Skip to main content

Funny You Should Ask Again - QI ****

The BBC TV show QI has some very irritating characteristics. First, there's the twee reference to their researchers as 'elves'. Then there's the smugness. No quiz show has ever been so smug in the way it delights in the wrong answers of contestants. And it has featured some scientific bloomers, such as naming Galileo as the inventor of the telescope. But this book is based on the QI researchers (still nauseatingly called elves) appearance on Zoe Ball's breakfast show on BBC Radio 2, answering listeners' questions - making it far less cynical and a compendium of good, fun, surprising facts.

What we get here is a collection of one and two page articles answering questions from how an ant measures distance to why we don't say 'sheeps' (unless we are Jeremy Clarkson). Some of the topics are fairly well-known already - like there not being a licence to kill in MI6, why a computer mouse is called a mouse, or whether or clone would have the same fingerprints (they don't mention that you just need to look at identical twins). Others are obscure, but frankly hard to imagine why anyone would want to know. For example, which of our lips is more important or has there ever been a strike at a bowling alley. But there is a solid base of genuinely interesting and surprising answers, whether it's to why embedded spies are called moles or why unsavoury doesn't mean sweet. It's not a long book - I read it in under two hours - but there's plenty to enjoy and to want to tell whoever is near you.

There were a few small issues. The 'answers' don't always answer the actual question. The very first one in the book is 'Why do ladybirds have spots?' What they answer is 'Why are ladybirds brightly coloured?' - which isn't the same thing at all. Sometimes there are opportunities missed to go a bit further in what can be over-simplistic answers. So, for example, the section on why Christmas puddings are sometimes called plum puddings points out that the pudding is traditionally made on 'Stir-up Sunday', the Sunday before Advent. The implication is that the Sunday is called this because of the pudding. But it's much more interesting if you know that traditional collect (prayer) for that evening begins 'Stir up, O Lord...'

The biggest gaffe is in the section answering 'What's the difference between antlers and horns?' The text points out that unlike bony antlers, horns (found on cattle, sheep etc.) contain a 'little core of bone' with the external part being keratin. And the exception to this is the rhinoceros which 'doesn't have a horn at all' because the apparent horn is all keratin and 'lacks the bony core that normal horns have.' The book is somewhat randomly illustrated. This section is illustrated with a deer and its antlers... and a rhino with its horns have a bony core.

Mostly, though, the content is fine if sometimes the (groan) elves try a bit too hard to be funny. This title is clearly aimed at the gift book market and it would make an excellent present for teenagers and adults alike.

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...
Post a Comment
Read more