand and eight thousand years old. Most of it is underground in the form of a massive mat of tentacle-like white mycelia (the mushroom’s equivalent of roots). These spread along tree roots, killing the trees and peeping up through the soil occasionally as innocent-looking clumps of honey mushrooms.

 

OR

 

The giant honey fungus of Oregon which was initially thought to grow in separate clusters throughout the forest, but researchers have now confirmed it is the world’s single biggest organism, connected under the soil.

 

OR

 

I'll give you the Great Barrier Reef - But that, is technically made up of millions of tiny organisms joined together. But as a whole, it is one of the biggest.

[Scotland]

Question 3

 

What color is water?

[Gorgiewave]

Question 3

 

What color is water?

 

same as this wee guy (sorry, got the book last year).

[Ibrahim Tall]

Light blue?(Colourless seems too obvious)

[Guest King]

Blue... is it not the seas and oceans etc which makes the sky blue? Or the other way about. Or is this a lie I have been fed.

 

I'll go for blue although its probably some smartarse answer like 'miniscule colourless particles blablabla'

[Scotland]

What color is water?

 

Answer

 

The usual answer is that it isn?t any color; it?s clear or transparent and the sea only appears blue because of the reflection of the sky.

Wrong. Water really is blue. It?s an incredibly faint shade, but it is blue. You can see this in nature when you look into a deep hole in the snow, or through the thick ice of a frozen waterfall. If you took a very large, very deep white pool, filled it with water, and looked straight down through it, the water would be blue.

This faint blue tinge doesn?t explain why water sometimes takes on a strikingly blue appearance when we look at it rather than through it. Reflected color from the sky obviously plays an important part. The sea doesn?t look particularly blue on an overcast day.

But not all the light we see is reflected from the surface of the water; some of it is coming from under the surface. The more impure the water, the more color it will reflect.

In large bodies of water like seas and lakes the water will usually contain a high concentration of microscopic plants and algae. Rivers and ponds will have a high concentration of soil and other solids in suspension.

All these particles reflect and scatter the light as it returns to the surface, creating huge variation in the colors we see. It explains why you sometimes see a brilliant green Mediterranean sea under a bright blue sky.

 

 

Looks like we need something a bit harder.

[Scotland]

Question 4

 

What do camels store in their humps?

 

Bonus points for whoever can say, exactly, where Camels are from.

[The Doctor]

Question 4

 

What do camels store in their humps?

 

I think it's fat, but it could be spare pyjamas for all I know of camel physiology.

 

I like this game though, I feel like Alan Davies...

[The Doctor]

 

Bonus points for whoever can say, exactly, where Camels are from.

 

Will I get a laugh if I say... the tobacconists?

 

[Ulysses]

Will I get a laugh if I say... the tobacconists?

 

 

Yep.

[Dave Spacey]

Water? and im gonna say the mummy camel

[Groot]

I'll guess they originally come from South America as they are not too different in appearance of Llama's

[lookoutjoe]

North America.

 

Its just been on Dave!

[maroongoals]

I would say muscle and fat,water would move about surely.

[Scotland]

What do camels store in their humps?

 

Answer

 

Fat.

 

Camels? humps don?t store water, but fat, which is used as an energy reserve. Water is stored throughout their bodies, particularly in the bloodstream, which makes them very good at avoiding dehydration.

Camels can lose 40 percent of their body weight before they are affected by it, and can go up to seven days without drinking. When they do drink, they really go for it?up to fifty gallons at a time.

Here are a few quite interesting facts about camels, which have nothing to do with their humps.

Before elephants acquired their reputation for long memories, the ancient Greeks believed it was camels that didn?t forget.

Persian hunting hounds?Salukis?hunted on camels. They lay on the camel?s neck watching for deer, and then leapt off in pursuit when they saw one. A Saluki can jump up to twenty feet from a standing start.

In 1977 in Zoo Vet, David Taylor observed that ?camels may build up a pressure cooker of resentment toward human beings until the lid suddenly blows off and they go berserk.? The camel handler calms it down by handing the beast his coat. ?The camel gives the garment hell?jumping on it, biting it, tearing it to pieces. When the camel feels it has blown its top enough, man and animal can live together in harmony again.?

Camel racing in the United Arab Emirates has started to use robot riders in place of the traditional child jockeys. The remotely operated riders were developed following a ban on the use of jockeys under sixteen years of age, imposed by the UAE Camel Racing Association in March 2004.

These laws are regularly flouted and there is a brisk child slave trade, with children as young as four being kidnapped in Pakistan and kept in Arab camel camps. The only qualifications needed to become a jockey are not to weigh much and be able to scream in terror (this encourages the camels).

The famous line from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, ?it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,? is possibly a mistranslation, where the original Aramaic word gamta, ?sturdy rope,? was confused with gamla, ?camel.?

This makes more sense, and is a comforting thought for the well-off.

 

 

North America

[Scotland]

Question 5

 

What were George Washington?s false teeth made from?

 

.

[Randle P McMurphy]

Obviously not wood then