QI

Sandi Toksvig is joined by Bridget Christie, Rosie Jones, Cariad Lloyd and Alan Davies to find out about ulex and other obscure U words.

Themes

- This is a general show covering various different topics, all beginning with "U".

Topics

- The most unsettling thing you can think of is anything in the Uncanny Valley. This occurs when something like robots or dolls begin to look more human-like, and people find it disturbing. Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori dubbed the phenomenon "bukimi no tani" in 1970, meaning the "Valley of Eeriness". The idea is that once a human starts to look more human-like, people find it upsetting, but if you continue and make a robot look really human, we would be happy with it because we would not know it was a robot. The lonelier a person is, the less they experience the Uncanny Valley. Another related issue is the Clone Effect, which is we think it is creepy if all robots look the same.

- XL Tangent: Bridget asks if the most unsettling thing is coming on the show and being shown lots of holes close together, as this is something she has a phobia of and has repeatedly cropped up on QI. Sandi says: "Something like this?", but nothing actually appears.

- Tangent: The TV show Is It Cake involves people making cakes so they look like everyday objects, and people trying to guess if it is the cake or the object. Part of the idea is that people are slightly repulsed by it because we are not supposed to eat things that they represent.

- Tangent: In 2016, psychologists Francis McAndrew and Sara Koehnke tried to quantify creepiness. They surveyed over 1,000 people and found that someone who is creepy is more likely to be male, very thin, frequently lick their lips, laugh at unpredictable times, stand too close to people, have unkempt hair, collect dolls, work as a clown, and own a sex shop.

- It is very difficult to tell if you, or rather ewe, have uncomfortable udders. Ewes can get many painful conditions, such as foot root and mastitis in the udders, but is hard to tell which ewe in a flock is unwell. A team from Cambridge University invented an AI system that can recognise five different expressions associated with pain. This became the sheep pain facial expression scale. Expressions include eyes narrowing, cheeks tightening, and the lips pulling down. These expressions can be seen more many pained mammals, including humans. The system works with an 80% degree of accuracy.

- XL Tangent: There are problem with using such systems on people, because of people much about with AI. In 2016, Microsoft launched a chatbot called Tay, which started out as being helpful and chatty, but within 24 hours it had become a racist Nazi.

- Tangent: On Bridget's honeymoon, which she says was quite boring because they went to Shetland in winter, she says the two really exciting things that happened was seeing a chicken and seeing a flock of sheep.

- Tangent: In 2017, it was reported that sheep could recognise human faces, but this is probably untrue. The sheep only managed to recognise the faces of Emma Watson, Jake Gyllenhaal, Barack Obama and Fiona Bruce, and they only recognised them when it was the identical photos, so the sheep might just recognise the image as a whole rather than the people. Sheep do recognise each other, but they do so with sound and smell. They have scent glands in front of their eyes and between the digits of their hooves. They produce a kind of smelly secretion which they can use to communicate. Sight is still important however, as sheep have problems recognising each other when they have been sheared. The eyes of lambs are useless for the first three months, and they cannot recognise their mother apart from the bleat.

- Tangent: Ewe udders are at risk of abrasion when they are full of milk, so to prevent this they sometimes wear bras. Bridget jokes they look like mutton dressed as lamb.

- Sandi asks the panel who gets their vote for the most unpopular person in history of the UK. Possibly most unpopular person was someone who did a fair amount of good. Victorian public health reformer Edwin Chadwick was described by his biographer has being the most unpopular single individual in the whole country. One of Chadwick's friends said: "It's one of the few unquestioned privileges of old age to be a bore and this great man had, I fear, discounted too early, too freely and too heavily of this privilege. One reason was that he babbled too much, not of green fields, but of sewage." Chadwick wanted to clean up sewage, restrict alcohol sales, and tried to get spelling expunged from the school curriculum.

- Tangent: In 1991, a British poll to name the most unpopular people named Jeremy Beadle the second-most unpopular person among Brits, only being beaten by Saddam Hussein.

- Tangent: The least popular US president of the last 100 years was Harry S. Truman. Donald Trump's approval rating bottomed out at about 34%, whereas Truman got as low as 22%, due to the Korean War.

- Tangent: There is a person the French like even less than Adolf Hitler. Harald Schumacher was the West German goalkeeper when they played France in the 1982 World Cup. He deliberately clattered into French forward Patrick Battiston. Battiston was knocked out and had three broken ribs, but Schumacher was not even booked for the offence, and he did even apologise. Schumacher said: "I didn't go over and see if he was all right, because there were a lot of French people doing that." France were 3-1 up at the time and ended up losing the match on penalties.

- XL: The most dangerous thing beginning with U that you can encounter on the way back from the pub is ulex, which is the Latin name for gorse. In 2005, a man in Yorkshire got stuck ten foot into a gorse bush for two days. He had to be winched out by an RAF helicopter, and he was found by a walker who could only see his hand poking out, turning a cigarette lighter on-and-off.

- XL Tangent: Gorse was used to clean chimneys, harrow fields, and as fodder. One scientist says there is enough gorse to feed the whole of Scotland. The flowers smell like coconut and taste like almonds, but also contain small amounts of toxin. Gorse can also be used to fire bread ovens. The town of Bandon, Oregon, was founded by George Bennett from Bandon, Ireland. He brought gorse from Ireland, so it could be used in ovens, but it caught fire the whole town was destroyed.

- XL Tangent: Ulexite is a mineral named after its founder George Ludwig Ulex. Technically it is hydrated sodium calcium borate hydroxide, but it is better known as the television stone. The stones have little fibres which run parallel through it, which internally reflect the light from one fibre to the other. It makes the stone almost like a hall of mirrors. As a result, if you place the stone on a 2D drawing, it seems to lift the image off the page.

- The opposite of penis envy is uterus envy or womb envy. Sigmund Freud suggest that all girls want to have a penis, but Karen Horney, a 1920s German psychoanalyst, claim that this was societal - i.e. women don't envy the penis, they envy the social status that comes with having one. Horney said that men have an intense envy of a woman's ability to be pregnant, to give birth, to mother and to suckle. Men thus feel empty and therefore are forced to look for success elsewhere.

- Tangent: As the only man on the panel, Alan is asked what he thinks of Horney's belief. He says that he is regularly told that it hurts to have a baby, and if you had to have one out of the end of your penis, you would not be laughing. Alan says if men are jealous of the things Horney suggests, they are really keeping it to themselves.

- Tangent: Other gender split theories in psychology include the "women are wonderful" effect, where people on the whole tend to associate women with more positive attributes. This effect is less strong in countries with more equality, but we don't know what happens in a country with total equality, because there are no such countries in the world.

- The panel are show a picture of a Balanced Rock in Utah, which is a large upright piece of rock balancing on top of another upright rock, and are asked who would find it uncommonly useful. It is an example of precariously balanced rocks (PBRs), and there are useful in case of earthquakes. If the rock is still there, it is possible to work out how long it has been there, you can work out if there are been any earthquakes in this spot, that were strong enough to topple the rocks. You can work out the age of the rocks using cosmogenic surface exposure dating, which tests how long something has been exposed to the elements.

- Tangent: The Great Unconformity is an unsolved mystery involving rocks. There are many rocks that are over a billion years old, and plenty that are young than 100 million years old, but we don't have many rocks in-between these periods. One belief is that the rocks in the missing period were just not strong enough and wore away quicker. Cappadocia, Turkey, is home to some of the most unusual erosion-related rocks in the world, known as fairy chimneys or hoodoos. They look like towers with bulbous pointed tops, and people used to live in them. There is an underground city called Derinkuyu which is 11 levels deep, has 600 entrances, and has miles of tunnels connecting it, with 40 other underground cities in Cappadocia.

- XL: Underground lipstick societies was something banned by Queen Victoria. In the mid-19th century, lipstick was considered vulgar, and only something to used by actresses and prostitutes. There was a trend for naturalism at the time, and there was a belief that single women, in particular, who wore make-up, was akin to false advertising. However, many women still wanted to wear make-up, so it went underground. Clandestine beauticians were created, with women arrived veiled, then taken to private rooms where they could buy products and smuggle them home. Friends would share make-up recipes, and wealthier women would by the latest lipsticks in Paris.

- XL Tangent: One of the oldest powder recipes was grinding up pearls to get a shimmery effect.

General Ignorance

- XL: If an airline passenger tries to open an emergency exit door in flight, the worst that will happen is the passenger being told off, as it is physically impossible to do. The difference between the cabin pressure and the outside pressure is so great that you could not open the door, because one of the first things you need to do is open the door inwards in order for it to go out. The force needed to open it is the same as trying to push the door if a couple of elephants were on the other side. Also, the doors are locked until the pilot says: "Doors to manual". In 2021, the Federal Aviation Authority fined a woman £68,000 for trying to open the door, but she also assaulted the staff too.

- XL Tangent: If you are in a car and drive into a river, you cannot open the door at first, but once the car sinks and is full of water, you can open the door because the pressure is equal.

- XL Tangent: During one flight, a window of a plane broke due to a single faulty screw, and the pilot got sucked up just as a steward entered the cockpit. The steward was able to grab the pilot's feet to save him.

- The sport which uses the most land in the United Kingdom is grouse shooting. Golf takes up 1,200 square kilometres, which is roughly the size of Berkshire. Football uses about the same size of land, with there being about 45,000 public football pitches, but if every school has two pitches, you can probably triple that figure, but it is still about the same size as golf. Grouse shooting however takes up over ten time the amount of space golf uses. The area is about 80% of the North Yorkshire Moors, and the Pennine Special Protection Areas, as well as a 10th of the entire area of Scotland. (Forfeit: Golf; Horse racing; Cricket; Swimming; Football; Cycling)

- XL Tangent: Those in favour of grouse shooting say the landowners who look after the moors look after predator control, do tree planting, heather burning to create new growth, pond creation etc. Some environmentalists such as Chris Packham against grouse shooting, claiming an unnatural number of grouse are bred at the expense of other birds, and other birds such as peregrines, buzzards and red kites are being killed illegally.

- Clotted cream originally comes from the Middle East. It is known it was made at Tavistock Abbey in Devon during the 14th century, but the Phoenicians traded with Cornwall 10,000 years ago. Thus clotted cream could come from Turkey, Lebanon or Mongolia. Mongolian nomads have long made a product called urum, where yak milk is boiled up and continuously ladled. (Forfeit: Devon; Cornwall)

- Tangent: The Phoenicians were known to have travelled to Cornwall to look for metals such as tin. The Phoenician word "Baratanac" means "land of tin", and it is possibly where we get the word "Britain" from.

Scores

- Cariad Lloyd: -4 points
- Bridget Christie: -5 points
- Rosie Jones: -8 points
- Alan Davies: -53 points