No Such Thing As A Fish - 279: No Such Thing As A Backflipping Doctor

Episode Date: July 26, 2019

Live from Berlin, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss chicken lifeguards, carrot concrete and the most-signed birthday card in history.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Berlin! My name is Dan Schreiber, I am 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 you, Andy. My fact is that pigeons make better coastguards than people. In one specific way. What you're saying is they can fly down and pull people out of the sea maybe? Wouldn't that be nice? They look good in a red swimsuit?

No, they definitely do. So this was an experiment that was done by the United States Coast Guard in 1976. They knew that pigeons have really good eyesight and they started training them to spot people who were lost at sea. So the Coast Guard would fly up in a helicopter and they had a little observation bubble on the bottom of the helicopter and they put a pigeon in there and the pigeon was strapped on a special couch. Like on a sofa. They were on a little mini sofa. He must have been half terrified and half very comfortable. Yeah.

They would train these pigeons to, whenever they saw in the ocean below them a tiny scrap of colored fabric representing a person floating in the sea, they would train to peck a button and that hit a light in the cockpit and the pilot would know that there might be someone down there. Pigeons could do it 93% of the time they saw the bit of fabric. Humans only managed it 38% of the time. Wow. There's a huge difference. Although wasn't there a thing in this where humans managed it 38% of the time, the first time round and then they were told that the pigeons were beating them and then the next time round they managed it just over 50% of the time. Yes, that's true. That's crazy.

It's a good way to motivate people is to tell them a pigeon is doing better than you at this. The thing though, the problem is, is I didn't realize they were on sofas. The problem is, is a sofa is a very comfortable seating position that you often fall asleep in as you're hanging out. They thought of this. You're kidding. Well, were you on this scientific team then? The pigeons in the helicopters, they had to be kept at a very specific level of hunger. They needed to be kept ambitious for food.

So that was how they did it. But it was really, it was a very successful operation. And five years later in 1981, it was officially recommended that pigeons should be inducted into the US Coast Guard. And that's why if you're in the scene now and you look back, you always see them at the top of those ladders, don't you, on the beach with their jackets. So exactly. Why are we not seeing that? I think technology improved. Pigeons have not improved at the same speed as technology.

It's a real shame. Also, couldn't they only spot, they were only trained to spot three colors, weren't they? Like red, was it red, orange and yellow? They were trained to spot. So, and that was the colors that they were trained to peck when they saw the mountain sea. So it's only if someone is drowning, wearing red, orange or yellow. Yeah, but those are three of the big colors, you know, it's not like they trained them to spot mauve and teal and cerulean, you know, that would, that would obviously be a waste of resources. You're totally right.

But, and also if you're wearing blue at sea and you fall in, then it's your own fault. Yeah. So pigeons are good at a lot of things, a lot of other things. They can be trained to identify breast cancer by looking at images of biopsies. And once they're trained, they can get an average diagnostic accuracy of 85%. Wow. But when you do a flock sourcing system, where basically you get a load of pigeons and you get them to agree whether there's a problem there or not, they can get up to 99%. What?

Whoa. So what you're comparing individual responses? Yes, you get a load of pigeons and you go, what do you think of this? No, you're not getting a load of pigeons to vote on. Tell me it's worse than our current system. Don't worry, we've got a top team working on this. They're on their little coats. And have they tried motivating doctors to do better by telling them that pigeons are more efficient than they are?

Because I think we should start doing this on the podcast. I know. I actually think we should set up a company where you get little speakers in workplaces that just go, ooh. And that sort of means I'm after your job. They are amazing though, pigeons. So I saw a pigeon do something so cool the other day and I really nearly messaged you guys. Really? This is related to a fact.

So I saw a pigeon do a somersault and I'd forgotten that this happens and I remember that we'd mentioned that geese whiffle, they flipped to the side. So I was about to send you a message saying, there's a pigeon impersonating a geese. A geese? Sure. A geese. You're German, you don't know how plurals do you? So it wasn't a land-based somersault, it was an airborne one. Well, it was an airborne one, so they can do the airborne somersaults.

But then, yeah, you've got these Birmingham rollers who somersault for a living. Sorry, that's a kind of pigeon. A Birmingham roller is a kind of pigeon and they can't fly beyond a few months old, but they can do constant backflips. And what I read says, they do involuntary backflips. How annoying is that, doing involuntary backflips? And they have races, so they are pigeons that compete in a lot of competitions. Well, humans compete using them to see how far they can backflip. And I think the record is just over 200 metres for a pigeon just repeatedly doing backflips.

And this is what you saw the other day, a 200 metre. No, I just saw a pigeon do a somersault and it made me think, that's funny. That would be, I would feel, imagine you went to see your pigeon doctor and he did a backflip just before he told you your news. You'd think it was going to be good. So, was it good? I'm afraid that was an involuntary backflip. The news is very bad. Oh, no, Dr. Pigeon. And this is why they haven't got far in the medical profession, because it's seen as insensitive, isn't it?

Well, that's very cool. What a special thing to see. Yeah, so cool. They are also very useful, generally, and have been. Hey, here's a cool thing. You know when pigeons are walking on the street and you see them bobbing away like that? I think we've mentioned this on QI. I don't think we've done it on the podcast. But if you put them on a treadmill, they stop bobbing their head. So if anyone ever wants to see a bobless pigeon, pop them on a treadmill. Do we know why?

Yeah. I mean, the scientists know why. I read a bit. It didn't say it in the headline. It didn't say it in the headline. But hang on, hang on. Okay, so what it is, is it turns out they're not doing it as a part of a movement need for equilibrium as they're walking. So what it is, is visually, to understand the space around them, they need to do it. It's purely for spatial awareness.

So what it is, is we have saccade in our eyes. I think this is it. So our eyes kind of move around all the time, and that's how we can see things. If they always stay completely still, you won't be able to see anything. Now, pigeons and most birds don't have that. And so the way they see things is by always moving their head around. Yes, and then when you put them on a treadmill, and that's why I stopped reading the article. But wait, so what? The surroundings will stay the same if they're on a treadmill. Who knows?

But they've still got to see. What if a threat comes? They can't just stop being able to see because you put them on a treadmill. Well, when have you ever seen an eagle on a treadmill? Mate, she's seen a pigeon somersault. I think she's probably seen everything. I go to a very specialist gym. Sorry? It's the other way around.

They put the treadmill on the pigeon. They do a forward somersault. Which one are we wrong about? The wings can rise, and the seeds won't be able to fly still. You're going to throw your hands forward, but it's hard when they don't see. Ah. You know, most comedy gigs you go to, it's just, you're a shit. Do you know what, I think that was a long-winded way of saying you're a shit, to be honest. So, another use for pigeons.

You can use pigeons as fireworks. What? But it's frowned on. It's very much not frowned on, and the reason is that fireworks are very bad for the environment. So what you can do, but if you still want lights in the sky, and you don't mind a little bit of animal cruelty, then you can attach... Keep talking.

You can attach lights to the legs of trained pigeons, and get them to fly in certain formations, and it gives you the lights in the sky, but without the fireworks stuff. That's very cool. That happened in Brooklyn a few years ago. Cool. We need to move on in a second to our next fact. Oh, I've got a few more things about the ways animals see,

because this is about animal vision. So I never knew this before. Swallowtail butterflies. There are particular species of butterfly. They have eyes on their penises to help them position themselves during sex. And the females also have genital eyes, so they can position themselves. And they try... It kind of makes sense when you think about it.

It makes sense, yeah. You could just attach a GoPro to yours, and then... Yeah. They would do the same thing. The problem for these butterflies is they mate facing away from each other, so it's very hard for them to know, even if they're in the same room as their partner. And the way they found this out,

was that they tried blindfolding swallowtail butterfly penises. No. And they found that successful mating collapsed. Oh, my God. Wow. Do they use the eyes for other things? Like, if you're married, can they be like, I saw you throw that in the non-recycling bin.

But what will you do with your cock in the recycling bin? Okay, we should probably move on to our next fact. I don't know what's going on tonight. It is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that concrete is stronger if you make it with carrots. This is a new finding. This is from Lancaster University,

and they did these tests where they started blending up extracts from carrots and other root vegetables into just a household blender with concrete, and they mixed it up, and they used it, and they found that it has resistance to cracks, which is far higher than you would get in your average concrete, and it's 80% stronger than what you would buy in a shop as an average concrete. So this is in early stages for testing, but possibly the concrete of the future will be carrot-based.

That's really good, and one big advantage of it is when you put these little molecules in there, because they're like plants, basically, they can lock up more CO2 than normal concrete would do. So actually, it's good for the environments as well. Oh, that is good. Yeah, massively, yeah. Because concrete is very bad for the environment.

Yeah, it is. It's really bad. Yeah, yeah. It's very, very bad. You don't need to tell the people of Berlin how bad concrete is. Get this. So humans have been making concrete for 9,000 years, right? And that's, yeah.

But the oldest concrete in the world is 12 million years old. Wait. Yes, it is. Was that the same person from before? She won't believe anything we say. On Nemesis, the expert in everything has arrived. Who was making that, then? Pigeons.

No, no. It's naturally occurring. So it's from a place where there was some limestone and some oil combusted naturally. I think it's in Israel is where this site has been found. So they found this natural concrete. That is amazing. It's really good.

Which is it? Presumably it's bad for the environment. Sorry, just to go back to that, because there's just so much of it. So it's the manufacturing process. It produces a lot of carbon dioxide, the manufacturing. Yeah, yeah. Because I didn't realize it is the most widely used material

in the world, concrete, which is kind of extraordinary. And they do this amazing thing with it. So I was reading about the building of the Burj Khalifa, which is still the tallest building in the world, isn't it, the Burj Khalifa? Yeah. So that is six. So that's almost entirely made of concrete.

And the way they do it, the way they get concrete to the top of it, used to be that you'd have these big blocks of concrete and you'd have to transport them up to the top of a building and dump them on top. But now there's the technology for you to pump up liquid concrete to the top of a building. And so they had a vertical concrete tube

and they just pump up concrete 606 meters. It's incredible. So you need an enormous amount of pressure for this fluid to be pumped. But yeah, and there's obviously the technology behind that is bizarre. Even carrying this tube, carrying the weight of 606 meters worth of concrete is pretty incredible.

Wow. And I was reading an interview with an engineer who worked on it actually, and he was explaining how they trialed the system on the Burj Khalifa by doing it horizontally through pipes in the desert first. And then he said they had to source the pump from Germany, obviously. He said, we used a good German pump from someone in Stuttgart.

And the pump itself is called Putzmeister, which Asi pointed out is a great name for a pump. So the Putzmeister made the Burj Khalifa. So speaking of concrete, Dan, do you know any animals that can dig through concrete? I do. Because you've said this once on the podcast, haven't you? I have said this on the podcast.

So here's the fact, which these three question the truth of. If you corner a badger in a car park, it can escape you by digging through the concrete within, yes, way, within like 30 seconds. 30 seconds. That is a concrete, a badger. Yeah. It's impossible. Why?

They've got incredibly sharp nails. I bet they have. But they have. Of course they have. But concrete is really hard. Anyway, I'm going to hand over to my colleague, who I think has more information than me. So I know that you said this on the podcast and we always take

the mickey out of you for it. But I did find that there is an animal that can dig through concrete and that is the Indian Pangolin. And they have been reported digging through concrete and into houses. They have extremely powerful claws that they would normally use for opening up termite nests. So there is an animal that can dig through concrete.

Wait, so do you believe that? Well, this is true. Let's put facts aside for a second. And I was also looking into if there was any, I really, really did look to see if badgers could go through concrete. I really did look. And the best I could find is there was a story in the news a few years ago about an American badger who was captured burying the

carcass of a cow. It wasn't through concrete, but he just basically found this dead cow and he spent about three or four nights digging a hole so that he could put the cow into it and then cover it all over so that no one could find it. Exactly. It's to stop predators from being able to eat it. So they think, oh, it's not like a dead cow was here.

Oh, it's gone. And then they go away and then the badger will go down underneath and eat it. Wow. See, I know a lot about badgers. So I'm telling you that this is a true thing. Have you guys heard of, this is not the technical term, but crunchable concrete?

No. This is, I find this amazing. So do you remember there's been some cases where planes, as they've landed or are taking off, have overshot the runway. That's a big problem because there's no method to stop them at that kind of speed. So a concrete has been invented, which has been nicknamed crunchable concrete.

It's been around for a while, which is it's an extra stretch of a runway for an airport. But the concrete is made a bit softer, which means it can't hold the weight of an airplane. So as soon as the airplane overshoots and it goes on to this crunchable concrete, it's the equivalent of, say, riding a bicycle that you can't stop into sand. It slowly starts slowing you down by the fact that you are

slowly dipping into it. And that's a thing that they have at many airports around the world now. Wow. That's really clever. Do you know why washing machines are so heavy? Is it because they have concrete in them? Yes.

No, I've told this the wrong way round. Can you think of any household item that might have concrete in it? Brilliant. Yes. Is it a kettle? Yeah, it's a washing machine. I didn't know this and this is a bit sort of, this is, yeah.

I've never heard this. I've not heard this. It's not a very sexy fact, but most washing machines have in the top of them a 25 kilo block of concrete, which is to hold it steady when it's spinning in the later stages of the cycle. That's what makes a washing machine so heavy. They're not very heavy, except they've all got this massive lump of concrete.

Wow. And this is obviously very inefficient because transporting washing machines is, because they're so heavy, it uses a lot more fuel. So a student in Nottingham has invented, or he's thought of this system where you replace the concrete with an empty plastic container, and then you can just fill that up with water when you need 25 kilos weight at the top of the machine, and then

you can just empty it out at the end of the cycle. So it's lighter to transport. It would save thousands of tons of carbon dioxide just shipping it around. We've only just thought of that. We've only just thought of that. That is, we need to put pigeons on more healthier bias design jobs. We have to move on in a second.

Oh, concrete, you know, reinforced concrete. Yeah. Most buildings with concrete are made of reinforced concrete, which is concrete with big metal bars all the way through a metal framework that was initially used only for flower pots. No one thought of using it for buildings. Wow. Yeah.

That's amazing. There was a French gardener called Joseph Monnier, and he was unhappy with the flower pots available to him, and he thought, I need a really tough flower pot. And he devised a new version with steel mesh, and that was the first reinforced concrete. Just quickly on water and concrete. Water actually is really good for concrete at the start, so it

hardens it because the stuff in the concrete reacts with the water, and it causes it to harden. But this is actually related to something we've said on the show before, which I have to update. So in episode 44, we pointed out that Roman concrete is better than ours. So concrete that was made 2000, more than 2000 years ago, is stronger than ours, and we don't know why, and we have since

found out why. And it's because it's made of this combination of volcanic ash and seawater and lumps of volcanic rock, which is called potterlana. And the volcanic rock actually reacts with the seawater, and it hardens it, so like the seawater creates different chemical bonds within the concrete, and it hardens it. So we know how they did that now.

So does that mean, sorry to interrupt, but does that mean that at the start it wasn't as good as ours, and over the years it's gotten much better, because the seawater has hardened it? It was basically jelly, the pantheon, at the start. The pantheon is still 2000 years old, the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. It is incredible. And then we just forgot how to make proper concrete.

And we've just remembered, so let's celebrate. Okay, it is time for us to move on to fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that headlouse clinics always see an uptick in business when a new Pixar movie comes out. Why is this? Is it because children are sitting near each other? Loads of children all in the same place, you're going to get

lots of nits and headlights. And this is a real thing, so this was an interview with a lady called Melissa Chalade, who owns two hair salons in California, and she says that whenever these children's movies come out, you get all children who go together, and the lice, they go from one head to another. And it's not just that, it's selfies is another thing which is causing lots of headlice in young people.

Another thing is playing on a sports team, so when you get in a huddle, they like to jump between one head and another, and also during Halloween, because people try on Halloween costumes and they just pass them on to each other. Yeah. Although we should say so, they don't jump. They don't jump, no. So they don't jump from one head to another, which is something

I always find bizarre, that I can't, I don't have children, so I don't know if they spend their time rubbing heads constantly, but I just can't believe it happens that often. So they can't jump, they can't fly, they just have to walk, and children are jamming their heads together long enough, all these things are just walky, walky, walky. Yeah. Onto another head.

I always had headlice in Australia, like constantly. I had like in my, genuinely constantly in my bathroom, I had a normal brush and I had my headlice brush. Every day I would just do a quick extra swoop, and I can't remember putting my head next to other heads that much. Thank God for that. But what was I doing with it, because I'd get rid of it, it'd be gone, and then suddenly I'm Captain Lice again,

and I don't know what that was. Yeah, weird. I became quite fond of them. Became quite what? Fond of them. Really? Yeah, because you can see with lice, if they, because they suck on blood obviously, you can see the bit of red that fills it up,

and I would, mine were well fed. Well, the other thing with headlice is not everyone gets itchy with them. It's only if you're allergic to their saliva that you get headlice, you itch your heads, and actually that is most people, but there are some people who aren't allergic to it, and those people wouldn't know that they had headlice until the head starts crawling around.

Yes, yeah. Okay, but we should say, you listening to this now, you will feel your head itching now. That is normal, you don't have lice. There is a condition called delusional parasitosis where you think you're infested even if you're not. Right. So that's a proper condition, but it's just, it's,

what you're feeling is normal. Yeah. Although we've got, so we've got three kinds of lice, right? We've got headlice, which live in the hair. There are body lice, which actually live in the seams of your clothing. So as long as you change your clothing more than once a month, you're basically fine. What's the date today?

And of course, there's our old chums, the pubic lice. As they get called, trouser shrimps. So, but they, they are two branches of the same family that they split about 80,000 years ago and one went north and one went south basically. And, and they, they can't, this is something I found out because they are now so different in their physicality. Apparently they won't interbreed except under laboratory conditions.

So you can make it happen. When there's a nice sofa there for them to have. I think they can't, I think they can't go on the other part of hair because the claws are the wrong shapes, right? Yeah. Is that right? Yeah, they're the wrong size. Yeah.

What's interesting as well is that as we get older, as we become adults, our heads become a bit more acidic and lice don't like that. That's why they're predominantly found in children. And so you get any groups of children getting together, that happens. And James read a list of places where that is likely to happen. Another place that it happened was on the set of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Oh no.

Yeah. The kids, all of the kids got so infested with a lice outbreak that was happening that they had to halt filming. That's why, that's why in the third film they've all got shaved heads. I never thought of that before. Yeah. It's not in the books. So yeah, so they had to halt filming and they brought nurses in who

had to spend ages delousing them all. And they have specific nurses apparently. So there are lice doctors, which is, in fact lice doctors is one chain of lice pickers, professional lice pickers, and they're one of many. And in fact, there was a study into lice, into how immune they are to various treatments in 2015. And they recruited lots of professional lice comers, which is weird because you don't have to be very skilled to comb lice out of your

hair, but this is what people are doing. Well, this is present day. Present day, yeah. Well, because in the Victorian times there was a role in hospitals which was chief bug catcher, and it was for lice. And they at the time, in the 18th century, were paid more than surgeons were paid. According to a very good source, Lindsay Fitzpatrick, who writes

about this era and medical curiosities, she said that there was a guy called Andrew Cook who claimed to have cleaned up more than 20,000 beds that were all lice-ridden. It makes sense. It was a massive disease cause. I mean, you would focus on that, but we should be clear. Head lice can't do anything. I don't know why people make such a fuss about them.

They can't harm you at all. And in fact, other cultures and other people in history have been much more sensible about them. So they used to be given as gifts between friends and lovers. Stop it. What? There's a thing in the Aztec period, Montezuma, the great Aztec emperor.

He used to collect lice and people would give them to him as offerings. And in fact, he eventually employed someone to go and collect head lice off his subjects and bring them to him so he could keep them in little boxes. So I think in fact, when the Europeans got there, they saw all these ornate boxes and thought, oh, you must have pearls and jewelry in there.

And they opened them and they were just full of dead lice. Because it was a nice thing to collect. Well, apparently with the Incas, there was a thing of tax collectors at the time. And one of the things for older people who, for goods bought and so on, they didn't want to tax as highly, it would be a symbolic handing over of lice to them. That would be the tax.

You can have six of my lice. To be introduced post-Brexit, actually, when no one can afford actual money. I'm going to be rich. OK. It is time for our final fact of the show. And that is Anna. My fact this week is that in 1926, Poland sent the U.S.

a birthday card that was signed by a sixth of its population, which was very generous. That's incredible. Of them. So this is this amazing moment. It was back in a time when Poland was incredibly grateful to America because it considered America's having basically saved its skin in First World War and given it independence for the first time

in like about 150 years. And so it, and then afterwards Poland would have been destitute as would almost all of Europe had America not given a lot of charity money. So as this thank you, they sent a 30,000 page long card on the 4th of July. 30,000 pages. It was 30,000 pages long. It was actually late because it took a long time to get the signatures. So it arrived in October.

It was meant to arrive on the 4th of July. We all do that for birthdays. That's fine. I was just thinking in the office whenever it's someone's birthday and they give you a card and you have to sign it. And by the time five people have done all the different possible ways of saying happy birthday, you've got nothing left to say. What after 30,000 people have said it?

Yeah. Imagine the imagination of a 30,000th poll. Yeah. Imagine having a great one to do and you read through them all and the last one before you finally hits it. No, wait, it's more than 30,000 people. Sorry, that's how many pages. So it was 30,000 pages and it was 5.5 million people signed it.

It really got around. They delivered it in the form of 111 bound volumes. But it's quite useful now because it's all been digitized and Polish Americans can do family history research and they can look up where their ancestors were and which cities and towns they came from. But the thing is a lot of the people who signed were children who were being forced to sign it.

Yeah, they sent blank pages. So they had this massive book they were going to send and various pages went to various different bits of Poland and they sent it to the army and to cycling clubs and to banks. Loot singers apparently gave a very good offering and they all sent back stuff that was quite personal to them. So some of Poland's most famous artists did works of art in there.

Cool. Just on greeting cards and being sent, a lot of them. Do you know there's a Guinness World Record for the person who has received most? Okay, most birthday cards. Most Get Well cards. Oh, Get Well cards, okay. So just with the idea of being sent a card.

There's a Guinness World Record. There's a guy called Craig Schergold. He was very ill and his friends decided to do a chain letter. This was, I think, in 1991 that went out on the Internet that said send a Get Well card or a greeting card to Craig and let him know that you're thinking of him. He eventually, by May 1991, received 33 million cards. It just went so massive.

It went so big. But the biggest problem was that he actually got better, which was fantastic. It was amazing. And he was really ill. He shouldn't have got better according to the doctors. And he did. It's fantastic.

The doctor is doing backflips all over the place. Are you happy that I'm better? No, no, these are all involuntary. No, but so he received, in that time, 33 million. But the chain letter kept going around to different countries. The name kept changing on it as well. So he just kept receiving different bits of cards from people

all around the world. And so it's said that since 1989, he has now received 350 million greeting cards. Unfortunately, he died when he was crushed to death by a big pile of greeting cards. It got so big that the Royal Mail gave him his own postal code for his house because it was just such a deluge. And he used to give interviews about how exciting it was and stuff.

He doesn't. He's gone behind the scenes now. He's not a public figure. The only time he really comes out and talks to the press is to say, please stop sending me cards. Well, at least you haven't republicized it tonight. There were a couple of guys in 2016. They were American inventors, sort of inventors of fun, silly products.

They came up with a greetings card that you can send to new parents. And it has a button inside. And when you press it, it starts to play the sound of a baby screaming, which lasts for three hours, and which will keep going even if you destroy the card. And every time you press the button again to make it stop, it gets slightly louder. Wow.

And where can I buy this card? They sold out. Did they? That is amazing. That should actually win an award in the International Cards Award Ceremony. That is the best card I've ever heard of. Is that a thing? That is a thing.

What do you get for congratulations if you win it from your friends? You get the screamer. No, this is the International Greetings Card Awards Competition, or the Louis as they're known. They're held in America. They have been since 1988. And they seem to be quite a big deal. They're named after the father or the grandfather of Greetings Cards,

who was actually a German immigrant to America called Louis Prang. And he made the first line of Christmas cards in about 1875. And so, yeah, they have this big competition, and the winners are announced in May during the National Stationery Show, which I know will all be attending next year. We've missed it this year, sadly. It was a few days ago. But there was the Greetings Cards Association director said,

there is nothing like the genuine and lasting collection you get from receiving and sending a Greetings Card. And he is called Pete Docherty. Oh! Which I really like to think that Pete Docherty has been moonlighting as the head of a Greetings Card. Well, baby shambles have played on this stage. Have they?

Yeah, really. Well, but not recently, because he's been very busy at the National Stationery Competition. It's on Christmas cards just while we're talking about it. If you're an atheist or a skeptic, obviously Christmas cards isn't your thing. So there's an alternative that's been created, and it is celebrating the fact that Isaac Newton was born on the 25th of December.

So it's called Newton Mus. And Newton Mus is a... The Skeptic Society have a party around Christmas time, and that's what it will celebrate. And they send each other Newton Mus cards as well. And inside it reads, Reasons Greetings. The smallest Greetings Card in the world

is so small that you could fit 200 million of them on a single stamp. Wow. It's been made by some scientists. It's not a practical thing. But there's also the world's biggest card. So the world's biggest Greetings Card is 18 metres tall and 13 metres across. It was in India that it was created

by a housing company for more publicity. So I found that on the biggest card, you could fit 46 million stamps. So I wondered how many times you could fit the smallest card in the world onto the largest known card in the world. And that's just simple multiplication. Yes.

Well, no, no, it's just simple multiplication. It actually is a really big number. Your calculator probably doesn't go that high. My calculator didn't go that high. I had to go to a special online calculator and then really carefully check the answer and that I thought I was getting it wrong. I'm so sorry. I've misjudged this whole situation.

I feel like I have. Just give us a fucking answer. The smallest card ever made could fit on the largest card ever made 9,200 trillion times. Oh, is that all? Yeah. Anyway, that's the sum I did earlier today.

Cool. The oldest Valentine's card, the oldest Valentine's card in England was from 1477, and it was from Marjorie Bruce to her fiance, John Paston. And in it she says a few things and then she says,

I beseech you that this bill be not seen by non-earthly creatures save only yourself. Anyway, that's on display in the British Library. LAUGHTER We're going to have to wrap up, guys. Can I just do a really nice birthday card fact from Britain, in fact, which is that Britain's two oldest men

are called Al Smith and Bob Weighton, and they're both 111 now, I think, and they were born by coincidence on the same day in 1908. So Weighton sends Smith a birthday card every year, and Smith sends Weighton a birthday card every year,

and they send these really sweet messages in them, so they interviewed one of them recently, actually. They interviewed Weighton on his birthday, which was the day we were supposed to leave the EU, and he said... Which one? LAUGHTER I've lost track.

He actually said, a 111-year-old man said, my own feeling is that there were defects, but we should negotiate from the inside rather than walking off the field with the cricket ball and saying, I'm not playing, which did make me think we should start having over 100-year-olds in government,

but they sent each other these sweet cards, so he sent the other guy a card saying, do keep in touch, I wish we'd known about each other earlier, and then we did it. How nice is that? That is very cool. But if they'd known about each other, like 50 years earlier, it would have just been

two random men sending each other cards for no reason. Yes. The whole ceremony can only function because the two of them are the oldest men in the country. LAUGHTER I've just got one more thing. One more thing. No. Yeah, of course, of course.

Just because this is about America's birth... It's not under the sun, is it? It's another sun. No, it's not. This is about America's birthday, right? The 1926 birthday, which was what? 150 years of America. Ooh, good calculation. Did you have to go online for that one as well?

LAUGHTER So 50 years before that would have been 1876, which was the 100th birthday of America, right? LAUGHTER This is not the fact. This is not the fact, this is just the setup. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

You sarcastic people. Right. So they celebrated with a thing called the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. It was this massive, great thing that a fair basically had of human achievement. It was in Philadelphia 10 million people visited,

a fifth of the American population. There were massive displays. They had all kinds of stuff, the biggest building in the world. It was where they first had Heinz Ketchup. They first had... Like, they had the arm of the Statue of Liberty because they hadn't afforded all the money for the actual statue,

so you could just pay to go up the arm. LAUGHTER The best thing there was the inventions, and the inventions included the first typewriter, Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, a calculator, a mechanical calculator... LAUGHTER Now I see why you wanted to tell this fact,

which measured five foot by eight foot, which would have come in handy earlier today. LAUGHTER But the best invention was something called the convertible portmanteau, which was a suitcase made of rubber cloth which converted into a bath.

LAUGHTER What? It was... If you were travelling and there were no baths available, would you have your suitcase which folded into a bath? Your laptop's going to get wet. LAUGHTER It feels like you do have to unpack the suitcase first,

but he would be right. I don't know all suitcases convert into baths, but if you want them to, I could run the tap in my suitcase. LAUGHTER Yeah, I hadn't fully considered that, yeah. LAUGHTER Well, look, thank you for that, Andy.

LAUGHTER OK, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would 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 Shriverland, Andy.

At Andrew Underham. James. At James Harkin. And Chazinsky. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, nosuchthingasafish.com. We've got everything up there from our previous episodes. We've got upcoming tour dates. We have bits of merchandise.

Thank you so much, Berlin. That has been absolutely awesome. We'll see you again. Good night! APPLAUSE