Added: 1 year ago
From: waynesayonara
Views: 26,131
Sort by time | Sort by thread (beta)

Link to this comment:

Share to:

All Comments (102)

Sign In or Sign Up now to post a comment!
  • As a system the closed lorry's weight would include the birds's. However if you were to put it on a scale then only the lorry's weight would be registered because only the lorry's weight is pushing on the scale. I think. Right?

  • "If the tree fell down and there was no one there to see it fall it should still be upright"

  • John Lloyd just sucks the funny out of a room.

  • Funniest things she's ever said x]

  • explaining right and left to a technically advanced alien life form.

    Face north. The hand closest to East is on your RIGHT HAND side.

    Assuming they have a sun emitting solar radiation which would blow away their atmosphere UNLESS they live on a planet with a magnetic field which would deflect the solar radiation AND ALSO provide them with the reference points "North" and "South"

  • @manofoss without a reference point it said

  • @Azuresong At 01:36 he says, quote: "You're talking to an alien in a distant galaxy by radio, how could you explain which is right and which is left?" That's the original question in full. No mention of reference points what so ever.

    02:08 Alan: "Hypothetically, are we looking at any common reference points?"

    02:22 Fry: "Semantically there is no explanation for left and right without reference to a physical world that someone can identify..."

    Which is true enough, but not part of the question.

  • The quickfire round WAS quickfire... hypothetically. And Johnny Vegas is always entertaining on QI.

  • johnny vegas is such a twat, who books that retard to be on??? He's not even abit funny and the fact that he has to try so hard is even more anoying!!!!!

  • The answer to the "chicken and egg" question has to be the chicken. The creature that would be known as a "chicken" did not hatch from what we know today as a "chicken egg" but rather from the egg of its ancestors. I don't know why they presume the egg came first, because the question isn't asking if ANY egg came first, but rather specifically if a CHICKEN EGG came before or after a CHICKEN as we know it today.

  • @Razz14554 Well by that logic didn't the creature we now know as a chicken have to originally hatch from a chicken egg?

  • @Razz14554

    If we could trace it back you would see that the egg that gave birth to the chicken we know today...came first.

    So the answer to the question is still the Egg.

  • this is a long shot, but to answer the alien question u could use degrees say "if a protractor is in front of you, and 90 degrees is the top, then 0 is right and 180 is left.

  • @ADragonAmongRoses

    Would a protractor not be some point of common reference..? They'd have to have protractors too...

  • @ADragonAmongRoses But they may have started on the opposite side for zero. You can talk about the opposite sides but only ever have a 50/50 shot at them understanding which you mean is right or left.

  • Cute kitty

  • never disagree with stephen, he will devour your brain

  • That thing about some "law" saying the buttered side will go down is simply not true. It has to do with the height of the table. If you would drop it from a 10 foot table, it might got the other way.

  • So many cats ,so few reciepes Classic!

  • The lorry always weighs the same. Technically, if you're weighing the lorry, you shouldn't count the chickens anyway..

  • lol i thought it was bats too

  • If Johnny Vegas is a comedian then I am an imbecile. Or the Brits are total morons who have lost all taste for comedy and will take anything.

  • @zomailver1 me has dumb and no taste. me crayon write name. me... confuse?

    Way to judge a country on one out of a possible five people on a SHOW DESIGNED FOR ENTERTAINMENT.

  • @Schpudd It's the Paris Hilton thing. Don't tell me you Brits don't judge America by a few celebrities. I've seen these shows. What I am saying is your comedy becomes absurd with JV. Brititsh comedy is experimental as opposed to American but you can push it only so far. If you can't discern these things you don't know british comedy.

  • @zomailver1 Then watch Black Books, which has JV in, or try Ideal for something with him as the lead. I know British comedy well enough, keep your judgement to yourself thanks.

    I speak for myself, not all Brits.

  • @Schpudd I saw Black Books a long time ago. I loved it. See, I am not trying to dis anyone but want to understand British comedy which is definitely more sophisticated than American comedy. But then with JV or someone else it is not. It becomes too childish. I am sure you Brit see that. So I want to get to the bottom of things. No judgements.

  • @zomailver1 Dane Cook?

  • hahaha shit i knew the 13 seconds thing!

  • And wow, they completely butchered the "chickens in a truck" question. Almost everyone answered completely incorrectly, and the poo thing was just wrong.

  • @Phage0070 ...yes.... i dont agree with the chickens in a truck answer.. i think it would get marginally lighter (considering chickens dont weigh that much). a more solid way to check is lock yourself in a cupboard with a bowling ball and a scale. toss the ball up and catch it.. there will be a difference in weight.

  • @snowblind1985

    The truck *would* weigh the same, but it is because when the chickens "fly" they are actually hovering by pushing air downward with a distributed force on average equivalent to their weight. Covering the top is irrelevant, as long as all the air they push down ends up impacting the floor. The ball example would weigh less because the weight spikes up when it is thrown; if you averaged the throw and the catch with the hang time it would be the same as if it was just held.

  • @Phage0070 possibly..they could be absolutely correct... it just seems counter-intuitive.. thats all.. . but thats the point of the show isnt it? :D .. my only doubt is that weight is a downward force so if the chickens fly, how is the "weight" constant? i agree that the existing matter in that space remains same..also, how would you average the throw and hang time in the ball example? this is just to clear my doubts.

  • @snowblind1985

    The chickens are pushing against air in the same way they would be pushing against for instance a stool. The air has a weight like everything else (air pressure), its just very "soft". There would of course be little spikes and dips between flaps as they are in essence tiny ballistic hops, but if they were all flapping at once it would average out to be the same.

  • @Phage0070 If I'm right, I believe the explanation for it is Newton's third law of motion; that states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So, for a 3lb object to stay airborne, it would need to be displacing in a downward motion, the same weight. So the downward pressure would be the same in either state.

  • @snowblind1985

    As for averaging the thrown ball example, it depends on the time spent throwing and thrown for the ball. The faster the throwing process the more concentrated the force and larger the "kick". Remember that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so if you propel something into the air its going to have to push downward with that same force. You can change the duration that force is exerted over, but you can't get around using that energy somehow.

  • How to communicate left and right to aliens on the other side of the universe... I would probably try to express "clockwise" and "counterclockwise" according to the magnetic field lines which emanate from a wire with electric current passing through it. Then you could express right as being the lateral bisection which is first reached by going clockwise of centerline.

  • she looks like a conservative / lesbionic rupert the bear

  • Johnny Vegas is unbearable. Ridiculously stupid and not funny.

  • @ortcutt Absolutely agree. The one thing I can say for him is that at about 0:55, he did a good job of relaxing the tension between John Lloyd and Stephen Fry.

  • @tofuzzle. The fish...

  • So if the egg came before the chicken because of them evolving from reptiles....then which came first, the reptile or the egg?

  • @Tofuzzle

    Or you could ask what kind of egg does a chicken lay? A chicken egg. What comes out of a chicken egg? A chicken. What kind of egg does a reptile lay? It's not a chicken egg, I can tell you that.

  • @Tofuzzle Egg - the fish egg.

  • @Tofuzzle i suppose at some point going back, it was an asexually reproducing animal or a live birth animal that was also once an asexual creature like bacteria

  • @Tofuzzle The egg still came first.

  • @californiarednek The egg would die without a reptile to care for it. Of the two choices, both are paradoxical, one cannot exist without the other. But the reptile (chicken) wins because of the two, its the only one that is self sufficient and can survive without outside intervention.

  • @7CellarDoors No, the egg came first because there where still eggs before there where reptiles. But even if you said which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg, it is the chicken egg. Whatever laid the chicken egg was a proto-chicken. It is not paradoxical.

  • @Tofuzzle The egg still.

  • I think you should stop arguing about this here and go to the pub instead XD

  • Lorry question is ill-defined.

    WEIGHT is relative to What you weigh in relation to (say earth) , Where you are in relation to said object (say, sea level), and according to Einstein, how fast you're travelling (negligible).

    If the birds were sitting motionless on truck, then lift off simultaneously (without kicking off), any scale under the truck will feel as if less FORCE (weight) is applied upon it. The system will contain the same mass, but what if the birds fly off to Mars?

    Points?

  • Send the Alien a blueprint for a right-handed screw (common screw). Turn it right- it digs into the material, turn it left, it digs out of the material. There you have it, right and left.

    Do I get any points?

  • @2pacsrevenge

    That still doesn't work. When you're screwing it in, it is going clockwise. You are thinking of it going right starting from the top, but starting from the bottom it is going left. Your explanation still needs a point of reference (aside from the screw itself), be it from the top or bottom.

  • @BlackFalconKN OK, send the aliens a matching screwdriver, 'right' would be the tangent to the direction in which they must turn the screwdriver to drive the screw into the wood (if they don't have wood, we'll send them wood).

    Anyway, a 'right hand screw motion' being the 'negative' screw motion is evident in most of our vector calculus, it can be defined without reference.

  • @2pacsrevenge send them a screwdriver and wood with a radio...? if we could send them stuff then why not simply write left and right on a paper and draw arrows and send them that instead? :p

  • It's strange that me and my friends have had many of these arguments before this show came out.

  • Truck-bird question, IMO, is a load of shit. It breaks the law of conservation of mass! When the bird isn't making contact with the truck, its mass is extracted. Weight is proportional to mass, so if mass goes down, weight goes down.

  • Comment removed

  • @HittokiriBatosai "Mass is always the same for an closed system" - Quoted from "University Physics" By Hugh D. Young and Roger A Freedman

    Based on this, regardless of what happens inside the closed system (so long as it's closed) then the mass of it all would remain the same and so would the "weight."

    The situation you stated above means that the birds applied an external force onto the truck and were removed from the system (truck being the system)

  • @USSCannonFodder I suspect that's just strictly by definition, and sounds entirely counterintuitive. But it wouldn't be the first time nature decided to go against natural intuition. Thanks for the quote.

  • Cant you explain left and right using graphs and pictures?

    so you would have a sqaure picture with an x axis (left to right line) and y axis (up and down line) and all the negative parts of X would be on the left side while all the postive numbers of X are on the right. But I guess mathmatically doesnt count.

  • @Samwd1 To transmit a picture and know it's not backwards requires a prior agreement of what direction to plot out the data. And the idea that positive numbers are graphed to the right is an arbitrary convention of our culture. Furthermore, you could go to all the trouble of defining which side of the picture is up with illustrations of the nature of gravity, yet you still couldn't even be sure that they associate up with positive and down with negative.

  • What if we were communicating in stereo waves? But maybe then the receivers could be reversed. Maybe the aliens have no ears lol.

  • If a man speaks in a forest and there is no woman to hear him is he still wrong?

  • @HempBike Yes, he should sit home and talk to her

  • @HempBike He should always apologise anyway. Just for the quiet life.

  • @HempBike

    of course he is..

  • Describe magnetic lines of force using induction, B-Field and force coming out perpendicular to the B-field, then describe a five finger palm. It doesn't matter where they put the thumb; if they put the thumb on the wrong side then the force will go in the wrong direction, so they would know which is left vs. right.

  • @SumnerClaridge yeah, I read this and obviously meant current instead of induction; I was referring to the right-hand rule, of course.

  • I find it rather annoying that John Lloyd thinks he's cornered the market on definitions. I suppose I should still be nice to him though; after all, he created QI :)

  • Is that John Lloyd the former tennis player - not the one married to Chris Evert; the other one.

  • Fantastic tie, Stephen.

  • not in the top-tier of episodes.

  • @BlandBoy not in the top-tier of comments

  • I'm going to a attach a piece of toast to my cat now

  • John! I suck my thumb (which is quite embarrassing since I'm 15) and that's how I remember it's my left hand :)

  • Sandi's so great. Most of the women on this show are just so lame, but she's brilliant.

  • Comment removed

  • Sandi's great.

  • love Sandi Toksvig.

  • don't know why people are complaining about the panel, thought it was a pretty good episode.

  • john seems like he really isnt enjoyin the show he created.

  • poor panel this week but thanks for the upload anyway

  • Excellent!

    Good episode, thanks for loading it.

    What happened to the funny quote at the end?

  • Couldn't you reference what is left by using a magnetic field created by a current going in circles. Using the direction of electron movement as references?

  • @TumshieX Maybe - but "clockwise" and "anticlockwise" don't relate to the perspective of the viewer the way "left" and "right" do. If, when you face your house, the walkway is to your left and the driveway is to your right, that would reverse if you were to then stand facing away from your house. "Left" and "right" seem to be specific to bilaterally-symmetrical species, so we can determine one side from the other. Side preference (e.g. "right-handed") may have something to do with it, too.

  • @guysmiley00

    What I'm thinking is if you send directed current through a wire which goes in a loop, you can specify the loop as going away from you at the top. You can then place an electron in the middle of the loop, or potentially smaller loop, and then see which way it goes due to changes in the magnetic field as you increase or decrease the current...

    It's been 6 years since I took physics, so I don't really remember if it would actually work.

  • John Lloyd has zero sense of humor. He seems pretentious.

  • @jonjon2222 And he created QI.

  • @jonjon2222

    I wouldn`t mind so much if he actually had any idea what he was talking about.

  • @jonjon2222 Loyd has tons in his humor arsenal.What he might lack in quick responses, he makes up with real interest in ideas and human behaviour,and that's besides being the greatest comedy producer of the last 2 generations. Check out "The museum of everyhing" on bbc radio,as just one of many examples of his work.

  • No, I'm sorry. So many cats, so few recipes.

    Hahahaha I never really found Sandi that funny but she's really on fire here.

  • The correct answer to the Schrodinger question is that the RSPCA finally stops letting him adopt cats.

  • God I hate Johnny Vegas so much. I just never, ever find him funny.

  • @ZKY2 well it's better that he ruin an episode where the other guests are also shit, rather than appearing on an otherwise great episode.

  • @ZKY2 Same here, he's loud and ignorant, but not funny.

  • Can`t help feeling that Johnny is in John`s bad books now. We may never see him on QI again.

    Thanks for the upload!

  • I never knew that there were no moles in Ireland. That is definitely quite interesting.

    Thanks for the upload

  • QI must be the only show where it takes five minutes to finish a question during a quick-fire round.

  • @neaiznemts Quick is a relative term. It's quick compared to a sermon or childbirth. Not so quick when compared to a snakebite or a lightning strike.

  • I remember left in English because you can make an L with you left hand, and right (derecha) in Spanish because you can make a lower-case D with you right hand.

  • @janeeyre1990 surely u only need one of those

  • @midgetchinese I only needed the "L" for left hand when I was a kid, but I work at a childcare center so I'm used to explaining it to small children occasionally. I still need any trick I can to remember words in Spanish.

Loading...
Alert icon
0 / 00Unsaved Playlist Return to active list
    1. Your queue is empty. Add videos to your queue using this button:
      or sign in to load a different list.
    Loading...Loading...Saving...
    • Clear all videos from this list
    • Learn more