No Such Thing As A Fish - 264: No Such Thing As Bikes In Space

Episode Date: April 12, 2019

Live from Barnstaple, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss live scarecrows, the first ever caravan holiday, and the billionaire with only three things to say.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Bosta Paul! My name is Dan Schreiber, and I'm sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from 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 the 95-year-old billionaire who controls Viacom and CBS now communicates via an iPad preloaded with audio clips. His choices include yes, no, and fuck you!

So how does this work? You're having a conversation with him, and rather than respond with his mouth, then he responds by clicking a button. He's a very old man now, he's 95 years old, and his speaking has gone quite bad, so his communication is very bad, so what they've done is they've helped him swear at people with as much force via a button. Wow! Yeah, because he can't swallow, he has a problem with his throat. He is fed through a tube, and he really, really likes steak, and he wants to eat steak, but they won't never let him because he has this tube, and they say the only way he can get rid of his tube is

if he conserves his energy by reducing his sexual activity to once a week. And he refuses! Is he called Redstone? He is, he's called Sumner Redstone. He's a very big media mogul, he has a lot of, you know, CBS and so on, and things that are underneath that are like paramount pictures and so on. His family have a company which is the National Amusements Theatre Chain, and that's what that all sits underneath. He has a majority vote, so he's the big dog really, so he's a very important guy, and he kind of like, he's done a few things that have gone into

pop culture. Content is king is a thing he coined. Is that something that we're all supposed to know about? I think he would be very hurt by that comment. I know what he'd say. What is that? Content is king, you know, it's been said. It's not a very old saying. Sorry, you're saying he invented the non-existent catchphrase, content is king. Is this the kind of shit he's been churning out? He's a billionaire.

Yeah, that's all you need to do apparently, just one catchphrase and you become a billionaire. No, he's got a giant empire behind him. It's not a real catchphrase, it's not like nice to see you to see you nice. Bruce, he came out and shouted content is king. He's not on TV yelling it. Where is he? He's behind the scenes. But why? When is he saying content is king in a way that's become so famous?

He's saying it in meetings when Bruce Forsythe's going, what do you think of this great catchphrase but I've got no show. That's shit, content is king. That's when he's saying it. But the thing is, it's hard to know whether the fuck you, that he says, or the eff you, let's stop swearing, the eff you is said as a mean thing or a nice thing. There was an interview with one of his advisors, a wealth advisor called Rebecca Rothstein, and she said, I've only been the recipient of an eff you once. I think he meant it in an endearing way. It's all to do with how he presses the button, I suppose.

Take your cue from things like that. Was he known for being a particularly bad boss? Is this something he uses a lot this button? He's a big character, there's a lot of controversy in his personal life and his business life. It's hard to say, I don't know the guy, but yeah. We're talking about a billionaire, I don't want to say anything libelous, right? He's an asshole, what are you going to do? All my researcher is on asshole billionaires.

We're in trouble. One guy who admits that he used to be a bad boss is Bill Gates. I think he's got a much more cuddly image now, but when he was first working at Microsoft, when he was first in charge of Microsoft, Bill Gates knew everyone's car license plates so he could look out into the car park and see when people were arriving and leaving from their work. And he only stopped doing that when the company got so big that he could not physically remember everyone's license plates. If only he could come up with a system of putting letters and numbers in a big file. I was actually reading a thing in The Guardian where they asked people to write in and say examples of bad bosses

and what they made them do, and one of them may have been a Bill Gates employee because one of these people wrote in and said, my boss made us all park our cars facing the same direction for neatness in the car park. That same boss said that all of your buttons have to be made of pearls because plastic buttons are ugly. I don't think this is Bill Gates. No, I don't think that is Bill Gates. They do call him Pearly Gates, so maybe that's why. There you go. Yes, that's why.

This list of things for The Guardian, these are some other things people have had to deal with with bad bosses. Someone wrote in and said that they got a round-robin email from their boss saying, please can everyone do their number twos before they come into the office because I don't like going into the bathrooms and having them smell bad. So that's some advice from a boss. Another boss banned all paper clips because once he'd accidentally clipped some sensitive material to the back of someone's appraisal, which they'd read, and another boss said that all equipment in the entire office needs to be clearly labelled by Friday, otherwise disciplinary action will be taken, and that included things like every single thing by Friday,

things like chair, light switch, door, floor and ceiling. Someone had to get a stepladder round. I found a thing about how to be successful at work in relation to your boss. So if you keep a religious symbol at your desk, your boss is less likely to ask you to act unethically, and it can be a symbol from any religion. So there was a study of this in India, and they found that their bosses put less pressure on them to bend the rules or to be rude to other people. And it also works if you put a virtuous quotation at the end of your email,

like, better to fail with honour than succeed with fraud. But when you say it's getting them, you ask them to do less fraudulent things, that's what you said. Is it not that you just spend less time talking to them because you don't want to talk to them, so you ask them to do less things? Maybe. Because they've got an enormous crucifix, a six foot tall crucifix, about their desk. Larry's a bit full on, isn't he? I would give that person a wide berth, definitely.

How's this for a bad boss? I'm not sure if we've mentioned before, George Pullman. Have we mentioned him? Yeah. Ben Walibar. He made train cars. No, he just made train cars, didn't he? Yeah, he made train cars, but he was a terrible boss.

He ran, basically, he built a town for all of his employees to live in. So he had schools and churches. He changed the money from American dollars to paying them in Pullman money. So it was just his own currency, like he was the monopoly man. And yeah, so he just took over their whole life. Wow. Yeah, yeah. And then the thing about him is he was hated so much that his family buried him under, like,

three feet of concrete because they thought someone would go after his cops. Oh, dear. This is, I've got some advice. I'll just be offering some time-spun homely comments on proceedings. I'm not sure about that. Oh, dreadful. It's all right, it was dead. Wouldn't have cared.

Yeah, but there is... There are some tips if you have a really bad boss. I want you to do the leology at my funeral, Adam. Do what you like to this guy now. He doesn't give a shit. Do you know one thing that does work is sticking a pin into a doll of your boss. So this genuinely reduces... What do you mean, work?

As if they don't feel the injury wherever you put them. Sorry. That would be a hell of a fact. Voodoo works. Sorry, it works to reduce your anger at your boss. Participants in this experiment, they were asked to remember very specifically and clearly a time that their boss had humiliated or blamed them when it wasn't their fault. And then they were asked to name a voodoo doll on the screen, on the computer in front of them.

And some had to name it nobody, and others people could name it after their boss. And if you got the chance to do the damage to a doll named after your boss, you felt a much lower sense of injustice after it was all over. There's alternatives, because people do, I think, regrettably do stuff where they... If they don't like their boss, they send stuff. I was reading in America, there's a human resources director who's taking legal action to find out who wants her to eat a bag of dicks. Now, this is...

This is a company in America that send, on request, gummy-shaped little penises. No, penis-shaped gummies. Sorry. Not gummy-shaped penises. That's something... You need to see a doctor about that. What a frightening company that would be. But yeah, they're called dicks by mail, and what they do is, you ask them to send a package to a boss or someone, a relative that you don't like.

Right. And she's trying to sue that company now to find out who had sent that to her. Yeah, because she was very upset. The company's website, if you go to it, so dicks by mail, and it markets itself as, great way to tell your friends, family, loved ones or enemies to eat a bag of dicks. I actually have a related fact. It's about eccentric millionaires.

Do you know what John Wayne Bobbit is up to these days? Oh. So you remember him? He was the one whose wife... Yeah, chopped off his... Chopped off his gummies. Yeah. And threw it out of the cart.

Well, he is now a treasure hunter. Okay, he spends... He's not still looking for it. He is looking for a chest of treasure, and this is a chest of treasure that an eccentric art dealer has hidden in the Rocky Mountains somewhere. He's called Forest Fen. 350,000 people have tried and failed to find this treasure.

Wow. Is it worth... Did he say it was worth a great deal? I didn't, but it is. Okay. It's properly... It's worth about $2 million, and it's like jewels and stuff like that,

and he's hidden it somewhere, and four people have died looking for it. Ooh, yeah. It's very dangerous. One bad boss was the guy who ran Mars, Forest Mars Senior. He invented the Milky Way and Eminem, so he's quite a big deal, but when new managers came,

he would make them sign a resignation letter on their first day. What? Oh, and then just in case. And just in case, so he had it, in case they didn't reach their targets, he'd be able to say, well, now you're going to give me your resignation. That's pretty bad, isn't it?

That is bad. In a meeting once, he made his younger son pray for the firm on his knees for an hour. When you said he ran Mars, I thought you meant he ran... I didn't think anyone ran Mars, but no. You mean the planet? Yeah, exactly.

Oh, yeah. But you mean the chocolate firm. He says chocolate is king. It's a catchphrase. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Chazinski. My fact this week is that before Scarecrow's were straw dummies,

they were living children. Wow. So you're not saying every single Scarecrow that you see used to be a living child, are you? Yes. And then a powerful witch came across there. I'm not saying that. That's how stuck in the mud came about.

If you actually run under a Scarecrow's legs, it turns back into a child. That's true. But don't do it, because that child is angry by this point. No, that's not the fact. That would be amazing. This is the fact that

the way that people scared birds away from their farms in ye olden days was just by employing kids to do it, and the first use of the word Scarecrow to refer to something that scares a bird was in 1553, and that referred to children who had the job of doing it,

and then in 1592 came the idea of the stuffed dummy. But until the late 19th century, and I think into the early 20th century, then kids were just employed to do this, and it was quite a common job. You know how you got a job doing a milk crown or something, or working in a cafe as a kid. The equivalent of that in the Victorian era

was standing in a field and scaring away birds. And the reason that they stopped having children there is because the factories started opening and they could pay the children more. As in the factories could pay the children more? Yeah. So the children decided to work in the factories instead. Well, I'm not sure they had much say in the matter, I must say.

But they worked in the factories instead. And also, the reason that the Scarecrows came in is because of the plague. The plague killed so many people that there weren't enough children to go around, and so they had to make the Scarecrows instead. Oh, really? It wasn't a terrible gig.

I read that in the 1800s if you were, for instance, a child's Scarecrow in Winchcombe, you would be paid a penny per day plus a swede. By which you mean the vegetable. No, a Swedish person. We had a surplus then. There's only one celebrity Scarecrow that I've found in history who is, you know, the Thomas Hardy book, Jude the Obscure.

Yeah. Jude the Obscure used to be a Scarecrow as a child. Oh my God, I totally forgot that, really. I'd forgotten it too. It's not a real celebrity. It's not going to Trouble Heat magazine anytime soon. I mean, I would say a bigger celebrity Scarecrow is the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz.

Yes. Yes. That's true. So there are two. Well, actually, so just quickly on the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, I was reading about him today, and it turns out that in the original books, he doesn't actually lack a brain.

In reality, when she meets him, he's only two days old and just really ignorant. Yeah. So he actually has a brain. And then in the movie itself, if you all remember that great moment where The Wizard does give him a brain, he suddenly recites Pythagorean theorem,

and he states that it applies to an isosceles triangle. That's not correct. No, obviously, it's a right-angled triangle. What the fuck is he talking about? I mean, he's only had a brain for like 10 seconds. I would have loved to have been in the cinema with you as a kid watching that. That's actually the character of the Scarecrow. So it was played by a guy called Ray Bolger in the original Wizard of Oz,

but it was mostly played by a guy called Buddy Ebson. And if you look this man up, Buddy Ebson was, he was six foot three, he was incredibly skinny and he looks exactly like Scarecrow, his whole face is Scarecrow-like. And so the people making the film thought, this is our guy, he's an actor, looks like a Scarecrow. And then they decided to cast this guy called Ray Bolger as the Tin Man.

Little did they know that Ray Bolger had been inspired to act and seen a production of the Wizard of Oz. And he'd seen the Scarecrow leap up through a haystack off a trampoline and seeing that Scarecrow made him think, one day I must play the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz. And so he was cast as the Tin Man and he was pissed off. He insisted and they said, no, no, we're not going to let you,

we've got this guy who looks like a Scarecrow. And the guy who looked like the Scarecrow, you know, was practicing the lines and was being taught the dances and eventually Bolger just wore them down and said, I will be the Scarecrow, it's my life's mission. And he was a Scarecrow. So that's, if you could see inside the Tin Man, he looks like a Scarecrow.

But do you know, do you know, they swapped? Yeah, they swapped. No, no, no, this is what's amazing. Yeah, no, no, what happened was they swapped. So they were like, okay, we're still in the movie. This is fine. Then the guy who was the original Scarecrow was now the Tin Man. But he got allergic to all of the paint that was put on him,

couldn't do the job. So he got fired. He's not in the Wizard of Oz. He's not there. He lost his job. They should have given him lion. I don't think that's how it worked. I don't think there was just a...

He was also allergic to cats. There are cool old words for Scarecrow, which I never knew. In Old English, they were called a free boggard. Nice. Which is a good... Really? We still call it that round here. Now they know what we're talking about.

What the hell is a Scarecrow? Well, let's try a couple of others then. Potato boggle? Ah, got you there. Potato boggle, which was a... That hasn't got here yet, that one. Or a tatty boggle. I think tatty boggle in Scotland.

Potato boggle, if you're from Oxbridge, obviously. But tatty boggle for the rest of us. I was reading that in 1989, they were testing new Scarecrow ideas, and there was one exciting one, which was a Scarecrow that I think must have been laying back, because every now and then, a propane cannon would lob it up, and...

Oh, yeah, no, these are still sold. And it really works. It really scares away the birds, because suddenly... Yeah, there it goes. I read one more bit of Scarecrow technology. In Australia, they have AI Scarecrows. Although we've been in the West Country for two days now, and I've realised around here,

AI stands for artificial insemination. We learned that last night, and did learn that... We learned that hard way. We mean the hard way. Yeah, they have this... It's kind of like a box, but what the box can do is it can recognise what animals are going to come towards it,

and it can make species-dependent noises. That's cool. Yeah, so they know what crows don't like, and they know what geese don't like, and all these different things, they can make different sounds. And the main problem with Scarecrows is they get used to whatever's trying to scare them. Scarecrows get used to it,

and so they can change it all the time. We're going to have to move on to our next fact. Shall we move on? Well, I found one article in the Metro. It was entitled, Is This The World's Most Useless Scarecrow? And it was a picture of a Scarecrow that was completely covered in bird poo,

and it had a nest of five chicks tucked inside its shack. OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that the first ever leisure caravan had a man on a tricycle going ahead of it to check that the roads were good enough. So caravans, you know,

were traditional mode of transport for a long time before they were used for leisure. And then I found this on a blog by a guy called Eugene Byrne, which is a great blog, I do recommend it. And it was all about the guy who invented recreational caravanning. He was a guy called William Gordon Stables,

and he was alive in the second half of the 19th century until 1910. And he was a crazy guy. He wrote for the boy's own paper advice to boys, and most of the things he recommended were cold baths and hot porridge and long walks, and he said that kind of sorts you out.

And so he wanted to have an adventure, so he commissioned a wagon company in Bristol to build this beautiful thing that he called the Wanderer. And it's really ornate. It was made of mahogany. It had a paraffin oven, it had a bookcase, velvet lined furniture, lots of musical instruments.

He kept a pistol in it as well, I do not know why. And he went on adventures, but... But yeah, he called it, I think, he called it a land yacht. And it was the land yacht wanderer. And he was an interesting guy. The other thing he did, he had a real passion for dogs and cats, this guy, William Gordon Stables.

And he wrote a load of books in his life, he wrote books about how boys could survive in the wild. You know, like camping, like Boy Scout style books. Or he wrote books about how to keep dogs and cats. He wrote a book called The Domestic Cat and The Dog from Puppyhood to Age. Yeah, and then on top of that, he wrote Medical Life in the Navy,

Wild Adventures in Wild Places, and his last book was called The Sauciest Boy in the Service. Yeah. Oh, wow. Absolutely strange. And I looked into that, it's not what you think. The word saucy just used to mean cheeky, didn't it? Oh, okay.

I think he was Scottish as well, because he loved dogs and cats, and he wrote a lot about them. And he would frequently turn up at dog, cat, and agricultural shows, usually in full Highland dress. Yeah. So he's quite a character. And his thing with the whole tricycle was that he...

So the caravan was horse drawn. He had two horses that were taking them forward. They were called Captain Cornflower and Polly Pea Blossom. And they would both be going down. But the man servant that he had on the tricycle, who was called Foley, he was both checking that the road surfaces were okay for him to go on, but also in case anything was in the way,

he would say, get off the road. There's a caravan coming. And they're all like, what's a caravan? Yeah, it's true. Yeah. I guess it was a new thing. Well, we should say it wasn't a new thing. So the caravan had existed as a way to travel

and for circuses and travelers for a long time, thousands of years, really, but the idea of using caravans for leisure, which some people would say is an idea that should have been nixed at the first second, but he was the first person to do that. And the early ones were really luxurious. It was a thing that the upper classes did.

And they would be one of the few holidays that you could take where you'd have running water. They had running water in the turn of the 20th century. They would have libraries, full libraries. Some of them had pianos in them. And the pioneers of caravanning called themselves gentlemen gypsies. And they were always horse drawn,

in fact, except just coming up to World War One, then the motor car had been invented by this point, but it wasn't quite strong enough to pull most caravans. But a few people experimented with motor cars pulling caravans, and they were very much frowned upon as like too fast paced. This isn't what caravanning is about. You can still get some really posh caravans, really expensive ones with lots of great stuff in.

The Element Palazzo is the world's most expensive caravan. It costs about £2 million. £2 million? Yep. Go on. It has a rooftop terrace, underfloor heating, and a pop-up cocktail bar. Pop-up cocktail bar.

But really, very pleasantly, it's known as the land yacht. Really? Which is the same as the first ever one. It's interesting, isn't it? Marketing's very clever, because if you analyse those three things, a rooftop terrace is just a route. It just means you can get onto the roof.

Underfloor heating, not super impressive, right? You put a radiator on the floor. And a pop-up cocktail bar. That's just a table. That's just a foldable table. I just need to go and get my £2 million back. There was a panic in 2014 about caravan holidays, and people thought that there were sleeping gas gangs

who would go around and they'd drop a sleeping gas canister through the window of your caravan, so then you'd be unconscious, they'd knock you out, and then they'd come in and they'd rob your caravan of all its stuff. They'd take the pop-up bar and they'd take some of it. They'd rip the radiator from under the floor. But this was...

It seems to have been a completely fabricated thing. So the Royal College of Anesthetists got involved, and they said... There were dozens of newspaper stories about these sleeping gas gangs operating in France and Italy, I think, on innocent British tourists who were taking their caravan around. And they said it is the view of the college that it would not be possible to render someone unconscious

by blowing ether chloroform or any of the others through the window of a motorhome without their knowledge. Ether is extremely pungent, and it would cause coughing and sometimes vomiting, and it takes some time to reach unconsciousness, even if given by direct application to the face on a cloth. So they said it just doesn't happen. If you were going to rob people,

and you would think, where do people store their most valuable possessions? Should we rob a mansion? Should we rob a castle? No, I think if we pop over to one of those haven caravan sites, try and render those guys unconscious, we'll get a couple of bottles of cider. I mean, it doesn't make any sense at all. I read just an article that was sent to the Royal Society in 1957,

and it was about the history of the caravan, and it was done by the head of the caravan society. And he was talking about the kind of... They had their caravans, but people were really against caravans for a little while. He said, conservative elements that feel their own interests threatened and fear it,

have accused followers of caravans of every sin, from leaving litter and stealing chickens, to sexual promiscuity and spying. Spying? All right, 007, this isn't going to be your most glamorous gig yet. OK, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that the gravity

on Mars' smallest moon is so weak that if you built a ramp on it, you could ride your bike into space. So you escape the... You escape, yeah, you go into escape velocity, and you can fly into space. You wouldn't really want to ride a bike there because you probably wouldn't be able to ride

because you need gravity to ride bikes. So you can kind of... They've done experiments where they have bikes which kind of, they're built to make it look like there's no gravity to make you feel like there's no gravity, and they found that people can balance, but they can't turn and they can't use the brakes. Really? On Mars?

That's in any kind of anti-gravity kind of situation. We haven't... Not on Mars. We haven't got people to Mars, just for the sake of doing this bike experiment. You want to cover up, that won't be. And also this isn't Mars, this is the smallest moon, which is called Deimos. Deimos, Deimos.

It is 150 millionth times as big as the moon. So really, really small. Its radius is about four miles, so you could run a marathon around its equator and have the finishing line pretty much where the starting line was. Cool. And because it's so small, the gravity is really weak, so I would weigh about the same as a teaspoon of salt.

Wow. Just on bikes not going into space, actually there was a plan that we were going to send bikes with one of the Apollo missions because, yeah, the lunar buggy wasn't going to be ready in time. Apollo 15 actually tested out bikes that they could take to the moon. This is electric bikes as opposed to pedaling bikes,

because that was suggested as well. You couldn't pedal in a space suit, though, presumably. Presumably, yes. Although someone did do a tandem quadra bike that they wanted to send up there as well. And they actually got close to the testing. They actually brought them up into a vomit rocket so that they could experience what it was like

while plummeting back to the Earth and experiencing one, what is it, one 16th, or one, sorry, one sixth of the Earth's gravity. Wow. Wait, so I think that they thought that maybe they wouldn't have time to get the vehicles ready and so they'd have to send bikes instead. Because if you were going into space and they said,

I'm sorry, we haven't had time to rig up the stuff we meant to, do you mind bringing your bicycle? I would just say, I don't think I'm going to do this mission. Count me out. That's true. I don't think you guys have thought enough about this. Yeah. They got there with Neil Armstrong and he just hits a rock and lobs off into there.

Yeah. We've lost Neil. You know, you could run off the surface of this moon as well if you wanted to. So you just have to reach a speed of about 12.5 miles an hour. So if we were all stuck there, that's kind of the maximum that a kind of fit person could sprint.

So the fit ones could get off it and then the really unfit ones would be stuck on the moon. Yeah, but neither is ideal. So the radiation and exposure and... Yeah, it's not a dream world for anyone. No. Gravity is different. Different places on Earth,

which I didn't know. So this is about gravity being different in different places. So the place which has got the lowest gravity is just south of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean. But there is a fact that Peru's gravity is also extremely low.

There's an area of Peru and the Arctic's gravity I think is quite high. So if you fell from exactly 100 meters all over the Earth they've done simulations on this. They have not tested it for real. If you would drop from 100 meters high all over the Earth you would hit the surface in Peru

16 milliseconds later than in the Arctic because the gravity is different. I mean, it's not much different. A bit more of your life would flash before your eyes. Because there's a moon of Uranus called Miranda and it has an 11 mile high cliff on it called Verona Rupees and the peak is so high

and the gravity is so low that if you fell off it you would fall for 12 minutes before hitting the ground. That's a lot of life flashing before your eyes, isn't it? There is an app you can get which is called High Jump which can tell you how high you would be able to jump

on various different planets and moons of our solar system. What a vital app. This is made by astronomers Stuart Lowe and Chris North for example. If you jumped on the moon you could jump 3 meters, 10 feet off the ground you'd be in the air for about 4 seconds.

On Mars it would be 3 feet for 2 seconds but the 6th largest moon of Saturn you could jump if you did your average jump you would go up 42.6 meters and you would float back down and you would land with the same force that you did

if you did the jump on Earth so it wouldn't crush you and it would take roughly a full minute To be honest this moon, Dimos is pretty much the exact perfect one if you want to jump as high as you possibly can because if the gravity was any less there

then you would just float away but you can just about not. Do you know the story of how Mars's moons were discovered? They were discovered by a guy called Asaf Hall which is a very weird name but this was in 1876

and he really thought that Mars probably had a couple of moons which it does or some moons and so he had this telescope and he was looking through this telescope looking closer and closer to Mars and so the thing about the Martian moons is that they're very close to the planet itself

and he got really close to this telescope and the glare from Mars was getting too much and he was like no, there clearly aren't any moons there and he went home away from his observatory and he went home to his wife who was a woman called Angeline Stickney who can possibly exist here.

The thing about Angeline, his wife is that she had been his maths teacher at university and she was very good at calculations like this and while he'd been there looking for the moon she'd done the calculations of how close a moon could be to Mars and said no, I've worked it out

it's going to be closer than anyone thinks is possible go back and look again and there was a thing then that women didn't really look through telescopes like men were allowed to operate telescopes women could do the calculation stuff go back because she said I really think it's there and then he found the two Martian moons so she used to do his calculation

so she calculated the orbits of the moons around Mars and did lots of stuff for him and then eventually said to him do you mind because I'm doing a lot of this work if you pay me the salary that I might get if I work for you and he said no and so she stopped doing it for him

Amazing person, fair enough But even before that Kepler said that there were two moons of Mars he said Earth had got one moon and Jupiter had four moons and so it just makes logical sense that the planet in between must have two

He was right Well he was right, apart from the fact that Jupiter has a lot more than that and the logic is completely spurious Mind you people were predicting it left, right and centre so Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's travels in 1726

so 150 years before they were discovered so in Gulliver's travels if you've read it the Lepusians the Lepusians they discovered that Mars has two satellites and then he described them and he said the inner one orbits within 10 hours so it's orbit last 10 hours

the outer one's orbit is 21 hours and actually is 8 hours and 30 so pretty damn close this is 150 years before they were discovered he said I reckon it's got two moons That's pretty good So we're talking about Mars Do you expect of going to Mars?

You know possibly soon? So I was looking at some of the problems of it and the really interesting thing is that it would be a much longer mission than anyone's done in space before you need to do about three years in space to get to Mars so already being in space causes problems

so your skeleton is constantly it's adapted to gravity and so without it calcium gets into the bloodstream which gives you kidney stones and it also causes constipation and then you take depression so medical students remember this as bones, stones, abdominal groans

and psychic moans but there's a thing where there's another problem which is being in microgravity it moves where your brain is in your head so microgravity makes astronauts brain squish upwards and squash at the top of their skulls

and what that does is that puts pressure on two particular lobes the frontal and perietal lobes which control movement function which is essential for planning things and remembering details so you would end up not being able to do anything or plan anything and also those regions of the brain

are associated with pro-social behaviour so they think that you'd end up making a lot of hurtful and inappropriate comments to other astronauts but they all would be here's a weird thing, I don't have the science behind this but I read it, they've worked out recently through tests that they've done with

astronauts who've been up at the ISS recently when you go up let's say the three of you who don't wear glasses well Andy you do but you two don't, your eyes something happens to it where it means you might suddenly need glasses for close reading whereas my eyes and Andy's eyes, he's wearing contacts

we suddenly will have better vision and I'll be able to take my glasses off yeah, very weird it's a thing that happens with the eyeball and the way something at the back distorts so that would be another problem Space truly is the home of real nerds 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've said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our Twitter accounts I'm on at Shriverland, Andy at AndrewHunterM, James at JamesHarkin, and Shazinski

you can email podcast at qi.com yep, or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or you can go to our website nosuchthingasafish.com we have everything up there from our tickets to our upcoming tour dates we have merchandise and all of our previous episodes

we'll be back again next week with another episode we'll see you then, goodbye!