Funny You Should Ask

The QI elves are a team of writers and comedians who find the answers to impossible questions, doing the research for the long-running QI TV series, podcasts and the spin-off books. For the next little while, we’ll be running some of their finest findings: the weird, wonderful, witty and wise, from their latest book, Funny You Should Ask ... Again.

If you cloned yourself, would your clone have the same fingerprints as you?

No.

If your clone is genetically identical to you, all the instructions in your DNA for building “you” – such as those that determine the colour of your hair and eyes – would match. However, some things, like fingerprints, are only partly determined by genetics. Your prints would more or less match those of your clone, but if you looked more closely, there would be slight differences.

Three months before you were born, your fingers grew a layer of skin, and then a second one underneath. The underlayer grew faster than the one on top, so it creased and bunched up because there wasn’t space for it to lie flat.

This created the individual ridges of your fingerprints. This process is quite random and, as a result, so is the final pattern of your fingerprints. And there were other factors at play: the chemical balance around you as a fetus, and even the physical action of you squashing your fingers up against the wall of your mother’s womb, resulted in subtle changes that made your fingerprints unique to you.

Can you identify someone’s fingerprints from a photograph?

Yes. In 2021, police apprehended a criminal after he posted a photograph of a block of stilton from Marks & Spencer. Unfortunately for him, his hand was also in the shot, holding the cheese, which meant his fingerprints were visible. The police were able to analyse them and identify him.

FINGERPRINT FACTS The first person to be caught by fingerprinting was a student who was stealing medical-grade alcohol and drinking it out of a measuring jar.

The only known fingerprint belonging to Michelangelo is on the bottom of one of his wax statues. There’s an island in Croatia that is covered with drystone walls, making it look like a fingerprint from above. Locals have to keep chopping down trees to maintain its appearance. Until it was digitalised in 2014, the FBI’s fingerprint database was kept on 83 million cards.

Extracted from Funny You Should Ask … Again, by the QI Elves (Faber, $27.99), which is out now.

has demonstrated the foolishness of “intelligent design”. Unquestionably, he is one of the foremost scientists of this century and largely responsible for making knowledge of the intricacies of natural selection involved in species evolution accessible to the layperson.

For myself, the matter of our water I find most instructive. There can be no doubt, of course, of our complete reliance on H2O for our existence, but to ascribe to it spirituality or personhood (in the form of a river) really pushes the boundaries of political correctness to the limit.

Peter Rodriguez

(Whanganui)

AUCKLAND RAIL

In Russell Brown’s Diary

( January 8), it was good to see Raymond Siddalls – who still works for Auckland Transport – being given the credit he deserves for his part in saving the city’s passenger rail network. He arranged for the purchase of redundant diesel railcars from Perth – some only 12 years old when they entered service in Auckland in 1993. This turned around train patronage sufficiently to give politicians – led by current councillor Christine Fletcher when she was mayor – the confidence to proceed with building the Britomart Transport Centre, opened in 2003, which led to the electrification of Auckland’s rail network and then to the decision to build the City Rail Link, now under construction.

The column perpetuates a misunderstanding, however, when it says “the proposed light-rail line along Dominion Rd traces the old No 6 tram route to Mt Roskill”.

Auckland trams never used route numbers. The mistake is understandable because the 1930s Auckland Transport Board map of the network referred to in the article – which I have another version of – does number the routes, but only for reference purposes. If you google “Auckland trams Graham Stewart”, you find hundreds of wonderful tram images from the 1950s – with not a single route number displayed. A

NZ Herald photographer, he was honoured in 2011 for his documentation of the end of the tramway era. His book End of the Penny Section – first published in 1973 – includes maps and details of all networks.

In not using route numbers, the Auckland system was unusual, but not alone. It had this in common with the Sydney tram network, one of the world’s largest, which closed in 1961. Route numbers were introduced to Auckland with the trolleybuses. Dominion Rd services used the number 8 until three-digit route numbers were introduced in 1974. Anthony Cross

(Auckland)

REDUCING PLASTIC

For many years, I have been picking up rubbish along a lakeside area. These days, apart from an occasional shoe or towel, it now consists entirely of mostly plastic takeaway containers. If they can’t all be biodegradable, let’s ban them and have everyone take their own refillable containers.

Diane Calder

(Hamurana)