QI annoyance

Burnsy2023 · 5 Oct 2009 at 13:22

Ok, so I was watching Season 6 Episode 12 of QI and there's a bit at the end that makes me cringe.

Stephen asks "What makes up 70% of the Internet?"

This is a flawed question to start as you haven't specified the metric by which you are measuring the traffic. Are we talking about specific requests or total bandwidth?

He then proceeds to say that less than 1% of all email traffic is porn. Which could very well be true, but SMTP traffic is not the biggest bandwidth user by far and so doesn't really relate to the question.

He concludes by saying "A recent study has established that the world wide web is less than one percent is pornography and on the other hand 89% of all emails are spam."

Now this further annoys me as email traffic is nothing to do with the WWW at all. He is using WWW and Internet interchangeably which is incorrect. By doing so, he neglects all WWW traffic, a lot of which will be porn as will P2P traffic.

Now if I am to come out with witty anecdotes about how someone's commonly held fallacy is indeed false, I need correct information and QI is one of my most useful sources. Now I don't know who to believe. I'm so annoyed I might have to write a letter

Burnsy2023 · 5 Oct 2009 at 13:52

LeJosh said:
If it makes you feel better he probably should have said what makes up 70% of the internet' traffic?

And that would still be wrong. Email as a whole doesn't account for that much internet traffic. If he said "What makes up 70% of email traffic" I would be happy.

Burnsy2023 · 5 Oct 2009 at 14:04

Abraham said:
while he would I'm sure respond to a correction if you sent it via twitter or similar, I find it a touch odd that people actually think it's his own knowledge that he spiels off. His researchers and more likely script writers got it wrong, maybe they just give him notes to talk around and he improvised/omitted incorrectly

Of course.

However, this episode was shown a good few months ago, so I'm sure someone else has made this point already.

Burnsy2023 · 5 Oct 2009 at 14:11

Kenai said:
:/

Dude, you need to get laid or something. Seriously. Or maybe try some illicit substances, something, anything...

If I get laid any more than I currently do it'd fall off.

Janesy B said:
It's an Entertainment show and as such the contents should not be taken as fact.

The whole show is centred on being pedantic. I think they do try and be correct as much as possible, but because of the nature of the obscure topics they talk about everything is very specialist and hard to get correct all the time. Doesn't stop me cringing though.

Burnsy2023 · 5 Oct 2009 at 14:15

Sinque said:
So surely you've just told yourself exactly why they may have got this one thing wrong?

I never questioned why they got it wrong, simply that they did and it annoyed me. I think it annoyed me as it was an obvious mistake to anyone who can use wikipedia.

Burnsy2023 · 5 Oct 2009 at 14:41

As a footnote, I think Stephen Fry is a British institution and as such should get a state funeral when he does finally die (which I hope is a long time yet).

Burnsy2023 · 5 Oct 2009 at 14:46

Von Smallhausen said:
Write a letter Burnsy. A reply from him would be good.

Before I think about doing this, I need to know where to send it - and I need a list of witty quips to include in the letter; it needs to make him laugh as well as inform.