QI

Sandi Toksvig is joined by Rose Matafeo, Lou Sanders, Ross Noble and regular Alan Davies answering questions involving some ticks, a bit of tax, a few toes - and a pile of matchboxes that plays tic-tac-toe.

Topics

- A Parisian taxi ride may be electrifying, because passenger seats there used to be electrified to stop rowdiness. In 1987, an experiment using electrified seats took place, operated using a foot pedal in front of the driver's seat. They said the shocks were non-fatal, and they could tell if a passenger was going to be violent by seeing their expressions. However, the seats were 52,000 volts, slightly more powerful than a police stun gun (40,000-50,000 volts). These seats were eventually banned.

- Tangent: From 1907, the first coachwomen appeared in Paris, driving horse-drawn taxis. The women, Clementine Dufaunt and Eugenie Charnier, attracted large crowds, but were often heckled, usually with the line: "et les chaussettes?", meaning: "What about the socks?" in the sense of who is going to darn them if they are busy working. In Paris there was a craze for postcards and newspaper cartoons mocking coachwomen. There were other postcards mocking women doing other occupations, like hanging up billposters.

- The panel are played the sound of a clock and are asked what noise it is making. All clocks go "tick-tick", but people automatically organised repeating sounds into music. Generally, the brain gives the second note in a pair a slightly lower tone, so we put the emphasis on the first note. You can overrule this conditioning by saying aloud: "tick-TOCK-tick, tick-TOCK-tick", as you listen to the clock. People however like the "tick-tock" sound, as is evidenced in other phrases such as "flip-flop", "ping pong", "mishmash" and "tiptop" - although Rose does challenge this with the noise a telephone makes: "bring-bring", leading Ross to discuss "dick pic". (Forfeit: Tick-Tock)

- Tangent: Alan says all these noises are similar to listening to The Prodigy, a band Sandi has not heard of. Ross says it involves a small child playing the violin, and that posh people get confused asking: "When is this young boy going to say, 'Smack My Bitch Up'?"

- Tangent: If you glance at the second hand of an analogue clock as it is ticking, the very first tick seems to take slightly longer than usual. This is known as the "stopped-clock illusion". This is similar to having a phone receiver in one ear, and then switch to the other ear, for a brief moment you can hear silence. Similarly, if you are on a two-week holiday, by the time of the second week time seems to flow quicker because you are used to where you are. Similarly, time seems to slow down on a person's first skydive by 36% because you are so over-stimulated.

- Tangent: When you pull the ripcord when skydiving, you do not shoot up into the air. You just fall slower. People think you shoot up because when you are filmed skydiving, the cameraman is still in freefall and is thus falling faster than the skydiver. Alan once skydived, and he says it was the most frightening thing he has ever done. He did it because he had just broken up with a girlfriend who told me her previous boyfriend was much braver and funnier than Alan was.

- XL: You would hide 17,000 swimming pools by using various methods, including camouflage netting, blankets that looked like grass and floating titles. In 2008, the Greek government decided to tax swimming pools in Athens. Only 324 household checked the box on the form to say that they did have a pool, so they checked satellite images and came across 16,974 pools. There was a swimming pool builder in the city who got requests from people wanting to hide their pool to evade the tax.[colour=#000080]

- [colour=#000080]XL Tangent: France has got the highest proportion of privately owned swimming pools in Europe. These too are taxed as they are considered a luxury. There was also a time when being a bachelor was considered a luxury to be taxed, and that single people should be taxed for their failure to marry. This occurred in around 1920, as it was seen as not doing your duty after the First World War. In 1920, a group of women in Perigueux, France, formed the Anti-Bachelor Society, who demanded that bachelors should pay extra tax, be banned from voting or holding public office. The government responded by introducing a 25% tax surcharge on unmarried men and women over the age of 30, because they wanted to boost the ageing population. In 1695, the English Parliament passed the Marriage Duty Act which taxed bachelors over 25 in a bid to raise funds for war with France. The USA also had discussions about bachelor taxes, but it never brought in. Between the late 19th century until the Second World War, Danish women aged between 13-20 could take out insurance against celibacy, and if they were still unmarried by the age of 40 then you got a pension.

- The panel are shown a stuffed animal and are asked what is wrong with it. The creature is an echidna, and the problem with it is that the feet are back-to-front. This echidna dates back to 1828 and is in the Grant Museum at UCL. Echidnas, mammals with a four-ended penis and which lay eggs, also have feet that look like they point backwards, which allows them to dig more efficiently. The problem with the stuffed echidna is that the taxidermist had never seen an echidna before, and wrongly assumed that the feet should face forward. At the time this occurred, exotic specimens would arrive without any photos to show how they originally looked, and the specimen would probably be picked and incomplete. The taxidermist had to figure out how to put it back properly, but this sometimes led to errors. Examples of poor taxidermy include the Gripsholm Castle Lion in Stockholm, which was a president to King Frederick I in the 1730s, and today the lion has his own Facebook page. There is also a badly stuffed ocelot from 1880.

- Tangent: There is a taxidermy juvenile blue whale in Gothenburg, which was caught in the 1860s. To make it, they took the skin off and stretched it over a frame. To make it more attractive to visitors, they hinged the jaw and people could go inside it. There is a photo of about 25 people inside the whale having dinner. They stopped letting people inside the whale in the 1930s after they spotted a couple having sex inside it (as Ross describes them: "Jonah and the moaner"). When Gothenburg's Natural History Museum was moved to a new building, the moved the whale be knocking a hole through the old museum's wall.

- Tangent: There used to be stuffed dogs at train stations with coin slots in them to collect money. It dates back to a Victorian tradition that lasted until the 1950s, where charity dogs roamed around railway stations collecting money for good causes, with collection boxes on them. Some of these dogs were then stuffed so they could continue collecting after death. One dog, London Jack, was a black flat-coated retriever, but he went blonde in the sunlight, and a taxidermist re-dyed him black after it was discovered he had dark roots.

- Tangent: Ross once owned a stuffed otter, which he bought in Kilkenny after he won some money on a horse. At the time he was living in London, and he wanted to make sure it was OK to import the otter from Ireland to Britain, so Ross went to the local police station with the otter. Ross told the policeman: "I want to take this otter to London", to which the policeman replied: "Oh, that'll be nice for him." The otter was destroyed when Ross house in Australia was gutted in a bushfire.

- The thing elephants and ballerinas have in common is that they walk on tiptoe. Elephants naturally walk on their toes, with their heel bones off the ground, and they have a large fatty pad behind their toes. This gives them a longer step and enables them to spread out their massive weight. Ballerina tiptoe techniques started in the early 19th century, with the aid of wires. This was considered a stunt until Marie Taglione did it naturally. Taglione was a superstar, with cakes, hairstyles, dolls named after her. After he last performance, in Russia in 1842, a group of ballet fans supposedly bought a pair of her shoes, which they ate fricasseed, washed down with champagne. However, Taglione ended her life poor, giving deportment lessons in London.

- XL: A completely futile game is one in which if both sides play it perfectly, it will always end up in a draw. An example is noughts and crosses, aka tic-tac-toe. The game appears to be universal and has been around a long time. The three-by-three grid can be seen on roofing titles dating from around 1300 in ancient Egypt. The same grid is chalked all over Rome around the first century BC.

- XL Tangent: In the 1960s, former Bletchley Park code breaker Donald Michie decided to build a computer that would never lose at noughts and crosses. He built it out of matchboxes and coloured beads, and called it MENACE - the Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine. It consisted of 304 matchboxes, because that is all the possible number of situations in the game, and each box consists of different coloured beads. The panel are shown such a machine built by mathematician Matthew Scroggs. MENACE was the first machine that allowed people to develop an idea that a machine can learn. You can play against MENACE yourself at the website https://www.mscroggs.co.uk/menace/.

- The curse of knowledge is when we overestimate out ability to clearly convey information. They demonstrate this by giving Ross a stick and getting him to tap out a tune. Ross guesses that the chances of anyone getting it right are 2%, but Alan recognises it as "The Teddy Bears' Picnic". Psychologist Elizabeth Newton did an experiment in the 1990s similar to this, and the tappers estimated that people would get it right 50% of the time, but their success rate was about2.5%. The result was the tappers were astonished that the guessers couldn't figure out the solution, because they knew what the answer was, and assumed the guesses must know it too. Alan tries tapping and things 100% people will get it. The Audience manage to recognise Alan is doing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star".

General Ignorance

- The little bumps you can see on your tongue are called papillae. Test buds are on them, but they are invisible to the human eye. Cats can use papillae to scrape the skin off animals with them.

- Tangent: 25% of the population, mainly women, are super-tasters, and are good at detecting bitterness. Another 25% of people are non-tasters and can't detect bitterness at all. Super-tasters tend to be fussy eaters as they can taste many more things. Children are more sensitive to bitterness than adults.

- The world's oldest boomerang is in Poland. The oldest Australian boomerang is about 10,000 years old and found, but in 1986 a boomerang in southern Poland made 23,000 years ago out of a mammoth tusk, but non-returning. Ancient boomerangs can also be found in North Africa and Arizona, mostly used for hunting and warfare, and almost all are non-returning. (Forfeit: Australia)

- Tangent: Alan got a boomerang as a present from an Australian aunt. He went to the garden, threw it, went through a window in the house next door and set off the burglar alarm.

- Tangent: Boomerangs have been tried out on the International Space Station. They also return in zero gravity, but this is because they work on air.

- Tangent: The Boomerang World Championships are dominated by the Germans and Americans, with no Australian winner since 1984. Britain exports over 50,000 boomerangs a year.

- XL: The talking cure was invented by Bertha Pappenheim, better known as Anna O. A famous client of Freud, suffered from headaches, blurred vision, hallucinations and memory loss. She went to physician Josef Breuer for help, and he said she had hysteria because she had uncontrolled emotions. Anna O decide to talk through her symptoms in detail with Pappenheim. Breuer and his young colleague, Sigmund Freud, co-wrote a landmark work of psychology called Studies In Hysteria in 1895, using her phrase "the talking cure". (Forfeit: Freud)

Scores

- The Audience: 10 points (Seventh victory)
- Ross Noble: 4 points
- Lou Sanders: 3 points
- Rose Matafeo: 2 points
- Alan Davies: -20 points