A Scarf-ful Lot of Questions Trivia Quiz

Answer: A very long scarf with multicolored horizontal stripes, made famous by the eponymous character on the "Doctor Who" television show

"Doctor Who" is an astoundingly long-lived science-fiction television program, produced by the BBC. The original series ran from 1963 to 1989; this was followed by a 1996 TV movie and a second series that began in 2005. The main character of the show is simply "the Doctor," a Time Lord who travels through time and space doing good deeds and solving problems. He travels in a ship called a TARDIS, which has the curious quality of being palatial on the inside and looking exactly like a 1950s British police box from the outside.

The Doctor had the extremely useful skill of being able to regenerate when he was near death, which allowed the studio to switch in another lead actor. (In the 26-year original series, there were seven Doctors in all.) The fourth doctor, Tom Baker (1974-1981), was known for his somewhat wild hair and his exceptionally long scarf, which wrapped several times around his neck and still dragged the ground on both sides. The story goes that the costume designer delivered a bag of nice yarns to the knitter she had commissioned, who didn't realize that she was supposed to choose from the yarns - and instead used all of them. Though the scarf changed from season to season, it became an icon of the show - and it certainly provides a lot of good knitting practice!

Answer: Rice

Despite its height and woody stem, bamboo is a member of the true grass family (Poaceae), like rice, wheat, and many other famous plants. It's the fastest-growing grass in the world - some species can grow over a meter a day! - and grows in every continent except Europe and Antarctica.

Its uses are manifold; in addition to these rather nice knitting needles, you can buy bamboo chopsticks, carvings, paper, and even luxury sheet sets! It's also used as a construction material (both in the buildings themselves and in scaffolding) and to make a variety of musical instruments.

Answer: John Henry

"When John Henry was a little baby / A-sittin' on his daddy's knee / Well he picked up a hammer / And a little piece of steel / Said, "Hammer's gonna be the death of me, Lord, Lord / This hammer'll be the death of me."

According to legend, John Henry was a steeldriver, a strong man who worked long hours to drill tunnels and lay rail in the grand effort to span America with a railroad grid. His job, and his teammates' jobs, were threatened when the team captain invested in new machinery. In some versions, it was a steam-powered drill (for digging tunnels under mountains); in others, it was a steam-powered hammer for laying track. John Henry set out to prove that a man could do the job better than a machine, and he did that -- but just after he finished, he suffered a heart attack and died.

His story comes from the 1880s, and may or may not be based in fact. Unusually for the time period, he became a hero not only to black workers, but to the entire American working class. The fear of being replaced by ever-improving new technology is an old one.

"And every time a train / Goes rumbling by his grave / They say, "Down yonder lies a steel-drivin' man, Lord, Lord / Yonder lies a steel-drivin' man."

Answer: Synthetic polymers treated with solvents and solutions

Yes, that wonderful, soft, machine-washable acrylic yarn is a plastic, at least 85% composed of the acrylonitrile monomer (also famed as a component in synthetic rubbers). After the polymers are produced, they're dissolved, passed through a spinnerette (to promote the formation of filaments) and then coagulated in an aqueous solution. They're washed, stretched, crimped, and dried, and ready for business! Its warmth, softness, dyeability and resistance to stretching makes it a very popular choice for knitters, although its flammability is a downside.

If you chose the answer referring to "acryll sheep," you may have been thinking of the famous argyll (or argyle) knitting pattern, which features diamonds arranged in a checkerboard. The pattern is supposed to have derived from the Campbell tartan of the Argyll area of western Scotland.

Answer: The company that handles the casting of extras and stand-ins for most Hollywood studios

Central Casting was founded in 1925 by the major Hollywood studios of the time. While casting major characters was the prerogative of directors, producers, and studio bigwigs, none of these busy people had the time to spend on finding the perfect extras. The librarian whose out-of-focus stroll lasts only thirty seconds is important for setting the scene, however, and Central Casting was born to find the faces to evoke those characters. Located in Burbank, California, it is still an active and important company, and its name has entered the language as a magical location where you can find all sorts of character types. "Did you see that stern clerk with her hair in a tight bun and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses?" a person might say. "She looks like she came straight out of Central Casting."

In knitting, casting on stitches refers to putting loops of yarn on a needle to begin the first row.

Answer: "I've got a nit to pick with you": I'd like to criticize a trivial mistake you've made.

The expression derives from struggles with head lice, familiar to parents of schoolchildren everywhere. A nit is the egg laid by a head louse; because it is glued to the hair, it can't be combed out and must be picked out individually. Without removing the nits, the infestation will return as soon as they hatch! (Modern chemical shampoos have partly removed the need for this, but many strains of lice are now resistant and must still be removed manually.)

Nitpicking is thus a repetitive, tedious and unrewarding activity, though it's something that has to be done. It thus seemed natural to extend its meaning to searching for small errors -- in a plan of action, in a piece of writing, in a calculation. A nitpicker knows that the mistake is small, but it has to be addressed anyway.

Answer: "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens

Madame Defarge is a major villain in this classic novel of the French Revolution. Every day, she sits in front of her shop and knits in code: her knitting reveals the names of people who must die as enemies of the Revolution -- including, dramatically, some of the central characters of the book. The image of her quiet, domestic, persistent malevolence is a difficult one to shake.

Answer: In rowing, the oars rotate about pivot points, where they are held in place.

An oar rotating about a fixed point acts purely as a lever of force, setting it apart from the paddling motions of canoeing or kayaking. This is one of only a very few things that are consistent across the board in crew. A rower might hold a single oar (sweep rowing) or two oars (sculling); might be directed by a coxswain (who might sit in the bow or in the stern) or might row in a coxless boat; might sit on a sliding seat, or a fixed one; and might be part of a boat with 1, 2, 4 or 8 rowers. There are few things everyone can agree on, but at the top of the list is that it's hard work, but fun.

Answer: Garter stitch

The garter stitch pattern is a little more complicated when knitting in the round (as when making a hat, for example): the knitter knits one row, purls the next, and continues in that way. The result is an attractive, reversible fabric that stretches easily in the vertical direction. This could potentially be a problem for my Doctor Who scarf: a twelve-foot scarf is liable to stretch quite a bit under its own weight! But the version on the show was knitted in garter stitch, so in the interests of verisimilitude (not to mention my own lack of skill), there is really no choice.

At many Western wedding receptions, the groom throws the bride's garter (a band used to hold up her stocking) to the unmarried male guests; the man who catches it will, it is said, be the first of them to marry. (Often, he'll either share a dance with the woman who caught the bridal bouquet -- or he'll end up ceremonially putting the garter on her!) The etymological relationship (if any) between the article of clothing and the type of knit fabric is unclear. It has been suggested that perhaps garter stitch was once used to make garters, or that the name "garter stitch" refers to the curly bands or ridges that seem to march horizontally across the fabric.

Answer: Scientific research that is significantly outside the mainstream

The fringes of something are its edges, its border regions, not subject to quite the same rules, filled in with shades of gray. One might refer to a frontier as the fringe of civilization, for example. In science, one often talks about fringe effects: famously, the magnetic field at the center of a cylindrical coil of wire is well known, but once one reaches the edges of the coil, "fringing" makes the field much harder to describe.

Fringe science is likewise on the borders of mainstream work, but follows the rigorous standards of the scientific method. Because of the nature of science, radical changes are often difficult to accept, but many fringe sciences (like plate tectonics) eventually become part of the mainstream. Cold fusion is perhaps the most famous modern fringe science.

Thank you for joining me in this surprisingly complicated project!