QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (23 page)

Honolulu, although it’s a bit of a trick question.

Under a Hawaiian state law established in 1907, the City and County of Honolulu are one and the same. The county not only includes the rest of the main island of Oahu but also the rest of the north-western Hawaiian islands which stretch 2,400 km (1,500 miles) into the Pacific.

This means that Honolulu covers the largest area of any city – 5,509 square km (2,127 square miles) – despite only having a population of 876, 156. Seventy-two per cent of the city is covered in seawater.

The world’s most populous city is Mumbai (formerly Bombay) with 12.8 million people living in 440 square km (170 square miles): an astonishing 29,042 people per square kilometre. If the whole metropolitan area is included, the most populous city is Tokyo with 35.2 million living in 13,500 square km (5,200 square miles).

Honolulu is the state capital of Hawaii, but it is not on the island of Hawaii. It is on Oahu, which is much smaller but much more densely populated. Hawaii is the most isolated major population centre on earth.

The islands of the Hawaiian Archipelago are the projecting tips of the world’s biggest mountain range. Hawaii is the only US state that grows coffee. More than a third of the world’s pineapples come from Hawaii and Hawaiians are the world’s largest per capita consumers of Spam, getting through seven million cans a year.

Spam’s popularity is mysterious but is probably due to the heavy US military presence during the war and the fact that tinned meat is handy during a hurricane. Spam fried rice is a Hawaiian classic.

Captain Cook discovered the Hawaiian islands in 1778 and renamed them the Sandwich Islands in memory of his patron, the Earl of Sandwich. Cook was murdered on Hawaii in 1779.

By the early nineteenth century the islands were known as the Kingdom of Hawaii. Although it became an American territory in 1900, and the 50th state in 1959, Hawaii is the only US state that still uses the Union Jack on their flag.

Great Bear Lake. None of the five ‘Great Lakes’ are entirely ‘in’ Canada.

Huron and Superior are larger than Great Bear Lake, neither are wholly inside Canada; Erie and Ontario are neither wholly inside Canada nor bigger than Great Bear Lake; and Lake Michigan, though larger than Great Bear Lake, isn’t in Canada at all.

Great Bear Lake up in the North West Territories on the same parallel as the Bering Strait and lying partly inside the Arctic Circle. It has a total area of 19,166 square miles, larger than the Canadian portions of Lake Superior, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Despite its relatively low profile it is the fourth largest lake in the Americas.

It is also larger than more than seventy of the world’s countries, including Albania, Belgium, Israel, Lesotho and Haiti.

There are somewhere in the region of two million lakes in
Canada – no one knows exactly how many – covering about 7.6 per cent of the Canadian landmass.

The second-largest lake wholly inside Canada is Great Slave Lake (17,751 square miles) which is also the deepest lake in Canada (2,014 feet).

There are 31,752 lakes with an area of at least one square mile and an uncounted number of smaller ones. One square mile is about 640 acres, which is a pretty big lake: almost seven times the area of Vatican City.

There are so many lakes in the country that naming them seems to have a been a bit of a problem. There are 204 Long Lakes and 182 Mud Lakes. Other popular choices are: Lac Long (152), Long Pond (144), Lac Rond (132), Lac à la Truite (109), Round Lake (107), Otter Lake (103), Little Lake (101), Lac Perdu (101) and Moose Lake (100).

Wrong answers include the Great Pyramid, the Great Wall of China and (for clever-dicks) Mubarak al-Kabir Tower, Kuwait.

Our answer is Fresh Kills, the rubbish dump on Staten Island, New York, though we quite like Jimmy Carr’s alternative suggestion – Holland.

Opened in 1948, the Fresh Kills landfill site (named after the Dutch word
kil
meaning ‘small river’) soon became one of the largest projects in human history, eventually trumping (by volume) the Great Wall of China as the world’s largest man-made structure.

The site is 12 square km (4.6 square miles) in area and, when operational, twenty barges, each carrying 650 tons of
rubbish, were shipped in every day. Had Fresh Kills continued to stay open as planned, it would have grown to be the highest point on the Eastern Seaboard. At its peak the dump was already 25 m (over 80 feet) higher than the Statue of Liberty.

Under local pressure, the landfill closed in March 2001, only to be opened again to cope with the enormous amount of debris created by the destruction of the World Trade Center.

It is now completely shut down, and new restrictions mean it can’t reopen (no landfill is allowed within NYC limits). The site is currently being flattened and landscaped into parkland and a wildlife facility. Nice.

Arguably, there are structures which are spread across more space – the US road network, perhaps? The internet? The GPS satellite network? – but the Fresh Kills landfill is the largest single cohesive structure.

Everybody knows its only seven times, because most of us have tried it. But, in December 2001, a fifteen-year-old American schoolgirl called Britney Gallivan proved everybody wrong. And here’s her proof:

 

 

W is the width of the paper, L is the length,
t
is the thickness, and n is the number of folds. The first equation describes folding a piece of paper in half in one direction and then the other, alternately; the second one describes folding it in one direction only.

The number of possible folds depends on both the length and the thickness of the paper, so you need either a very, very long or a very, very thin piece of it.

Britney tested her first equation by folding an extremely thin, square sheet of gold foil in half (in alternate directions) twelve times. She then took a single piece of toilet paper 1,200 metres (4,000 feet) long and folded it lengthways, breaking the world records for nine, ten, eleven and twelve folds one after another.

This doesn’t work for an ordinary A4 sheet of paper. You won’t be able to fold it more than five times, after which it becomes thicker than it is long. With, say, a 3-metre (10-foot) length of loo paper, though, seven folds is easy and eight just about possible, but you won’t be able to do it with your bare hands. Using the alternate folding method, the American TV show
Mythbusters
managed to fold a piece of paper eleven times, but after eight folds they needed the help of an industrial tarmac roller and a fork lift truck.

If it were possible to fold a very large piece of paper of standard thickness without restriction, because the thickness of the paper would double each time it was folded, after just fifty-one folds you would have a tower of paper more than 100 million miles high – tall enough to reach from here to the sun.

 

It’s in Finland.

In 2000, a team from Helsinki University of Technology cooled a piece of rhodium to a tenth of a billionth of a degree above absolute zero (–273°C).

Rhodium is a rare metal, whose main use is in catalytic converters for cars.

The next coldest spot is in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003, a team led by Wolfgang Ketterle produced extremely cool sodium gas.

Ketterle won the Nobel Physics Prize in 2001 for his work on Bose-Einstein condensate, a new state of matter that only exists close to absolute zero. As a child, his interest in science was sparked by playing with Lego.

These extremely cold temperatures produced in laboratories are remarkable. Even in deep space, the temperature rarely falls below –245 °C.

The only known exception to this is the Boomerang Nebula, identified by Australian astronomers in 1979. It looks like a boomerang (or possibly a bow tie). At its core is a dying star, three times heavier than our own sun.

The Boomerang Nebula has been spraying out gas at a speed of 500,000 kph (over 300,000 mph) for the last 1,500 years. Just as our breath cools when we force it through the narrow hole of our mouths, the gas squeezed out of the nebula is two degrees lower than the space it is expanding into. It reaches –271 °C, the lowest natural temperature so far recorded.

The coldest temperature in the solar system, –235 °C, measured in 1989 by Voyager II on the surface of Triton, one of Neptune’s moons – is barely chilly by comparison; and the
coldest temperature ever recorded on earth, –89.2 °C in Antarctica in 1983, is positively tropical.

Low temperature research is important in the study of superconductors, materials which have zero electrical resistance but which so far have only been found to work at very low temperatures.

If superconductors can be harnessed they will totally transform the world.

They will massively increase the power of computers, while hugely reducing the cost of electricity and the emission of greenhouse gases. They will provide fuel-free transport, an alternative way of seeing inside the human body without the use of dangerous X-rays, and the E-bomb – a weapon which destroys the enemy’s electronics without the need to kill anyone.