University Challenge and Useless Knowledge

I live my life by very few rules, but one I stick to is never to take alcoholic drinks on a Monday. This has served me well and is at least in part because one of the few times I watch television is at 8.30pm on a Monday evening when my wife and I settle in for thirty minutes of University Challenge. As someone who once appeared on Eggheads, I don’t mind admitting that UC is the apotheosis of quiz shows; the very distillation of what the genre can provide in terms of entertainment. It is unashamedly intellectual, unlike so much modern television, and it skips along at breakneck speed. To be successful requires amazing breadth of general knowledge as well as a facility of recall. It reassures one that the kids are alright, and that our foremost centres of learning still turn out some impressively interesting people. 

One person who may have cleaned up on UC is Bertrand Russell, the great British polymath who was a proponent of ‘useless knowledge’ – knowledge that doesn’t seem to have an immediate benefit when learned but which holds a value just by dint of being interesting. It is this knowledge, he argues, that makes life richer and makes idleness and leisure that much more enjoyable. Useless knowledge, he argues, ‘not only makes unpleasant things less unpleasant, but also makes pleasant things more pleasant’.  

In his 1935 collection, In Praise of Idleness, he argues that useless knowledge, in the case of the apricot he was about to eat, made the fruit, and by extension, his own life, much sweeter: 

I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known they were first cultivated in China in the early days of the Han Dynasty; that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kaniska introduced them to India, when they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word ‘apricot’ is derived from the same Latin root as the word ‘precocious’ because the apricot ripens early; and the ‘A’ at the beginning was added by mistake, owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter. 

Accumulating fresh information does not serve to push other information out of your brain. You should think of seemingly irrelevant information as like the tacks that stick pictures to the wall. You may not see them, but without them, the picture does not stay up. Learning is all about stickiness, and the more mental Velcro you develop, the more things will stick in your mind and be easy to retrieve. The answer to the question ‘why do I need to know this?’, other than the obvious ‘because I would never like to keep you ignorant by choice’, is because knowing things makes it easier to learn more things. Knowledge begets knowledge. When you have a lot, it’s easy to accumulate more. When you don’t have any, it’s hard to accumulate even a little. Think of it like the game Monopoly: once you start to win, you basically keep on winning, because when you’ve got a lot of money, it’s easy to get more. Knowledge is like that, too. 

And in the words of William Johnson Cory, the English nineteenth-century educator: A certain amount of knowledge you can indeed with average faculties acquire so as to retain; nor need you regret the hours you spent on much that is forgotten, for the shadow of lost knowledge at least protects you from many illusions. 

Our knowledge is what we use to think, to make decisions, and to navigate life. 

Another way of making knowledge sticky is to make it interesting, and we all find it easier to remember things when they are presented within stories. 

Therefore, when teaching wartime history, it’s worth mentioning Project Habakkuk, which was a British plan during WWII to construct an aircraft carrier out of wood pulp and ice, making it unsinkable. Maybe knowing that will make the important stuff stick; maybe it will provide a natural segue to the facts we want pupils to remember. Perhaps we could find a way to teach the Emu War of 1932 – a war which was lost by the Australian military and won by some emus. 

In maths, we might invoke Graham’s number, an immense number named after Ronald Graham. When introduced, it was the largest positive integer ever to have been used in a mathematical proof. It is too large to be computed in full, but its sequence of digits can be computed explicitly through simple algorithms. The last 12 digits are 262 464 195 387. Another little-known fact is that a sequence of six 9’s occurs in π, starting at the 762nd decimal place. 

Biology is full of sad stories, such as that of the 52-hertz whale, an individual whale which calls at the unusual frequency of 52 Hz. This pitch is a higher frequency than that of other whale species. Its call has been detected regularly since the 1980s and appears to be the only individual emitting a call at this frequency. The whale itself has never been sighted, only heard. It has been described as the ‘world’s loneliest whale’. Another poignant story is that of Lonesome George. He lived until he was over 100 years old. He was a male Pinta Island tortoise and the last known individual of the species. At the time of his death, he was the rarest creature in the world. 

Scientific research has shown that swearing can help to reduce the sensation of pain. Try it next time you stub your toe, though be aware that the phenomenon is particularly strong in people who do not swear on a regular basis.  

Another science experiment worthy of mention is the famous pitch-drip experiment at the University of Queensland. It was started in 1927 when Thomas Parnell poured a heated sample of pitch into a sealed funnel and allowed it to settle for three years. In 1930, the seal at the neck of the funnel was cut and the pitch started flowing. The ninth drop fell in 2014, 87 years after the experiment started, and we await drop number ten. What’s the point of it? I’d like to say it’s all about measuring fluid dynamics, but I’d be lying – it’s just quirky and interesting. 

Some knowledge of neuroscience stems from the experience of Phineas Gage, an American railroad worker who survived an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain. 

I have recently taught about Thomas Midgley, the American chemist who invented CFCs. I reckon Sixth Form chemists are more likely to remember this if they also know he contracted polio, which left him severely disabled. He devised a system of ropes and pulleys to lift him from bed. He then became accidentally entangled and strangled himself to death at the age of 55. 

Colour chemistry leads us to the fact that School bus yellow is a colour specifically formulated for use in North America. The colour is officially known as National School Bus Glossy Yellow. It used to contain lead, but because lead can cause developmental problems in children, it no longer does. Still on colours, Pantone 448 C is determined to be the least attractive colour. Given its status as the ugliest colour in the world, it was selected in 2012 as the colour for cigarette packaging in Australia. It is a kind of drab dark brown. 

We teach F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby in English, but were you aware of the book Gadsby, a 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright? It uses no word containing the letter E. 

I’ve walked up the world’s steepest street in Dunedin, New Zealand. I’ve also walked the world’s shortest street, in Wick, Scotland. It’s just two metres long and has only one address. I have not taken the shortest scheduled flight in the world, which is Loganair’s inter-island service to Westray airport. It’s a 2.8-kilometre flight and takes around 90 seconds including taxiing. Perhaps it’s wise not to make every dream a reality.  

I’m also still waiting for any of the above information to appear on University Challenge.

— Mr Benjamin Evans, Headmaster

Photo credit: Mr Evans’ time on Eggheads