QI is a fantastic TV programme that regularly shows you that you're not as smart as you think you are as well as dismissing facts you had previously held as gospel.
On a repeated episode tonight I learned that Mount Everest (then know rather romantically as Peak XV) was first measured by a young mathematician, Radhanath Sickdhar, in 1852.
Unfortunately he discovered that it measured exactly 29,000 feet which was somewhat unforunate.
Picture the scene...
"Sir! I have measured the highest peak in the world. And it is exactly 29,000 feet!"
"Bollocks is it! You've gone and made a rough estimate there haven't you, you lazy bugger!"
So, naturally assuming that everyone would believe he had just rounded it and not calculated it properly, he said that it measured 29,002 feet.
Thus, as TV's most intelligent person Stephen Fry pointed out, Sickdhar was the first man to put "two feet" on the top of Everest.
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