No Such Thing As A Fish - 290: No Such Thing As A Winter Fax Machine

Episode Date: October 11, 2019

Alex, James, Anna and Andrew discuss Tolstoy's hat-wearing habits, nuclear-powered icebreakers (literal, not conversational) and how to hack a fax from the moon.

Hello, welcome to another episode of no such thing as a fish. My name is Alex Bell. No, a weekly episode. No, what is it? A weekly podcast coming to you. You're doing great. Shut up. Shut up. I'm hosting a weekly podcast from the offices of the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Alex Bell, and I'm joined by James Harkin, Andrew Hontamari, and Anna Chasinski. And I forgot what happened next. Once again, we are going around the microphone to share our favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, James. That was the flawless. I would say flawless. It's so nice. You've given us outtakes for a year. See, we all think Dan's a complete idiot,

but now I see how difficult that job is. It's not easy. You've found respect for the man. Okay. Well, my fact this week is that in Japan, you can buy left-handed chopsticks. Amazing. Isn't that cool? It's not amazing because chopsticks are just a stick. How can they be left-handed? You would think they're just a stick, but I went to a shop in Nishiki Market, which is in Kyoto, and they had a whole shop full of chopsticks. And if they were just sticks, I don't think they'd be able to do that. I think you've been had. Really? Did you spend a lot of extra money on them? No, because I'm not left-handed. So they weren't really for me. But they also had right-handed ones, which I also didn't buy. So what do they look like? So they look like

chopsticks, but they're in a box that says left-handed. Oh, I think you were. There is a very, very important difference. And that is that they're not just sticks, they're slightly molded. And I put them on my social media to see if people could explain what was going on. And our good friend, Karyad Lloyd, asked her friend, who I don't know, called at gumi underscore the future is me. And at gumi underscore the future is me on Instagram, said that they are learning chopsticks for children. And the way they're molded is where you put your fingers. So you always put your fingers in the right place. And obviously, with left-handed people, that would be slightly different than right-handed people. And so these

are training chopsticks. Wow. Can you get training chopsticks that are attached to each other as well? Yes, you can. Like a hinge in a spring. So they're more like tweezers. You can get those as well. But these are ones to not just show you how to pick things up, but show you how to hold them correctly. So it's a bit like, you know, when you're at primary school and if you're not very good at handwriting, they put a big plastic thing on your pencil so that you can hold it better. I don't know that. No one else had that. Well, I have one of those. Like it was like a little rubber thing, but I was left-handed. So I was out of disadvantage anyway. I'm left-handed too, but didn't get one of those.

So actually, half of this podcast at left-handed, because that is right, how did I know? I am, yes. We are not representative of the general population. And that's a good example of where a small sample size can be very misleading. So the left-handed chopsticks are not for adults. They're just for kids, left-handed kids when they're learning and they've got a little groove in them. That's as I understand it. If you know any different, then do message me on Twitter at James Harkin or on Instagram. No such thing as James Harkin. And the pictures are on there so you can just comment on it. Because the chopsticks are brought to Japan from China, of course, weren't they? And have existed in China for thousands of years, but weren't really used,

we don't think for the actual process of eating, like we use a knife and fork, for the first couple of thousand years, they were just basically for reaching into boiling pots of water and oil and retrieving the food that's in them. So they were used in the cooking process, like a like a tong or something. And they just really have a spoon to eat off or eat with their hands. Must have been an amazing moment where someone was just eating, cooking with their spatula equivalent and then just started eating with it. It says on the washing up, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. What really happened is that around kind of 500 AD, there was a massive population boom in China. And food became really scarce. And the way they cooked it was by cutting

it in really small pieces. And that kind of makes the kind of eating with chopsticks a good way of doing it. So I thought it was to do with people chopping up their food small so that it takes less cooking fuel to prepare. Because of the population boom, there was much less fuel to go around, you know, the fewer trees to chop up as firewood and stuff like that. Yeah, it's partly that. So it was partly that there's a really good book, though, called Chopsticks by a guy called Edward Wang. So he looks into this. And actually, they started eating with chopsticks using them like as we use knives and forks in about 400 BC. But it became very commonplace in 400 AD. And it's partly because of the population boom,

but also because oil became readily available. And so that's when they started stir-frying stuff. And so that's when, I guess, Chinese stir-frying came in, as we would know it, and obviously to stir-fry, you need those little bits of meat. And so then you don't need a knife anymore. But the other thing as well is, like you say, you would eat with a knife before that, you would kind of stab things and eat it, right? And that was in Europe in the Middle Ages as well. But the other thing is Confucius thought that you shouldn't eat with a knife because a knife is something you would use in war or in aggression. So he thinks it shouldn't be something you should have around the table. So anyone who followed Confucianism also thought that you shouldn't

eat with knives. But did you know you can get Japanese left-handed knives as well? Yeah, because European knives are traditionally symmetrical because they're obviously just sharp. But some Japanese kitchen knives, they're cut asymmetrically. So the cutting edge is supposed to be closer to the body. So it's like at an angle. So you need the left-handed knife. Wow, that's interesting. So it points towards you, you mean, the cutting edge? Yes, yeah, exactly. You lean the knife slightly in towards you when you cook. Oh, when you cut. And if you're left-handed, you can't really do that. Total mess. You lose all your fingers.

So many left-handed things are just, you know, not really necessary. And I say this as a left-handed person, like left-handed scissors and all of this. I think they're a big crock of hooey. Really? Yeah, I do. Because I can't cut with scissors with my left hand. I agree. I can't do that either. I've tried and I can't. Well, you can use the right-handed. You're not supposed to. No, but how do you cut with scissors with your right hand if we can't cut with right-handed scissors with your left hand?

Jam my fingers into the holes that they're not supposed to fit into and it's fine. Yeah, we're used to overcoming adversity, I guess. It just learns it in the hard way. It hurts. It bleeds every time I cut. I do it. They do make a big old fuss, lefties. Obviously not you, Andy. Thank you for representing the other side, but you know about how difficult life is and it basically all boils down to a can opener, doesn't it? Can I just say, I don't think we should be annoying the left-handed community because science has shown that they are better at fighting than right-handers.

Oh, what? Because it's surprising. Yeah, well, that's basically it. Yeah. Also, we've got the left-handed scissors. Yeah, but we've got way more right-handed scissors. We've got way more weapons than we have. If it's a battle of can-openers and scissors, our armory is way better. It would be like fighting your own clone. It's all expertly matched, but in opposite ways. As soon as we invent a left-handed gun, you guys will be in great trouble.

There is a left-handed gun. You can get left-handed guns. They're just guns in opposite. Because you also have a dominant eye, as well, often. And so, for people who are in the army and stuff, if you have precision shooters, precision weapon, I don't know what the verb is for when you shoot a gun, gun people. I don't think we're going to be winning this war any time soon. Set them the gun people. The general what though? The precision gun people. Yeah, but it's all a reversal that you can put your left eye on the sights.

You want to be careful saying things like, the left-handed gun is just a gun in reverse. I don't think we should encourage lefties to use it that way. And I should just finish off the fighting thing. The reason that we think, no one's really sure, but basically, 90% of people are right-handed. And so, throughout history, people who have been fighting have been more likely to come across a right-handed person. So, we basically trained ourselves to fight right-handed people. So, when a left-handed person comes along, it's much more difficult. And there was a study of the careers of 10,000 boxers and martial arts competitors found that those who are left-handed do much better.

But then, around this table, you guys are much more lovers than fighters, aren't you? Yeah, I'd say that. You're just reading my t-shirt. You haven't been to my left-handed fight club after work. You never talk about it. We're always very, very hungry afterwards because no one can open the cans. So, I thought I had invented something in the researching of this fact. And it turns out I haven't, but I do think it's a very good invention. So, you know how you get a bowl of noodles and there'll be some soup with the noodles. So, normally, you eat the noodles and then you have

the soup left over. And you have to lift the bowl up often if you don't have a spoon, for example. I thought, what about a chopstick straw? Okay, so it's a hollow chopstick. And once you've finished eating the noodles, you just drink the soup through your stomach. Isn't that just a straw? No. It's two straws. Okay, I'll take you out to a Chinese restaurant and you can eat with two straws. And we'll see how well you do because I think you're going to go hungry. So, a guy called Julian Lachlan has invented it. And shamefully, he has not followed it up.

What's so he's invented one pear? I think, I don't know whether he's built a pear or whether it's just at the concept stage. It wasn't the runaway massive success that you would anticipate that it would be. I just think it's a way of making chopsticks lighter. They use less material because they use millions of trees, don't they? Every year, there's some terrifying stat that China uses 3.8 million trees making 57 billion pairs of chopsticks. That's huge. In China, they used to eat with silver chopsticks. And it was because they thought that silver would turn black if it touched poisoned food. So, you could tell if your food was poisoned.

But actually, silver often turns black when it comes into contact with hydrogen sulfide. And that's something that you get a lot in foods like garlic and onions and eggs. So, pretty much every time they cook with garlic and onions, it's poisoned. It's good for vampires, though. Well, unless they stab themselves with it. Actually, no, it's not a good for vampires. What? No, it is because you'd know if there's any garlic. Yeah, but also, silver bullets kill them and silver chopsticks will probably do some damage. You'd have to be a clumsy, clumsy vampire to stab yourself in the heart with a

chopstick while eating. I'm a clumsy eater, but I've never done that. Yeah, but they're always eating in the dark, so they're at disadvantage. Actually, chopsticks can be used as weapons. And I learned how to do this at ninja training a few weeks ago. Is it aimed for the eye? Well, yeah, I guess you would aim for whatever. Anything's a weapon if you're sticking in the eye. Well, yeah, I guess so. But so, ninjas would have these throwing stars, but they would more likely have a throwing stick. And it would be kind of a small metal

stick. But if you didn't have a small metal stick, you could do it with a chopstick. And they taught us how to throw it so that it kind of goes into a target like a dagger. This was apparently, as we spoke in about a while ago, not all ninja things are possibly true, but this apparently weighs at ninjas through chopsticks. And did you succeed in embedding it in well done? I can tell you the trick is to keep your wrist cocked the whole time. Put the chopstick in between your first and second fingers. So it's kind of in the gap between them. Have your wrist cocked.

Put it up in the air, your hand, and then go in and arc downwards. And then let go at about kind of, I guess, 40 degrees. And it just got, but you have, actually, what you're doing there, Anna, is you're kind of flicking at the end, but you don't flick. You have to keep your wrist cocked the whole time. I'm so sorry, wrist cocked the whole time, got it? Yeah, absolutely amazing. I feel like I hit the ground with that one.

It looks like you've just been taught how to do air quotes, but you're really struggling to execute them. It looks like we're all out for dinner and we're desperate for the bill. Well, that's really useful to know. Thanks, James. Although then you don't have anything to eat with afterwards. Quite right. Shame. This is, I thought this was really interesting.

Disney princesses are a good target group for working out the correct ratio of left to right handed people in the real world because there are 12 official Disney princesses and one of them is left-handed. So that mirrors real life. Wow. Right, so what, sorry, how was this useful ever? It was useful. I just thought that was interesting. Like muppets on the other hand, only all left-handed because their operators are right-handed. So their right hand is up the muppet in the head, operating the head,

and then the left hand is operating the left hand of the muppet. Just as a point of order, which Disney princesses left-handed? It's Tiana. Who's that? The one from the princess and the frog. She's not one of the main ones, is she? They really made a bit of a runner up princess, the lefty, which I think was the right choice.

In China, less than 1% of people are left-handed. Really? What? According to Chinese people. Why? No, it's because they're suppressed, it must be. It's, yeah, so it's not biologically speaking, but in China claims that less than 1% of its students are left-handed,

the global average, as you say, is 10 to 12%, as you can tell by watching 12 Disney films in a row. And it's actually because people tend to have to switch their dominant hand in China, a lot of people say because the characters can't be written left-handed, but I was reading a blog by a woman who's lived in China for decades, who was saying that she'll go around and say, I'm left-handed, and people will say there are no left-handed people in China, you know, and she'll say, what are you talking about?

Of course there are. And she'll demonstrate that you can write Chinese characters with your left hand, but people will look at her and say, nope, it's wrong, it's done with the left hand, can't be done. Wow, that's amazing. Do they pretend they can't read what she's written? I don't think they go quite that far, they just say it looks gross. Wow, wow.

You know the musical composition Chopsticks? That was written in 1877 by a girl, a 16-year-old girl called Euphemia Allen, and her brother was called Mozart, Alan. No way. So weird. Once again, the brother got the musical talent, James, didn't he? Well, I think she got the musical talent, but they hoped that the brother had, because he was called, the parents called him Mozart,

obviously hoping he would be some great musician, but actually the daughter managed to write this composition, which is now probably one of the most played by people. It's ubiquitous, it's not necessarily great art, it's the baby shark of piano, really, isn't it? No, don't you bring a baby shark installation. Is it called Chopsticks because it's kind of like you could play it with Chopsticks? No, well, kind of, the reason is that when you play it,

it's like two notes that are next to each other, and you move outwards, don't you? So it's like, like that. But you're not supposed to play it with your fingers, you're supposed to turn your hands sideways, and then play it as if you're chopping something, and that's how you're supposed to play Chopsticks, and that's why it's called Chopsticks.

So we've all been playing it wrong? Yeah, so you turn your hands 90 degrees so that your thumbs are facing the air, and you play it with your little fingers. You karate your piano, basically. Exactly, isn't that cool? Do you want to hear some stupid Chopstick records? Yes, please.

Okay, so the most marbles moved with Chopsticks in one minute is 43, and that was broken not by someone from China or Japan, but by an Italian man called Silvio Saber, and then a few years after that record was made, a Japanese man called Mr. Cherry tried to break the record, for most marbles moved in one minute with Chopsticks, and he didn't, he exactly equaled it. Wow, but he did get the record for the most baked beans

eaten with Chopsticks in one minute. Swings around about it. Sorry, actually, what was that record? That was 71, that's more than one per second per minute. That's more than I can do. Yeah, but I'm sure there would be a way of building up some kind of sluice where you just turn the Chopsticks into a chute and you pour the baked beans down it.

I'm not sure that's allowed. Maybe like some sort of propeller where it scoops them up when you spin it around. Yeah, exactly. I think you probably, the rules say that you have to pick them up in traditional Chopstick fashion, although they would enjoy those baked beans more, because there's been a study that finds that you would,

you enjoy food more if you eat it with Chopsticks. This is specifically with popcorn, and specifically in one study of 68 participants, but hear me out. Basically, the idea is, because you can only eat one at a time, or one thing at a time, it's almost like, let's say you're eating something else, like Alphabeti Spaghetti or something,

when you have the first spoonful, fuckful, it's really tasty, right? It's like, that's so good. But then by the time you're halfway through it, you've kind of even forgotten that you're eating Alphabeti Spaghetti, aren't you? You're just eating it, though. But if it's really hard to get that food to your mouth every time,

then each time you're kind of building up to the mouthful. Yeah, I see that. I have that one at with Chopsticks. Basically, if you're so cat-handed, that you're just enormously relieved that you've managed to get that one bean into your mouth, it is more enjoyable. How did the world record attempt go in the end?

Wow, so it's kind of novel as well, and it's just an unusual... That's exactly true, because whenever anything seems new, people pay more attention to it. And when you're eating it more slowly, each mouthful appears more new than if you're shoveling it in.

If you look, astonished every time that next big bean goes in. Oh, my God, what is this? So I think I read about this experiment, because there was another way they tried it. And this was asking people to drink water, but to come up with their own fun ways of drinking water. So some people drank it normally, and then afterwards, they were all rated

on their enjoyment of the experience. So some people drank it normally, and I guess just gave it five out of seven or whatever. Yeah, what were the other ways that they did it? Well, I only have written a couple down. One was drinking it from a martini glass, which is fun, I think, you know, anything from a martini glass is fun.

Another person drank it out of a shipping envelope, and they have a whale of a time. They love it. I can imagine you coming up to this study with a pair of chopsticks, and everyone's like, hey, you can't drink water with chopsticks. And you're like, aha!

You went counting on my sluice. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that... Sorry, can I just... Down often does the okay with a little bit more vim. Just give it one more try. Okay, it is time for fact number two,

and that is my fact. You can't please all the people all the time. Sorry, what was your fact? My fact this week is that the fact machine is older than the telephone. Okay, the fact machine. It's a fact about facts. It's a fact about facts.

Um, so the telephone was, what, early 20th century? Was it all the 19th century? It was, yeah, like late 19th century. So you're saying that the fact machine was from the 19th century. Well, the first patent was in 1843 for an electric printing telegraph, and it was actually another Scottish inventor

called Alexander Bain, so quite similar to Alexander Bell, one of the inventors of the telephone. And he was actually a clock maker, and he invented this device. It was also called a facsimile machine. There were various different versions, and it involved synchronized pendulum,

so you can see where the clock's kind of come in, that would scan a message line by line, conversed it to electrical signals, sent them down some wires, and then reproduced it at the other end using electromagnetically sensitive paper that had this kind of chemical imbued in it. It wasn't, the first version wasn't very good

because there were all sorts of like synchronization problems, and then he improved it between 1843 and 1846, but then he was beaten to it when he tried to repatent the improved version because a rival had got in the way and demonstrated a much more accurate version, and it was just the synchronization of the pendulums that you can never get right

because it was really difficult to get it to swing, because it's swinging left to right across the page at the exact time, so it's getting, it's almost like an inkjet printer, kind of doing dots along a line. Wow, it's very tricky. It's very clever. All the paper that you need to be receiving

the electrical current, it needs to turn black whenever it receives the current, so it needs to be soaked in potassium ferrocyanide. Was that kind of toxic? Sounds like it was cyanide, didn't it? Like every time you get a fax, you basically died. I mean, I thought that was probably why it didn't work. Yeah, no, I don't think it was, I don't think it was lethal either.

I think you should not eat too much of it. So this, but then, so he was the, you know, the pioneer, but then I think the first really usable one was in 1860, which is still so long ago, and it was an Italian called Casselli, and you would write your message on a piece of tin, and you would write in non-conductive ink, and then the sheet was scanned by a stylus,

and that was attached to telegraph wires going to the other place, and then whenever the stylus at the other end got to a bit of ink, the conduction would stop, and then at the receiving end, whenever the conduction stops, the stylus there would stop, and so you'd make a kind of perfect mirror image of it. Okay.

So it's actually the same in reverse, because it's the drawing that's non-conductive, sort of during the disconnection. I think I've explained that right, but it was demonstrated for Napoleon III. I think that's amazing that Napoleon III had a fax machine. It's just unbelievable. And he said, this is incredible.

He got sent the signature of the composer Rossini from 100 miles away by fax. Wow. That is amazing. And it didn't catch on, did it? The idea with the fax machine, I think, is that they weren't in the information age yet, so business just worked too slowly.

So I think was that one between Paris and Lyon and Paris and Marseille, they set those ones up, and there just wasn't really any interest in it. Yeah, it was a gimmick. Because, yeah, it was a gimmick sign. This is not going to catch on. They did lots of public demonstrations of it and stuff, and everyone was like, wow, but no practical applications.

The Russian Tsar had one, Nicholas I, between his palaces in Moscow and Petersburg, there was a fax connection. Amazing. It's so weird. So I'm sure you guys came across this in your research. Do you know who's the biggest buyer of fax machines in the world? Is it Korea?

It's... The NHS. Not Korea, it's the NHS. They have at least 8,000 machines across the NHS just in Britain, and I asked a friend of mine who's a doctor, just out of interest, he works down on the south coast, and I said, do you use faxes? He said he sends at least one or two every day.

Oh yeah, they use them all the time. They're banned from doing it now, so they're no longer the biggest buyer. They're banned from buying anymore. They haven't been banned from using them. No, but as in they're not the biggest buyer anymore because the government's finally said, you are not allowed to buy an old bloody fax machine.

This is ridiculous. I don't know, because when I used to work as an accountant, we used to use faxes, like you say, not two times a day, maybe 10 times a day, and they're a really good way of getting kind of invoices across. It's useful for sending secure information, I believe, and there is secure email, but it's a bit of a pain, and yeah. I feel like you can ring faxes for no reason at all

and you just get a weird noise. I just think that's a totally unnecessary... Is that how you spend your evenings? I know, I've never used actually faxed with a fax machine, but I do routinely ask any ring people's fax numbers. You've never sent a fax? No, I don't think I've ever sent a fax. What?

But to be fair, I'm not a doctor. That is insane. Well, sorry, can I just say, I had to do it for my work. Well, you just did it like asking your friends if you're going to the shops or whatever. I did work a lot when I was younger. And also me and my friend used to send faxes to each other after school. That's what I mean, like not on the social...

I don't think anyone's ever, apart from you, sent faxes for a social reason. Wow. What did you say in your faxes? So I remember she once sent me a fax of the newspaper article in her local area, which on the headline was her dog getting married to another dog. This is an incredible insight into your early life.

This is like an analogue version of Buzzfeed that you invented there. It was a pretty huge moment in our childhoods, actually. Wow. Yeah, it's so funny. Are the dogs still together? Are they happy? They had a lovely long life together, but I'm afraid, sadly, they have expired

because this was 25 years ago, which in dog years. This is our 175th wedding anniversary. Oh, I had a fact about wedding anniversaries, which is through this fax research, which is, you can... This is not really fax related, but you can request anniversary greetings from the White House. What?

If you are a US citizen, and if you contact them several months ahead... But Trump's not sending them, is he? I can imagine his fax is in massive capital, his foul letters. He does faxes you saying no collusion. It's kind of weird. I think you can request presidential greetings, and they send some, you know,

poor drone in the White House has to send you presidential greetings, but they made it clear you can only request a limited number of greetings per day, which I think is a very funny idea. Obviously, somebody at some point received about 100 different greetings on the same wedding anniversary. I just love the idea of keeping Trump busy

by sending him on the fax machine. They're just like, sorry, Mr. President, Barack Obama used to get through 20 a day. It worked with the Queen. She's got almost no political power, because she has to write cards to every 100 year old in the country. Something really cool you can do with fax paper,

if you've got any left over, from the 90s. Or from your friend's dog wedding. Yeah. Is, so this is if you use a thermal fax machine, and fax paper would be thermal paper. You use those in the winter, don't you? No, so if you're using a thermal fax machine, then the paper turns black when it's exposed to heat,

so it's specially chemically treated. And basically, what a fax machine would do, how it would work is, it would only heat up the parts that were meant to be written on. Those bits would turn black. But what you can do is you can just get some fax paper, or this also works on receipt paper,

because they still use that for that, and heat it up, and it'll turn black. I was expecting another part to that, like some useful life hack. Like what? Yeah, what's that for? Well, if you've only got a white crayon, and you need to write someone a message immediately,

you need black paper to write on. That's true. So why don't you heat your thermal fax machine's roll of paper? Oh, if you're going to a fancy dress as a zebra, you can heat up one roll of receipt paper, don't heat up the other one, and just wrap them around you like a mummy. Brilliant.

Instant zebra costume. It's a multi-purpose life hack. Sorry, hang on. Is that how the receipts work in old till machines, is that they've selectively heated up the paper? Not in the really old ones, I don't think. Okay, and I think quite a lot that are still in use. That's amazing.

They're slightly waxy at the paper, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're a bit more transparent. And if you do heat them up, yeah, they go. So it's quite a good way of redacting things as well, because if you heat it up, then obviously it eats all of the words that we've heated up. When you cool down, does it not go back to normal?

I don't think so, because almost as soon as the receipt came out of the thing, you'd have to be given a blank receipt. It was momentarily written on the record of what you bought. I'm talking to my tax man, I'm really sorry. All these receipts said stuff when I got them. I don't know what's happened to them all. You'll have to trust me. Can I tell you my favorite ever facts machine, facts?

I'm pleased. I actually went to George Orbanck to find some. So in 1966, the Russians landed the Lunar Nine craft on the moon, which was the first craft to successfully achieve a soft landing and land without crashing. And it was designed to take the first photographs on the moon. And it was basically a contraption that had a camera with a film in it.

So it would take the photos, and then the machine would take the film out of the camera and develop the photographs, and then put the photographs into a little facts machine, basically, and then transmit the photos back to Earth. Is it all on the moon? All on the moon in a little craft, yeah. And the Russians were broadcasting it back to Earth.

And the British were monitoring all of the landing and everything and all of the signals from George Orbanck. And then they noticed that when it landed, and all of this stuff happened, and we didn't know what was going on, because the Russians didn't tell anyone anything, that the signal had changed, and they recognized it as being a standard signal

from something called Radio Facts, which was a standard way of transmitting photos by a kind of facts machine kind of system around the world that was used in journalism. And so they very quickly realized that they could interpret the signal. So they rang up the officers of the Daily Express in Manchester and said, look, do you have a Radio Facts

receiving a machine that we can borrow? And they said, yes. So they stuck in a car and raced it over to George Orbanck and managed to get these transmitted photos and print it out. And they got the first photos of the moon on the surface of the moon. And they then published them on the front cover

of the Daily Express before the Russians had even released them to the media. So we actually hacked the first facts from the moon. That is amazing. But what was great is that Bernard Lovell, after whom the Lovell Telescope is now named, was annoyed because the Russian photographs were calibrated for a slightly different size of paper

from what we had. So it slightly distorted the photographs. And he was really annoyed because he thought that everyone would think his telescope was a bit shit. Well, there are disadvantages to theft of property, aren't there? OK, it is time for fact number three. And that is Anna. My fact this week is that a boatload of researchers

are about to deliberately get themselves stuck in the Arctic ice for a year. And for fun. And for science. No, not for fun. I think it's for work. It's fun and science, guys. Science is fun, isn't it?

Yeah, the two are not mutually exclusive. And this... I reckon in this case they are. You're spending a whole winter in the Arctic. That's not going to be fun. You're talking to someone who faxed their friends for fun in their childhood. Her sense of fun hasn't walked.

No, man. These guys are going to have the best time. They're going to eat one of those thermal fax machines. So this is a project called the Multidisciplinary Drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate, shortened to Mosaic. And hundreds of researchers from 19 countries are involved. It's the largest Arctic expedition in history.

And it's all about data collection in the Arctic. So just gathering as much as they can from the ocean, from the ice, from the atmosphere, about the climate, the algae, all the chemistry of it to basically work out how climate change is affecting the Arctic. And they're doing it by going on this big... Well, they've just arrived, actually.

So there's this 400-foot-long icebreaker ship called Polarstone, which left Norway a few weeks ago. And it is now about to freeze itself into this little bit less than 2 miles square bit of ice. And then it's just going to let that bit of ice carry it through the North Pole for the next year. It is amazing. I read that on Monday, the sun set where the boat is.

And so it's set, and it's not going to return for 153 days. That's a long night. Yeah. Okay, fine. So that bit's not that fun. Because obviously they're going to be locked in the ice. So they can't really control where they go, can they? No.

So I read that they have to be a bit careful, because there's a risk that the ice will drift them into the Russian economic zone. And if they go in there against their will, they don't have permission to carry out research there. So they've had to select the bit they've locked themselves into quite carefully where they think they'll stay in sort of international territory.

Interesting. Yeah. I bet they'll end up there. And they'll be like, oh no, we can't do any research. We just have to sit and drink all the time. It must have been fun selecting the flow where they're going to embed themselves, because they had 15 candidates,

and they just had to narrow it down. And you have to work out, as you say, you have to predict where you think it's going to go. So they've picked this one that's the perfect depth. So it needs to be deep enough that it can really lock you in place, and it needs to be deep enough that planes can land on it, hopefully, in winter, which is what they're intending,

how they're going to resupply themselves. At the moment, it's 350 miles from the North Pole, and they need to work out the direction it's sort of traveling in, and they want to drift right past the pole, because obviously that's the big money. Wow. And they will be resupplied. I was reading an article on Mashable

that said they were resupplied with provisions and rotating scientists. I've seen one of those in a kebab shop. But actually, they're scientists from all around the world, and they're going to come and stay for a little bit of time and then go away again. I think that's the idea. Yeah.

I think most have signed up for two months, and I think a couple of people are going to do the whole thing, although that's pretty hardy. They'll need some vitamin D pills. You could say that these guys are going to go with the flow, I bet they're not saying that, though. Oh, I bet it's painted on the side of the bloody chair. Of course it is.

It's the best joke. I bet there was an embargo on saying that phrase two days ago. It's really cool. They're divided into these different sections into what they call cities. So if you go to their website, it's kind of like at a theme park, and you know you've got the different zones.

So essentially, the ship will be stuck in the flow, but then they're going to spread out onto the ice all around it to set up their various cities. Like Ice City, which sounds like it's going to be a lot of it, but Ice City is basically the patch of ice on which the ice researchers will work, and that's they'll pick up bits of ice and study it. They've got Ocean City,

and that's where the oceanic researchers drill a hole in the ocean, and then they pick up water. No, they don't. No, they drill on the ice. They don't do it on the ice. This drill is working. Every time I make a hole, it fills back in.

This is why I was fired from the project. They drill a hole in the ice, and then they retrieve the ocean water, and what they have to do in Ocean City is set up a tent over the hole, and that's because they need to keep that a bit warm, because otherwise, if you pull the ocean water up to where you are, it immediately freezes,

and then you've just got ice again. That's how you do winter fishing in Russia. Is it? Yeah, every winter, if you go to the Moscow River, you'll just see loads of little tents, and basically it's just like men in their little tent doing fishing with a bottle of vodka, and that's what they do.

These guys on the Arctic as well, there are loads of problems that they have, obviously, because it's a very, very challenging environment, so they're going to have guards who are wearing night vision goggles who are constantly looking out for polar bears, and every research station on the ice has to have a two-mile radius around it

with the perimeter fence, which is monitored for polar bear activity, and they've got guns, but before that, they obviously don't want to shoot polar bears, it's not what they're about, so before opening fire, they will honk the horn of the ship to try and scour off,

and then they will use a flare gun just up in the air to alarm it, and then finally, they've got a pepper spray to try and deter it. Oh, my God. I think you would have to have considerable presence in life to not open fire, to use the feathers, right?

Do you have to wait until it goes really close to you? The next thing is you poke it in its nose, and if that doesn't work, you bring out the throwing chopsticks. Have you tried reasoning with it? Yeah, it is cool. They're also setting up tripwires for the polar bears themselves around,

so when a polar bear crosses one of the tripwires, it sends up a big loud flare. It sounds like home alone with polar bears, really. I found out about another experiment that's being done on the Arctic at the moment, so scientists need to study how organic matter decays in the soil, and that varies by the soil's temperature

and moisture and acidity and all of this stuff, so they have to sew bags of material, organic matter, to decay. That's the test subject, so lots of leaves and things like this go into the matter, and then they bury that, and then a couple of scientists,

they had spent weeks laboriously sewing litter bags full of leaves and then sealing them up to be buried, and then one of the scientists was having a cup of tea, and she realized, oh my god, we have bags full of leaves that can be buried under the ground

that are made to an almost exact uniformity standard, so at least 1,200 groups across the world are doing citizen science using teabags now, and there are 5,000 teabags just buried under the Arctic. Really? Yeah. That's an advantage of global warming, isn't it?

When it melts, you've got a nice cup of tea. It's going to be very weak. That's really cool. Can we talk about making a knife out of your own poo? Yes. Oh yeah, we better. Every week you are. So Wade Davis, the famous traveler and writer,

he wrote about an Inuit man who once sculpted his own frozen poo into a knife and used it to kill a dog, and people have kind of taken this as truth that it might have happened, but this year, for the first time, scientists have properly tried it out by making knives out of their own excrement,

and they found that it wouldn't have worked. It wouldn't have been able to cut into a piece of pig hide. They said, like a crayon, it just left brown streaks on the meat, no slices at all. That's the, if I was working in that lab, that's the point of which I put in a complaint to you, that was awesome.

I found a poo in the freezer. And this is a proper experiment. So first of all, before they even had the poos, they adopted an arctic diet, which was high in protein to ensure that their poo would have the same consistency as the Inuit people. That's cool.

That's so clever. That's really interesting because I read somewhere that people escaped from prison by making shives out of frozen poo, so it can't be true. It's not true. It's an urban myth, it turns out. Yeah, most prisoners don't have access to freezers though,

do they? I don't know. I think they're like in lower security prisons, maybe. I don't know. You have to ask the chef, and they do ask questions when you approach them with a bag of your own feet so you can say, would you mind putting this in the freezer? If it was very cold outside,

you might be able to dangle the poo out of a window and wait for it to freeze overnight. The way you keep the milk fresh, if your fridge is on the blend. I just think there are easier ways to make shives. There must be. Yeah, you're in a place full of metal, there are rice bars everywhere.

Yeah, you're right. So I've got, I thought of a question about the poo knife, experiment. Oh, how did they manufacture it into a knife? How did they mold it? Oh, that's a great question. Was that in the ejection? You have to sort of clench and release at the right moments

to get the shape exactly right. What a skill that would be. What an Edinburgh show. I will now be pooing this sculpture of Michelangelo's David. Is that the next balloon sculpture magician trick? I imagine that they just cut it into shape. Did they make a standard symmetrical European knife or a left-handed Japanese poo knife?

And it doesn't work. It doesn't work. It just leaves a brown streaks on the meat. Another really cool arctic experiment that's happening is to deal with climate change. And so that's a problem with the arctic, which is heating up faster than the rest of the world. So it's really bad, ice is all melting,

and there have been sort of three main proposals people are thinking about for us to geo-engineer it, so that this problem is solved. One of them is just re-freeze it, they're thinking. Try and re-freeze the ice. Just re-freeze it like a big poo. Just re-freeze it. So the plan is to put 10 million windmills there,

and they will power these water pumps. And what the water pumps do is they suck up the seawater from underneath the ice, and then they spray it out on top of the ice during the winter, and then it freezes. And so that restocks it with ice. Sounds like a talk to evil plan. 10 million windmills.

I mean, presumably the windmills have to use less energy than they pump out. Well, they're getting free energy from the wind, I guess. Yeah. Okay, sorry. Yeah, no, that's how they work. That's how windmills work, so... You don't plug them in.

That's why my windmill has been so expensive to run. Another idea that they had is you basically get a submarine, and this is an idea, sorry, by a 29-year-old architect called Farris Kotahato Ha Ha. And he says that you... Are you laughing at his name? No, it's not laughing at his name. That's his name.

Anyway, his name isn't important in the story. He is going to get this submersible vessel, and what you would do is you would get a load of water from the sea in it, and then you would somehow suck all of the salt out of the seawater, which then makes it freeze. So you suck out the salt,

it freezes because it's cold down there, and then it floats to the surface, and you're making icebergs. That's really good. Isn't that clever? How are you sucking the salt out, sorry? I said, I don't know if you heard. By some method.

I don't think I could be more clear than that. It's an almost foolproof plan. How are you going to fix the Irish border? By some method. I'm so sorry, I clearly wasn't listening. This ship that's getting frozen name is an icebreaker, isn't it? Yeah.

And we should just say how amazing icebreakers are. They're very, very powerful things. And then what shape would you guess they would be at the front? Triangular. Yeah, pointy. Pointy. Yeah, that's what I meant. Like a poo knife.

Right, like a poo knife. They're not pointy. They're shaped like the backs of spoons at the front. Really weird. So when they hit the ice, they ride up onto it, and then the massive weight of the vessel just crushes it down.

Wow. Yeah. So Russia's biggest icebreaker is called 50 years of victory. And it's powered by, which is a great name. Always humble, aren't they? We would cause us 40 years of hurt. And it's powered by not one, but two nuclear reactors. So it's extremely impressive.

And it's, the reason it's nuclear is because otherwise, it would expend more than 100 tons of diesel every day. So, I mean, it would just have no range. It wouldn't be able to get anywhere, you know? Yeah. Doesn't it need to be in cold waters then? Because I was reading about how the nuclear engines, the cooling system, depends upon the icy water.

So you couldn't sail it into warm waters because it would overheat. So it's literally built. It needs the ice as much as the way the ice doesn't need it. But I like that. And it's hopeless in open water as well. They roll from side to side all the time because of this spoon-shaped bow at the front.

So some are being built now, which are reversey purses. They can go forwards and backwards. That's so clever. So they've got a pointy back end, and then a spoon-shaped front end. And if they're ever sailing in open water, they just sail backwards using their pointy bow

because that gets through the water very nicely. Great. But do they have two steering wheels? Or does the guy... I imagine it's got a nuclear power, and I imagine they can stretch to the steering wheels. All the way back. They have to look over their shoulder the whole way, yeah.

A terrible, correct neck, don't you? Okay, it is time for our final fact, and that is Ami. My fact is that Leo Tolstoy, one of the greatest writers of history, frequently wore two hats in case his head got cold. Oh, what a guy. This is from someone called Mariana Hunt, who sent me this fact.

So thank you to you, Mariana. And it's just that Tolstoy was very sensitive to head cold, so he wore multiple hats. He literally wore multiple hats. It's cold in Russia. We've already established that. It's cold in Russia. And the hats were nuclear powered.

It's incredible. So amazing. Did he have like a reversey-pursy pattern when he was walking backwards? Were they two of the same type of hat, or was it like a top hat and then a tiny collar hat on top of that? I am not sure the history relates tragically. I don't know if it was like a fez followed by a fedora,

or yeah, so I don't know. Because he could have just bought a thicker hat in Russia. You know, you often get these big, bare-skinned things that go out in meters. Yeah, famously with the flaps. With the flaps, of course. But he didn't. Not that smart, turns out.

No, no. Thicky Tolstoy, we call it. We call him Leo Tolstoy, but his name was Lev Holiev. And the reason that we do that is because Lev means lion in Russian. And when he brought out his book in France, they translated his name as Leon Tolstoy. Because that means lion.

And he kind of gave his blessing to that. And when he gave his blessing, it meant that everyone else could kind of go in that direction. And so when it came into England, it was Anglicised to Leo, which also means lion. Right. Do we know if everyone does that? Like in Kenya, are they calling him Simba Tolstoy?

That would be amazing, wouldn't it? I can't remember if that's really for lion. There's one of the words in it. It is really for lion, doesn't it? Yeah. That's so funny. On translation, I was looking at the, the, so apparently the Russian word for peace

is mute. Yeah. So that can also mean like world or society. It can mean like, like a place where people, like a community. Right. Yeah. But, but there was,

there's an argument about how you could translate the title of war and peace to war and the world. Oh yeah. Which I prefer as a kind of sex in the city vibe. Well, one of its provisional titles, went through a couple of titles before he settled on war in the world. War of the world.

So yeah. Um, one, it was provisional title at first, the year 1805. Okay. And then briefly, all's well that ends well. No way. Well, I think it must have been the Russian for that, but. He hated Shakespeare as well.

He didn't think he was a very good writer. Is that so? Yeah. 00:44:55,200 --> 00:44:55,200 00:44:55,200 --> 00:44:55,200 00:44:55,200 --> 00:44:55,200 00:44:55,200 --> 00:44:55,200

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00:44:55,200 --> 00:44:55,200 00:44:55,200 --> 00:44:55,200 00:44:55,200 --> 00:44:55,200 00:44:56,160 --> 00:44:58,560 He and Shaw talked about Shakespeare, didn't they, about how they hated him? Wow. He thought that Shakespeare was unfair to servants and poor people,

and they were frequently made the object of ridicule in his plays. Yeah. Yeah. He was big on the rights of servants and serfs. He was kind of obsessed with that, especially in his later life, wasn't he? And he sort of shifted his whole family

to this different kind of barren land to try and make his own farming, using his own farming ideas and principles, which, if you've ever read Anna Karenina, are basically all written out in the character of Levin, who is essentially, I think Levin is who Tolstoy wishes he was in Anna Karenina. He's a kind of wheat obsessive, isn't he?

He is, yeah. Basically. He's the opposite of someone who's gluten intolerant. Yes, exactly. The exact opposite. Gluten enthusiast. He doesn't just love sandwiches, guys. There was a whole socialist philosophy behind this.

Sandwiches for everybody. He did, he loved eggs as well. There's an app you can download, which is his wife's cookbook. It's now available as an iOS app. So we know all about the different things, because his wife was amazing. She's kind of the great woman behind the great man kind of thing.

He had terrible handwriting, so she copied out seven drafts of War and Peace, the 1400 pages by hand, often like after he'd gone to bed and finished, she would stay up and do it by candle. And he had terrible handwriting, and sometimes she needed to use magnifying glass. But look, we have to stay on the eggs for a minute,

because this is really relevant. He was born in 1828, and he had this huge mental crisis around his 50th birthday, which I think was after War and Peace and out of Corona. And he gave up smoking, gave up drinking, gave up meat, and became a massive vegetarian. So there was no tofu or corn, obviously. So eggs it was.

And he had a rotating menu of 12 egg dishes, which he ordered to be cooked for him. He kind of been fun to have been around around that time, can he? I think after his big life change, he was a major bore. So like eggs with Brussels sprouts and beans. Oh, you don't want to be sitting next to him for one thing.

That is an amazing meal, isn't it? Don't order that in the first date, as I'm saying. One of them was just omelet in soup. It does look gross. And he became a serious buzzkill. Like he would cobble his own shoes, and it got so bad that his wife, after 25 years of this kind of shit from Tolstoy,

his wife was given a gift of a joke recipe book of all the mad dishes he'd received. I think that's the thing that is the app. Yeah. Yeah. She had a terrible time, notwithstanding the constant farsing based on a disgusting egg-based vegetarian diet.

I've got really mixed feelings about Tolstoy, because he's such a brilliant writer, but my God, he was awful to his wife. So Sonia, even if they met, she was one of the daughters of a family that he was friends with, and she was 18 when they met. And he sort of fell in love with her, or fell in lust with her.

He was quite a lusty man. And he proposed very soon afterwards, and amazingly he proposed. And the scene of his proposal is repeated in Anna Karenina, and it's always a scene I've thought, that's so unrealistic. So there's this scene where spoilers, Levin proposes to Kitty,

but he proposes by just proposing with the first letter of every word that he means to say. But it's not just like, will you marry me? It's incredibly long sentences. And I remember reading this scene and thinking, that is absolutely ridiculous. And she can work it out, can she?

She can work it out. This is exactly how Tolstoy proposed to Sonia. So it was in, it was more complicated, but it would be like, W-Y-M-M for will you marry me? Exactly, but in his instance, they had a whole conversation. This was Tolstoy and Sonia,

and he spelled out the letters of pieces of chalk, and it was sentences like, in your family there is a false view of me and your sister Liza. You and your sister Tanya must defend me. Spelt out in initials. I think that could work in some cases. Like if I was to go OMG and you went BS, then that works, doesn't it?

Is that how you proposed? That was the response I got. But yeah, sorry, after you proposed, and before they got married, he said there shouldn't be any secrets between us at all. I'm a massive diary writer. He was a huge diary writer. You must read all my diaries.

I must read all of yours. She said, okay. And he forced her to read all of his diaries, which involved just his constant recounting of his affairs with surf ladies. And just lots of shagging around. And there was one, he had fathered a child by a woman

who still lived on his estate, and she was still there. And so Sonia read this, and obviously felt very threatened by it, because he'd had a child with her, and she was constantly worried that they were going to take up again where he'd left off. And he made her read this at very weird.

I know. In fact, he then made her transcribe. One of the first things he made her transcribe was a short story based on his relationship with this surf woman, which is one of the few stories he didn't finish, which we suspect is because she drew the line at some point.

He's just saying, and then my wife turned up. What a bore. He sounds like a river dick. Yeah, I think what happened, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think his early life where he was doing all these naughty things,

then he had this kind of midlife crisis, didn't he? And then that's when he started giving everything away. And obviously neither of those parts of his life were particularly happy times for his wife. He did go from one extreme to the other. But it was when he, in the 1890s, he retranslated the New Testament.

So he got a copy of the Bible in presumably in Greek or something like that. And then they had the Russian Orthodox version, which everyone else read, and he translated his own version. And then he realized that actually the way I should be living is vegetarianism, giving everything away, living as a surf,

all that kind of thing. But he was tortured his whole life, like if you do read bits of his diaries, which I kind of have over the years, it was like an adolescent constantly. So everyone thinks Tolstoy had this phase where he was shagging around and writing all these great novels,

and then this phase of ascetic religiousness. And actually he was up and down all the time. His diary is full of him messing up, letting himself down, scolding himself saying, all right, tomorrow I will do this, this and that. And it's like real kind of self-loathing, but self-involved.

And it would be stupid stuff he'd get annoyed with himself about, one entry in his diary said, receive my gymnastics teacher over familiarity. You know, hate myself for that, or made a bad exit from the Colossians' drawing room. That's very interesting. This does sound like a lot of stuff

that I think I angst over all the time. He was so angsty. He's correctly freezing people as a classic though, isn't it? So someone else who did that, someone else who noted their moral failures or what they thought of their moral failures obsessively, was Isaac Newton, which we've discussed. He said, you know, I got this wrong,

or I was peevish, or I think threatened to kill my parents. Parents have burned their house down, was one thing. Oh, up to that point I was going to be like, it sounds like social anxiety, but I think that's probably a bit further. Also, the fact that he translated his own version of the Bible, which is like Thomas Jefferson, which we talked about a few weeks ago.

So these, that sort of great people of history tend to think they can have another crack at the bottom. Yeah. One of his things that he tried in his early teenage diaries was he kept a note of his attempts to only go to the brothel twice a month. I know, so he really was trying. Yeah, he was.

That sounds like the gym. He's got his membership, he never uses it. It's a waste of money. Got it on Christmas day. I want to quit the brothel. After a while, you haven't been to the brothel, you can't really go back, because they've noticed that you haven't been there.

When he was 16, he recorded that he sort of scourged himself and whipped himself, because he wanted to toughen up to physical pain. And then immediately the next day, he remembered that life is short, and so he lay in bed for three days, enjoying reading and eating honey cakes. Honey cakes are nice.

Are we all Tolstoy in some way? He wrote The Shawshank Redemption, or he wrote the original... Sorry, I am feeling a bit down here. So The Shawshank Redemption, the film, is based on Stephen King's novella, Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption. But that in turn was based on a short story by Tolstoy,

called Falsies the Truth but Waits, about a man who's sent to prison for a murder that he didn't commit. Really? Yeah, and it's all about redemption and forgiveness. But he wanted Tom Hanks for the part, didn't he? He did, yeah, thank you. As a young man, Tolstoy lost so much money gambling

that he had to sell off his family home. And this was a huge shame and all of this, but the buyer dismantled the family home and removed it from the site it was. So there were just two huge wings of the house on either side, which he had not sold off. And there's lots of gaping hole in between them. Oh, that's amazing.

Well, all the useful rooms in the middle bit. 20 on suite bathrooms and no bedrooms. Okay, that is all of our facts. That's what comes next. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to subscribe to our podcast, if you'd like to get in touch with us,

Alex is so concerning because you're supposed to listen to our podcast every week to check it all sounds okay and then upload it. And it sounds like you've never heard it before. Yeah, I'm sorry. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us, if you'd like to get in contact with any of us, we can be found on our social media account.

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Okay, thank you so much for listening. No, no, okay, okay. Or you can get in contact with us all at No Such Thing. Okay, look. Or you can get in contact with all of us at No Such Thing. On Twitter, at No Such Thing. Sorry, what was the other thing? Just to say, okay, thanks so much for listening.

And if you want to listen to any of our old episodes, you can go to NoSuchThingAsAfish.com and you can also go to the website if you want tour dates and the book release. Yeah, you can go to our website, NoSuchThingAsAfish.com for tour dates of the book tour. And also, no, it's just a book tour, isn't it? For the American tour?

Book of the Year, isn't that also that? No, there's still some tickets for New York. If you're from New York, come along. Yeah, Alex doesn't care about any of this because he's not going to be here. But please go to NoSuchThingAsAfish.com. You can get tickets for our US tour. If you're in the US, still some tickets left.

You can go to our Book of the Year 2019 tour or pre-order the book as well if you go there. Alex, you designed that website. You should have a real dog in this game. Thank you, sorry, goodbye.