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Stephen Fry of the BBC's Quite Interesting reminds us of the eroding certainty of knowledge.
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Easily my favorite game show is the BBC’s Q.I. (a.k.a. “Quite Interesting”),
hosted by the planet’s honorary ombudsman, Stephen Fry. I guess you’d call it a trivia quiz. But really the object is for the four
panelists, usually comedians, to be interesting, to be witty – even more often
than they’re correct.
A recent episode was themed around the Half-Life of
Facts. Essentially, the program’s
creator, John Lloyd, went back through the show’s earlier seasons and collected
knowledge which has since been proven inaccurate. Once, for example, the host reported that
there was no way to accurately tell the age of a lobster. But by the time of this Q.I. retrospective, marine biologists had learned that the
lobster’s eye stalk was the key to dating it.
