Dunderheads Prize - week ten results

Have you ever slid down the banisters?

A fairly straightforward trap, this, which most of you negotiated without difficulty - the point being that the bit with the rail on it that you can slide down is strictly called a 'balustrade'. The banisters are the thin struts that join the rail to the actual stairs. So the only entrants who impaled themselves on the newel post at the bottom of our slippery slope were: Sean Brady, Charles Rigden, Luke, Rebecca, Moira Crees, Rosey, Emily Schmidt, Anna-Marie Dunne, Nick Pope, Christine, Laura Haddon, Shaun Clark, Rachel Meaden, Lucy Deas, Emily, David, Dave Eccleshall, Sania, Kate Tulett, Shane, Phil Bonstow, Kimberley Pemberton, Claire Sharpe, and Chris Parkes. Penalty points all round, lads.

Many of you spotted what we were on about - too many to list, again, so you'll just have to make do with a quiet inner glow of satisfaction - and, of course, no points. A few bonus points for these two Quite Interesting snippets, though:

• "According to a 1913 dictionary, banister was also the name for a stringed musical instrument 'having a head and neck like the guitar, and its body like a tambourine. It has five strings, and is played with the fingers and hands'" (Victoria Davey) (Sounds like a banjo to us, Victoria - so is that where the word 'banjo' comes from? Or is it just that banjo was the next word in the dictionary and you got in a muddle? Check it out and let us know.)
• "The salt miners of Halstatt in Austria use this method to descend to a lower level wearing leather reinforcement to reduce temperature build up." (Ahmet) (Are you saying that Austrian miners get to work by sliding down a sloping pole in lederhosen, Ahmet? If so, do you have pictures?)

Boffins Prize - week ten results

What is W?

A number of you came up with answers to this cryptic enquiry that we can only describe as "fair enough":

• Explanations of the origins, uses and peculiarities of the 23rd letter of the alphabet (many people), which is a consonant in English but usually a vowel in Welsh (according to Roger Hewitt)
• One of the two vector bosons which mediate the weak interaction. It was discovered by the UA1 experiment at CERN in Geneva in 1983, which earned a Nobel prize for Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer. It is thought to gain its mass, and a connection with the photon, via the Higgs mechanism (named after Peter Higgs, a professor at Edinburgh university) - if so, the corresponding Higgs particle should be discovered at the LHC accelerator, also at CERN, in around 2008 (Stephen Burke and Steve Pugh), with John Mealor adding that "by typing 'W particle' into your search engine, you can find a page called 'W discovery' which shows a chaotic but fantastically beautiful image of the particles' trails when this happens. It's reminiscent of a malfunctioning firework and well worth the effort to seek out.";
• W=-1/3 for a static (non-expanding universe). In cosmology W is defined as the pressure divided by the density of the matter in the universe. We actually observe the universe to be expanding so the value of W must be less than -1/3, this is why we need dark energy to drive the inflation. The exact value of W is one of the things observations of the universe hope to tie down (Richard Brown)
• Whiskey in NATO, Wingate for Israeli switchboard operators working in English and Washington for Israeli telephone operators working in French, William in Hungarian telephone directories, Wednesday in 1914 British Post Offices, Watch in the 1916 USA Army, Willie in the British Navy in 1917 (and the Dambusters raid), Waldemar in the Azores, Wagner or Walter in Italy, Wanda for Polish radio hams, Waterloo for Flemings, Weltnordpol for those trying to remember their German morse code, Wali in Swahili, Wilika for children in Ndonga in Namibia, and Wuzhuang for Chinese soldiers learning Romanised Mandarin (Lemming)
• The shape of the constellation Cassiopeia (Carl)
• The symbol for dew in Meteorology (David Webster)
• An abbreviation for Western, West, women's (size), watt, wicket, wide, with, wife, weigh and width (Dotcom)
• The symbol for tryptophan in biochemistry, a 1973 American film, a Unix command that displays information on users currently logged in, the first letter of call signs allocated to broadcast television or radio stations east of the Mississippi river, and the name of an American fashion magazine. (James Aber)

Russell Anscomb maundered on at great length but didn't really seem to get anywhere much, while others proposed rather more far-fetched solutions:

• Short for 'wanging', an obselete musical term from the 18 century when string players would be directed to 'wang' their bow across the strings of their instrument (David Morris)
• The amount of electronic impulses sent from a lorry's gearbox to the tachograph head during the course of the lorry travelling one kilometer (Ian MacDonald)
• And the well-known legend that the outgoing Clinton administration removed all the Ws from the keyboards in the White House before they left (David Press). Does anyone know if that's true, BTW?

These are all fairly interesting answers, and a number of them are Quite Interesting, so they all get points - although we can't say with certainty which of them are true. What we do know, however, is that W is Tungsten, or Wolfram, the name preferred by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, which rules on such matters.

European countries are evenly split on their personal preference. The German for tungsten is Wolfram (spelt with a capital W, like all German nouns) and the Spanish is wolframio, but the Portuguese is tungstenio and the French tungstène. In Italian, either wolframio or tungsteno are equally correct, though wolframio is favoured.

'Tungsten' (tung sten) is Swedish for 'heavy stone'. Wolfram is the older name and comes from the German meaning 'wolf dirt' (Wolf is German for a wolf, and ram is Middle High German for dirt or soot). German tin miners found that lumps of the mineral wolframite (which is a mixture of iron, tungsten and manganese) interfered with the smelting of tin and produced more slag than usual. They explained this in terms of the tin being 'devoured', as a wolf devours sheep.

Tungsten (or Wolfram) was first isolated by two Spanish brothers, José and Fausto Elhuyar, in 1783. Fausto wanted to call the new element wolfram and José wanted to call it tungsten- a controversy which has persisted ever since.

So, well done (and points) to those who told us about tungsten:

• QI Fanatic, Jamie Shoesmith, Hannah Drury (bunking off homework again), Lemming, James Harkin, Thomas Willcocks, David Mooney, Andrew, Nick Denny, Olga Matthews, Pete Myall, Dotcom, Neil Mackay, David Morgans, Adele Taylor, Kenneth McFarlane, Ross Mardon, Carl, Adam, Dave Howell, James Aber, Phil Weight, Ritchie Swann and Victoria Davey.

Finally, a few doughty supporters pointed out that W will be the theme letter for the 23rd series of QI. True, more or less, although we're presently struggling a bit with getting twelve shows out of the letter "Q", so we might have to bring "R" forward a year. But thanks for the vote of confidence.

The last show in this series is on Boxing Day. Alan has a few tricks up his sleeve this week, so be sure to watch it even if some section of your extended family is being obstreperous. Meanwhile, get your paper thinking caps on: this week's quiz concerns turbulent priests and chuck fruit.

We hope your festive season is really Quite Christmassy - best wishes from all at QI.