Quite Interesting

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A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.

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#	Date	Post	↓ Outlier	Views	Likes	Reposts	Bookmarks
1	Feb 18, '24	In 1979, Casio made a pocket calculator that doubled as a cigarette lighter, also known as the ‘calculighter’. [📷: Joe Haupt]	12.3×	6.3M	13k	1.9k	1.2k
2	Jun 10, '19	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 t	4.8×	0	29k	6.2k	179
3	Nov 18, '18	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.	4.4×	0	27k	5.4k	210
4	Dec 19, '20	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.	4.2×	0	24k	5.4k	303
5	Aug 18, '21	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	3.9×	0	30k	1.7k	39
6	Jun 28, '20	Crows not only hold grudges, they tell their friends and family about them.	3.7×	0	20k	3.8k	337
7	May 17, '18	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 milli	3.4×	0	23k	3.4k	30
8	Jul 25, '19	On October 1st 1861, Charles Darwin wrote in his diary: ‘I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything’	3.3×	0	19k	4.1k	286
9	Apr 3, '21	In 1991 stonemasons quietly added an alien to the gargoyles of Scotland’s Paisley Abbey. (Image: Colin CC-BY-SA-2.0)	3.1×	0	21k	2.8k	268
10	Apr 23, '18	Word of the day: TASLEEK (Saudi Arabic) - to nod along and pretend you care what another person is saying	2.9×	0	6.9k	8.2k	318
11	Jan 12, '25	From 1264 to 1827, anyone who received a Master of Arts degree from Oxford had to swear that they would never forgive Henry Symeonis. By 1608, no one knew who he was or what he had	2.9×	1.5M	35k	1.2k	3.7k
12	Oct 13, '19	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 su	2.8×	0	16k	2.9k	140
13	Nov 27, '19	Black cats have become less popular as adopted pets, in part because they are seen as less Instagram-friendly than other cats.	2.6×	0	7.2k	813	134
14	Nov 21, '17	In Washington DC, the Slovakian and Slovenian embassies meet once a month to exchange wrongly addressed mail.	2.5×	0	11k	4.7k	6
15	Dec 12, '17	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 changi	2.4×	0	14k	3.2k	1
16	Mar 4, '19	Independence from Britain is celebrated somewhere in the world, on average, one in every seven days.	2.3×	0	12k	3.7k	157
17	Aug 30, '20	A 'kangaroo word' is a word that contains the letters of a related synonym inside it, such as BLOssOM, cHickEN or hoNOuraBLE.	2.3×	0	16k	2k	348
18	Dec 13, '20	Dinosaurs likely quacked and honked like today's geese. (Image: James Petts.)	2.3×	0	13k	1.5k	214
19	Oct 22, '17	Superterrain and @jve_academie have created a version of Fahrenheit 451 that can only be read when flame is applied to the book.	2.1×	0	11k	3.4k	1
20	Jul 6, '20	A compulsive need to make puns can be a sign of brain damage.	2.1×	0	9.3k	1.4k	198
21	Sep 15, '20	People who swear a lot tend to be more honest and more intelligent.	2.1×	0	11k	1.6k	138
22	Jul 27, '20	The average person walks past 11 murderers in their life.	2.0×	0	11k	1.7k	206
23	Oct 22, '18	Gary Numan is 13 days older than Gary Oldman.	2.0×	0	11k	3.1k	40
24	Oct 31, '18	The rule "I before E except after C" has been disproved by science.	1.9×	0	12k	2.3k	54
25	Dec 9, '18	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 "Fightin	1.9×	0	12k	2.3k	107
26	Mar 18, '18	Word of the day: GLUGGAVEÐUR (Icelandic) - Weather that looks lovely from inside your house, but is horrible to be outside in. Literally 'window-weather'.	1.9×	0	9.3k	3.5k	49
27	Nov 4, '20	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 ther	1.8×	0	11k	1.8k	273
28	May 5, '20	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.	1.8×	0	11k	2.1k	283
29	Jun 25, '18	There is a Ned Flanders-themed metal band in Arizona called Okilly Dokilly. (Photo: Casey Peters)	1.8×	0	9k	2.9k	46
30	Mar 18, '19	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.	1.8×	0	11k	2.6k	70
31	Feb 5, '19	A KAKISTOCRACY is a state or country run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous people.	1.8×	0	7.5k	2.7k	79
32	Feb 10, '20	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.)	1.8×	0	9.7k	2k	83
33	Oct 8, '18	Roald Dahl's last words were "ow, fuck".	1.8×	0	11k	1.9k	39
34	Mar 7, '20	Masturbation can help boost your immune system.	1.7×	0	8k	1.4k	138
35	Oct 7, '19	Word of the Day: ÁILLEÁNACH (Irish) - an attractive and yet useless man.	1.7×	0	8.5k	2.4k	261
36	Jan 4, '18	Technically, humans (like all mammals) have the genetic capability to hibernate.	1.7×	0	8.5k	2k	2
37	Jan 19, '18	The Finnish word for pedant, pilkunnussija, translates literally as ‘comma fucker’.	1.7×	0	9.2k	2.6k	3
38	Apr 12, '20	The tiny island of Lítla Dímun is often crowned with its own individual cloud. (Image: SPUMADOR.)	1.7×	0	12k	1.4k	158
39	Nov 8, '17	Have you ever wondered how paperclips are made?	1.7×	0	7.8k	3k	0
40	Dec 5, '19	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 bi	1.6×	0	9.9k	1.6k	192
41	Mar 9, '19	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 consumpt	1.6×	0	9.7k	1.9k	81
42	Jan 3, '20	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.	1.6×	0	10k	1.5k	57
43	Mar 14, '18	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	1.6×	0	8.5k	2.7k	15
44	Dec 22, '18	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 thi	1.5×	0	8.7k	1.8k	54
45	Sep 5, '17	Some tree canopies avoid touching each other as they grow; a natural phenomenon called crown shyness. (Image: Dag Peak)	1.5×	0	7.8k	2.5k	0
46	Nov 14, '17	Word of the day: MACROVERBUMSCIOLIST - someone who pretends to know a word, then secretly looks it up.	1.5×	0	8.1k	2.4k	2
47	Sep 1, '19	Word of the day: BORIS-NORIS (19th century) - to go on blindly, without any thought of risk or decency	1.5×	0	7.6k	2.5k	36
48	Jun 28, '19	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 militar	1.4×	0	8.6k	1.9k	94
49	Feb 24, '20	Homophobic people die 2.5 years sooner (on average) than people who are not homophobic.	1.4×	0	7.7k	1.5k	67
50	Dec 8, '18	A 2009 study by the University of Sussex found that reading for just six minutes can reduce stress levels by up to 68%.	1.4×	0	7.5k	2k	56
51	Jul 31, '18	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.	1.4×	0	7.3k	2.1k	63
52	Nov 21, '20	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.	1.4×	0	9.4k	1k	70
53	Nov 24, '18	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 organ	1.4×	0	7.1k	1.6k	93
54	Aug 16, '18	We all require and want respect, man or woman, black or white. It's our basic human right. - ARETHA FRANKLIN	1.4×	0	8.1k	2k	10
55	Nov 27, '17	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	1.4×	0	7.4k	2.2k	2
56	Sep 14, '19	We are closer in time to a T-Rex than a T-Rex was to a Stegosaurus.	1.4×	0	8.1k	1.6k	68
57	Jun 19, '19	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	1.4×	0	7.6k	2k	144
58	Jul 18, '20	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	1.3×	0	8.7k	1.2k	167
59	May 27, '19	Unmarried and childless women are the happiest subgroup of the population.	1.3×	0	7.7k	1.4k	64
60	Dec 23, '20	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 b	1.3×	0	9k	1.2k	93
61	Aug 24, '20	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, a	1.3×	0	9k	1.3k	31
62	May 30, '19	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 b	1.3×	0	8.4k	1.3k	67
63	Oct 29, '20	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.	1.3×	0	8.3k	1k	211
64	Apr 21, '19	Every Dutch police car is equipped with a teddy bear to give children that are scared.	1.3×	0	8.4k	1.3k	30
65	Nov 29, '18	There is one lonely whale in the ocean that sings at a unique 52Hz and nobody knows why.	1.3×	0	8.2k	1.1k	43
66	Aug 12, '19	"And what would humans be without love?" “RARE, said Death.” TERRY PRATCHETT	1.3×	0	8.1k	1.6k	70
67	Nov 12, '20	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 d	1.3×	0	8.8k	946	71
68	Sep 28, '19	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 5699368	1.2×	0	7.6k	1.2k	123
69	Oct 9, '17	J. R. R. Tolkien and Adolf Hitler both fought at the battle of the Somme.	1.2×	0	7.4k	1.7k	2
70	Jun 26, '19	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	1.2×	0	6.7k	1.9k	40
71	Oct 26, '20	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 Sc	1.2×	0	8.2k	1k	90
72	Feb 16, '20	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 th	1.2×	0	7.4k	1.4k	192
73	Oct 13, '20	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.	1.2×	0	7.6k	1k	70
74	Dec 5, '18	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 s	1.2×	0	7.7k	1.4k	31
75	Dec 29, '19	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.	1.2×	0	7.7k	1.2k	37
76	Oct 27, '20	The word 'his' appears in the Bible 8,472 times. The word 'hers' features three times.	1.2×	0	7.9k	899	144
77	Jan 15, '18	Dog owners are, on average, happier than cat owners.	1.2×	0	7k	1.1k	0
78	Apr 8, '21	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 piece	1.2×	0	8.4k	603	89
79	Sep 1, '17	One unclaimed item at Dublin Airport’s lost property office is a tombstone with the words ‘You will always be remembered, never forgotten’.	1.2×	0	7k	1.6k	1
80	Jun 23, '19	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.	1.2×	0	7.4k	1.2k	29
81	May 10, '20	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 themse	1.1×	0	7.2k	840	87
82	Jul 4, '19	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 him	1.1×	0	7.7k	956	36
83	May 30, '19	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	1.1×	0	6.8k	1.4k	44
84	Jan 25, '21	In 1986 Michael Foot MP was made the chair of a disarmament committee. The Times headline ran: ‘Foot Heads Arms Body’	1.1×	0	7.7k	1k	112
85	Oct 27, '19	Half of Americans believe that a British person saying something "with the greatest respect" is a compliment.	1.1×	0	7.4k	872	30
86	Oct 28, '18	In Canada, it is illegal to pretend to be a witch. Actually being a witch, however, is perfectly legal. (Photo: Florida Memory.)	1.1×	0	6.8k	1.3k	20
87	Oct 4, '20	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".	1.1×	0	7.5k	852	38
88	Nov 24, '19	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.	1.1×	0	7k	1.1k	94
89	Jul 26, '20	The namers of this neighbourhood in Porters Lake, Nova Scotia appear to have run out of ideas.	1.1×	0	6.9k	1.1k	88
90	Feb 5, '21	The oldest material found on Earth is stardust trapped inside a meteorite discovered in Australia that is older than the Solar System.	1.1×	0	7.3k	843	112
91	Apr 12, '21	56% of Americans believe "Arabic numerals" should not be taught in schools.	1.0×	0	7.1k	613	63
92	Oct 4, '19	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	1.0×	0	6.9k	949	43
93	Aug 18, '20	In 1998 "G-mail" was an email service offered by the cartoon Garfield, with the slogan "email with cattitude".	1.0×	0	6.9k	834	57
94	Oct 17, '20	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 ac	1.0×	0	7k	847	61
95	Sep 28, '19	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	1.0×	0	6.9k	855	85
96	Dec 3, '18	English language has more words borrowed from Hawaiian than from Welsh.	1.0×	0	6.8k	858	26
97	Oct 21, '19	David Attenborough is the only person to have won BAFTAs for programmes broadcast in black & white, colour, HD, 3D, 4K and VR.	1.0×	0	6.9k	874	36
98	Jan 21, '21	Just when we thought we couldn't love Bill Bailey any more.	0.9×	0	6.9k	578	56
99	Mar 7, '20	The QI Elves would like to be clear that we aren't proposing this as an alternative to thorough hand-washing.	0.9×	0	6.8k	509	14

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