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

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more