I missed QI tonight and so satiated my fix by watching about 2 hours of episodes (about 5 in total) on YouTube. So, here is a quite interesting snippet not included in the show, but in fact from my own brain.
The American robin, which looks a bit like a giant British robin, is in fact a member of the crow family and very much a different species to our own robin, whereas the tiny Australian robin with it’s yellow breast and living on the other side of the world is the same family as our own robin.
The octopus eye is the most advanced in the animal kingdom; our eyes have the sensory bit (i.e. rods and cones) at the back with the nerves actually coming from the front and trailing across the retina, thus obscuring our vision, whereas the octopus sensibly has the sensory bits in front of the nerves, with the nerves behind, giving more distinct vision without a trailing mess in between.
Fascinating.
Oh, and the best QI moment ever?
I get a page of code when I click on your link there.
One of the QIs we went to see being recorded will be on BBC2 this Friday.
We watched an old one on some random channel mid-week where Alan got to ask the questions and Stephen still knew the answers!
Really? It works fine for me… It’s the magnetic letters round… does http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8k5GcBfnDk work instead?
Soooo lucky to see QI! I’d love to go to a recording. Either that or HIGNFY.
I saw that one too! Fantastic – You Tube has that as “Stephen’s Christmas present to Alan” or something similar.