No Such Thing As A Fish - 218: No Such Thing As Tennis On The Moon

Episode Date: May 25, 2018

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss cavemen living on the moon, Victorian reaction times, and the mystery of The Mystery Of Edwin Drood.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin and Anna Chazinski, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts of the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that's my fact this week, my fact is that in an attempt to work out who the murderer in Charles Dickens' last unfinished novel was, the lead character was put on trial.

Wow. Mmm. So this is the mystery of Edwin Drude. Yeah, this was the final novel of Charles Dickens that he was serializing in a newspaper. There were meant to be 12 installments, he only got as far as six before he passed away and as it was the lead character, Edwin Drude goes, he disappears and so we never know what happened to him and people ever since have been trying to work it out by looking for clues within it and so on and in 1914 a mock trial was put on as part of an attempt to

try and work out who might have murdered him and the lead character of the book, John Jasper, was put on trial and it was full of celebrities. The judge of the trial was G.K. Chesterton, the foreman of the jury was George Bernard Shore. It was a very, very cool trial. And did they find him innocent or guilty or...? No, I think they wanted to go for manslaughter in the end, but then G.K. Chesterton got very impatient with everyone and found everyone guilty of contempt of court by the end of

the day. Except himself, right? Except himself. But when do you get a judge finding himself guilty of contempt of court? That's super rare. I think that has happened. I remember that happening in America in the last few years. Really?

Yeah. Is that a really good moral judge or an extremely immoral judge? It's hard to say because he just looked at himself and gone, God, even I can see that I'm terrible. My feeling is, and I might be wrong about this, maybe a judge had his mobile phone on or something and then he got a call and he kind of found himself in contempt or something. Yeah, that rings a bell. Yeah.

That's really good. So fans of this novel are called Druids, which I think is very clever. Yes, yeah. Or Druidians or Druidists. Yeah. Yeah. There's a whole website where you can read every single possible scenario or sort of outcome of what might have happened to Edwin Trude.

And there's hundreds of over the years, just so many people have been trying to work it out. There's been four movies that have been made of the book where different outcomes have been revealed at the end. There was a Broadway musical whereby the audience actually voted on who they thought it was at the end of the show. It wasn't only that, was it? So this musical was a really big deal.

I'd never actually heard of it, but it won five Tony Awards. I think it won Best Musical in the 80s and Best Actor, I think, but the audience got to vote on who killed Edwin Trude and they also got to vote on various other things. So they got to vote on what was the identity of Dictatory, which was unknown at the time Dick and Stop Writing, and they got to vote on which couple would become romantically involved in the end. And all the actors had to train up to be able to perform any scene of any of these possible outcomes.

When I was a child, I had a computer game called Star Wars Chess, and obviously there was a good team and an evil team, all characters from Star Wars, and every single possible move combination that you made, there was a little cut scene showing you how R2D2 defeated Darth Vader. Yeah, but not for every single possible game of chess, because there's, like, billions for every piece combo. So you would always have a good rook defeating, you know, an evil pawn, or you would have it.

It was brilliant. Yeah, I was surprised, actually, because it sounds very geeky that and you never really struck me as the kind of person who would like that kind of thing. Yeah, weird, isn't it? Speaking of which, has anyone else been in a mock trial in their life? No. Yes. Have you?

What? A wide school. Yeah, same. Yeah. For what? What did you both do? Arson, it turned out, and I was livid. No, I'm joking.

It's really fun. That's so fun. Well... They put them in trial, and they give you a big dossier of facts about a case. So mine was a fight in a pub, someone had been hit with a poor cue, I think, and they give you lots of different eyewitness accounts, and you have to then hold a trial, and you sometimes... I think we went to an actual court to do this.

Did you? Very exciting. Wow. Yeah. Are you just... You were a juvenile delinquent, and you kind of post-hoc rationalised it as a game. That's it, yeah. We went to a court when we were kids at school, and I remember it because we were there, basically

a load of kids, and then these people just kept coming up, and they'd all been beating each other up the night before, because it was like... Wow. It was basically people who had been locked up that night for assault, and then they were coming and doing their pleas and stuff like that. Was this your school trip? Everyone else went to Alton Towers, but... Yeah, probably me.

We sort of went to the Battle of Hastings site, and I mean that, in a sense, was a lots of people beating each other up, so I think maybe it was just to prepare us for the future. God. It's weird that they felt the need to investigate it, though, because Dickens did actually finish Edwin Drew, didn't he? What? Did he? He finished it in...

No. Yeah, he finished it in 1873, so he died in 1870, but he did finish it with a medium, but it was with a medium called Thomas Power James, which I think is really cool, and it was the mystery of Edwin Drew, part two, and he published part one kind of cockily under his own name now, Thomas Power James, and then part two was what he'd learned from Dickens' ghost, and it had two prefaces at the start of it, one from Thomas Power James, who was saying this is such a privilege to be able to write with Dickens, and then the other from Dickens himself saying...

He's saying... You'll notice... Woo-hoo! Yeah. So, there is a story that Dickens wrote to Queen Victoria a few months before his death, and he was saying to her, would you like a spoiler of what happened to Edwin Drew? And she wrote back, and she said, no, I'm fine, thank you. Ouch!

He offered her a little more of it in advance of her subjects, and she said, no, it's cool, I'm enjoying the installments, or whatever she said, but we could have had Queen Victoria solving the mystery of what happened to Edwin Drew, which would have been very cool. Wow! Well, supposedly the illustrator of the book claimed to have known who the murderer was, so his name was Luke Fields, and he had given instructions by Dickens that John Jasper, he wear a net tie, and the idea was that Jasper strangles Edwin Drew with it, and he used to have a close collaboration, obviously, with Dickens, because he liked to seed things

that would appear later in the story, so maybe he did do it. We don't even know that Edwin Drew died, though. No, we don't. At the time the book ends, he has just disappeared, he might come back. Most people at the time kind of thought that he hadn't died, didn't they? Yeah. That was like prevailing theory at the time. There's another character.

Did you mention him, Dick Dattery? Yeah. Some people think that Edwin Drew is Dick Dattery, who turns up after Edwin Drew disappears. Get out! I know. That would mean so much more to me if I knew what the story was. Have you guys read this? I started reading it today, and I was too hungovered to get through it, I got through about five

pages. I would have thought you would, Anna, because you read loads of Dickens. I chose not to read the one that's only half finished, but I do really want to now, partly because people say that it's so impossible to work out what might have happened. There was one woman who adapted it for the BBC and she had to finish it a few years ago, and she said, a lot of people know that Dickens didn't finish Edwin Drew. What they don't know is that he died intentionally so that he didn't have to, because he literally had no idea how to tie up all these loose ends.

Stephen King has an unfinished work. Now, he's still alive, obviously, but he has an unfinished work. Is it just a thing he's working on at the moment? It's called The Plant, and it was a really interesting experiment he did, so he published it chapter by chapter online, just like Dickens, and he asked people to pay for it online, a dollar per chapter, and he said, if the number of people paying for this dips below 75% of the people who are downloading it and reading it, then I will stop writing it, and that's exactly what happened after about five chapters.

Really? Some people were really annoyed because they'd paid six or seven dollars, and they didn't get a finished story, but by part four, only 46% of people who downloaded it were paying for it. Really? Is it bad? Have you looked at it? I haven't.

Do you know what it's about? Is it about a plant? It's about an author who I think receives a creepy gift of a plant. It doesn't exactly sound like a shining doesn't it? No, I've heard it's very good, and it was just for that reason. He was testing the internet model of commerce, and it didn't work for him. He did release, if you remember, his book, The Green Mile, which was transformed, was made into a movie.

We're transformed, majestically, into the silverscreen. We don't have the book anymore because it was transformed into a film. Transformed into the film Transformers. So The Green Mile, he did that with the Dickens model as well. He put out single chapters, because the idea was Dickens always used to end on a cliffhanger, and he thought, could I do that, and could I generate a whole book where I was forcing myself month by month to reveal the next chapter? And yeah, so that's what The Green Mile is.

There's one book that we'll never read, so I looked at a bit of unpublished novels. And Evelyn Moore wrote his first novel, actually, called The Temple at Thatch in 1925. And then he gave a draft to his friend called Harold Acton, and Acton gave it quite bad review. So he wrote a letter to Evelyn Moore saying, suggesting that he do it in a few elegant copies for the friends who really love you. And then he gave a list of the suggested friends, and they were all the idiots they knew. And Evelyn Moore was so upset by this, so devastated that he walked down to the sea,

he took all his clothes off, he left a note with a Euripides quote about how the sea can wash away all ills, and then he swam into the sea intending to commit suicide. And he was stung by a jellyfish, so he gave up and returned to shore. Wow. That's amazing. So yeah, if it weren't for a jellyfish, we would not have Brideshead revisited. You don't have people taking off all their clothes and going into the sea these days, do you?

No. They used to be a thing, didn't it? I think so. Craig Venter, who's famous for sequencing DNA, he did that as well. He, I think he was fighting in the Vietnam War, and he... That wasn't a clever tactic, was it? Right. What we'll do is we'll all leave our clothes in the shore.

They'll think they've won. Actually, we've gone around in a big boat. No, that's not what happened, Andy. You weren't that man. No, he got very depressed, and he swam out into the sea. I think he did exactly that, took all of his clothes off, and then while he was quite far out, he suddenly had an apathy that he wanted to live and that he wanted to do well in science and so on, and he turned around to come back.

And that supposedly is the big problem when you swim too far out, and people have a change of mind. You're too far out to have the energy to swim all the way back. And so he said that was the hardest struggle of anything he's ever done, because he lost all his energy. And then in this moment of sort of near death, he realized he wanted to live. Do you know what happened to Terry Pratchett's unfinished works? I think he had about ten novels on the go at the time he died, sort of in various stages

of completion, obviously, so some much closer than the others, but they were crushed by a steamroller after he died. By accident? No, it was deliberate. He decreed in his will that he wanted them to be crushed by a steamroller. But it's paper. No, it was a hard drive. No, it was a hard drive.

Got it. Otherwise... I mean, how did you get a piece of paper? Oh, no, this piece of paper is completely pleasant. It was done by a vintage steamroller at a steam fair, and it was called Lord Jericho, the steamroller. Sounds quite cool. It's a good name for a steamroller.

Yeah, it is. It was done as part of a celebration of opening of an exhibition for all his work, and that's now part of the exhibition, his broken hard drive. I think Dickens didn't know what happened at the end of Edwin Drude, because I didn't realise that the ending of Grey Expectations, I think quite famously, originally was different, which is so satisfying, because it's always been kind of an annoying ending where spoilers, guys, close your ears if you haven't read it. So Estella and Pip obviously end up together quite abruptly at the end, sort of end up

together. They walk off into the sunset together, and the last line is something like, I saw no more shadow of her leaving my side or something like that. But in his original one, he probably sent it off to the publishers and stuff, and they'd split up. She was widowed, she then married someone else, they had a little meeting, and he went, oh, how sad, I guess we'll never be together. And then he sent that to the publishers, went on holiday with his mate, who was a guy called,

it was Edward Buller-Lytton, and went on holiday with him, showed him this, and his friend said, that's too miserable, you've got to change it immediately. And so he immediately, quickly, hurriedly changed it and had them end up together. It's quite good as an author if someone says, that's crap, you need to change it to actually do it, isn't it? I know. But he would have just gone, no, what? Sort of, mate.

Yeah. Well, Buller-Lytton was kind of the leading author of his time, and it's weird, no one really reads him anymore, but he came up with the phrases, the great unwashed, and the pen is mightier than the sword. Two phrases I use every day. Andy, why don't we not get on the bus? Because I haven't had my shower yet, and so I am feeling a bit like the great unwashed. OK.

That's never the context in which it's used. You just used it non-metaphorically, you idiot. Why are you attacking that person with a pen? Oh, well, the thing is, James, the pen is mightier than the sword. All right. My sword is absolutely tiny, but I've had this special novelty samurai pen belt. You can take your head off. OK, is time for fact number two, and that is Czazinski.

My fact this week is that in the past 10 years, the number of registered pinball players worldwide has gone from 500 to over 100,000. Wow. That's a big increase. It's a big jump. How? People got really into it. Why do you have to register?

You were allowed to play pinball without being officially registered, but then there is the International Flipper Pinball Association, which is where you officially register if you want to take part in competitions or just be recognized as a player. This is, I think it was measured by them in 2006, and there were 500 official players and then NBC reported last year, there are over 100,000. And this is huge comeback. Do you have to sign the register of pinballers? What do you mean?

Well, just normally, when there's a register, you have to sign the register. Do you? Yeah. The only other register I could... You don't have to sign the sex offenders register, do you? Well, I don't know, but that's... Why have you got special circumstances? In the register at school, they just say your name and you say here.

Yeah. That's true, but... They don't do that. There's not a register of pinballers, is there? Well, they read out 50,000 names. It's obviously ridiculous. Not all 100,000 people attend every single contest, and you don't need to check them all in before you can start.

And the idea is that pinball is now becoming really fashionable again, is that what you're saying? That does seem to be it. And Forbes cited the BBC as being the first to spot this in 2012. They ran a piece on how people were getting back into it, and it's thought one of the reasons is actually kind of video games where pinball is one of the games that you can play on certain video games that are on computers, and so younger kids got into it on that and then wanted to do the real 3D version.

And on phones and stuff, right? Exactly, yes. Like, smartphones. Yeah. But yeah, pinball is great, but it's got quite a checkered history. I think have we done on QI that it was banned for a long time? We haven't done yet, because the P series isn't going to go out until the end of the year, but I've just a slight feeling that we might mention it at some stage in the future.

Wow, God, that's that premonition coming back. Get in there quick, Anna. So pinball was banned in 1942. It was banned in New York, and then most big American cities followed because it was kind of seen as gambling, which is a bit weird because you often didn't even win money. I think it was often seen as just a slippery slope, because if you play on a pinball machine, you might then play on a proper gambling machine. I thought you won prizes, though.

You could win prizes. Or you could win free games and stuff, couldn't you? And the gambling bit was because back then, what we know as pinball is almost the essential bit of the pinball, which is the two flipper bits that you press on the side. That didn't exist. I know, crazy. Yeah, so it was just a game of chance. It was like roulette.

And you would bet on the result, wouldn't you, so you bet, I think it's going to land in slot, whatever, and then if you've got it right, you might win a free go. But it sounds much less fun than having control of the flippers. Yeah, you're still allowed to tilt it and nudge it and stuff like that. Oh, okay. Cool. Anyway, yeah, that's kind of how you control it. But yeah, they didn't invent the flipper until 1947, five years after the ban.

And then there was this big trial in America in the 70s when this is a guy called Roger Sharp, whose son, Zach, I think, is now ranked number one in pinball. But he was hired in 1976 by the MAA, the Music and Amusement Association, to try to be a star witness in this trial that overturned the ban. And he had to prove it was a game of skill, not a game of chance. And there was this amazing moment. So he played two games. He was moved onto a backup machine because they thought that he might have tweaked his

own machine in his own favor. So he's moved onto a backup machine. He played really well for two goes. And then the judge was not impressed. And he said, okay, if I make it through the middle lane in one shot, will you overturn the ban? And the judge was like, yeah, sure. And he took one shot and it landed exactly where he said it was going to land.

The ball did. Wow. And then the jury voted to overturn it. That supposedly happened in darts as well, didn't it, in like 150 years ago or something. They had to prove that it was a game of skill. And so some guy in Leeds kind of got into court and through darts where he said they were going to go. And then the judge came up and tried to do it and he couldn't do it.

And he's like, oh, it must be a game of skill then. Wow. How did they possibly think that was a game of chance? I mean, it's so obviously, how could you are aiming something in a ball? When I last time I played darts, it was against my wife and she beat me. And I kind of thought that maybe it was a game of luck. This ban was absolutely mad. So Mayor LaGuardia, Fiorello LaGuardia, who the main airport in New York is named after

now, he said that people who pushed pinball were slimy crews of tin horns, well-dressed and living in luxury on penny thievery. And he was photographed with a sledgehammer smashing up pinball machines. And he ordered the police to make prohibition style raids on pinball machines their top priority. Top priority. New York. It was 1942 as well, total war.

It was the methamphetamine of its day. Yeah, but they did ritualistic things to the pinball machines. So he's basically basically, they said it was a waste of metals, which could be turned into armaments and bullets. So 5,000 machines were confiscated and destroyed. They were dumped into Long Island Sound, but the metal in the balls was confiscated. And supposedly it was enough to build four 2,000 pound bombs. And the police carved the pinball table legs into cudgels and presented them to Mayor LaGuardia.

But then they dropped the bomb on some enemies, but they just flicked it away, didn't they? That's what the Danbusters was based on, actually. And basically, even though it was illegal, they still used them, didn't they? They just moved them to pornography shops. Right. Imagine. Imagine. So if you wanted to play pinball, you had to go to a pornography shop.

So you'd send your seven-year-old like, okay, you can't play the game, but yeah, God, that's terrible. I just think that's a very funny idea. Yeah. Very distracting. It'd be much harder to focus, I think, on your pinball game if you're surrounded by porn. Yeah, that's true.

If I ever join this association and do it professionally, then when the other guys are playing, I'm just going to put porn everywhere. I'm trying to make it like the 40s for you. This is classic pinball. I really like LaGuardia. I've never really, I've known his name through the airport. I didn't know he was the mayor. I had no idea.

I saw photos of him and he looks like a mafia Batman villain. He looks amazing. So I thought, okay, I'll just quickly look into him. So all this stuff of him being against the pinballing and sledgehammering and the prohibition style raids, he was someone who was against the alcoholic prohibition that was going on and actively protested it. And so he invited 20 newspaper reporters to his congressional office in Washington, D.C. and there he drank it in front of them.

And he had a beer that was admittedly had low alcohol. So I think it was almost on the edge of legality and he mixed it with some tonic and he drank it in front of the reporters with a straight face to say, look at this. I just think that's really pathetic. I think if you're going to make a statement by drinking beer during prohibition, don't drink low alcohol beer mixed with some tonic. Just have a proper point. I can just see you if there's prohibition in this country and you're an MP drinking

a full bottle of gin on the steps of the House of Commons. This is the point I am making. What was I saying? Where are my keys? Okay. So given that pinball was banned for such a long time, this is a nice thing. The Museum of Pinball is in a place called Banning in California. That's very good.

That's really good. Yeah. And I think the guy who won the world championships last year was 13 years old. So this is, he's a guy called Esher Lefkoff and he plays with this doll, I think, but it really is attracting all ages. This one's just opened up in London, actually. In December 2017, we've got our first proper devoted pinball hall. I think we definitely should go in Croydon.

Oh. We'll put it on the back burner. Do you know what a gobble hole is? Nope. I think I do. It's just a hole in the playing field of a pinball machine, which the ball can fall in ending that ball. Oh, that's rough.

That's a mean move to have in the middle of a pinball thing, I think the ball can fall there. Do you know what a thrust magnet is? A thrust magnet. These are names, these are all names of magazines that used to surround the pinball machine, isn't it? A thrust magnet is just an electromagnet that accelerates the ball through a tube. Okay.

It goes quicker. Do you know what a drain-o-matic is? No. I got 300 of these. Yeah, yeah, let's keep going until we get one. A drain-o-matic is a pinball game where the balls are lost too easily, so it's like you just keep losing all the time and it drains your money. Oh, no.

Like when you go on a fruit machine, but someone's already won it loads, and so it just eats up all your money. Yeah, like that. Because it doesn't have any left. Damn, the cheating machines. In Japan, arcade games are very much more popular than they are here, and they've got such a good array of them. Have you guys come across the tablecloth hour game?

No. I really like this. It's an arcade game, but instead of having like a joystick or buttons that you press, it's got a sticking-out bit that's like the edge of a tablecloth, like something hanging over a table, and then on the screen there's lots of crockery, and you just pull the tablecloth along. That sounds really good. See if you can avoid breaking the crockery.

That's incredible. Have you done that in real life? Tried to do that in real life. No, I didn't do that. It's really hard. Yeah. Because I used to work in a restaurant. I used to try it all the time.

Not for long, I bet. Your wages were docked every week. Bolton's Smasher fired from 10th restaurant in a row. But of course, you have lots of crockery, and you have tablecloths, so what else are you going to do if you're a teenager? Can it really be done? I guess it could be done if you're really, really fast, right? It could be done like for just one object.

You could kind of do it, but more often than not, it would just go flying. So funny. Haven't we said before there's a Japanese arcade game where you have to poke a robot bottom? Yes, with your finger. This is a game where it's a sort of prank on your friend to stick your finger at their bottom, yeah. Because there is a prank in Japan known as the enema, I can't remember what their word

for it is, and you go through all the different games and you have to do it to the teacher and then to the policeman and then someone else, and the game is just to poke them in the bottom. In real life? No, no, it's in the game. Oh, it's in the game. But the prank is a real life thing. Right.

It's like, you know, like a wet willy where you put your finger in someone's ear, it's like that, but with an anus. For the anus? It's much harder to shove your finger up someone's anus, I think. Especially when everyone's wearing clothes, they almost always are. You say the words wet willy before you do it as well. Sounds a bit bad. Yeah.

I think you're all going to have to sign the register and I'm praying for that. OK, it's time to move on to fact number three, and that is James. OK, my thought this week is that the Victorians had better reaction times than we do today. Did they? Did they? That's a good question, Anna, because did they? The thing is, some people think they may have done. OK.

And this is because we have, we can work out what people's reactions times are now by doing studies and stuff. And we have some old results done by friend of the podcast, Francis Galton. We've talked about lots of times. I mean, major eugenesis, probably an acquaintance of the podcast, I'd say. But it was at a time when eugenics was cool, wasn't it? Yeah, it was. Which is not now, of course.

But his statistics show that people who he studied had quicker reactions than people today. And so it could be that his data are wrong or it could be that people have gotten less quick. Yeah. Which do you think it is? I think people have come up with reasons why it might be that we're slower. Like, maybe there's a lot more contaminants in the air and your brains have got more mercury

in them or whatever. Your brains have got more stuff in them that are making them slower. There are a lot of serious people who think this is true. Yeah. My favorite one is in the 20th century, there was a scholar called Irwin W. Silverman, who believed the reason that we got slower reactions is because height has increased. Therefore, it's taken longer for things to travel to the brain or from the brain. So it's that extra bit of time.

Does that not sort of make sense a bit? I think they found that tall people are just as fast. Oh, okay. From where? Because most reactions are based on you seeing something and responding to it and your eyes don't get further from your brain as you get taller. Yeah. No, that's true.

You understand if someone stomps on your foot, maybe it takes you a bit longer now to back away, but it doesn't make sense at all. I retracted my earlier comments and it doesn't make sense. My favorite guy who studied this was the 93rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He is called Edwin Boring. He's my favorite psychologist. I just love him. One day maybe we'll talk about him, but his most famous thing that he did was work out

one reason why moons look bigger when they're on the horizon than when they're up in the sky. Oh, yeah. I just like the idea that he was cited in so many papers because his name was Boring. I think it must be. People slagging him off indirectly by just putting a little asterisk in at the bottom saying Boring. I read that one of the things to help, this has done a team of Japanese scientists and

researchers came out with these results saying a way of getting your reactions to be better is to chew gum, which is really interesting. Yeah. I've not heard that before. So they did this experiment where they said that chewing on gum improves the participant's reaction time by 7%, which is an average of 36 milliseconds. It doesn't sound like a lot, but the point is made that in say like sport where it takes less than half a second for a baseball pitcher to pitch a ball to the mitt.

That's obviously a huge amount of time. So what they say is that it only takes 10 seconds of chewing to activate the brain regions that are responsible for improving your reactions. And after you've done the 10 seconds, it keeps it active for 15 minutes. Wow. You buy 15 minutes of extra reaction time of 10 seconds of chewing gum. You are chewing steroids though. Congratulations by the way on the Tour de France win, Dan.

Do we know what the mechanism is that is it that chewing saliva means that you're... According to this, it says your jaw muscles when you chew stimulate certain regions of your brain, including the premature cortex. Hmm. Okay. Works for me. Sounds like science. I got it from science.com.

So on reaction times, you know the thing of gunfights in films where there are two cowboys facing each other and obviously the bad guy draws first because he's an evil trickster and he's trying to legitimately gain an advantage in the gunfight by shooting first. And then the good guy draws second but always wins. And Nils Ball, one of the most famous physicists of all time was obsessed with this and he theorized that gunslingers who draw second, they draw faster because they're not thinking. It's just, it's an instinctive reaction. It's like a separate circuit that works.

It's almost like a reflex reaction. Interesting. And he staged mock duels with toy guns at his lab in between all the other important stuff he was doing and his partner George Gamow drew first and lost every time. However, it's recently been proved by a University of Birmingham study that he was partially right but it wouldn't quite help. So if you draw second, if you draw responding to, if I'm facing you Anna and you draw, I see you draw and I draw first.

You're about 10% faster when you draw second than when you draw first. But the difference that it would make is only 21 milliseconds. That's enough. And is that not, yeah. If someone's already pulled a gun on you, it's likely that you won't be able to... Compensate. I will be 21 milliseconds faster, but the gap in time between Anna starting and me starting will still be longer than 21 milliseconds, so I'll still die.

So the scientist who studied this, Andrew Welchman, he said, you'll die satisfied that you were quicker, but that's not much to you. I don't understand how if you're using fake guns, not real guns, you can tell who got hit first. I think they kind of had a... A paintball or something. Paintballs. You know what paintballs are edible. So if you got shot in the mouth, you're laughing.

Yeah. And you fall. It's just, yeah. Are they nice? No, they're really not nice, but they're made of like food coloring, and the outer shell is like some kind of plant-based material. After you were fired from every restaurant in Bolton, James actually went to work at a paintball place.

From when she was sacked by eating the ammo. You've got to get away with it because you've just got red stuff all around your mouth. No. I love, by the way, the only two scientists we've cited so far are boring and bore. That's quite cool. Oh, yeah. So other reaction time things in running races, if you're doing a sprinting race, then if you move within 0.1 seconds of the starting gun going off,

that counts as a false start. So even if you move after the starting gun going off, you've made a false start because it's known that you can't possibly have reacted that fast to the gun going off. So you must have started before you heard it go off. But that 0.1 is based on an experiment that was done in 1865, and it still stands today. So it was done in 1865 by a scientist called Franciscus Cornelis Donders, who was actually an ophthalmologist.

But he also worked out reaction times. He gave electric shocks to people's feet, and then he had them squeeze stuff with their hands with a corresponding hand. And it was how quick it was for people to go, oh, fuck you, you took my feet. Go on, Donders. The interesting thing about that was really, really short people actually reacted much, much faster than really tall people.

Which is why the best sprinters are so short. Look who they're saying, but he's only three foot nine. I spent all day on the internet just testing my reaction time, and I agree that I don't think you can get quicker than 0.1 seconds. Right, it's kind of impossible. Because you can't. Well, it's so far away from my best. It's hard so much in anyone.

What, you're on eight or nine seconds? Look, we had a very heavy night last night. Can I just add just a little bit of trivia about Donders, which I quite like. He's apparently also known very well in the world of dentistry, as well as being an ophthalmologist and a reaction time experimenter, because he named the space between the dorsum, the back of your tongue, and the hard palate. So the gap when you're at rest between the back of your tongue

and the roof of your mouth is called the space of Donders. Cool. Just name that. That's very cool. That's awesome. It's good to know. Andy, you mentioned Usain Bolt a second ago. I was looking into sprinters as well,

and there's an article written by this guy who claims that Usain Bolt could have broken his world record speed times for the 100 meters, not by running faster. He could have run at the consistent time that he was doing and still beat it. It was his starting point. It was his reaction to the gun. He's famously as a slow start, doesn't he?

So when he was in the Beijing Olympics, he was the slowest of all the finalists to leave the starting blocks. So this guy worked out that at Beijing, his starting time, his reaction was 0.165. If he was able to bring that down to 0.13, he would have brought his world record from 9.58 to 9.56. So he would have shaved two milliseconds off that. And that's not even a hard one to get.

That's sort of your average finalist will sprint at that speed off the starting blocks. And the reason is, so if you go online now, if you're listening to this and you try these games, where it's like you're looking at it and it changes color and you have to press the button as quickly as you can, it's different to seeing things as to hearing things. And I think you're quicker at hearing things

than you are at seeing things, I believe. Yes, you are. So your audio response time is usually lower than your... Yeah, that's true. I know a really weird thing about audio response times. So athletes who are closer to the starting gun do better. Now, that's partly because you're closer. So you get an advantage of about 15 milliseconds

in the closest lane compared with all the other lanes on average, right? Oh, that's quite a lot. It is quite a lot. But there's another reason for this. Sorry, just to say, I thought they have speakers behind the blocks. I think you're right. They now have speakers behind the blocks. So this was in races where you would have just one gun at the side being fired.

But the weird thing is, it's not just that you're closer, it's that the louder you hear the gunshot, the faster your reaction time. The volume has an effect. You react to louder noises faster. Is it because you're like scared of it, do you think? I think it must be, because it's like an evolutionary thing. Yeah. How cool is that?

That's really cool. You're right. Otherwise, they wouldn't have to do it nearly as loud. So actually, it's an advantage in running a race if you have a big ear trumpet, which you carry next to your starting blocks. But do you think that advantage is lessened by the fact you have to carry your ear trumpet? Well, it never did me any harm on school sports day, actually.

I was actually looking at sports, because I was thinking, this thing about reaction time is sort of based on IQ. So a lot of people seem to think, or that's very contentious, that reaction time is related to IQ or how smart you are. So the idea is that the Victorians might have been cleverer than us. So I was thinking sports people often have very fast reactions if you're like a table tennis player or something. So I was wondering if they were cleverer.

And this is a long-winded way of saying, I ended up finding out that Marion Bartoli, who was my favorite tennis player for a while, has an IQ that is almost off the chart. So she has an IQ of 175, which as soon as you're over 140, then you're very bright. If you're over 160, you're a proper genius. And she's there.

And she said, I'm not really someone that's into telling people about, you know, how smart I am. I'm kind of trying to hide it. And that's what she said to reporters. When she published her IQ results. Not that smart, is she? There's a fly, which has the fastest reaction time, I think, of any animal.

So it's called the Condula stylus fly. And it's so fast that it's almost impossible to take a photo of it lying still. What do you mean? So it has a startle reflex of about two milliseconds. And it's scared of cameras. It's scared of the flash. It's scared of the flash. So just do it without a flash.

Well, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, that's this bit. Yeah, on we go. Fine. It's got this reflex about two milliseconds. So if you take a photo with a shutter speed of one 200th of a second,

which is a very fast shutter speed as they go, you will almost always capture it in flight because that's five milliseconds. So nine out of 10 times you take the picture, you just get the fly in movement. You know how when you take a photo of a lot of people, there's always someone with their eyes kind of half closed. These guys, like if they want a family photo of all these flies. This is the blur.

The chance of them all being there is pretty low. Yeah. So there's a possible reason for it, which is that they're so brightly colored. They're really brightly colored flies. And we think this is because they are trying to teach predators not to bother trying to hunt them because they always get away. So they're trying to teach the predator to associate

that bright coloring on them with, don't even bother. No, that doesn't make any sense. If you can really get away that fast, then you don't need something that warns them. That sounds like they're bluffing. Honestly, don't worry about it. It would be a waste of effort. But then again, like you get these really poisonous frogs,

don't you, that are really brightly colored. Yeah. The two born predators. Why are they all thinking in the best interest of the predators? I'm a bit sweet, but... OK, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is that the first people to live on the moon

might be cavemen. Might be. Might be. Might not be. Yeah. My notes actually begin. Well, they might. So why might they?

Because it's obviously going to be very uncomfortable living on the moon. No one's going to have a great time, but if we want to get into space and colonize somewhere, the moon is not a terrible candidate. And a Japanese space probe called Celine has just found a massive cave on the moon, which would solve a load of the problems of living on the moon.

It's 31 miles long. 100 meters wide. So it's a huge cave. We could get loads of lunar cities in there if we wanted to. It's 31 miles by 100 meters. What did I say? Sorry. Yeah, no, you said that.

I just think you can't get that many cities. It's still going to be a bit cramped. It's going to be smaller. London is, like, what, 40 miles in diameter? I guess, yeah. Like the M25 is about that. You're just doing a bit of a sleazy estate agent job here. It's very roomy.

Lovely. You could put a partition wall in here if you wanted to. So they think it's a lava tube created during volcanic activity. And the problem with living on the moon, one of many problems, is there are so many. But the temperature is 107 degrees Celsius in daytime and mine is 153 Celsius at night. So any equipment is going to have to deal with that,

which is a real pain. Yeah. And all the radiation from space and all the asteroids hitting you all the time. Yeah. So it's just not a great place to live. If you're in a cave, you get much less radiation. And the temperature is...

There is no pinball in these tunnels. And until there is, I'm not going. Yeah. It's because, so the moon has no atmosphere, obviously. So the reason that we're at the... Light-light-crowded. Oh! Damn it.

No, you drew first. It's all that reaction time practice you put in has paid off, James. You're miles ahead of me. So the moon has no atmosphere. So its temperature fluctuates massively. So Earth's temperature is quite stable because the heat from the sun

is dispersed a bit by the air particles. But don't have that on the moon. So if the sun's not on you, then, like you say, your eye's cold. It's a nightmare. But I don't really understand this asteroid thing. So asteroids hit the moon far more often. They do make out like that's going to be a big issue.

Just little dyes. Like little asteroids that would kind of burn up in the Earth's atmosphere. The little pebble. Yeah. But that would be quite awkward, wouldn't it? Like, I know they're small, but if you're getting hit by them all the time...

It's so annoying. Imagine. What and the damage they can do, it's like with the stuff that's going around our planet, if even something the size of a bullet hits the International Space Station, it could shatter at the speeds that they're going at. So yeah.

I mean, a bullet is traditionally a harmful thing to be hit by as well. Yeah, I know. I don't know why. Even a bullet. Let's imagine. One of the problems, though, if you live inside one of these tubes,

is that the moon constantly suffers from moonquakes. I think they believe that these lava tubes can suffer huge internal damage off the back of it, collapse and so on. Just with my estate agent's hat on, I'd like to say this one's absolutely fine. The previous tenant's no complaints. Screaming from under the rubble.

And cosmic radiation is a problem on the moon, and that's something that we're trying to deal with. So this is kind of... It gets hit by all sorts of stuff that we've talked about before. So the moon gets caught in the solar wind, the solar tail sometimes, and gets hit by all these damaging particles.

And I think the lunar reconnaissance orbiter, which went up to the moon from NASA a few years ago, sent a plastic replica of human skin, which measured how much damage this kind of radiation will do. Wow. And it worked out that it is quite a bit of damage to human bodies. Why would we not just send up human skin?

Because I think human skin's not alive, I guess. Maybe it's hard. Do we send up a candle? Yes, because that is the perfect replica of the human body. That's a plastic replica of human skin. Yeah, but then you won't see what happens to genitals. Oh, that's true.

Which is important, because it might make you infertile if you have all this radiation passing through you. Yeah. But a day on the moon is 14 Earth days, and a night is 14 Earth nights if you're on the equator. So it's just not going to be fun, isn't it? Nice long line in the morning.

Yeah, that's true. But then a long day at work. Oh, true. There's not that much work to do there, I don't think yet. No, but why would anyone want to live on the moon? Like, what is the point? Well, I've watched some interviews with those people who were signed up for the Mars mission to go to Mars,

and a lot of them say things like, I haven't really been able to find a girlfriend, so I don't really see any point in staying on Mars. Might find one on Mars. Mum, Dad, nice to see you on the video link. This is Janice, she's a dead microbe, but she's mine and I love her. She's a plastic replica of human skin.

I think it would be scientists, right? It's like the same as Antarctica. No one lives in Antarctica apart from scientists, so it would be the same, right? Yes. But I read one article that said, one of the advantages of going to the moon is it might be so terrible that it will force us to accept

that the Earth is the only decent place to live and will make us look after the Earth better. That is a good argument. I mean, the Earth is so much better than the moon. Yeah. Well, it's better at some things. Name one thing the moon's better at. It's got better craters, I think.

That's what you're into. We've got craters. It's got better ones. Yeah, it's got bigger mountains. I'm not booking my ticket just yet, guys. I think you guys have turned into the travel agents. The sky is always black as well, which I didn't think I would like,

just because I guess we're not used to it. But even in daytime, you're 14 day day, the sky is totally black. I think that's really creepy, because the only reason the sky is blue is because, again, of the atmosphere. I can't even conceive of total broad daylight but with the black sky.

No, that doesn't make any sense. It doesn't work. How can that be right? Because it's bright, but it's dark. It's bright, but it's black. I think that can't be true. That's weird. It's true.

You can't compute it, but it's the case. Because what other, I mean, what other color is it going to be? No, I do believe you haven't. But it's just, it's too much for my brain to manage. Do you know what the main problem would be if we, I mean, sorry, we've just been through about 15 of the main problems.

But according to Eugene Cernan, who's the last man to walk on the moon, the main problem would be the dust. They spent most of their time dusting on that last mission to the moon. Yeah, because they had like a vacuum cleaner to get all the dust off their stuff and it clogged up the black vacuum cleaner.

Really? Yeah. But you know what the main problem is? So spots are going to be very difficult. And the reason is like you can jump and throw balls much better. This is according to an article on space.com. So you can throw a ball maybe like 10,

six times higher or six times further. And that means that your American football field, which is what they were talking about, would have to be 600 yards long. And so you need that space. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. You don't have the space because it's a small like planet.

Tennis will be quite crap as well because top spin doesn't work. So all the best like Nadal's game is going to go completely to pot because the reason top spin works is because of the, it's the Benui effect that I think we've mentioned before. It's about how air pressure acts differently on one side of a spinning ball to the other.

So that means that top spin brings the ball down into the court faster than it would otherwise go because of this effect. And with no atmosphere on the moon, again, you're not having top spin working. So all of Nadal's shots go out. What about cricket? Is this possibly the one place where we can ascertain we're going to have a fair cricket match?

Why, because there's no Australians there. And by the way, guys, our Brisbane date has really not sold so far and we don't know why. But Mariam Bartoli might be able to work it out before anyone else, that's what I'm thinking because she's so smart. You're right.

Like she would be able to work out the trajectories and stuff. The perfect way to hit it. I'm actually interested in going to the moon a bit more now that we know that top spin doesn't work because it just levels that playing field when I'm playing a bit. A little bit. So there was a guy in 1964 who made a bet. He was a British man called David Threlfall

and you remember President Kennedy promised in about 1961 we're going to get to the moon by the end of the decade. And they squeaked in in 1969. He bet in 1964 that a man would get to the moon before the end of the decade. And William Hill gave mods of a thousand to one, but they did take the bet. And when they landed on the moon,

he was taken to a TV studio and he became a minor celebrity. He was presented with a check for a thousand pounds, which was a lot of money at the time. It's about a hundred and eighty thousand pounds in today's money. And the really tragic thing was he died the next year in a crash of the car that he bought with the winnings. No. That's awful.

That's a sad story. Oh, thank you for telling us. Should we end on that? I looked into if you move to the moon, there's a lot of stuff that is left there by previous missions that you can collect to make your house a bit more interesting. It's not interesting enough that you're the only person living on the moon. Oh, yeah.

I need to have a space. Some bagged up feces. Well, there's... Come round to my house, town. You can have bagged up feces in your own home. Very easy. You've got a baby. You should know all about bagged up feces.

My house is bagged up feces at the moment. There's some Andy Warhol art up on the moon. Oh, wow. Yeah. There's a cock and balls that he drew. He drew a cock and balls. He paraded it as his initials, an A and a W. It's artistically done.

The W was upside down and the A. Really, that sounds like an M and an A. And it's what it looks like as well. It's silly. Yeah. It's extremely confusing. It's Andy Murray's painting. Oh, he drew the balls.

You do it like that. If you do it like that. Andy Warhol. He's done the same thing. Yes. You're right. Yeah. So that's how it comes, and that's why I thought it looked like an M, but he's right.

No, you've just... You've been having that work of art upside down. I've been looking at it upside down. You've hung it wrong. It's badly hung. Yeah. So this was a kind of... It was a mini little piece of art where six different artists contributed to it.

Andy Warhol was one of them. And it was put on this way for small size little thing that was meant to be taken up, but NASA disagreed. So what's happening? Why are you drawing more cock and balls? Well, I've just worked out. My name is Andrew Murray. And look at that.

That's an A and an M. And it also looks like it. I think I've got a new signature for the next book. My driving license, people are going to be so happy. Put that down, Andy. Go on down. Yeah. So they submitted it as wanting to take it to the moon, but it was rejected,

but it was actually smuggled up there. A lot of smuggling happened, yeah, in the early days, like Buzz Aldrin, I think, smuggled up the communion that he brought up to the moon and so on. People did like to smuggle stuff. So you can get communion. Holy communion. Holy communion. You're right.

Very nice. So Andy Warhol art is up there. There's also a feather from a falcon up there. Cool. Just a single feather, which is really cool. It was done as part of an experiment. Oh, yeah. I remember that one.

Yeah. The Apollo 12 experiment, what they wanted to do was recreate the idea of seeing whether or not the idea of a bowling ball and what was it in the original. So supposedly dropped two balls from the leaning tower, leaning tower of Pisa. Yeah. And they landed at the same time. Yeah. Because it's independent of mass and they tried it with a bowling ball and the feather.

I proved that it was true. Yeah. Hammer and a feather on the moon. Yeah. Yeah. If the most powerful rocket can only take three men and a bit of kit to the moon, taking a bowling ball seems like a needless experience. But yeah, it was the Air Force Academy's falcon mascot.

They have a mascot and they plucked off one of its feathers and that still was on the moon. So it could be part of your house. So just to be clear, is that because there's no air resistance? Yeah. Because obviously if you drop hammer and a feather, the feather will float down because of air resistance. Yeah.

On earth it would, yeah. But on the moon, they drop it the same. That's cool. Yeah. Very cool. I was just looking at things that we'd have to train to learn to do when we get to the moon. And I don't think we've mentioned before that all astronauts at the moment who go into

space have to do toilet training. So you have to be read toilet trained. Really? Have we talked about this? No. Because I didn't know that. So they've forgotten how to do it. It makes you forget how to urinate.

Yeah. No. So NASA, you can't have the same design lose in space because stuff might kind of get out of them. So when you sit on the loo, it's a very, very small aperture that you have to aim your stuff into. So the opening of a toilet in space is four inches wide. And usually I'll lose 18 inches wide, like 15 to 18 inches wide.

That's not four inches, Andy. No. Oh, I thought it was. I'm disappointing the A all around. But now you've got, so NASA has a specially designed toilet training room. It's at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. And it's actually got two different toilets in it. So in this room, it's got a positional toilet.

And that's not functional. That's just so you learn how to position yourself properly on the toilet. And actually that's... Oh, no. I'm sure some trainee astronauts have mistaken the positional one where you're just practicing. For the functional one. It's like when you go at the showroom, at the bathroom showroom. Is that a thing?

Better just try this one out. That's a comedy trope, isn't it? Is it? That's where you got kicked out of IKEA that time, isn't it? So yeah, you've got the show toilet and that tests your aim. And it's got a little camera inside it that looks up at you. So you can then review the footage afterwards to check that you've aimed right. And then when you're ready for it, you can transition onto the actual functional toilet,

which is also in the training room where you can practice how to flush and stuff. OK, I have a question. Are there any astronauts who have aced every single other metric, but just haven't been allowed to get a space for the toilet? They can't. Always ends up on the floor. I don't know. It must be, right?

Like, if you can't do that. That's true. You have to pass through it. That's one of them. Actually, that's probably one of the more important things to get right in a spaceship. Well, flying the rocket is quite important. Come on. They've probably got autopilot stuff today.

But if you've got a cabin full of poo floating around, that is a Houston. We have a big problem. OK, that's 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 at Shriverland. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. That's James Harkin. Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yeah, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our Facebook page, no such thing as a fish, or no such thing as a fish.com, which is our website. We have links to our tours, our books, all of the previous episodes that are up online. We will be back again next week with another podcast. We'll see you then. Goodbye.

Bye.