Don’t believe collie dogs when they say sheep are stupid. They aren’t, I learn from this absurd compilation spawned by the BBC TV show, Quite Interesting. Clever sheep beat cattle grids by taking a run-up, then rolling into a ball to cross them, sort of special forces-style.

Careful with bears (and not just teddies in Sudan). Play dead if you meet a brown one; but not with a carrion-loving black bear, ’cos it’ll eat you.

This little book leaves us with the comforting thought that animals know much that we don’t, and worry about absolutely nothing at all. Way to be!

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The first call was about an unknown knocking on his front door and wanted the police to come around to his house. In the second call, he claimed that he knew where some illegal narcotics were being sold and that he needed the police to come around. The third call was that direct to the sheriff’s non-emergency line to see if the person who knocked on his door had been arrested yet.

Finally, Deputy Michael Brake, who answered all the calls visited the man and asked if he had an emergency. The man said he did not, but wanted to ask a question. He then pointed at the moon and asked if it was a half moon.

After the man revealed to Brake that this was the sole reason of his calls, Brake arrested him.

Story from the Northwest Florida Daily News

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Funes, who is director of the Vatican Observatory near Rome and a respected scientist, says that God may have created alien races in outer space. He also says that the search for extraterrestrial life does not contradict belief in God and that such alien races could even be free from original sin.

Funes has gone on to say that mistakes were made by the Vatican in the past, such as the condemnation of Galileo, and that it was time to move on.

The Vatican is trying to be more scientific and is currently organising a conference for next year to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.

Story from the BBC

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http://www.cracked.com/article_16241_6-most-frequently-quoted-bullsht-statistics.html?redux">Cracked has printed what it claims are the top six most incorrect pieces of statistics.

Some of these have been covered in QI in the past. The top six are:

1. "Christmas Causes Suicide" - It is commonly believed and often reported in newspapers that more people commit suicide during the holidays. In reality, the suicide rate actually goes down during Christmas.

2. "You Must Wait 30 Minutes After Eating Before Swimming" - As was covered in Series E of QI, there is absolutely no evidence to support this old wives tale.

3. "Spousal Abuse Skyrockets on Super Bowl Sunday" - This is a myth that reached the height of its popularity in 1993 when battered women's advocates claimed there was a 40% increase in hotline calls on Super Bowl Sunday.

4. "Men Think About Sex Every Seven Seconds" - Again, a very common myth which is hard to pin-point it origins, but there is again no evidence to support the claim. Some experts believe that 30% of men do not think about sex during the day at all.

5. "You Only Use 10% of Your Brain" - This is because the brain is devoted to lots of different tasks. You cannot devote yourself to one tasking using all of your brain power.

6. "You Accidentally Swallow About 8 Spiders a Year" - Spiders are much more clever than most people think and would never want to go inside someone's mouth because it is so big to a spider, as well as noises most people make when asleep.

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American Nathan Stubblefield machine however was not that mobile. It used a system of wire suspended in metal rods, with a transmitted placed between on a train carriage or a boat. As the vehicle neared, the signal was sent using magnetic fields and it the sound could be heard at the other end of the wire using another phone.

Stubblefield was given the patent for his device in 12 May, 1908 and proved that his machine was able to transmit voice both through he ground and under water.

In honour of the anniversary, Virgin Mobile has created a webpage devoted to him. Owner of Virgin Mobile Sir Richard Branson said, "Nathan is the father of the mobile phone and I'm thrilled we can celebrate the 100-year anniversary of his invention that in some way went on to change the way the world communicates."

Story from the Daily Telegraph

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Could an educational revolution come about as the result of a television quiz show? Unlikely, perhaps – but underneath the amiable silliness of BBC2's QI lurks a radical remit.

And in the week after Chris Parry, the new head of the Independent Schools Council, made an outspoken attack on the state school system, it is surely worth looking at an unorthodox new approach to learning.

QI – which stands for Quite Interesting and is also IQ backwards – was created about five years ago by John Lloyd, who had enjoyed great success as producer of Spitting Image, Not the Nine O’Clock News and Blackadder. It was soon regularly drawing in more than 3m viewers, and was particularly popular among 15 to 25-year-olds.

Even more widely successful are the QI books – 1m copies have been sold in the past two years. Lloyd's formula is simple: everything you know is wrong, and everything is interesting. The QI Book of General Ignorance, for example, poses 240 questions, all of which reveal surprising answers.

So we learn, for example, that goldfish have quite long memories, that you are more likely to be killed by an asteroid than by lightning, that the word for assassin is not derived from hashish, and that kangaroos have three vaginas. Another QI gem is that Julius Caesar was not, in fact, born by caesarean section.

The popularity of this compendium of fascinating facts on etymology and zoology and history proves Lloyd's other thesis: that human beings are naturally curious.

Indeed, in the world of QI, boredom does not exist. Lloyd and his writing partner John Mitchinson set themselves a challenge: could they make even Chelmsford interesting? After doing some research, they discovered that it was the location for famous witch trials; it was the town where Marconi had a laboratory; and its MP, Simon Burns, is nicknamed "Third Degree", reflecting his results at university.

Lloyd and Mitchinson believe that there is a thirst for knowledge among all age groups that is ill served by school – which tends to turn people away from learning. Even the best schools can take a fascinating subject – such as electricity or William Blake or classical civilisation – and make it boring by turning it into facts that have to be regurgitated for exams.

QI's popularity also proves that learning takes place most effectively when it is done voluntarily. The same teenagers who will zoom happily through a QI book will sit at the back of geography class and do their utmost to resist being taught.

It was with all that in mind that I approached Lloyd and Mitchinson and asked whether they would like to expand on the ideas behind QI in a special issue of The Idler. What, I asked them, would a QI school be like?

"There would be no work, for a start," said Lloyd. "It would all be play. Plato said that education should be a form of amusement. That way you will be much better able to discover the child’s natural bent."

This approach is in direct contrast, of course, to the largely Gradgrindian approach common to most schools. As Mitchinson points out, it is actually a method of containment: "There's that great line: you're taught for the first five years of your life how to walk and talk; and for the next 10, you’re told to shut up and sit down."

For Mitchinson, schools have turned into wage-slave production farms rather than places of learning. "What do you remember from school," he asks. "Most of us would probably recall one or two good teachers, some successes and many humiliations, the ebb and flow of friendships, the torture of exams.

"But what about the actual lessons? Try it: sit down and make a list of the first 10 things that loom out of the murk. Then examine the list and see whether it passes muster as either useful or interesting. Unless you are gifted with a photographic memory, you'll be staring at a rag-bag of half-grasped theories, fragments of other people's books and a soupy residue of 'facts' – many of them not even true."

Then think about that list of great men who barely went to school: Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, William Cobbett, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell. Our most independent thinkers were more or less self-educated. You will also find that the best schools – for example, Eton and Westminster – have the shortest terms and do the least teaching, a paradox that would suggest we need less formal education all round.

In the QI edition of The Idler, Lloyd and Mitchinson present a five-point manifesto for educational reform.

One: play not work

Schools should be resource centres, not prisons. Teachers should be returned to their original roles as facili-tators, not bureaucrats or drillmasters. The more "work" resembles play – telling stories, making things – the more interested kids will become.

Two: follow the chain of curiosity

Ask a kid what he wants to learn, and he's unlikely to say: "a broad-based curriculum that offers the core skills". Real learning is obsessive. It happens through watching, listening and practising something that really interests you. Encourage children to follow their own curiosity right to the end of the chain, and they will acquire the skills they need to get there.

Three: you decide

The QI School isn't compulsory and there are no exams: only projects or goals you set yourself with the teacher acting as a mentor. This could be making a film or building a chair. From age seven onwards, our core subjects might be: philosophy, storytelling, music, technology, nature and games.

Four: no theory without practice

If you're lost in wonder looking at, say, a lettuce, you will want to have a go at growing it, too.

Five: you never leave

There is no reason why school has to stop dead at 17 or 18. The QI school would be the ultimate "lifelong learning" venue – a mini-university where skills and knowledge would be pooled and young and old could indulge their curiosity.

Ebury Press, is out now, priced £10.99

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Carl Lee Mikell (41) has been arrested by Charleston City Police and charged with entering a financial institution with the intent to steal. The police claim that he entered the Federal Credit Union and poured flammable liquid on the carpet.

Story from Live 5 News, Charleston, South Carolina

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In Alhambra, California, a golden retriever has given birth to a green puppy. The puppy, named Wasabi, was one of five puppies born five days ago.

Sceptics claim that the dog has just been dyed, but the owner claims that the puppy was born green. Vets say that it is possible for a newborn puppy to have green fur because of the placenta, which is green, rubs off at birth.

In the "Blue" episode in series B, it was claimed in the General Ignorance round that there are no green mammals. There is a sloth that looks green, but this actually green algae that grows over it.

Story from Local 6, California, with pictures.

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Cornelia Turner (49) was caught smoking a joint outside the court in Houston, Texas, while prospective jurors were having a 45 minute break. She was caught outside after she failed to turn up after the break had finished.

Judge Sherman Ross said, "I've had prospective jurors get lost before, but it never occurred to me that they might be getting ready for a marijuana trial by, allegedly, smoking marijuana."

Mayo was charged with possessing marijuana and will be sent to the court directly across Judge Ross's.

Story from KHOU.com

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Recently released documents from the National Archives in Kew have shown that government officials were "very nervous" about tea supplies, with fears that three quarters of tea stock would be lost. They wrote in one document that, "It would be wrong to consider that even 1oz per head per week could be ensured."

A paper in 1955 read that, "The advent of thermonuclear weapons... has presented us with a new and much more difficult set of food defence problems." The aim was to be, "completely ready to maintain supplies of food to the people of these islands, sufficient in volume to keep them in good heart and health from the onset of a thermonuclear attack on this country. It has become increasingly clear that the severity of the attack which the enemy could launch would produce a catastrophe in the face of which past measures would be fatally deficient."

The Ministry of Food also listed risky areas to place food. It claimed the London, Birmingham, Merseyside, Manchester and Clydeside would be likely targets for H-bombs. A-bomb targets included Tyneside, Teesside, Leeds, Sheffield, Hull, Derby, Purfleet in Essex, Southampton, Portsmouth, Bristol, Plymouth, Cardiff, Coventry and Belfast.

Other foodstuffs mentioned in these documents include bread, milk, meat, oils and fats and tea and sugar. The documents claimed that methods used previously in World War II would be, "unable to maintain bread supplies under the conditions envisaged".

Story from the BBC

P.S. - Keep an eye out for explosive details on food and other "F" topics in the new series of QI which starts recording tonight.

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