No Such Thing As A Fish - 313: No Such Thing As A Dangerous Coconut

Episode Date: March 20, 2020

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss fruit that's expensive and dangerous; and people who got very hot and very cold.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi guys, just before we start this show I wanted to say hope you're all doing okay in this bizarre situation that we've all found ourselves in. And I hope you're staying safe and washing your hands a billion times a minute and not going near anyone else. And there's really nothing that we can tell you about this virus that you can't already learn from the news and the medical advice and all of that jazz. But what we can do is we can still share with you our four favorite facts from the last seven days and fill your head with distracting nonsense facts which hopefully will distract you from the fact you're stuck in a house with your spouse or your kids or your mates and you now all want to kill each other and will distract you even from the

slightly more disconcerting global event. So as long as you guys continue to listen we I'm afraid are going to continue to podcast every week starting now. Okay, on with the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Culverin Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Czenski 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 my fact this week my fact is computer pioneer Charles Babbage once cooked himself in an oven for four minutes at 265 degrees just to see what would happen. What was he trying to make at the time?

Cooked Babbage. Babbage, cabbage confusion. So this was as a result of an artistic friend of him called Sir Francis Chantry who was a sculptor and he made big bronze statues and he was doing a particularly big one so they had to build this giant oven for him to build it to cook it in and so Babbage heard about this and he was really intrigued and he went to see it and while he was there he was sort of talking to them and they said why don't you go inside, be interesting right? And Babbage said yeah that would be interesting so he went along with another guy called Captain Cater and his description which he wrote in his memoirs say the iron folding doors of the small room or oven were opened. Captain Cater and myself entered and they were closed upon us.

Then the further corner of the room which was paved with square stones was visibly a dull red heat, the thermometer marked if I recollect rightly 265 degrees. He talks about his pulse quickening, he talks about the perspiration and he says it was fine, he says it was absolutely fine. What? Well he's only there for how long, four minutes? Four or five minutes, six minutes, he wasn't sure. The heat sort of made him a bit dosy probably. There's one other thing he said, someone didn't go in with them. He says Sir Thomas Lawrence who was suffering from indisposition did not think it prudent to join our party. In fact he died on the second or third day after our experiment. Oh so who got it? Oh Thomas Lawrence never got to go, it wouldn't have mattered if he

had gone in the oven probably. Well maybe he should have gone in, you never know, perhaps had some healing properties. Maybe, yeah. This is not sound medical advice. It's amazing, and he went in other hot places. Well it's thought that this was in preparation for his next big trip, which was he went down a volcano, an active volcano. He went down Vesuvius, one of the most famous volcanoes. Yeah of all. Celebrity volcano. Did your mate who died, die from falling into a volcano or what? It doesn't, I don't think so, no. But he was obsessed with, he wanted to experience an earthquake, and he once found out he was in Italy at the time, and he heard a town have been destroyed by an earthquake, and he rushed there just in case there were some aftershocks

he could feel. But he said my passion was disappointed, so I consulted myself by a flotation with a volcano. Oh, and he didn't feel the earth moved. So did he go and dip himself in lava or what happened in the bottom there? He went into the crater. You know there are bits in sort of in the lip of the crater of an active volcano, so he went in, he saw the lava below him, and he observed the bubbles of it swelling up, and because it was active at the time, he made a measurement of the eruptions, he said right, those are every 10 minutes, and he said well okay, so I can go in for up to eight minutes, and he did, he went in for six minutes. And he was lowered by rope,

was he? Yeah, yeah, it's extraordinary. And did he eventually throw the ring into the lava? One thing, he put his cane down in a specific spot, and it happened to hit I think a bit of lava, so it burst into flames, so he had a flaming cane as he was trying to put it out. Okay, so first of all, no, second of all, because we've already done some stuff, but who was Charles Babbage then? Charles Babbage, computer pioneer. He's historically linked with Ada Lovelace, and he was the person who dreamt up effectively the original computer. He's known as the father of computing, and it was something he never got to fully make in his lifetime, though in the hundreds of years since, we've actually finished his plans and shown that his plans did

work, so he was a genius, this guy was a proper genius. Although, you say he was a father of computing, but I quite like the description that is uncle of computing, because he didn't spawn anything, and I hadn't quite realized this about Charles Babbage, so he made this very famous difference engine, or he designed this difference engine in the 1820s, early 30s, and that was essentially going to be a big calculator, and then he thought no, no, I want to do this analytical engine, which was going to be a big computer, and kind of the difference being I think about memory and storage, the ability to build on stuff. Well, so for instance, a difference engine could only do certain things, but the analytical engine, you could program to do

lots of different things. Yes, and that's where Ada Lovelace came in with her ability to program, but he did all this, never got made, because the government stopped funding him, because he kept not completing stuff, and essentially he had zero impact on computing, so he didn't spawn anything, because everyone was just like, well, that was all pointless, it got sold for scrap, or used up for scrap, that was it. Only one of the computing pioneers in the 40s knew about him. Really? No one else did, and it was only in the 1970s when they're going through his paperwork that they actually discovered, oh yeah, Babbage was sort of onto this, something similar. It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah, he got the equivalent of two million dollars from the government to

make this difference engine, and then there was a change of government, and he insisted on meeting the new prime minister who was Robert Peel, and he basically just turned up and yelled at his face, give me more money, give me more money, and then Peel went, okay, fine, I'll talk to Parliament, and so Peel went to Parliament and sort of discussed this idea of giving him more money, and everyone just decided to make jokes at his expense. It's like, oh, the first thing he's going to calculate is when it might finally do something, and stuff like that, so yeah. Sounds like it's up there with the banter you see in the House of Commons today. And then he tried to become a politician, didn't he? Yeah, but he couldn't get

elected because basically everyone said, you just took two million dollars for nothing. Yeah, and they said they would heckle him during his speeches about this whatever project he was doing and why he was losing this money, and it infuriated him so much that he would abandon whatever political speech he had just to yell back at them going, you don't understand what I'm working on, I'm a genius kind of thing. And then to get more money, he came up with this brilliant scheme because he couldn't get any more money from the government, so he thought, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a computer that can play notes and crosses, and I'm going to go around the country and play notes and crosses against people for money and get all their money off them.

Did he really? Yeah, and then Ada Lovelace said, no, that's a stupid idea. Yeah, he's extraordinary. He had so many of these little plans and ideas that took him away from this great big idea that he was trying to work on. There was a crazy one I read about where he was at the ballet, and he was watching this show, and he got really bored, and he thought, this is just too boring, I could do better than this. So he dreamt up. We've all thought it. He dreamt up an idea which was called the rainbow dance, and he actually had this rehearsed. He had 60 female dancers, they were dressed in white, and they represented fireflies, and they were all dancing, and in the background, there was a huge projected hydrogen blow lamp

that had color filters on it, so he would put different colors projected onto each of the dancers on the stage, so it would look like what he called the rainbow dance. That sounds really cool. It sounds really cool. The problem was is that it was extremely dangerous, so when they did their first rehearsal, they had two fire engines standing by, because they would worry that the theater would burn down, and eventually the theater owner said, I'm not doing this, I'm not putting this live flame in this theater while you try and do this, we'll kill everyone. So it was never performed. So the difference engine, the first one he designed that would have been a calculator basically, I didn't know why it was

necessary to build it, but it's, so before that, you just had to use, if you were doing calculations for various reasons, you had to think of a ready reckoner, which was a table of basically sums that other people had done, but they'd done them by hand, and these were the early computers, the computers were the people who were sitting in rooms doing basically boring wage slave work with these primitive devices, but they had loads of mistakes in them because it was really badly paid and it wasn't interesting work to do. Okay, I read this in two different places, and I can't quite believe it, but allegedly the first computers doing these ready reckoner tables were French hairdressers who had been left out of work by the French Revolution.

Well, because everyone had their head chopped off and didn't need a haircut on the mark. Or maybe like if you had long hair in the French Revolution, you would just put your head just at the edge of the guillotine, so it would cut the long bit of your hair off. Well, I hope no one noticed it was just their hair that had gone not their head. And then they waved their hair around to the crowd. Yeah, we've got it! Slink off back down the ladder. So I have no idea why these French hairdressers were left short of work by the Revolution. It was definitely true that the French were the best at having logarithm tables and trig

tables and stuff like that. And that was why he wanted to do this difference engine because maybe it might help us catch up with the French because it gave them an advantage in warfare because it's good for working out which directions to go in your ships and it's good for building bridges and building things. Yeah. Is it true? I read somewhere, actually, no, this was, I remember this was on a QI episode. Dara O'Breen made this point that when he did the plans, he left sort of like mount weasels in the plans so that no one could build them. So you need to explain what a mount weasel is. Yeah, so a mount weasel is in a map. When you want to have copyright over a map, you put in a fake town or a stop or it's just a little detail that means it's yours. So anyone

copies it, you know that they copied it. You can prove it by saying this place doesn't exist, we created it for our map. And so that's the same thing. He put a few mount weasels, but these mount weasels were designed to kill the machine from working out. So it's like a virus, basically. Is that an excuse for cocking out? I think it's, yeah. I must say, if we get any facts wrong in today's episode, they are mount weasels. My six years of this podcast have been mount weasels. I think a friend of mine has just written a book about dictionaries. It's not out yet, but she's called Ellie Williams and it's a book about mount weasels, basically. And apparently, I think one of the first ever mount weasels was someone in an encyclopedia. It was an entry about

Miss Somebody Mount Weasel. Oh, is that where it comes from? Yeah. And she was a sort of, she was an intrepid pioneering journalist. She used to have sex with weasels. That's right, she did. Yeah. What was that was the clue that it was written? And in the original encyclopedia biography, I'm going off memory, so it's slightly wrong, but it's something like she was killed by an explosion when she was working for shrapnel magazine or something. They made up this really fun fake biography for her. But talking about viruses and bugs, it would really be, if we're talking about actual computer viruses, kind of the Ada Lovelace department that was responsible for those because she joined him, essentially, didn't she? So she was Byron's daughter and she,

her coming out ceremony, she, when she was 18 or whatever, she met him. Coming out had a different meaning in those days. Different meaning, yes. What's the meaning? I actually took it to be... No, no. So people, when they sort of came of age, young ladies, they could be presented in society, posh young ladies. Okay, cool. And it was basically saying, ladies, my daughter's on the market now, have your, you know, have a go. And so... If you think you're hard enough. Anyway, she bumped into Charles Babbage. It was impressed, joined him, wrote loads of code for his engine. So I was reading a blog by a coder, a modern day coder, he wrote this a couple of years ago, and he actually ran her code. It was a code for working out Bernoulli numbers, and he ran her

code through his computer, and it didn't work. And he went back through her code and I had a bug in it. What's a Bernoulli number? Oh, God, don't ask that. You know what? I was really good. I thought, you know what, I'll just have a really simple way of explaining Bernoulli numbers. And I started looking into it and boy, is it complicated. Yeah. Oh, my days. It's about number theory and powers of numbers and adding them all together and them having certain relationships between each other. Okay, sounds hot. It's sexy stuff. But yeah, so that's the first ever bug. How cool must that have been for that coder? Who found the first ever computer bug? That is amazing. I know one of us he might have struggled to get along with. Based on something, a line in his biography.

Who, Babbage? Yeah. Okay. Did he hate men with beards? No. Men with, you're looking at me. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Glasses. It's not glasses. Did he hate Northerners? He hated puns. Sorry, Dave. He wrote that puns are detestable because they just rely on one word sounding like another word. He would have hated the Babbage Cabbage joke at the top of the show. The best thing about Babbage, which is always comes up with QI research is how much he hated noise. It's so good. Like he just, he was just so anti any noise in London whatsoever, that he had made lists of whenever there was any noise that put him off his work. He detailed 165 interruptions that he suffered over 80 days. He made a list of encourages of street music,

which included tavern keepers, public houses, gin shops, children, visitors to the city from the country. And then basically his neighbors hated him so much that they just started playing tin whistles outside of his house and stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, it sounds, London sounds horrific back then. And he had it in especially for organ grinders. He said there are a thousand of them. And he was a bit xenophobic about it. He said they're all Italian organ grinders who've come over here to destroy the peace. And he spent all this money on lawyers. He went to the home secretary and he got the law changed. He actually campaigned for and won a change in the law. He was the Nigel Farage of the early 19th century. I don't think we could be changing the law.

Can't go that far. It's not a big leap. Yeah. So like, and like I said, people would like tease him because they hated him about them just him always saying, turn it down, turn it down. And so at one stage there was a brass band that played outside of his house for five hours. Children would follow him down the street making loads of noise. And he said, he was quoted as saying, in one case, there were certainly above a hundred persons consisting of men, women and boys with multitudes of young children who followed me through the streets before I could find the police. I just followed by a hundred people making a load of noise. He's like the opposite of the pine by prevailing. He's not playing an instrument.

Yes. Everyone else playing instruments at him as they chase him down the street. Wow, my God. He also believed in ghosts. So he started a ghost club at university to prove their existence. And the other club that he set up with the same sort of group of friends was the extractor's club. And the extractor's club was dedicated and a lot of fans. He wouldn't have liked that. Yeah. The idea was that they were dedicated to liberating any one of their members from a madhouse. Should they be committed? Yeah. I guess they were coming up with so many odd ideas trying to summon the devil. Maybe it wasn't funny. So just quickly back on the relationship with Ada Lovelace. So she was obviously very famous at the time and very high in society. And he was

an inventor who was obviously a bit of a genius, but was not very good at completing his inventions. And so she decided to write him a letter saying that I would like to kind of go into partnership with you. And I'll make sure that you get everything done. But you just have to do it, basically. And she wrote to one of her friends, if he does consent to what I propose, I shall probably be enabled to keep him out of much hot water and bring his engine to consummation. She said, I will be willing to be his whipper in during the next three years if I see fair prospects of success. And she gave him all these lists of conditions that he would have to do if they were going to go into partnership. And then Babbage read her letter and then wrote his own

notes on that saying, saw AAL this morning and refused all the conditions. Okay, it is time for fact number two. And that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that the Manchineal tree is so toxic that if you park under it and it rains, the drips from the branches can strip the paint from your car. So this is a tree. You get it in the Caribbean. I have seen it, I have to say, when I was in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. And when you see it, there's always all the ones that I saw. There was a big red mark on it saying don't go near this tree and a sign saying don't whatever you do, don't go near this tree. Although it was in quite small fonts, you had to get quite close to the tree in order to read it. But this is probably the most poisonous tree on earth.

And it says so in the Guinness Book of Records that it's the most poisonous tree. And everything about it is poisonous. So if you eat the fruit, it's terrible. If you burn it and breathe in some of the smoke, it's terrible. And it has this chemical called four-ball. And it's very water soluble. So if water goes onto it, the chemical can get into there and it will drip on you. And it can cause terrible rashes on your skin. And it's so strong, apparently it can rip the paint from your car. It's extraordinary. It's so cool. Although lots of them in Florida are painted with a big X, which to me looks like the treasure. So I would be tempted to go there and spend ages digging around, eating the roots probably. The obvious thing would be get rid of

them, right? That sounds like why don't you just chop them down. But apparently they choose not to purely out of, they help with erosion from the coast as it's coming in. It's very good for protecting other trees. Also, I don't think we just destroy every bit of nature that's dangerous to us. Yes, we do. So I mostly got interested in this because I saw this article in the BMJ from a few years ago called Eating a Manchineal Beach Apple by Nicola H. Strickland, who is a consultant radiologist. And she and a friend were holidaying in the Caribbean and they saw a piece of fruit on the floor and thought, oh, that looks nice. And then decided to eat it. She sounds like a woman after my own heart. And so they ate this stuff and got extremely, extremely sick. But

luckily she is a scientist, so she could write it up about what happened. She said it was incredibly painful. She could hardly swallow. The pain was exacerbated by most alcoholic beverages. I love the way that she's tried all the different alcoholic beverages, although it was mildly appeased by peanut collardas. So if you ever do have one of these, then have some peanut collardas and that will make you feel a bit better. That's the song, isn't it? If you like peanut collardas and getting caught in the rain, don't park under the Manchineal Tree. It was used as a useful thing for Indigenous people who were living, say, in Florida at the time where the tree is. There's a story. It's a bit of a myth of a story, but it's one of those ones that sits 50-50 on the side of, we're not quite

sure if it's true or not. There was a guy called Juan Ponce de Leon who was an explorer and he tried to colonize a specific bit of Florida. He was initially, it was said, legendary looking for the Fountain of Youth, which was said to be in Florida. So he returned there after a few trips and he brought 200 people. He had priests and farmers and artisans and 50 horses and so on. And he wanted to properly colonize this place. And they were attacked by the local people who wanted them to go away. And what they would do is they would dip the tips of the arrows in the Manchineal sap and fire at them. So even if it sort of pierced them just a bit, it would go inside and give them a poisoning. And supposedly that is how this leader,

Ponce de Leon, died. He took an arrow to the thigh and they retreated. So they actually, it worked. We need some pina coladas over here now. I read that that was just a slight attempt later to slander him saying he was looking for the Fountain of Youth because it's basically saying this guy's an idiot. Yeah, some lots of sources say, I mean, what he was definitely searching for was an island called Bimini. And the King of Spain had granted it to him, but he hadn't said where it was. I don't know how this came about. Basically, King of Spain said, you can have it, if you can find it. So he was definitely colonizing Florida at this point. What an easy trick for a king or queen. Oh, you can have Bibli-Bobli-Boo-Boo. And that's my debt

paid off. They say it's going excellent Mount Weasel, sir. But yeah, apparently as well, it would aid people who sort of were shipwrecked sailors, for example, if they didn't want to die a gruesome death, they would know just eat that and end your life early. It was sort of used as a suicide assistance as well. Again, these are reports from the annals of history. Can't be sure if they're true. You could rub yourself all over with lime juice, apparently, to stop the toxin corroding your skin. This is based on an account I read in 1821. And so I maybe check the updated medical advice, but that's what the local carib people used to do. So they'd sort of cut the trees down and they wouldn't really be wearing clothes, but they would cover themselves head to

toe in lime juice. But I think there's a lot of limes. That is a lot of limes. To cover a whole human body. Yeah. They're small, aren't they? Limes are small, yes. Yeah, compared to human bodies. Much smaller. They were used in fishing, because you can drop the poison into a sort of pond or a lake and all the fish just sort of go belly up, float to the top really. Yeah. So again, this was in this account, but it seems very risky to then consume the fish that have consumed this highly because it might be concentrated in a bit of them. You would have thought. Although fish is often served with a little bit of lemon. So if you coat all your fish in the lemon, maybe that's why. It's made into furniture as well, isn't it? You're kidding. Yeah. So they use the trick,

but so they have a special way of removing any poison elements. Okay. But yeah, so yeah, if you dry it out, so they light fire all around it before cutting it down for harvesting it and that just dries it all out and then you can cut it down relatively safely. You have to wear a big mask. Interesting way of potentially killing someone, because it would just look like a normal bit of furniture. You know, have a seat. They have a seat. Yeah. They'd have to sit down with a burr bottom though, wouldn't they? That's how I conduct all my meetings, Joe. Thank you for coming in. Trousers off. Thank you. Have a seat. Have you heard of the man-eating trees of Madagascar? So these were written about first in 1874 in the newspaper

The New York World, which was quite an unreliable newspaper, partly because it published this account about the man-eating trees of Madagascar. And it describes this human sacrifice done by a tribe called the Mkodo tribe who took a woman to this tree and they leave her by it for a bit, and they put her on it and then its branches all coil around and devour her. And this is complete yellow journalism hoax stuff. It's not real at all, obviously. But a book was written a couple of years later called Madagascar, Land of the Man-eating Tree. And in it, I just really like this author kind of using the story but then disassociating himself from it. He said, I do not know whether this tigerish tree really exists or whether the blood-curdling story is

about a pure myth. It is enough for my purpose if its story focuses your interest on one of the least known spots of the world. It's such bologna. Wow. He's just saying it's not true despite the fact it's the title of his book. Yeah. There's a so meta that you're now then repeating and making with the same fascination. If I get people interested in Madagascar, that's all I'm interested in. Wait, and what's the title of his book? It's not the Man-eating Tree of Madagascar. Yes, it's Madagascar, Land of the Man-eating Tree. Actually, on his side, I reckon a few more people visited, boosted the tourist industry back in when was it he was writing? The 1870s. Boosted Madagascar's tourist industry in the 1870s.

Yeah, because there's like a butlin' zone now. Actually, can I just mention one more dangerous tree? Yes, please. So there's one more dangerous tree that's probably the most well-known tree for being dangerous and that is dangerous because it knocks you on the head. The coconut tree. Do you know why the coconut tree has quite a bad reputation? So people say like in gales, people sort of flock inside because they're going to get knocked unconscious by it and loads. You know there's that fact about. Yeah, I thought it was like in Papua New Guinea, like 10% of the people who were in A&E had been hit by a coconut or something. So this is all the fault of sharks because I think Straight Dope and Snopes looked into this, but there was the myth that

increase like rocketed after 2002 and it was propagated by this shark expert who did that famous comparison that said falling coconuts killed 10 times more people or 15 times more people than sharks do. Trying to say, look sharks aren't that dangerous. Fair enough, but he was basing that on a nonsense made up study by an insurance company, holiday insurance company that was saying 150 people a year are killed by coconuts and it was actually based on two anecdotal potential deaths by one traveler and then coconuts have this terrible reputation. Are you telling me that all that coconut insurance I bought is completely timeless? I'm so sorry. I'm going to take my coconut helmet back to the shop tomorrow. Just saving you all a bit of hassle. Well there's

something so Queensland, do you remember in Australia? Queensland removed all its coconut trees from beaches in 2002 because of the danger posed. See, I told you people do that for dangerous trees. You're right, they do. It's not just me, but I am Australian so maybe it's Australians. I would genuinely just give people helmets which have a massive blade, like an axe blade on top. That way you just get two coconut halves and you're fine. Does it not maybe make the whole of the earth a little bit more dangerous if everyone's walking around with blades on their heads? Maybe. What you take with one hand you give away with the other. Yeah, coconut deaths would drop, but I think axe helmet deaths would rise a bit, yes.

Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is Anna. My fact this week is that cryonic freezing chambers are built to store up to four bodies and five heads. Wait a minute. So that means there's something not quite added up here. This is like a future game show, right? Where they battle out five heads for the four bodies. Who's going to be placed on the head? That's it. What do you mean like musical chairs? It's much like that. How does that work? Well, this I will say at the top is a very morbid fact, but basically you can get cryonically frozen. A few hundred people have done it so far and you've got two options. You can go whole body, head to toe, or you can do just head.

And it's actually a bit cheaper to do just the head. Yeah, it's not that much cheaper though. It's not enough cheaper, is it? You're right. I would, I mean, so full body or one, I got full body cost two hundred and fifteen thousand dollars from the source I was on. I've actually got a better deal. Oh, okay. Two hundred thousand, but okay. Okay, and then the one and then head is ninety five thousand dollars, but that's half as much. Now the head is the bit I would want to keep, but I think you should pay a quarter as much. You're storing so much less. You're using so much less. Way more important though. It's about demand, isn't it, Andy? It's not about space. Yeah, come on, mate.

Well, you're using less dry ice. I just think that should be better deals. Well, I agree. I think maybe when demand does go up, maybe the price will come down. But yeah, at the moment you can do either. And also another weird thing about the storage is everyone's upside down, which is truly bizarre. So you've got all these bodies in a tank and they're still with their heads at the bottom. And apparently that's because if there's some sort of an error, there's some sort of a leakage and the body starts to thaw, it'll come from the top. And then the feet will thaw first because you don't want your head thawing first. Because as Andy said, that's for some of us is the bit that we like the most. This is only in the Russian one,

isn't it? No, they're all upside down. The Russian one is the cheaper one, by the way. Maybe the one that you have a good deal at. I know, is that right? What was your prices? My price was 200 grand. That was Alcor in America, but the Russian one does do a bit more The Russian one is $36,000 for full body and $18,000 for just the head. So it's a lot cheaper. But the bad thing about it is you don't have your own fridge. You have to share fridges with other people and sometimes with pets and things. I read that. It's unbelievable. Also, you're not in a CreoRus is the name of the firm, isn't it? They're like Toys R Us. Well, actually, because it's Russian, the R will be backwards.

But you're not even, so you're not only not in a separate chamber, you're just in this place in a sleeping bag, apparently. You're just upside down in a sleeping bag with some dog next to your head. It's the same in the American ones, completely, except there are just more people in the Russian ones. So you do have to share with a few people. It's more like, you know, I thought you got your own tube, basically, in the American ones. Oh, I thought the American ones, I think it's in the tube that you have the full bodies. And they do, even for the heads, they put that in its own special sleeping bag. I'm just quite like that. It's a sleeping bag. It's going in so nice. Yeah. And it's because they sort of say

that to reanimate the body is going to be a lot harder, like with the theories of, you know, why just use your head as opposed to the full body. That's one of the things they say, you know, will probably grow you a new body is what they say, or will 3D print you a new body. You know, who knows what the technology will be, but that's not the worrying bit. You could be a robot. You can say, you can say any bollocks to people who've just given you 200 grand undergoing in your freezer. I mean, yeah, I think that's why we are saying this is pseudo science, right? Is that what we're saying? I don't, so I kind of agree with, there's one scientist, I was reading an article by one scientist online, who I agree with, who was saying,

essentially, it's not pseudo science. It's like science is on very unproven at the moment, and there is evidence that you can reanimate certain animals, but it's extremely unlikely we'll be able to reanimate ourselves. But on the other hand, even if there's only a 1% chance, you know, why not take it? Well, one reason is you might come back to life forever. Yeah. I mean, it seems like it's worth doing. Well, not forever, just a bit further down the line for a bit more time. That's assuming immortality has been cracked. I think that's two things that have been shoved together that are quite quite right. That's the 0.5% chance we've got the elixir of life, and we're able to reanimate. What if they can do it? They can just do it again, can't they?

You know, if they can reanimate the dead. I'm with Punks Diddlyon over there. The big problem, which neurologists say is basically your brain can't survive this kind of thing. Yeah. And even if you could somehow bring your body back to life, you'd be very likely to severely brain damaged. Yeah. The brain is designed to keep out other liquids and stuff. There's the blood-brain barrier, which is meant to keep your brain separate. And so you would have to pump the antifreeze, basically, so vigorously into the brain that it might be, it might really damage the... Yeah. There is a British outfit devoted to cryonics. So there are only a few cryonics chambers in the world. There are a couple in America, one in Russia. But there is,

in the UK, a cryonics ambulance. And the Financial Times interviewed a guy called Tim Gibson, who is a member of the British Cryonic Society, basically. And they do all the medical procedures to cool you down and stabilize you. And then they'll send you to the USA. And there are 40 people on the list who might ring up at any time and say, I'm dying. Can you come and get me? And they give you all the drugs. And then they replace the blood with antifreeze. We should probably say why they replace it with antifreeze. Because when you're cryonically frozen, you don't actually have any ice in your body. Because that would be really bad. Your body is huge proportion of it is water. And if you actually frozen it into ice, then it

would expand and all your cells would explode. So you have to replace all the blood. You have to pump the body full of antifreeze to stop the water actually turning to ice. So I think people think you're becoming kind of ice. But yes, we have we have Austin Powers images in our head, I think, for cryogenics, right? It's it's yeah, demolition man. So this thing about having this ambulance come, they try to get there quite quick, because obviously, once you pass away, no, no, no, it's all to do with preserving the body straight away, right? So part of this Russian company, the cryo rs company, they offer VIP package deals. Yeah. And so at the base level, what they do is they give you a Fitbit style wristband. And that will alert an alert that will alert a nearby team.

So when they see it sort of flatline, they'll go quick, let's get to them ASAP batteries just run out. I have an Apple watch, right? And the battery runs out all the time. Every time that happens, suddenly a crack squad of ambulance men turn up and try to cut your head off. It is is the only ambulance which turns up hoping that you'll be dead. Yes, if you're fine, then they have to go away again. Yeah, that's really interesting. They would have to wait outside with the other ambulance crew who are trying to keep you alive and then have an argument. So the father of Chronix is a guy called Robert Ettinger. And he is preserved at the moment in one of these places, as are his late mother, and also his first and second wives. God, that's

going to cause problems. I just read that as well. And what a brilliant sitcom that is in the making, right? Do you think they're all in the same tube? Because that's four people. That's a four person tube right there. Yeah, I wonder who's that? Some stranger's head. Oh, God, how did I end up with these guys? No, once you learn that that's the dynamic, you're like, I'll pay to go in that one. I want to see that when I wake up. Your first wife going, oh, and who's this lovely lady? So this all is quite farfetched, obviously, this kind of cryonic freezing. And actually, Dan, you said cryogenic earlier, but just to be clear, cryogenics is actually the science of getting stuff to really, really, really low temperatures. It's not to do with cryonics. And

this is made very clear on the official cryogenics website of the United States, which is basically the website which serves anyone who's interested in that scientist who are interested in that. Basically, on their front page, they're like, we are not about freezing bodies and hoping to reanimate them after death. We did not believe this is a real thing. If you want to do that, look up cryonics, please leave our website. So that's people always confuse those things. But it's quite farfetched. But what we can do is reanimate people very temporarily now. And this is really exciting. So it's just happened. So it's basically about if you're in a traumatic accident, and it's extremely unlikely that you're going to be able to be saved in the time that

you've got, then they can sort of put you on hold for a few hours. And this is really early days. It hasn't been the study published, but at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in November last year, they've placed at least one patient in suspended animation. And so what they do is they come in, they've had a trauma, they've been shot or stabbed, they have a big cardiac arrest, they've lost loads of blood, they're not going to survive if you only have five minutes to operate on them. So you cool their body to 10 to 15 degrees Celsius, which is obviously much colder than the human body is supposed to go by replacing all of their blood with ice cold saline solution. And so their brain almost completely stops. They've done this for a few hours. And

then you have two hours to actually operate on them and save their lives. And then you replace their blood and they come back like, and they are clinically dead for that period of time. For two hours clinically dead. Wow. Isn't that amazing? It is amazing. It's not much of an episode of Austin Powers, isn't it? When you come back after two hours, the fashions are kind of similar to when you left. So many dated references. But that's, so we've learned how to press pause on life, basically. It looks like it. Yeah. Again, it hasn't been published yet. There's sort of like drip dropping all these hints that it's very exciting. But they should be known by the end of the year. That's extraordinary. I have another

freezing thing. Okay. Yeah. So Reader's Digest magazine just suggested various methods to deal with hemorrhoids. There's just a top 10 methods to deal with hemorrhoids. One of them was putting a warm tea bag against your bottom. And one of them was grating a raw potato and making a kind of potato poultice. Okay. And then off the back of this, there are lots of other websites which recommended putting a frozen wedge of potato into your bottom for 30 seconds. And then for a minute and then for one minute and so on. Like a chip, a frozen chip. No, like a potato wedge. But that's like a thick chip. A wedge is, sorry, I can't believe that this is the debate we're having. A wedge is different to a chip. Yeah, it's different. A chip would be a cuboid, whereas a wedge would

have a curved end and a sharp end. Yeah. It's shaped like a wedge. It's like shaped like a door wedge. Do you think the shape is important? Probably is, isn't it? Because you'd not want to go sharp-ended first. I think if you're going to put anything up your bum, the shape is important. No, but you will want to put the thin end of the wedge. That's where we get the phrase from. You don't start with the big end of the wedge. No, you're right. That's the right way to happen. Anyway, doctors recommend not to do this because it doesn't work. And you just end up ruining a perfectly good potato wedge. That's the second fact you've had today, where there's been a very long explanation of an amazing fact with the caveat at the end that this isn't true. What was

the first one? The Madagascar trees. Have you not read Andy's autobiography? I shove frozen potatoes up my bum. Page one. I don't actually do that. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. Okay, my fact is that if Hamlet had wanted to buy a lemon, it would have cost him 700 euros. Okay, this sounds like another one of your facts from this week. I think I've got dance notes here. Now, the Hamlet I'm referring to is contemporary with Shakespeare. So it's if Hamlet had been alive when Shakespeare wrote the play, because Hamlet's based on an older story. It's several hundred years before that. So I'm talking about the late 16th century. Yep. If Hamlet had been alive in the late 16th century. Yes. And real.

Yes. And he'd been at home in Elsin or Castle, which is real. That's good news. That's a one part of the story, isn't it? It would have cost him 700 euros. Well, did they have euros? They would have cost him the local equivalent of 700 euros. So you've decided when there was a very famous real man available for this fact. Shakespeare. Yep. You decided to go for a fake man. Okay, if Shakespeare had wanted to buy a lemon when he was on his research trip to Elsin or it would have cost him the local equivalent at the time. Yeah. Of 700 euros. Except he never went to Elsin or so. That's another fact is that lemons used to be expensive. That's why you said the word if at the start. Yes. In fact, all of these things are completely sorted by that one word

if. Let's do that with more of our facts. Yeah. So the fact is lemons are cheap now is basically the fact but they were expensive then they were expensive then and they're both are true. The price of lemons has changed. I think it's the one thing we can all agree on. Sorry, should have made that my fact, shouldn't I? That's one thing that is definitely true. What have you got any sort of further explanation? You know, why were they so expensive? Were they gold plated back then? So obviously lemons are more of a tropical fruit and the other thing I didn't know when researching this is that lemons didn't get to Europe for a really long time. And in fact, the part of the reason was that they are manmade humans invented lemons. Wow.

They're crossbred between a citron which is a Himalayan fruit which is large and not very juicy and then another kind of sour orange and we're not I think sure exactly what the other ingredient is but we know that it is a hybrid. Was it was it definitely not a natural hybrid? It was definitely manmade. So I thought they're very good at hybridising, aren't they, a citrus plant? They are. I don't think we've got the records of whether it was manmade or natural. No, because I think some of them naturally met each other. All the hybrids weren't manmade. But all citrus goes back to these three super citrus fruits, isn't it? So weird. Yeah. So anyway, they started in Northern China or

India or Pakistan, Northeast India or Pakistan, I'm not sure where. And then by the 4th century BC they were in Rome but they were still obviously very expensive and especially in Northern Europe, i.e. Denmark which is where Elsa North Castle is. I found out how much they cost in Britain around a similar time-ish. So Henry VIII has his privy purse so you can see everything that he spent his money on and at one stage to James Hobart for bringing oranges and lemons to the king at Hartford he paid 20 shillings. Now I don't know how many oranges and or lemons there were but he went to Hartford Castle as almost a bit like a holiday home kind of thing so he wouldn't have been there for the whole time so it would have been for a

shortish amount of time he would have been eating these oranges and lemons so maybe not so many of them. And other things that were worth 20 shillings around the same time so I could work out what 20 shillings was. To Arthur the looter for a loot for the Duke of Richmond. So if you wanted to buy a loot, the musical instrument, not the magazine for buying used cars, then that was 20 shillings. What a very useful point of comparison for all of us because my loots, I know how much they cost me so that's very helpful. If you wanted to buy a citron in loot this could be a... very good. That's the joke I think that Charles Babbage would have hated most of all in this whole show. He paid Anthony Ansley, 20 shillings for playing him three days at tennis

and 20 shillings would also buy him a brace of greyhounds and a wig for his fool. So these are all the equivalent of getting a certain amount of oranges and lemons is about the same price. An undisclosed quantity. Sounds like they were cheaper, we can broadly say they were cheaper. It feels like they were cheaper here than they were 700 euros. Yeah and that was earlier. So I should say where this fact is from which is from the guide to Cronborg Castle and Cronborg is the castle that was fictionalized as Elsinore in Hamlet. So we went to Copenhagen last year and I bought the guidebook and then I waited seven months to read it. In the middle of the 17th century 51% of Dutch paintings contained a lemon. Really? In the middle of which century? 17th.

That was a big one for Dutch painting as well, wasn't it? It was the biggest, yeah. Which is weird because lemons I would have thought are very easy to draw and if I were a renaissance great I would challenge myself with something more like a pineapple. Well they weren't of lemons, they just contained lemons somewhere in them. It wasn't like a paint the fruit contest. I don't know how familiar you are with Dutch masters but they tend not to just be of one lemon. The big lemon and the big apple one next to it and the bananas, the crowning glory. Yeah but I think they're a big status symbol and they were in fact they were ornamental mostly. You wouldn't eat them because they were so hard to get. And if you did eat them you initially would eat them with the

skin on apparently and same with oranges, yeah. But then actually I was reading a little cooking blog in the Guardian by the chef Tom Hunt and he actually said that if you eat like he said good lemons are nobly juice-filled and should be eaten whole like apples. Rind, flesh, the lot. So I'm going to try that next time. Cool. Yeah. But I mean most lemons are waxed aren't they? Yeah. So you wouldn't want to eat the waxed ones? That's why you've got to go organic, yeah you don't want that wax. But you could boil off the wax I suppose. Yeah. You could do that. Yeah. Culinary tips from fish. Have a potato wedged in a body. Oh a restaurant is not a wax. But citrus fruits have gone mad in the last few hundred years

then haven't they? They've really multiplied. Oh okay. Given that they did start with these three types of citrus. So citrons, pomelos and mandarins were the official grandfathers of all the citrus fruits we have today. And now I think I was reading that the I don't know why this is the authority but the University of California's California Riverside selected list of citrus varieties lists 1200 and that's the edited list and they are they're all hybrids. So grapefruit is part lemon. It's hybrid of lemon and a bitter orange. And yeah as you said lime is a citron and a mandarin orange. But grapefruits are quite relatively new I think and they were accidentally made from this hybrid. Mandarins which I think of as quite ubiquitous

now didn't reach us until the 19th century. Didn't have any mandarins. What about Sainsbury's Easy Pealers? They were the original. They were almost the fourth grandparent. They were in the Garden of Eden. In the early 20th century there was a phrase in America that you would be handed the lemon. Do you know what that is? What it might be? If someone handed you a lemon. That's not like a bad car you know where you say a bad car is a lemon. No I see what you mean but no not that. And that's not a that's not a make lemonade. The first just the setup okay. Is it testicular? No and actually I don't think you could guess this. It was it meant that you were splitting up with your partner. Okay so you would say I'm handing you a lemon and that means that

we're going to go our separate ways and you used to get like cards or you know where it said I'm handing you a lemon and it would be like a dear John letter that you would give them and it comes from basically it's because they're the opposite of sweets so like you would have a sweet fruit and this is a sour fruit and there was a song called A Lemon in the Garden of Love by the Broadway composer Richard Carl which had this idea and then it became really popular and then in 1907 there was a letter in the Boston Herald from a fruit dealer who was complaining about this I'm saying I'm trying to sell my lemons and yet it just means that you're splitting up with someone that's not really fair is it? Just all his customers going we're not even in a relationship

I don't know why either you got the authority to dump me. He said why not an overripe cucumber or a frozen tomato instead of having a lemon. Is this someone an overripe cucumber could be a good way of is that when we get the phrase I'm standing around like a lemon because I say that sometimes no you do it a lot but because there is there is the that is a phrase isn't it? I haven't made that like you know I've been left around here like a lemon for half an hour. I think it just probably comes from the fact that lemons are the longest lasting thing right? No you don't say I'm standing around like a lemon because lemons don't go off quickly. No but it might be the last thing in the fruit bowl. It's the last thing in the fruit bowl so it's sitting there alone. Oh yeah that's

what I would have thought. I agree I think what Andy's saying is if you've been split up with then you're alone and if you're standing like a lemon then you're lonely. Exactly. So they're kind of similar. Yeah I can see how one might have changed that. I really do think the other is right. Okay well whatever whatever guys. Oh there is a related fact about lemons and personality which is that the amount of saliva that you produce after tasting a lemon can tell you whether someone is an introvert or an extrovert. Come on. Really this is something called the reticular activating system and it's a bit of the brain that responds to some stimuli in food and also to some social stimuli and it controls the amount of saliva you produce. We haven't judged the cause and effect here have we

because maybe they're introverted and antisocial because every time they meet anyone they start dribbling at the end. That's possible. Do you think that's why they say you know when you're stood on your own in the middle of the room they say it's like you're 11 and that's because you're dribbling all over yourself and no one will stab near you. Because that is a phrase isn't it? Yeah. Yeah yeah. Basically this system reacts to social contact so introverts react very strongly to meeting people it gives you know it's kind of more of a reaction and so does lemon. So if you think someone might be an introvert just give them a bit of lemon slip them a lemon and then ask how much that's elevating. Do you know that lemon juice kills sperm?

So it's actually an effective contraceptive. Okay. You know that phrase that's where you're like standing like 11 in a room? Do you think that comes from the fact that you get like a load of sperm in a bowl? Yeah. And you put lemon in and only one of them survives. Yeah. Because that is a phrase isn't it? It's definitely a phrase yeah. God there's only one flaw with that and I think it's that I think all the sperm would be killed. Oh yeah. So I think maybe you've got one sperm out of the bowl and the lemon's missed it and he's on his own. Yeah. But it's definitely could be used Casanova used it apparently and the idea is that you put it inside the female of our species as a woman as we call them. I always forget what they're called.

It was half a lemon he supposedly used as a Dutch cap which makes more sense because if you put the full lemon in then the juice is not going to get out of there. I actually think even half a lemon is quite an ask. Me too. I couldn't quite work out because then if you're putting the whole thing in isn't that just effectively a condom rather than just using the lemon juice? Well it depends which way up it goes. Yeah. No it's a cup I guess. Yeah over the bell end. Yeah. Yeah I know but so that's a condom. No no no no no. But it's inside the vagina. It's a cup inside the female of the species. I see. Yeah yeah so it's sort of a catching it's a catcher's mitt. Right. I guess it's the yeah by the way sperm in a bowl definitely the worst dish on our

restaurants menu. I think Michelin stars are coming our way. Okay that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at tribal and Andy at Andrew Hunter M James at James Harkin and Chazinsky. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep or go to our group Twitter account at no such thing or our website no such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. Have a listen and we'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.