Quite Interesting
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A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
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Last Seen Profiles
Until 1979, Sweden classified homosexuality as a mental illness. That year, activists took the classification as an illness to its logical extent - Swedes called in too gay to go to work.
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We are deeply saddened to hear of Sean Lock's passing. Sean was a QI regular right from the first series, and helped to shape the show with his fantastically sharp wit and anarchic good humour. Our thoughts are with his friends and family.
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In English, a "French exit" is to sneak out of a party without telling anyone. In French, it is known as "partir à l’anglaise" - to leave the English way.
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The word ‘Tory’, commonly used to refer to a member of the UK Conservative Party, comes from the Irish Gaelic word ‘tóraidhe’ meaning outlaw or robber.
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An 81-year-old Australian with a rare antibody has retired from donating blood. Going every fortnight for 60 years, officials believe he has helped save the lives of over two million babies.
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In 1991 stonemasons quietly added an alien to the gargoyles of Scotland’s Paisley Abbey. (Image: Colin CC-BY-SA-2.0)
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Crows not only hold grudges, they tell their friends and family about them.
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On October 1st 1861, Charles Darwin wrote in his diary: ‘I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything’
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Every year, Katmai National Park and Preserve crowns a Fat Bear of the Year. This year's winner was bear 435, named Holly.
A former park ranger notes that “Holly was single this summer and able to devote all her energy toward herself".
(Image: Katmai National Park & Preserve.)
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A 'kangaroo word' is a word that contains the letters of a related synonym inside it, such as BLOssOM, cHickEN or hoNOuraBLE.
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In 1975, a cat was listed as the co-author of a prestigious physics paper because the author had accidentally written 'we' instead of 'I' throughout and couldn't be bothered changing it.
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Dinosaurs likely quacked and honked like today's geese.
(Image: James Petts.)
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Independence from Britain is celebrated somewhere in the world, on average, one in every seven days.
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In 1979, Casio made a pocket calculator that doubled as a cigarette lighter, also known as the ‘calculighter’. [📷: Joe Haupt]
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The rule "I before E except after C" has been disproved by science.
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When Mariya Oktyabrskaya's husband was killed during WWII, she sold all her possessions to pay for a tank and petitioned the USSR to let her drive it herself. She named it "Fighting Girlfriend" and killed so many Nazis she was awarded the Soviet Union's highest military honor.
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In Washington DC, the Slovakian and Slovenian embassies meet once a month to exchange wrongly addressed mail.
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The tiny island of Lítla Dímun is often crowned with its own individual cloud.
(Image: SPUMADOR.)
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People who swear a lot tend to be more honest and more intelligent.
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The average person walks past 11 murderers in their life.
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Superterrain and
@jve_academie
have created a version of Fahrenheit 451 that can only be read when flame is applied to the book.
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Although sugar makes up more than 90% of a Tic Tac, they are allowed to be labelled as ‘sugar-free’ in the U.S. because each mint weighs 0.49 grams and the FDA lets brands say there are 0 grams of an ingredient if its amount is less than 0.5 grams per serving.
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The last date that all living humans were together on Earth was November 2nd 2000. Since then there has always been someone onboard the International Space Station.
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Jadwiga, canonised saint and the first female monarch of Poland, held the title of King as Queens couldn’t rule, but the law didn’t state that a King had to be male.
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In January 2007, a woman was refused entry to the UK because immigration officials claimed it was ‘not credible’ that someone wanted to spend a week in Gateshead.
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In 1944, a Finnish soldier escaping the Russian Army took 30x the dosage of methamphetamines designed to keep soldiers awake. He managed to ski 250 miles surviving on only a raw bird and some pine buds, and when he got to hospital a week later his heart rate was 200BPM.
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When Hannibal Lecter famously said “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti” he was saying more than you might think: the antidepressant MAOI prohibits the consumption of liver, fava beans and red wine. He was slyly revealing that he was not taking his medication.
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The best selling chocolate bar in America (Hershey's) doesn't contain enough cocoa to be legally classified as "chocolate" in the UK.
(Image: SpooSpa.)
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The Finnish word for pedant, pilkunnussija, translates literally as ‘comma fucker’.
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Word of the day: GLUGGAVEÐUR (Icelandic) - Weather that looks lovely from inside your house, but is horrible to be outside in. Literally 'window-weather'.
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The total cost of rescuing a stranded Matt Damon in all of his films (including Saving Private Ryan, Interstellar and The Martian) is an estimated $900 billion.
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There is a Ned Flanders-themed metal band in Arizona called Okilly Dokilly. (Photo: Casey Peters)
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Earlier this week, Donald Trump pardoned suffragette Susan B. Anthony for her crime of voting when it was not legal to do so.
The Susan B. Anthony Museum has rejected his pardon, as Susan B. Anthony did not accept she had committed a crime and therefore did not need a pardon.
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A compulsive need to make puns can be a sign of brain damage.
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By the time a large whale dies, it has removed 33 tons of carbon from the atmosphere and will store it at the bottom of the ocean for centuries. Each whale has been calculated to be worth $2 million to the world economy this way.
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In the 2019 European Elections, one British voter wrote 'wank' next to every party on their ballot slip except for the Green Party, which they annotated with 'not wank'. This was deemed acceptable as a vote.
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Roland the Farter was a court jester of Henry II who, every Christmas, had to perform a dance that ended with 'one jump, one whistle, and one fart' executed simultaneously. For this he was given a manor house in Suffolk and over 100 acres of land.
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In 1989 the cash-strapped Soviet Union paid Pepsi with 17 submarines and 3 war ships. Pepsi sold these for scrap, but the deal briefly made them owners of the sixth largest military submarine fleet in the world.
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Every year, ancient Athenians would scratch the name of a person they disliked on a tile. If enough people wrote down the same name, that person would have 10 days to leave Athens for 10 years. In Greek, a tile was called an ‘ostrakon’, which gives us the word ‘ostracise’.
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We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special. - STEPHEN HAWKING
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Every Dutch police car is equipped with a teddy bear to give children that are scared.
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Word of the Day: ÁILLEÁNACH (Irish) - an attractive and yet useless man.
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Technically, humans (like all mammals) have the genetic capability to hibernate.
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MI5 initially worked with Boy Scouts for information gathering during WWI, but found that they were unreliable spies and inclined to brag about their work.
MI5 then replaced the Scouts with Girl Guides, who proved much more reliable.
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Ernest Hemingway survived two plane crashes in two days. He was believed dead for almost 24 hours afterwards, until he was spotted emerging from the jungle carrying bananas and a bottle of gin.
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"And what would humans be without love?"
“RARE, said Death.”
TERRY PRATCHETT
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In Elizabethan England, the word 'Nothing' was slang for female genitalia. The title of the Shakespeare play 'Much Ado About Nothing' is a double entendre.
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There is one lonely whale in the ocean that sings at a unique 52Hz and nobody knows why.
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We all require and want respect, man or woman, black or white. It's our basic human right. - ARETHA FRANKLIN
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We are closer in time to a T-Rex than a T-Rex was to a Stegosaurus.
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Word of the day: MACROVERBUMSCIOLIST - someone who pretends to know a word, then secretly looks it up.
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Jigsaw puzzles almost never have the number of pieces described on the box. To preserve aspect ratio, most 500 piece jigsaws have 513 pieces, and 1000 piece jigsaws have 1026 pieces.
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Word of the day: BORIS-NORIS (19th century) - to go on blindly, without any thought of risk or decency
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In 1890, Congress was initially going to accept Wyoming as a new state only if it revoked its women’s voting rights, which they’d had since 1869. Wyoming answered with a telegram saying: ‘We will remain out of the Union one hundred years rather than come in without the women’.
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The word 'his' appears in the Bible 8,472 times. The word 'hers' features three times.
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Homophobic people die 2.5 years sooner (on average) than people who are not homophobic.
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Unmarried and childless women are the happiest subgroup of the population.
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A KAKISTOCRACY is a state or country run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous people.
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Copenhagen is planting communal fruit trees around the city so that everyone will be able to enjoy fresh fruit, even if they don't have a garden.
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In 2016, an octopus named Inky went missing from the New Zealand National Aquarium. It later emerged that he had removed the lid of his tank, crawled across the floor, squeezed himself into a narrow pipe and escaped into the ocean.
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In 1986 Michael Foot MP was made the chair of a disarmament committee. The Times headline ran: ‘Foot Heads Arms Body’
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Some tree canopies avoid touching each other as they grow; a natural phenomenon called crown shyness. (Image: Dag Peak)
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Half of Americans believe that a British person saying something "with the greatest respect" is a compliment.
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If a borrowed word is not changed, like ‘pizza’ from Italian, it is a loanword. If it is translated, like ‘superman’ from German ‘Übermensch’, it is a calque. ‘Calque’ itself is a loanword (from French) and ‘loanword’ is a calque (from German ‘Lehnwort’). (h/t
@GreekEtymology
)
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8,000 years ago, Britain had so many trees that a squirrel could go from John O’Groats to Land’s End without touching the ground.
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A 2009 study by the University of Sussex found that reading for just six minutes can reduce stress levels by up to 68%.
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J. R. R. Tolkien and Adolf Hitler both fought at the battle of the Somme.
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Lincolnshire Wildlife Park has recently been forced to remove five African grey parrots from the main park after they started to tell visitors to "fuck off".
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In Elizabethan England, the word 'Nothing' was slang for female genitalia. The title of the Shakespeare play 'Much Ado About Nothing' is a double entendre.
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Mathematicians have just discovered a third way to represent 3 as the sum of three cubed numbers. The first is 1³ + 1³ + 1³, the second is 4³ + 4³ + (-5)³, and the third is 569936821221962380720³ + (-569936821113563493509)³ + (-472715493453327032)³.
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Five African grey parrots have had to be removed from display at a Lincolnshire Wildlife Park for swearing at visitors and then laughing with each other.
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The Fibonacci sequence where you add two consecutive terms to make the next (1,1,2,3,5,8,13…) can be used as a rough conversion from miles to km: 3m=5km, 5m=8km, 8m=13km etc, as the ratio of one term to the next is always around 1.6.
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Belphegor's prime is 1,000,000,000,000,066,600,000,000,000,001: a palindromic prime number with 666 in the middle and 13 0s on either side. It is named after Belphegor, one of the seven princes of hell.
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The oldest material found on Earth is stardust trapped inside a meteorite discovered in Australia that is older than the Solar System.
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56% of Americans believe "Arabic numerals" should not be taught in schools.
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Black cats have become less popular as adopted pets, in part because they are seen as less Instagram-friendly than other cats.
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One unclaimed item at Dublin Airport’s lost property office is a tombstone with the words ‘You will always be remembered, never forgotten’.
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In a 2014 study, participants were given a choice between sitting in silence with their own thoughts for 15 minutes or giving themselves electric shocks.
Most chose to shock themselves.
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Since 1936, the Haribo factory has let children pay for gummy bears with acorns and chestnuts; the most up-to-date exchange rate for 1kg of sweets is 10kg of chestnuts or 5kg of acorns. The nuts are then used as feed at wild animal parks.
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Due to a genetic mutation, this Indonesian charcoal-coloured chicken (dubbed the ‘Lamborghini of poultry’) is not only completely black in appearance, but all of its internal organs, muscles, and bones are black as well. (Image: Max Pixel)
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When Charles II died he had no legitimate heirs, but he did have several illegitimate children. Two of those children were ancestors of Princess Diana, so when William becomes king, he will be the first descendant of Charles II to take the throne.
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As originally coined, a FACTOID is an incorrect fact that is repeated so often people think it is true.
A FACTLET is actually a small fact.
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In the recent European Elections, one British voter wrote 'wank' next to every party on their ballot slip except for the Green Party, which they annotated with 'not wank'. This was deemed acceptable as a vote.
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Just when we thought we couldn't love Bill Bailey any more.
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In 1998 "G-mail" was an email service offered by the cartoon Garfield, with the slogan "email with cattitude".
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David Attenborough is the only person to have won BAFTAs for programmes broadcast in black & white, colour, HD, 3D, 4K and VR.
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The Japanese marathon runner Shizo Kanakuri fell asleep while taking a break during the 1912 Olympic marathon in Stockholm. In 1967 the Swedes invited him to return and finish the race. His final time was 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes and 20.3 seconds.
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The QI Elves would like to be clear that we aren't proposing this as an alternative to thorough hand-washing.
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Because female sanitary products in Germany are taxed as luxury goods at 19% and books only at 7%, earlier this month a local company protested against the luxury tax by publishing a book about menstruation with 15 tampons inside. (Image: The Female Company.)
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English language has more words borrowed from Hawaiian than from Welsh.
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The namers of this neighbourhood in Porters Lake, Nova Scotia appear to have run out of ideas.
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In Canada, it is illegal to pretend to be a witch. Actually being a witch, however, is perfectly legal. (Photo: Florida Memory.)
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‘The Banksy of Grammar’ is a Bristol man who sneaks out at night to correct grammatical errors on shop fronts and street signs.
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Houston airport kept receiving complaints about the seven minute wait time at luggage collection for one of their routes, so they switched the gate to make the walk there five minutes longer and the complaints stopped.
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