No Such Thing As A Fish - 209: No Such Thing As A Sexy Black Hole

Episode Date: March 23, 2018

Live from Glasgow, Dan, James Anna and Andy discuss denim arson, and why 1p on the ground isn't worth anything.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Glasgow! My name is Dan Shriver and I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anatozinski and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go! Starting with you, James. Okay, my fact this week is, when a very large star quietly turns into a black hole without the usual explosion, the official term used by astronomers is a massive fail.

As if it wasn't embarrassed enough, it wasn't able to make the explosion. Well it turns out that about 30% of massive stars turn into massive fails, and they found this out quite recently, they were looking at an area of the universe called the Firework Galaxy, where there's loads of supernovas, so when it explodes, when you've got a big star and it explodes, it's called a supernova, and eventually that turns into a black hole, because sometimes it's happening without the supernova, and this area called the Firework Galaxy had loads of supernovas, but there weren't quite as many as they thought there should be, and they couldn't work out why, and then they were looking at a star called

N6946-BH1. My uncle's called that, so that's an Aussie name. That's a prisoner number, isn't it? And they noticed that it wasn't there anymore and it just kind of quietly dissipated, and this is a thing that happens that they've only just found out in the last six months or so. But I think massive fail is a really unfair way to characterise it, because so basically, yes, the way stars turn into black holes is it was thought that they turn into a supernova,

as you said, and so there's this huge explosion, and then they suddenly shrink into a black hole, but then these stars aren't doing the explosion, but that actually means that they don't blow away as much of the debris, so apparently supernova blow off a lot of the star's outer layers, and therefore there's not as much gravitational pull left to make a massive black hole. So actually the massive fails make a massive hole, a bigger hole than the massive successes or whatever they call the supernova ones. I didn't know that black holes are not really holes.

Yeah. What did you think they were? I thought they were holes. Oh, yeah, of course. I could probably have inferred that from your previous sentence. I think I may. But they're not, they're the opposite of holes. Do you guys know this?

Black holes are the opposite of holes. What's the opposite of a hole, like a sticky out thing? Just a big bulge. Well, yeah, they're really, really full. They're fuller than anything you've ever seen in your life, because they're so dense. So for example, so how much do they weigh? Okay, they could have a mass greater than 20 times the mass of our sun. And the really big ones can have a mass equal to four million suns.

Yeah. They're extremely large, supermassive black holes. But they are everything crunched inwards. Yeah. So it's just like a very large body which has been crunched down to a tiny size. They could be any size really. Yeah. Basically it's the density that's the important thing.

So you can have tiny ones, you can have massive ones. You could be a black hole. If I squash you down to the size of about a tenth the size of a neutrino, you would be a black hole. Okay, but you and me would fall out. If the earth got about as dense as a black hole, if you were crunching it down to roughly the density of a black hole, it would be about the size of an eyeball. It would be about two centimetres across. Wow.

That density. And the whole point of it is the gravity is so strong, light can't get out of there. You can't get to the escape velocity because light can only go at certain speed. And so nothing can escape because light is the fastest thing that there is. If light can't get out, then nothing can. Although that's the thing about black holes that's been challenged over the last few years, isn't it? And by Stephen Hawking, who, yeah, so it was assumed that black holes did have this strong gravitational pull that would mean that everything just disappeared into them.

But it turns out they do what is referred to as a cosmic burp. And this apparently is when they consume so much, they overeat, they eat so much stuff that they almost are force fed huge amounts of gas and they can't swallow it all. So it spits some back out. That's amazing. It's so weird. It's really hard researching black holes because I guess we don't really know fully what they are. It's all hypothetical.

And as a result, they do stuff. All the headlines I was looking into is colourful language, like they burp stuff up. Or I read one that I got excited by, which was black hole caught having a post lunch nap after it eats solar system. And I was like, this is going to be great. And then it was not. What did you think it was going to be when you said you thought it was going to be great? Did you think they were going to describe the fold out bed that they had all set up in their office? I don't know.

I clicked on it just optimistically, not thinking anything. So the stage before a black hole is a thing called a neutron star. So this is where a star collapses, and it doesn't collapse with quite enough force to become a black hole. But it does become a thing called a neutron star, which is very, very, very dense, but not as dense as a black hole. So this is very cool. A sugar cube of neutron star would weigh on Earth a billion tons. Oh. Yeah.

And it's hard to imagine what a billion tons is, isn't it really? Yeah. Imagine a billion one ton elephants. Can I put it that way? Wow. Yeah, exactly right. Supposed to say it's pretty difficult to pick up your cup of tea, I think. That's going to break the China.

So this is the cool thing. If you drop a marshmallow onto a neutron star, if you're ever in a position to do so, it's got such a strong gravitational pull, but the impact will be the same as an atomic bomb because of the amount of gravity pulling the marshmallow towards it. Do you guys know when the first supernova was recorded on Earth? No. The year 3600 BC. Hmm. Yeah, it's this.

So this is a paper that's been put forward. It was found in Kashmir on a cave wall. It was a cave painting which had two bright glowing objects in the sky. And so this paper is putting forward the idea that it was the first recording of it because the people in context of the painting weren't hunter-gatherers. They were in a very separate situation. So they looked at it very cleverly by going, how can we prove that our theory is right? It's a supernova. There's something amazing about supernovas that have been logged.

It can happen back in 3600 and it was glowing in the sky, but the remnants of it still exists. You can still look for bits of it in the sky. So they've actually been able to look at one specific supernova and date it to roughly that period. So it's called HB9. That's the supernova that they believe it is. And they think it's 3600 years ago in Kashmir, first ever supernova recording. And they named it after a pencil. Yeah.

That's actually my auntie's name in Australia. There was a supernova in 1054 which was visible all over Europe. Europe was the best place to see it. It was visible in the daytime for three weeks. And at night time it was so bright that it cast shadows on people on Earth. It was absolutely massive. But no one in Europe wrote about it. Why not?

It was written about in China. It was written about you can see it in cave paintings and stuff like that in other parts of the world. Basically there was a schism going on between the Roman Catholic church and the Orthodox church at the time. And apparently both sides thought that it would be an ill omen. And so no one wrote about it at all. And they just kind of ignored it. And it's like, what's that? And they're like, oh nothing.

That's amazing. You do get rogue black holes. These rebellious black holes that do wander around the universe. So a lot of black holes are at the center of galaxies. And the vast majority that we've detected are at the center of galaxies. But you get some that don't have their own galaxy. And they've only been detected recently. But it's kind of thought that they've basically had their galaxy stolen off them.

So this is what astronomers call mergers. It's like a financial terminology. But a minor merger is when a larger black hole eats up all the stuff that's circling around a smaller black hole. And then those poor black holes that have had their equipment stolen, they just spiral off into space. And they're just bouncing around space. Or it's thought maybe they bump into another black hole to put it extremely crudely in a way that an astronomer would faint at. And yeah, they crash into another black hole and they propelled away into space.

So they're alone black holes, desperately looking for a mate. But are they like cowboy maverick black holes who don't give a damn with any of the things that they do? And they're on the mission of vengeance to get their stuff back. Yeah, they're sexy black holes. Hey, what I really like about this fact is the massive hole, sorry, the massive fail bit. So what I love is the massive fail thing. Because astronomers have a really good sense of humor. There's a lot of jokes and a lot of just little acronym puns that happen.

There's one that's called the collaboration between Australian and Nippon for Gamma Ray Observatory in the Outback, or kangaroo. Very nice. There's the package for the interactive analysis of line emission, or pint of ale. One word. Okay. Pint of ale. Okay.

I thought that was great. For this one, there's a star that's been named after Vladimir Putin. Unfortunately, it's been named by Ukrainian astronomers who've named it Putin Julio, or hulo, which roughly translates as Putin is a dickhead. And that's a star in the sky. It only costs $10 to do it, but it's quite nice that it's Ukrainian astronomers who officially did it. They do. They're famously in the astronomy circles, good with acronyms.

It's kind of like doctors. So you go to big astronomy conferences, and there's just all these presentations that are based on acronyms. So, yeah, I think there's Poopsie, which is phase one observing proposal system. There's super huge interferometric telescope, which is... Shit. Shit. It's shit, Glasgow. I mean, probably if you're not more comfortable saying that.

Normally, when audiences are all shouting shit, they're telling it to me. There's this one that is absolutely pushing it too far. So this is what it's called. And this was a name for a workshop, a big astronomy conference, and it was titled Testing Astro Particle with the new GEV observations, positrons and electrons, identifying the sources. It's too long. I forgot what the first letter was.

I know. It's tango in Paris. Oh. It's too long. Imagine if someone got that. You would have only had to have listened. Oh, yeah. Imagine the brain that could possibly have reached that conclusion.

So speaking of imagine the brain, we should probably be talking black holes. The death this week of Jim Bowen. No, Stephen Hawking, of course. Very much into black holes. Hawking radiation is what he's famous for, which is the fact that black holes get smaller over time by very, very small amounts, and he discovered that. He had quite a good sense of humour, didn't he?

Yeah, I think. Amazing guy, yeah. His tango in Paris joke didn't go down so well, but it was other stuff. I love the official biography of him that came out in 2012 was by a lady called Kitty Ferguson. Very good biography. And she wrote in it that there was a rumour that Hawking used to run over the toes of people who annoyed him.

And he would do it sort of subtly as if he was just turning round or something like that. And while she was writing the book because she had access to him and asked him the questions, she said, is this true, this rumour that you do this? And he said, it is a malicious rumour. I will run over anyone who repeats it. He was a wild wheelchair driver, though. Yeah.

Years ago, when he was able to do whatever he wanted with his wheelchair, and a colleague said that he used to show off a lot with his tricks, so he used to do a lot of spins, he used to drive his wheelchair incredibly fast, he actually once broke his hip crashing into a wall in a show-off stunt that got out of hand. Wow, yeah. There was one, so at the time he was trying a section of Stephen Hawking's stories, basically, and things he'd done. There was a time where he was appearing on Newsnight,

and he was in the pre-phase, they were getting the studio ready for him, and they were setting up all the lights. And one of the producers pulled out a lead for one of the lights, and Hawking immediately slumped over in his turn. The producer absolutely freaked out. Thinking he had killed Stephen Hawking, ran off to get someone, came back a few minutes later, found him giggling and crying. What a guy!

Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Czazinski. My fact this week is that Levi jeans are set on fire before they're sold, and this is specifically Levi jeans, ones with holes in them, or like distressed bits on them, you know, like sort of rips or bits that look cool, and they've been on fire in the factory, that's how they do this. So there's been a bit of coverage lately about how Levi is changing the way it distresses its jeans because it's got new laser technology, which allows it to make its jeans look really worn, just with lasers, rather than by hand.

And yeah, if you fire a laser at jeans, obviously it can set them on fire, and that's how you get the effect of the holes in jeans. And if you go into a Levi factory, or many jeans factories also use kind of laser technology, then it just smells of smoke all the time, because you're sort of setting jeans on fire all the time. But this is really good, because the previous way they did it was really bad, basically, right? Yeah, people having to do it, yeah. You basically had people getting a pair of jeans, putting them on mannequins, and just scrubbing them with sandpaper and with chemicals, and they get very sick.

I saw you say put them on and set themselves on fire. In 2014 there was a Japanese brand, which, to get their jeans distressed, they were called Zoo Jeans, and they had jeans which lions, tigers, and bears had attacked in a zoo. They only made three pairs, but... I don't really think you want to wear those, do you? Because once a bear has gotten the taste for those jeans... It's true, it'll go on a mission of gene vengeance for you. Well, it was so clever how they did it, so they took old tires and giant rubber rings,

and things that animals in zoos are given to play with, they wrapped them in a sheet of denim, gave them to the animals, animals went rip, rip, rip, and then they took, as they said, the most fashionable remnants, and they turned those into a pair of jeans. Very cool. Wow. Well, they also have got people to wear down jeans for potential consumers. So this is a Welsh denim label called Huit, and in 2014 they hired 50 men to break in their jeans. So they hired all these men, and they had to wear these jeans for six months non-stop,

so wear them every single day, whatever they did, and they weren't allowed to wash them, and so there was... I read an interview with one of the guys who said he wore them every day for everything. He played rugby in them, he cooked in them, so cooking spills, he did carpentry in them, he was a carpenter, he sunbathe, he cycled every day. He sunbaved in them. He did not get a good tan. But then that's to kind of make them seem worn, and then they were auctioned off, and they got a few hundred pounds each for them.

A few hundred pounds for six months' work, though. I know, it's not a good rate, is it? Let's hope the carpentry business worked out. Apparently if you wear jeans and you commit a crime, they're kind of like a fingerprint, the police can tell the jeans that you're wearing. If they catch you on CCTV and the CCTV is good enough, they have a unique wear pattern. So if you're caught on film, they can look at them and they can tell that these are the actual jeans that were used in the robbery. As in the specific pair, or they can tell that that was... oh, he's wearing skinny jeans there, is he?

No, no, they can tell the actual pair. So let's say you have been playing rugby and sunbathing in a pair of jeans, or you've just been walking down the street, they look slightly different, and there are forensic people who can tell the difference between what you've been doing and can tell your jeans from someone else's jeans. Wow. What you should do is just have a pair of crime jeans. Oh, yeah.

When they're forensics guys, they say, well, these jeans have only been used for crime. And then you keep them in a drawer when you're out crimeing. They can be used as armor jeans, in a way, because there was a guy in Pennsylvania a couple of years ago whose strange wife attacked him with a box cutter to his genitals, but his jeans were so thick that they stopped him from getting injured. Wow. That's a little tip for you.

A little tip? That's all he lost in the fight. Wow. Did it rebound off the cloth, or was there a risk that it was stuck? There was a rip in the jeans, but she couldn't get through the jean fabric, because it was really thick in the crotch area. Wow. Handy.

Very. Sometimes the process of making jeans is quite intense. So they're sometimes baked, which, you know, to get that worn look, they're repeatedly washed. They are there. So they used to be sandblasted, but the new way of doing it with lasers is, it takes 90 seconds, I think, to make a pair of jeans look like it's been worn for a year, whereas it used to take about half an hour.

But do you know why? So this is all kind of technology that Levi is at the forefront of, but do you know what made them famous? Why we think they know? What made Levi's famous? Early jeans? Yeah, I thought they were like the first. Levi Strauss made the first jeans.

So it didn't invent jeans. What he invented was, you know, the weird bits of metal. The rivets. The rivets that are in your jeans and that no one knows why the hell they're there. That's what Levi invented. That's why they're there to protect the genitals from your estranged wife. Bizarrely, they didn't because they had to get rid of them specifically on the crotch because if people were outdoors back in the day, leaning over a fire,

they would suddenly heap their genitals up. That was the biggest complaint. I was having a nice time by the fire when my balls lit on fire. But yeah, those metal bits actually keep them together. And I've always wondered what they're for. And they were invented in 1871 by a guy who came to Levi Strauss who marketed them. And they keep jeans together. So jeans used to just fall apart before that because they didn't have that strengthening technology.

And that's what they did. And they also put the tiny pointless pocket in which, you know, that pocket that's inside the pocket. We know that's folk. Yeah, it's for pocket watches which haven't existed for about a century. And yet still they are in jeans. Okay, yeah, that's good. Weirdly, I think the patent for it, everyone assume it's the denim, but it's actually the rivets. Yeah.

When they actually filed the patent, that was the big thing that they were trademarking. That's cool. Yeah. This stuff on lasers. Do you know that parrots have been flying through lasers recently? Because this is so scientists want to make better drones. They want to make us work out technology for how to fly better. And so they've been investigating how birds fly.

And there was a study done, I think last year, but there was a study done that looked at the flight of a parrot. But they needed to investigate exactly how they flap their wings when they take off. And so what they did was that it was actually a parrot let, which I really like. It's like a really tiny parrot. But what they did is they had it fly through a bunch of aerosol particles in the air that were then lit up with lasers. Because they're so precise. So then you can have the aerosol particles all illuminated and then the lasers kind of show what kind of wing movements they're making. And so they found out how birds' wings move when they fly.

And then we can use that in drone technology. But what's quite sweet is that obviously going through lasers is quite damaging for you. So if you look it up, they designed tiny pairs of goggles for the parrots to protect them from the lasers. Parrotlets as well. For parrots. Yeah. So they're tiny little glasses. Really tiny.

Yeah. It's almost as sweet as not making a parrot fly through a load of lasers. I imagine parrots were what children parrots would have on their shoulder. Imagine. Pieces of four. Okay. It is time for fact number three. And that is my fact this week.

Thomas Edison tested over 1,600 different materials to find the right filament for the inside of his light bulbs, including fishing lines, cardboard and hairs from the red beard of an old friend. Imagine if that had been the most successful as well. All light bulbs would have to be full of red beard hair by now. It did turn on. It would be excellent for the economy of Scotland. A risky comment. Yeah. So this is one of those stories that is, Thomas Edison is a character so clouded in apocryphal stories and legends and so on.

But this was reported in a number of official biographies by him. But the story goes that they were trying to work out how to make the light bulbs of the original light bulb he was doing last longer than a few hours or so on. That was, they had a limit on it. And he tried over supposedly 1,600 things. And when it was 1,600 things, it would be like they used like 40 different varieties of bamboo. So that would be part of the list, for example, because it wasn't completely random things like ripping beards off and so on. But one of the stories from an official biography says that a friend of his, of old days, who was his boss at a station, at a railroad station that he worked at when he was younger, called Mr. McKenzie, came in.

He was a really fun character. And Edison, as a joke, said, why don't we try it with your red beard? Took off the strands, put it in. It did go up and it had a red light as it went up as well, which is nice. Cool. And yeah. Actually, when they did that, there was a competition between McKenzie and another guy called John Creusie. And they wanted to have a competition whose beard would be best inside the bulb.

Oh, really? Yeah. And Creusie, he was Swiss and he had a big black bushy beard. McKenzie was more bristly and straight and they had a competition. And McKenzie was the winner. But actually, they were both pretty shit. What was the thing that won, excuse my ignorance, out of these 1,600 things? Well, now we use, what, tungsten or something, don't we?

Oh, yeah. But it was bamboo at the time, wasn't it? Or sort of a bamboo? It was bamboo, yeah. So it was bamboo to start off with. He found Japanese bamboo and he sent a team of explorers to South America and they found some really good bamboo. But then they got confused and they forgot where they found it. So they brought some back, but they couldn't remember where they got it from.

So then he had to send another guy called James Ricalton out to the jungles around the world. Actually, Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaysia, India, all over. For a year, he looked around for the best perfect bamboo. And he got to Sri Lanka and he found this bamboo. It was amazing and it was going to be perfect for the light bulb. And he got home to Edison and he said, I've got this bamboo. And Edison said, oh, we're using carbon now. And then carbon was the final thing that he used.

That's really harsh. That's quite funny though. Edison could at least have said, oh, thank you. This looks great. Thank you. Great. And then quietly said, we're going to use the carbon. Let him have a few days of thinking he'd won.

The amazing thing about the carbon, actually, that was invented by a girl called Lewis Howard Latimer. And he was an African-American draftsman who was a son of an escaped slave. But the amazing thing about him is he invented the carbon filament, which made Edison's millions. But he was also the draftsman who drew up the patent for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. Wow. So he's one of those two massive things. The big rivalry. Yeah.

But his light bulb was obviously very revolutionary, even though he didn't technically invent the light bulb. But I guess he was extremely good at PR Edison. So he had this invention factory, which made sure they turned out the best inventions. And one good PR move he made was in 1884 on Halloween. He got, so employees of the Edison Electric Lighting Company, they paraded up and down New York with light bulbs strapped their heads. So they all thought they were having an amazing idea. Maybe that's where that came from. But yeah, this is amazing.

It was to show off the new light bulbs, which had just been invented. There was a huge horse drawn generator in the middle of all these hundreds of employees of the factory. Horse drawn generator, which changed steam into electricity. So this big kind of steam powered machine in the middle. And then hundreds of people who were held together with wire that was going from the light bulbs on their heads and down through their sleeves and then linking them to the next person. So kind of like, you know, there's gloves that you wore as a child that connected to each other through your chest. Oh, yeah. What?

Yeah, mittens. Not through your, I mean, around your chest. But yeah, they paraded through New York. There was this huge PR thing. That must have been amazing. All these people tied together with light bulbs flashing on their heads. So sorry, were they tied together because it was one chain? Yes, it was one circuit.

Imagine if one of them had gone like in Christmas lights and you had to go through testing every individual employee. No. He used to do it. So for ideas, he used to do this thing. And this, again, has been written in a bunch of biographies and a lot of people think that this really happened. We're not sure. He used to, when he was falling asleep, he thought that's when he had his best ideas. And he would think I would have the idea and then I'd fall asleep and I'd wake up later and go, Oh, what was that amazing idea?

So he used to take naps during the day on a chair. And in his hand, he would hold metallic balls, just two metal balls with a metal plate underneath him. So as he was going into that zone where he was having an idea as he was going into a nap, his hand would go loose when he fell into the sleep. The ball would land on the plate, wake him up and he could immediately go, Ah, that idea is amazing and write it down and have it. And no one's officially said that that's definitely the case of how he did that. But there's a famous statue in Florida of him, which people always go and visit. And in his hand is a metal ball, which gives a little nod to the fact that they think it was true. He was famous for taking naps because he said that sleep was rubbish and no one needed that much.

And he said he only had three hours sleep a night. But there are all these photos of him with Henry Ford, who was one of his best friends of Ford fame. There are all these photos of him asleep. And he was really often awake and he's just having a nap in the background, just like constant cat naps. And they were close him and Henry Ford. They were super close. It's like proper BFFs for life. They went on camping trips together.

So Edison became confined to a wheelchair in his later life and Ford bought a wheelchair for himself so they could have wheelchair races. Yeah, no way. Yeah, that's really sweet. And there's a thing which is quite famous, but maybe a lot of people haven't heard, which was when he died. They captured, they were said to do this and it was handed over to Henry Ford by Edison's son. The last breath of Thomas Edison. So they had these little test tubes and there was eight of them that were sitting along there. Breathe this last breath, they put in the cork afterwards.

And if you go to this day to the Henry Ford Museum, he has the test tube on display. But you don't know which is going to be the last breath in advance. They must have been stuck there for a long time. Yeah. For months maybe. You just wait, they wait with the test tube and say, here's the last, the second last breath. The third last breath. Okay, new test tube.

Yeah, I don't know. It's in a museum. Yeah, this won't go in, but I'll just quickly say it because I read it today. I read the last words of Roald Dahl and Roald Dahl's last words. He was surrounded by his family. He was very ill and his final words were the thing I'm going to miss most is being with all of you. That was his final words. And then he went down, except it wasn't quite his last words because the nurse who was with him thought,

I'll make it easy on him and gave him a shot of morphine to make it go easy on the way out. But as she did it, he went, oh, fuck! And those were Roald Dahl's last words. Brilliant. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact is that it's only worth leaning over to pick up a one P coin if you can do it in less than three seconds. Anything more than that? Waste of time. Move on. I reckon I could do it in that time.

I'm sure you could. Yeah, I'm sure you could. But you'd have to do it pretty much every three seconds for it to be worth me giving up my job. You would. Yeah, yeah. This basically applies if you're on the median UK salary, which is £539 a week. And if you do that, assuming you work a 40 hour week, 96 with an hour for lunch, let's say, you've got 2.6 seconds to do it.

Okay. Now, the problem is, if you earn more than that, obviously you have to do it a lot faster to make an economical exercise for you. So the Prime Minister, based on her current salary, I have assumed a 60 hour week for her because she is busy. But I have given her an hour for lunch, don't worry. She would have to do it in 0.5 seconds, which is quite hard. Yeah. That's tough. I've worked it out for Cristiano Ronaldo as well.

Oh yeah. On his current salary, he would have to do it in 0.002 seconds. And he would have to pick up 391 every second to make it work as well. Wow. He is quick though. He is quick. Yeah. He worked out for Philip Hammond based on an independent article that estimated his income.

So this is not just his salary, it's all of the money that comes in for him. And he would have to be able to pick it up in 0.2 seconds, which is coincidentally the limit of human reaction time. So he would have to immediately notice it, pick it up, without any movement, just notice it, pick it up, notice it, pick it up, notice it, pick it up. Basically, that's the fastest anyone can possibly pick up coins, I reckon. Wow. But if he did that, he really would not be getting on with the job, would he? And it is an important job he's got. I would say he should focus on being a chancellor and then leave the coin picking to Theresa May.

Theresa May? Maybe that's what she's been doing. It's a strong plan for Brexit written. We're just going to look for any coins we can find. We've got no trade deals, but has anyone looked behind the sofa? But this is partly about how the 1P is silly, but it's not worth very much at all. And there's a lot of talk of getting rid of it, right? So I think it's basically not worth picking it up at any point.

You're not even allowed to pay with 1Ps in more than 20 1Ps. So if something's 22P, you can't pay with just 1Ps? Yeah, and I've broken the law on multiple occasions. Well, it's not a law per se. It's that they don't have to accept it as legal tender. But if you're in one of those self-service places and you can just put them in really quickly before they notice, then you can do as many as you want, actually. So yeah, there is an idea of getting rid of the 1Ps and the 2Ps.

I think George Osborne wanted to do it, didn't he, when he was chancellor, but David Cameron said we shouldn't because everyone will vote us out. And the amount of money you pay to make them is more than what they're worth. Yeah, it's something like 6 out of 10 UK 1P and 2Ps are only used once and then put in a jar. And then one in 12, the coins are thrown into the bin immediately. And at one stage, the Royal Mint was having to make 500 million 1P and 2P coins every year to replace those that were going out of circulation. I do not believe anyone throws 1P coins into the bin. Does anyone here throw coins just into the bin?

One in 12 people do, so... No, in a charity box or into a jar. Straight in the bin. Not a maniac, but I've been tempted. It's completely insane behavior. Okay, so did you say 500 million a year? Yeah. Guess how many pennies the UK made in the year 1933?

God. It's the worst game show ever. A billion. Seven. So close. They made seven pennies for the whole year. What? Why did they do that?

Because they had loads already, it turns out. But seven is a strange number, isn't it? You would think zero. Why would you need seven more? Get the machines back up and running. Does anyone have seven P? Okay, the reason for it was because I think the Mint didn't want to miss a year. They didn't want to have a year in which they did not make one of the coins of the realm.

So they made seven. Oh, wait a minute. They must be really rare. They're so rare. So this is even rarer because three of them were placed by the king under the foundation stones of important buildings. Okay, two went to the British Museum, two went into private hands. Which buildings do we know what they are? I don't know.

I think it probably is known. There are four prototypes coins as well. And one of those in 2016 sold for 72,000 pounds. Wow. They're so rare that people start modifying 1935 coins because they can most easily be adapted and made to look like a 33 penny. So if you do find one of those, do hang on to it. They used to in the eighth century, they had pennies, but they didn't have because things would cost less than a penny. So what they ended up doing was just they would chop the pennies in half.

So if you were to shop, you'd be like, I need some change. And they would just slice your penny into and give you the either the quarter or the half that they... There was Hapenies as well, didn't we, half pennies? Yeah. Well, sorry, Hapenies were, they came about from the chopping in half and actually the design of coins in that period, like the eighth century around and then in the 1200s, Henry II introduced what was called the long cross coin. And there was a coin where the cross figure on it, the Christian cross, went properly from top to bottom and from right to left.

And that was to make it easier to cut. So that was if you could change, you could give it more easily because you could just break it up. And then that's where Hapenies comes from. That's where pieces of eight comes from as well, isn't it? Oh, really? Because you were saying before about pieces of four and whatever, the pieces of eight was you would have a coin and you would cut it into eight pieces. And that's why a quarter is called two bits in America.

What would they be made of that you could chop it so easily? Metal. Soft metal, specifically silver. Silver and gold are quite soft, aren't they? Yeah, exactly. And that's why if you get a gold medal and you bite it to prove whether it's real gold or not, to prove it's gold, it's not harder, it's softer. So if you bite something that's made out of gold, you should get little teeth marks in it.

Okay. Yeah. Unless it leaves really big teeth marks in which case it's a chocolate coin. Yes. Don't be fooled again, Dan. So people used to chop little bits off the edges of coins and that was a really bad crime. It had very severe punishments because obviously it's devaluing the coin of the realm. But people used to do it anyway because you can melt down the silver and recast it.

And in 2015 again, a horde of silver clippings was found in a field in Gloucestershire by someone with a metal detector and it was a huge bundle of shaved off coins. And I just love the name it's been given. It was called the toenail horde because it looks all these little round trimmings of coins. They look like a ton of coins. That's amazing. That's why coins have got milling on the side of it. So little kind of indentations on the side of every coin if you look at it,

that's to stop people from shaving off. And that was invented by a thin kaiser Newton who was the master of the mint as well as doing all the other stuff he did. Master of the mint. It's such a good name, isn't it? Yeah. Here's another idea. Get rid of one piece, two piece, five piece, 10 piece and 50 piece

and instead have one piece, three piece, 11 piece and 37 piece. You've gone mad. Yeah. It's just mad, Sandy. It's just mad. It's just mad. If you have those coins and it makes it easier for any kind of combination of coins to be used for any number of any price basically.

37 piece. Yeah. Because they're all prime numbers. So apart from one, but they're all kind of prime numbers. One's kind of a prime number, isn't it? Oh, we're going to get so many of that. But basically it means that say something's, you know, 76 piece or 84 piece, it's just easier to work out with that specific number of things.

On average it's 4.1 coins per transaction compared to 1P, 2P and 5P and 10P. But two of them will be 37P coins. That's so hard to work out. No, you get used to it pretty quick. Like if you had to learn your 37 times table just to pay for stuff. You know the first person who introduced the penny to the UK? This is also in the eighth century and this is King Offer of Mercia. So eighth century he made the first penny in the UK.

And the incredible thing about this, which I just love and I learned when I went to the British Museum and I saw an example of one of his early gold coins is this. So only three gold coins from his reign survived. So the introduction of the penny to Britain. And he was a Christian king and the phrase around this gold coin in the British Museum is there is no God but Allah alone and is because it's so incredible. So it was just a century after Mohammed basically and the Abbasid Caliphs were taking over large parts of Europe and he wanted to be able, well we're not entirely sure why the coin said this,

but one theory is that he wanted to be able to trade with them and they would see these coins as valuable. They would recognise that and think, yeah, you're one of us, that's fine. But then a lot of other people think actually he just didn't speak Arabic and he had no idea what those words meant. And he's a Christian king who accidentally wrote on his coins, there's no God but Allah alone. And they go in a tattoo with some old kind of Japanese characters and it actually says you English wanker kind of thing.

Do you know what the least valuable coin in the world is? It's an Uzbek coin and it's the one Tigian coin, okay? If you had 3,000 of them, you would have one penny. That's the exchange rate, 3,000 more penny. And I worked out that Ronaldo, if he wanted to make a profit, would have to pick up 1,173,000 Tigian every second. Wow, he is fast though. Okay, let's wrap up guys.

Okay, that is it, that is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on Ant Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin.

You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, where you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or our website, no such thing as a fish.com where we have all of our links to our upcoming tour dates. We have links to our book. We also have a link, actually we don't, do we? It's a very exclusive thing that we've got this tour cassette and we're about to give one away actually to a member of the audience

who sent an effect to us at the beginning of the show. So for a cassette, Andy, what's the winning fact? The winning fact comes from someone called Julian Mazay. I hope I'm pronouncing the name right and it's this. It's about the city we're in. It's that Glasgow was once voted the friendliest and most dangerous city in the UK in the same year. Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts. Thank you so much, guys. We'll see you again. Goodbye. Thank you.