Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
A WORLD OF KNOWLEDGE
We all know those nagging questions that eat away at us. Why is that? When is that? What would happen if that...? Now, thanks to The Elves – the team of writers, researchers and comedians behind QI’S shows, books and podcasts – we can solve some travel-related brainteasers, courtesy of their new book. Read on, and become the pub quiz champ (whenever we are actually allowed to go to the pub again)
When does a rock become an island?
Drawing up exact rules to define an island is tricky. The EU, for instance, excludes land masses that are less than a kilometre from the mainland; are attached to the mainland by a rigid structure; have fewer than 50 permanent residents; or are home to a capital city. If these rules were applied to the UK then
Great Britain,
Anglesey, Skye and Lundy are not islands.
Much simpler is an old Scottish rule that “if a piece of land will support a sheep, it’s an island. If not, it’s a rock”.
The UN takes that a step further: in 2016, its Permanent Court of Arbitration said that the difference between a rock and an island is that the latter can support human life.
The world’s smallest island by those rules is in the St Lawrence River, between New York and Ontario, and is called Just Room Enough. It’s the size of a tennis court and contains just one house, one tree and a small patch of beach. The owners built the house to find peace and quiet, but because it is so unusual, it has become a tourist attraction, with boats full of sightseers going past.
Why is there an Essex, a Wessex and a Sussex, but no Nossex?
When the Romans left Britain in around 400 AD, the islands were extremely susceptible to invasion. Numerous groups arrived from Europe, settled in different regions and started naming these areas after themselves.
The biggest of these was the Saxons, a group who came from modern-day Germany and the Netherlands. They’re responsible for the “sex” in Essex, which was where the East Saxons settled, Sussex, where the South Saxons lived, and Wessex (which covered much of the south coast from Hampshire to Devon), where you could find the West Saxons.
There was no Nossex because the Saxons didn’t get particularly far north.
The Angles had come over from Denmark and made their home up there. Then there were the Jutes, who came from another part of Denmark and settled in Kent, Northumbria (the lands “North of the Humber”) and Mercia, which got its name from a word meaning “boundary lands”.
Who is the most isolated person in the world?
The Amazon rainforest is home to more than two million species of animal and almost 400 billion trees, but you could walk for a long time before coming across evidence of another human.
One area, the Vale do Javari, is so unexplored that Brazil’s highest mountain remained undiscovered there until 1962. There are tribes who live in Brazil’s wilderness, out of contact with the modern world, and one of them is down to a single member.
Brazilian officials first became aware of the man’s existence around 25 years ago and gave him the nickname “Man of the Hole”, due to the fact that he builds temporary homes which all have a large hole dug alongside them.
Nobody is quite sure what the holes are for: they might be to capture animals to eat, or to hide in, or they could have religious significance.
The only way to know for sure would be to ask him, but that’s
impossible: the Brazilian government has declared that an area of 31 square miles surrounding him is off-limits to anyone else. It’s part of their “policy of no contact”, the idea being that if uncontacted tribes want to reach out, then they should be able to do so on their own terms rather than having the modern world forced upon them.
Why do Canadian airport codes begin with a ‘Y’?
The organisation in charge of the codes that are printed on your boarding passes and luggage tags is the International Air Transport Association (IATA).
Some of these letters follow clear logic – like “JFK” for New York’s John F. Kennedy airport, or “LHR” for London Heathrow – but IATA’S master list is 8,965 airports long, and many of the codes appear to be much more random.
All 17 of Canada’s international airports have codes that begin with a “Y”, and no one seems to know exactly why.
The most persuasive theory we
The DVLA keeps a list of rude licence plates that are banned
found is that it’s because when three-letter airport codes were introduced, the Canadians adapted codes which they were already using to identify their cities’ weather stations. The “Y” signified that “Yes”, this was an airport with a weather station.
Why do aeroplane window blinds have to be in the up position on take-off and landing?
Take-off and landing are the riskiest bits of a flight. In an emergency, the cabin crew’s aim is to evacuate the whole plane in under 90 seconds.
They open the blinds so that everyone’s eyes can adjust to the natural light outside.
Sudden changes in brightness are disorientating, but if your eyes have several minutes to adapt, you can see up to a thousand times better. This also applies when it’s dark, which is why the crew dim the lights when taking off or landing at night.
Additionally, opening the blinds lets the cabin crew see out and the emergency services see in, meaning each can be aware of any dangers, such as blocked exits or fires.
Why aren’t monorails more popular?
The future overtook them. There are two types of monorail. In one the carriages sit astride the rail, in the other they hang below it. And they’re much older than you might think. The first one was up and running three months before the first passenger steam train in the early 19th century. It was of the hangingdown type and ran for three-quarters of a mile in Hertfordshire.
It was built to transport bricks from a brickworks to a river for shipping, but they added a novelty open-topped carriage at the front so that sightseers could go too. The “engine” was a single horse.
The Greater London Council once looked into using monorails but decided that they wouldn’t improve things.
Monorails tend to be slow, expensive and a blot on the landscape.
Because they run on a single track, trains have to be wrapped around it so they don’t fall off, meaning it’s much more complicated (and more costly) to make points that would switch them to another track. A whole section of the concrete support would have to move, rather than just the rails, as with a normal train.
Why are British car number plates white at the front and yellow at the back?
So other drivers can tell whether you’re coming or going.
L1C3NC3 PLAT3 FACT5
The Queen is the only person who doesn’t need a licence plate.
The DVLA keeps a list of rude licence plates that are banned; e.g. SN07 is forbidden because it looks like SNOT.
The most expensive plate sold in the UK was 25 O. It went for over £500,000 because the buyer wanted to put it on his Ferrari 250.
When a motorway sign says ‘London 50 miles’ where exactly is it 50 miles from?
Traditionally, all distance markers for London referred to a large cross erected in memory of Eleanor of Castile, the wife of Edward I. When she died in 1290, the King had her body taken from the embalmers in Lincoln to her burial place in London.
At every spot the body stopped, a cross was erected. The final and most elaborate one was on what is now a roundabout on the southern edge of Trafalgar Square.
The cross was demolished during the English Civil War, and so signs to London referred to the empty spot where the monument had once stood.
However, in 1675 a statue of Charles I, which had survived the war, was erected in its place.
A replica of the Eleanor Cross was built in the 19th century and placed down the road, just outside Charing Cross station, but the statue of Charles remains London’s point zero.
Markers in other British towns and cities refer to marketplaces or civic buildings, and Highways England say they usually choose somewhere that is simply “appropriate for drivers”.
Google Maps uses the geometry of a town, calculates the shape of the place and puts a pin in its exact centre. This gives some interesting results: according to Google, the centre of Newcastle is a nondescript café owned and run by the city’s university.