No Such Thing As A Fish - 387: No Such Thing As The Northern Lights

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

Dan, James, Anna and special guest Robin Ince discuss hidden sounds, flashing lights and lots and lots of dancing. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Fish. Before we get going, we just want to let you know that we have a very special guest on this week. So Andy's off away, God knows where, but in his place we have the wonderful Robin Ince. If you're not aware of Robin Ince, you can't really call yourself a true nerd. Robin is the great godfather of nerdery. He is the co-host of the brilliant Infinite Monkey Cage, the BBC Radio 4 show with Brian Cox. He is also the person who sort of gathers together all the dorks and geeks of the UK and gives them a platform and a place to be heard. One of those places is called CosmicShambles.com. Robin of course as well is an author. He's published numerous books in his latest book, The Importance of Being Interested, Adventures in

Scientific Curiosity, is coming out this October, the 7th of October. Do get it, he's an amazing writer. I've read all of his previous books and I can't wait to read this one as well. Also, he's going to be doing something quite astounding to promote the book. He is going on a 100 date tour of the UK to all the independent bookshops around the UK to do little talks and signings and so on. And you can find the dates for those on CosmicShambles.com slash 100 bookshops. And honestly, you must see Robin Ince live. He's such a wonder to behold. He is such a fantastic guy and a really nice guy on top of everything else. We've wanted him on the show for years. We're so glad we finally got him. So we hope you enjoy this episode. Do get his book, The Importance of Being Interested.

But for now, enjoy him on No Such Thing as a Fish, on with the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, James Harkin and special guest. It is Robin Ince. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, that is Robin. The Nobel Prize winning scientist Richard Feynman was allowed to investigate the entirety of the universe except the Aurora Borealis, which is a very beautiful thing. It has a beautiful story attached to it,

which is the fact that his sister, Joan, loved science. And this is one of the few times that golf courses play an interesting part in the future of physics. Now this might be entirely wrong. One of the great lines about golf courses is Steve Islet, the writer who once said, the only proof of the existence of God is that once a year a golfer is electrocuted in a thunderstorm. Oh, God. I can feel James getting wound up as you're speaking. But think of all those golfers who don't get hit by lightning. How evil is the one who God decides must die during that? So what's this about golf? I'm really interested. What's golf?

Well, in fact, actually, I've realized there is a, oh no, there is another golf link to science, which is Fred Hoyle's steady state theory was partly influenced by the Ealing horror film, Portmanteau horror film, Dead of Night. But we can get back to that, I think, at another time. No, let's go there and let's end this whole section on you finally explaining your facts, going along. It's like the other day, I was doing a show about reality and I suddenly realized that Alice Cooper connected everything that I was going to talk about. And this is the trouble, isn't it, with tangential thinking. But yeah, Portmanteau horror film, Dead of Night. And I warn you, there's a spoiler alert here. So if you haven't seen it yet, it did come out in 1945.

But if you haven't seen it yet, I'm going to give out something about it at the end. So it's about a man who visits a house and when he gets to the house, he's like, I'm sure I've been here before. And everyone in the house has a different story, including a terrifying story involving a ventriloquist possessed by his dummy or not. We're not entirely sure, played by Michael Redgrove. And there's also a beautiful golfing story from the great Bazelle Radford and Norton Wayne, two golfers who play golf to win over a woman's heart. And it all goes horribly wrong. But at the end of the film, the man wakes up from his terrible nightmare and has to drive to the house, which we then realize is the house where we began. And he is in this cycle

of reality. And that led to Fred Hoyle thinking about the theory of the universe, this kind of cycle of size that we see. So that I've suddenly realized is the other place golfing actually may have played a much bigger part in refuted physics of the 20th century. So first of all, I'd like to apologize. I'm not normally on this show, as everyone realizes. So I tell you the story now, I'm sorry. So yes, so basically that's the thing, Robin, the problem with golf is there's links. Oh, man, I can't believe it's five minutes to a pun. But when one like that comes out, that is fantastic. What a beautiful fantasy. These two had practiced that for hours beforehand. It's worth the buildup. I can't even remember what the golf link was. So Joan Feynman woke up his

young sister, Joan, and took her to the golf course, because this was the darkest place to go, because that night they could witness from just outside New York, the Aurora Borealis. And a deal was made. And the deal was he could have the whole of the rest of the universe to investigate. But Joan was allowed to have the Aurora Borealis, and he could not go near it. We should just explain who Richard Feynman was. He was an extraordinary character in the world of science, the Nobel Prize winning physicist. He was very much one of the fathers of quantum mechanics. And as a child, the stories that you have to read as autobiography, and genius by James Glyke, it is just full of him just doing experiments, including on his

sitster. And so he rigged up her cot so that it was sort of electrically generated, so that it would go back and forth. He paid her pocket money for cents to be sticking her finger in electrical sockets and stuff to test her ideas. I think she was paid to press switches, and she might have put her finger in the socket just for fun to kind of show off to his friends, right? I don't think he paid her to electric herself. Well, some reports from her are that he would occasionally say, when his friends were around, pop your finger in that. So I think there's some wonderful interviews that she did with Christopher Sykes, who was the maker of Pleasure of Finding Things Out, the horizon documentary about Richard Feynman. And she just talks about its play, you know,

even in her 90s, when someone would say, what is science, Joan? She'd say, it's play. And it's something that gets missed out so much in a lot of the science education in the UK. You know, I'm sure all of us have the experience of working with scientists and rising the excitement when they see a new idea or they see a new snail shell. It's filled with excitement and play and joy. I like that it extends to going to the cinema and watching Ealing Horrors. And you come out going, oh, I've just invented a model of how the universe functions. I like how golf tells you a lot about physics as well. I can I can now see that Dan's going to go to the cinema and James is going to go to the golf course, both expecting to come back Nobel Prize winners and you're going to be

sorely disappointed. Richard Feynman was great at encouraging science communication, right? And this is obviously partly what inspired Joan. And he even used to come into her room at night, kind of annoying, actually. For instance, she'd cry out for a glass of water in the middle of the night and he'd come to her bedroom. And rather than give her the water, he'd always swill it around in the glass, apparently to demonstrate centrifugal forces, which does sound annoying. And also at one point it did fly out of his hand and smash against the wall. So fun, fun and dangerous. Richard was very, very supportive of her. But the world wasn't when she was trying to do her dissertation. One of the professors who was teaching her said, why don't you write it on cobwebs?

Because that's going to help when you're cleaning houses. You mean sorry, you mean why don't you write about cobwebs, right? Not on us in sort of like trying in a tiny, tiny pen. Yeah, it turns out he was really supportive when he was trying to innovate. And she actually wrote it in the end on the absorption of infrared radiation in crystals of diamond type lattice structure. Just kind of cobwebs, infrared radiation. It's not much difference, is it? I've got to be honest, and I don't want to be the bad guy here, but I would have been more likely to read the cobwebs one than the lattice structure one. Just small catch, isn't it? I love cobwebs. Ironically, that PhD dissertation is now covered in cobwebs. I didn't know anyone's ever read it, have they?

But no, she was brilliant. Yeah, and the mother was quite progressive, but still said to her, oh, women don't have the minds to do science. You know, that's how deep the belief was. She was only eight when her mom said women don't have the brains for science, and she sort of sat in her chair sobbing incessantly, which is quite impressive at eight. No, you want to be a scientist. I think all I knew was I wanted to climb a tree. I think there's an interesting thing to learn from both the Feynman's here in terms of looking at progress. Richard Feynman didn't get into his first choice university because at that point in the 1930s, there was a Jewish quota. And that is an incredible thing to know, I think.

And in the same way, what Joan Feynman had to deal with was also the fact that women can't do this, and we're not going to allow it. And sometimes, even as a professional scientist, there were rooms where she was told, oh, women aren't allowed to go up there. But she did keep on trying to get into the men's bathroom, didn't she? Which... But that was only because her brother kept coming into her bed and that whole kind of thing. And she was only going into the men's bathroom to show centrifugal force, which of course made a right old mess. But in a men's bathroom, you can't really tell that much because they're always in such a state in the first place. But I think the importance of role models, it must not be forgotten because I think in science, this is still going on. It's

getting better, but we still need that going on all of the time. Because science is for everyone, and it would be crazy not to realize that the excitement of curiosity is not limited by an X or a Y chromosome. Yeah, yeah. I think you have an amazing psychiatrist, actually, because she went to a psychiatrist to say, what shall I do? Whereas usually, I guess you'd say have these antidepressants and maybe try some CBT. The psychiatrist basically said, why don't you apply to this Earth Observatory at Columbia University? And that's what you need, isn't it? So great psychiatrist, terrible rabbi. Because the rabbi said, what right do you have to have these science jobs that are meant for men? Some of them haven't got a job. So there we go. There's a great

the battle there. Some of them haven't got a job. You've got to wait till all the men have a job, and then you can start applying. Shall we talk about what she discovered? Because it was pretty cool. I mean, she did hog quite a cool thing in hogging the auroras. She essentially realized that it was these kind of charged particles that are flying out of the sun. And when the sun's having a particularly turbulent time, when there's a bunch of storms on the surface of the sun, then the northern lights get bigger. And so she equated those two and thought one must be causing the other. And I hadn't actually realized these cycles that the sun goes through. It's got an 11 year cycle of high and low activity. And that's caused by its magnetic poles switching around

every 11 years, which is very often given the Earth has been ages, hasn't it? Since we did it. But also it's got this 88 year cycle that's kind of running underneath that, where the 11 year peaks and troughs kind of get higher and lower. There is another cycle that I know of, which is there's always a trough whenever I go to Iceland to see the northern lights, which has been on two occasions. And every single time they were like, oh, if you were here last week, it was amazing. See, I think that that's a correlation causation issue. I don't know if your presence is causing a difference. You have to time it right, because if they know that Joanna Lumley is going to be making one of her documentaries, where she goes, I've always been fascinated in the aurora borealis,

then the magnetosphere, the solar winds go hold back. Joanna Lumley is coming next week. James is mainly doing audio based stuff. It's really not important to get involved. Do you know what the oldest depiction of the northern lights is, we think? Is it like on a cave painting or something? Well, it is, but it's specifically a macaroni. A penguin? No. So this is a cave painting. It's 30,000 years old, which is very cool. I'm not convinced it's the northern lights, because you know when you look at cave paintings, and it all looks like smears on a cave, and then everyone goes, well, this is clearly a walrus, and this is a aurora borealis. But these are chromagnon cave paintings in France,

and it's the specific type of paleolithic finger tracings in clay, which is called macaroni, which I'd never heard of. So the first northern lights is a macaroni. It is quite remarkable when you think, you know, that cave, whether it's true or not, and I think you're right to probably be skeptical, because there's so much new investigation in terms of what cave paintings mean. But I do think, you know, that moment of experiencing something like that, I don't know if you ever went with the tape modern, about probably 15 years ago, there was an artist who created this piece, which was basically just the sun rising. And what he wanted to create was something that had the impact of what it must have been like each morning to see this thing,

which, you know, was almost like a godlike experience. And he did really create that, I've got to say, standing in that turbine hall, the way that it connected to was just remarkable. And when you talk about the aurora borealis, I think, you know, I've never experienced it. I have the same as you in Iceland. I think Paul O'Grady was going to be there the next week. So the aurora borealis stayed off for me as well. But that experience should really hit you in the gut every now and again, to go, that is up there. What is going on? How is it that a universe exists that creates these things that we have somehow evolved to find beautiful and fascinating and mesmeric? Yeah, although I had exactly the same thing as you two in Norway. So I'm starting to suspect

the Northern Lights actually don't exist. And it's a huge conspiracy. Okay, it is time for fact number two. And that is Anna. My fact this week is that at the turn of the 20th century, women wore pedometers to balls to track how many miles they were done. Wow, miles at a single ball. That's a lot of dancing, isn't it? Oh, God, they were dancing miles and miles. Well, one dance was about a mile, mile and a half. And this was all the rage. Women would strap pedometers to their knees or their feet, and they'd go to a ball and there would be competitions over who would dance so furthest. So you'd show your pedometer at the end of the night. And I think the winner

of one contest, I was reading dance 25 miles in a night, which that girl has not gone without a partner for the evening. Yeah. Were these those dances where as a big group, they were dancing together or were they one on one with partners? Partner dances at the balls. Yeah, you're technically supposed to be going, I think, to find a husband back in the day. It was a debutante era. But one of the complaints about the pedometers in one of the newspaper articles I read is that it was distracting the women from seducing their husbands because they were so into counting their number of steps and competing over that that they forgot to do their duty. That's amazing. But did anyone sort of just quickly leave the venue and just go for a mad dash and just clock up the numbers and

come back? I don't think a mad dash would help because dancing, you're dancing almost as fast as you're, I mean, you can't really run for 25 miles straight. True. I mean, you obviously can. Have you just watched the, just watched the Olympic marathon that's just happened? I just think it's much harder in heels and a corset. It's probably easier to do a bit of jigging. Do you think that in the bathrooms, when you went into the ladies' bathroom, everyone would just be kind of jiggling around to keep the pedometer going? You know, like if you really need the toilet, you kind of do that little jiggly run on the spot, don't you? That's where that comes from, actually. What would be the tap dancing, I guess, would be the most useful dance? Yeah, definitely. You're wasting a lot of

leg time in the air, though, with one of them legs. Well, I think a ska music festival would work very well because you would, something like Lip Up Fatty from the Band, Bad Manors, there's a lot of movement as in, which is kind of a walkie movement. So I would say if you perhaps set up this experiment in a series of different Butlins holiday camps across the South Coast, you would take various different genres. I think Northern Soul would go well, but Northern Soul, as you said before, the high kick element of that possibly means that you're not travelling as far as you imagine, that the leg is going high, but it's only travelling a meter or so. I think in terms of rave culture of the late 80s, early 90s, so many of those come back,

that seems to be quite a stoical thing. It's mainly upper body stuff. So I think there's a lot of research to be done here. I'm sure Shakira could clock up some numbers with a bum shake. I'm sure if it was attached to the thigh, that would give vigorous penduluming. You're going to get a really accurate reading because our hips don't lie, of course. Do you remember the film that they shoot horses don't they? It was about marathons. This terrible thing that was done during the Depression in America, which was marathon dance competitions where you just danced and the winner would then get some money when everyone was desperate for money, but they would go on for days and days. People actually died dancing. I would imagine no one, if they'd had

a pedometer, that would have already gone down to the pawnbrokers. So they wouldn't have had that on that because that was why they were there. But it's just that fascinating thing where dance becomes torture. And I think when you talk about 25 miles, that amount of dancing, I'm reckoning that if we went for a walk, that's what seven to eight hours of walking. Six hours probably. I walk fast because I have places to go and I believe life is finite. But there's a lot of dawdlers. And I would say between dawdlers and then people like me, I reckon it's about 3.2 miles an hour. So that's a lot. I do. Wow. Because Anna and I have been for a walk in the park every now and then just to kind of chat work. And I must say that is probably the best

workout I've had in the last two years. Trying to keep up with Anna walking around a park, it's ridiculous. Yeah, it was awkward when I realized you'd collapsed. I felt that. So are you one of those people like me, which is I don't mind stopping and looking at things. And I don't mind having a slow walk if there's things around. But the dawdle is something which because you know, there's a certain way that some people walk where you go, you have no ambition. There's a way that you just. I am like you. Yes, I judge someone's entire character, a level of ambition based on their walk. And then I'm furious with them and kind of want to push them in front of a car. And they deserve it. Well, the worst thing was you had to push me

half a mile out of the park to get the road. I did. Yeah, really went for it. But yeah, I would have been clocking up those those 25 miles. And they said even at the time these women said that it was really addictive just like it is today whenever anyone has step counters because it made a little tick every time you stepped. And so you couldn't resist making this tick happen. And people were worried their mother said they're dancing too much is dangerous. And I think some of them maybe rigged it because there's this thing with pedometers about whether it's about steps or whether it's about distance. And of course, this would tell you how much distance you traveled. But that was because you had to set it to your step length. So I think you could

set it to anywhere between 15 or 41 inch step length. So if as a cheating lady, you said every step you step 41 inches, then that's going to save traveled further, isn't it? Well, so the modern day pedometers came after the Tokyo Olympics in the 1960s. And there was a Japanese company called Yamatsa, the Yamatsa company. And they came up with this new kind of pedometer. And they thought that everyone should walk 10,000 steps a day. And there's a lot of controversy whether that is just a completely random number that they made up, or whether there's actually any science to it whatsoever. There is a professor of epidemiology at Harvard called I'm in Lee. And she reckons having spoken to the people who came up with the idea that they chose 10,000

because the Japanese character for 10,000 looks a little bit like a man walking. And they thought it would be a really good way of publicizing it. But then there are other people who say, well, actually, they did a bit of maths about it and worked out how many people would have less mortality due to more exercise and stuff. So yeah, pedometers are the subject of the longest movie ever made. I discovered the longest movie ever. Now, previously on Fish, we spoke about the longest movie ever made being called Ambience, which was 720 hours long. The trailer itself was 72 minutes. That has since been overtaken by a movie, which is 857 hours long. So this was made in 2008 by Erica Magnusson and Daniel Anderson. And they wanted to look at where the pedometer came from.

So they had this idea of following the production cycle, but in reverse chronological order. So basically, it's an 857 hour long movie backwards. This sounds actually, I would almost rather read Joan Feynman's dissertation than watch this. That's amazing. There's a lot of reviews on IMDB, you know, as it starts off slow, says one person, first three and a half days of runtime, kind of boring. But oh my god, by the fourth, through to the 25th days, things really pick up. So, you know, check it out. Do we know what the point is? Was it some sort of artistic experiment? Was it a bet?

It's definitely an artistic experiment. Yeah. They didn't just plan to make a feature length film and it got out of hand. They just had so much material and a bad editor. They can be dangerous. Can't they? Pedometers and Fitbits and stuff. There was a pig in Northern England, the Etta pedometer pood it out. And it was in a bit of warm poo and hay. And because it had Olivia Mayan battery, it exploded and set fire to the entire farm. Luckily, no animals were hurt. Sounds so much like an insurance scam to me. I'm sorry.

You know when you go, you know, when the farmers making up the story, when they just had things haven't really worked out on my pig farm and you will not believe what happened, right? So I left the pedometer over there and he's always been a hundred feet. I would not pay out on that one. Surely that's more likely to be true than I dropped it in the toilet or something for your like it's it's who would make that? No, no, no, but I'm not I'm not talking about the claiming insurance on the pedometer. I'm talking about claiming insurance on the entire farm.

Of course. Yeah. You've got to get bigger ambition, James. Yeah, you need an arsonist, don't you? But you can't say there was a crime committed because then the police get involved. So if you say it was the pig, then who's going to arrest a pig? Oh, in France. And I'm sure you've covered many pig trials on this show. Still one of my one of the greatest films if people haven't seen the hour of the pig, it's really it's all about a pig trial.

And was it a pedometer based crime? No, it's pre-pedometer. And it starts off beautifully with a man and his donkey about to be hanged for some sexual shenanigans. So the donkey with the noose around it and the man with the noose around it and this man running through and he's going, stop, stop, stop. And you see the man go, oh, and he goes, the donkey has been pardoned. Everyone in the town has said it is on good character.

And then you see the donkey's news taken off and the man dropped from the gallows. Wow. I mean, I'm definitely watching that. And I think that's going to be the one takeaway from this podcast. Yeah. OK, it is time for fact number three. And that is James. OK, my fact this week is that Charles Darwin invented the office chair. Did he?

Well, did he? That's a great question, Anna. Did he? Yeah. So that's my skepticism. I'm going to go on. I'm going to say that he invented the kind of wheelie office chair that you have. And I'm saying that because his chair had wheels on.

And this is the first example we know of. I was reading an article in The New York Times. It was a review of a book called A Taxonomy of Office Chairs by Jonathan Olivares. And he talked about all the history of office chairs. And he said that Charles Darwin had a customized wooden armchair in his home and he would wheel around his front room looking from specimen to specimen. And then I went on to the welcome collections websites and they have a photograph of this very chair.

So it definitely did exist. They have a photo of the interior of Charles Darwin's study, which shows that it's kind of just like an old armchair with just casters on the bottom of it. OK. But yeah, the evolution of the chair started from there. The origin of this species of chair. Yes.

Robin, I assume you've been to Darwin's house. Have you seen this chair? No, I haven't. That's what I was thinking about. I kind of flash back to think, have I seen that at a down house? And I don't remember seeing that, but they don't let you have a go on the furniture. So that's the thing is it depends how discreet it is.

You know, and especially they would have all known I'm a big Starlight Express fan. So of course that would have caused. Yeah. I mean, I love the idea of that wheelchair going around his wonderful thought pathway. He would go round and round. And I think there's something rather attractive about that idea. So what is that he used to walk around just to think of things? Throughout the day, he would have these moments

when he would basically have some stones in his pocket and he would make a little pile of stones. So he would know roughly how many times he'd walked round. And it would just be to take himself into somewhere else to just mull over whatever he'd recently found out about a pigeon skeleton or whatever else had been boiled down. But I mean, going back to what we were talking about with Joan Feynman as well, that curiosity and that play.

Yeah, now I want to go and have a look at this particular crab that's over there. And now look at this barnacle over there. And that lovely thing when he would go to London Zoo and he would look at some of the viper snakes and he would see if he could stop himself from reacting. So obviously the snake can't get to him. And he would just stand and just look at the snake, wait for it to strike. And they are I still react.

You know, and that that's just plain people would have walked past them. And who's the guy over there with the big sideboards who looks like he's goading snakes. But I've just recently been to London Zoo and my experience is very different that the snakes just kind of hide and you spend half your time going, is that a twig or is it a snake? I'm not sure. They didn't do much of the attacking when I was there.

Although I did that. That's the fun thing, isn't it? Of I mean, Edinburgh Zoo, I think used to be the zoo that had the most hiding animals. To the point where you began to think this is predominantly hay. I love that reptile house is such a delight. I think because you see that, you know, the old structure of the zoo there. I absolutely love looking at the snakes.

I don't know. I'm starting to think that the zoos might be in other Northern Lights. They're just a huge con. Only when do our Lumley goes so the snakes emerge. But yeah, he was from a super early age, crazily curious, wasn't he? And not a very good student. So I hadn't realized that Darwin's dad thought he was a bit useless, said that, you know, this boy will never concentrate on anything.

But he just was obsessed with collecting stuff. There was one story where he found two unusual looking beetles that he thought were new species. And then he found the third one. And so he put one of the two in his mouth so he could carry the third one home as well. I don't know why he couldn't just carry two beetles in one hand. But he put it in his mouth and he accidentally bit down on it,

or it squirted some disgusting poison into his mouth. So sadly lost his beetles on that occasion. Wow. Yeah, always collecting. It's like with his barnacles, which Steve Jones, who's a wonderful writer, I'm sure you know. And he is a great expert on Darwin. I once said to him, are there any books by Darwin that I shouldn't read?

And he said, don't bother with these books about barnacles. He became overly obsessed. So there's a story of, I forget which son it was, who was so used to seeing Charles just looking at barnacles all the time. And they were being delivered from around the world, people sending specimens barnacles to him, that when he went round to a friend's house, he started running around all the rooms

and became increasingly confused and rather upset because he couldn't find the room where his friend's father did his barnacles. And that was when it had to be explained that not all parents spend most of their time examining barnacles. So I think that's, you know, all fathers do barnacles, don't they? No. I was reading about what happened when his son William was born.

He just started measuring everything. The sneezing, the hiccuping, the yawning, the stretching. But the papers are amazing because they really read like a very proud father who kind of thinks that his children are so advanced. He's like, of course, sucking and screaming were well performed by my infant. He wrote at one stage. And then he said, I touched the naked stole of his foot

with a bit of paper and he jerked it away, much like an older child would do when tickled. Oh, no. He's one of those parents at the school gate. My child's too good to do that. I used to work in a children's bookshop where you would always get people coming in and going, ah, my son is four, but he has a reading age of 10.

And of course you would show them a book for a 10-year-old, go, well, I don't think he'll quite be able to manage that. And then eventually when you sold them a book for a two-year-old, you know, but that was... We were often told that Victorian parents were quite detached from their children. I think it's kind of quite a myth. And you would see that the relationship

that Charles and Emma Darwin had with their children was an incredible closeness. There's so many beautiful letters between Emma and Charles, which are filled with love and which entirely disintegrate some of the illusions that we have about Victorian behavior. Right, wow. He had a really cool uncle who sadly died quite young, who looked like he might have made a lot of innovations

in the medical world. And he was called Charles Darwin as well. And Charles Darwin, the one we're talking about, was fascinated by him, even visiting the university where he worked at to meet his professors to say hi, because he never met him. He died before Charles was born. But when he was young, he had a stammer.

And there was a theory that his father had, that if he taught his son French, he would get rid of the stammer. So he was packed off to Paris, where he learned and studied under a reverend who taught him to speak French fluently. And it got rid of his stammer, but only in French. So he always had a stammer in English, but never in French.

It's quite weird to picture Darwin's trip on the Beagle, right? Because that was just one huge massacre. And for someone who was kind of too squeamish to be a doctor, when he was training to be a doctor, he once ran from the room, because someone was being operated on. But he did love shooting. And we'll just go around bashing things on their heads,

strangling them, poisoning them, and eating them. All for science. All for science and a bit for fun. One of the things he did was he ate lots of tortoises, which we've probably mentioned before. And this was one of the things that tipped him off to evolution. He ate a tortoise on one island, and then he ate what seemed to be the same tortoise

on another island, really close by. And it tasted a bit sweeter. And this is one of the things he recorded. He was like, why is the tortoise on this island sweeter than the tortoise on this island? How have they diverged? You know, why would God do this, make these tiny little differences so close together?

But wait a minute. How come everything has evolved to taste like chicken then? He actually didn't address that. There's a line that I've often repeated. In fact, the most recent book I wrote originally, this is what I wanted to call it, because it's something that I love, which is when he talks about being around the rainforest, and he says, one's eyes attempt to follow the flight

of a gaudy butterfly, but is soon distracted by some strange tree or fruit. Today, my mind was a chaos of delight. And I think that's the thing, chaos of delight, which is a phrase I've used many, many times, is such a good way of explaining what the truly curious are always being attracted to. Well, and also as well as delighting in your discoveries,

getting so angry when things go wrong, you know, just being passionate generally. Like one of my favorite letters I read of Darwin's recently was when he'd been looking into bees that pollinate red clover. Some had a long proboscis, some had a short one, and they got nectar in different ways. Quite a niche discovery he thought he'd made. He told his friend, John Lubbock,

said, I'm really excited about this. And then he wrote a follow-up saying he'd realized that he was wrong. And he said, I do hope you haven't waited any time for my stupid blunder. I hate myself. I hate clover. And I hate bees. Speaking of finding beauty in the banal,

what about office chairs? Can you quickly talk about those? Let's get some beauty out of that. Chairs are killing us. Chairs are killing us. What? Because chair sitting puts 30% more pressure on your spinal discs than standing up.

Varicose veins only exist in cultures that do lots of chair sitting. If you sit down for long periods, it means your muscles and your legs don't fire, which means your pancreas doesn't get the message to produce lipase, which is the enzyme that you need in your liver to digest fat. And there is an amazing person

called Professor Galen Krantz, who says, basically, we all need to stop sitting down too much because it's killing us. And I spoke to Professor Krantz this morning. And she was basically telling me that there's loads of massive studies with epidemiologists looking at really, really, really massive data sets.

And they have found correlation with premature mortality and sitting down, which is greater than the correlation for being old, being fat, or being a smoker. So sitting down, according to some studies, is more dangerous than that. And for that reason, Professor Krantz doesn't have any chairs in her house.

I read this in an article. She's a terrible host, isn't she? If you go around... Yeah, come on. Okay, in fairness, she has a couple for when guests come round, she did say. I read this in an article from new scientists about 20 years ago.

And I emailed Professor Krantz who says, is it still true that you don't have any chairs in your house? And she says, yes, she's continued that experiment for over 20 years. And she perches at the kitchen island when she wants to eat. She thinks that perching is a good way.

It's like half sitting and half standing. Whenever she's doing any work on her computer, she always uses a chaise long. Isn't that amazing? Even as a guest, if she did put the two chairs out, you'd feel so judged sitting in them, wouldn't you? You wouldn't risk it. But yeah, so there's obviously a lot of chat

about how sitting's bad for you now and standing desk, which I have, are useful. And I also try squatting, because I think about a quarter of people when they're at rest or when they're at work, they will adopt a squat rather than a seat. So a quarter of people in the world. And that's around the world, yeah.

Absolutely. Not in our office. Sorry, not in the office. But I've tried squatting and you can't do it for long, or I can't. I always try working in a squat at a low table. And I think once you've had 30 years of not doing it, it's pretty hard to get back, isn't it?

Well, that is the problem, actually. It's like all these things about not sitting down really, once you've been sitting down for 30 years, doing anything else can put a lot of pressure on your body and give you pain and discomfort. But we know that in history, people have squatted more than they've sat, not least because we haven't found many chairs from history,

but also because when you squat down, the end of your shin bone kind of presses into a little bone on your ankle, and it gets a little indentation. And we can see by lots of old skeletons that that's how people must have spent a lot of their time. So we know that in history, squatting has been the standard way of resting.

Okay. You know, one thing I really loved about this fact was such a seminal character is the person who we have the oldest example of an office chair from, but also a bit further back in history, the oldest example that we have of the swivel chair is from Thomas Jefferson.

The story goes is that he wrote up the Declaration of Independence while sitting on this swivel chair because it has a little table that is attached to it. And yeah, it's very nice. He also had a pedometer, Thomas Jefferson. Yeah, he did, didn't he? One of the earliest ones we know about.

Yeah, he had it made by an expert watchmaker in Paris. And he even sent one to one of the early presidents. I think it was Madison, maybe. Yeah, Madison. Yeah. But he gave his swivel chair to Martha, didn't he? His daughter. And she said that she thinks he did indeed

write the Declaration of Independence on it. And his opponents took the piss out of him for his stupid chairs and called them whirly gigs. And said, you know, they'll look at Thomas and his stupid whirly gig that allows him to look in all directions at once. Isn't he a moron? They didn't say that.

That's my addition. OK, it is time for our final fact of the show. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that horror movies often have two soundtracks, one you can hear and one you can't. I know that sounds spooky, but what's the point of that? It is literally for spooky reasons.

So this is the idea of infrasound. And infrasound is any frequency that is sort of 19 hertz below. So humans can hear 20 hertz and above. As soon as you get lower, it becomes out of earshot. But your body can sort of feel the sensation of the sound if there's a big sound system in the room. You can give you a sense of sort of, oh, what's going on here? You know, it can give you the shivers.

Do you know any examples of movies that have done this? Sound of music, presumably not, but... Well, it's mainly the examples that they give are for thriller slash horror movies. So Irreversible was said to have used it. And Paranormal Activity is rumored to have used it as well. They sometimes are sounds that are like, I don't know, a fan going or an air conditioner.

But they play with the bass as such that it creates an eerie noise. I did read that air conditioning can achieve this effect, which maybe explains why being in the office is such a scary experience. Peacocks can do it. If a peacock kind of wiggles its tail, it makes this really, really deep sound that humans can't hear. But if you were able to hear it,

it'd be about as loud as a car driving past you. And they do it to kind of signal to each other. But yeah, I guess if you walk past a peacock, you might feel a bit uneasy. Does that happen? Or you feel like a lot of eyes are watching you. Well, that's the famous Darwin line. The sight of the feathers in a peacock tail make me sick.

Really? He was, yeah, he felt that the expenditure felt like such a waste for the nature of survival. You had to have that huge expenditure. And it's such a lovely line because it feels like a very modern line. You don't expect to suddenly find that in Darwin. But as a horror movie fan, I'm not keen on this idea because I'm a big fan of atmospheric horror films

which really get under your skin. In fact, brilliantly, you mentioned sound and music. Isn't it amazing how quickly you can create some kind of sense of synchronicity in any of these programmes? I think it was Robert Wise, I think, who directed Sound and Music and he also directed The Haunting. And that is one of those films where so much of the unsettling nature of it is not that you ever see a ghost but you hear noises.

There's a sense that there is something wrong with the house. Yeah. Well, whenever I watch horror films, I was watching horror films on my own recently actually and the way to find it not scary is absolutely not to close your eyes. It's to just cover up your ears and immediately a horror film will become completely innocuous. It's so weird, I think it's more about the sound.

Hitchcock said that 33% of the effect of psycho was entirely due to the music. Yeah, they did do test audiences with the movie where in the shower scene there was no music originally and it just didn't have the impact. And then they put the music on and suddenly the scariest scene in cinema to that point. Yeah.

That's really interesting. What was the horror film you were watching, by the way? It was called His House, My House, Her House. It's fantastic. It's really good. His House, if anyone listened to this, if you've not seen it, I think it was nominated for a BAFTA, very deservedly.

I was just watching it at home and I was like, I hope it stops being scary because I want to go to the loo and I'm not sure I can risk going down these stairs now because the changing understanding of the narrative in it and that's why I find that kind of use of infrasound to me that feels like a very Hollywood thing which is going, oh, we can do this thing instead.

No, do you know what? Film something brilliantly. Yeah. But then do you want to get rid of soundtracks altogether then for that reason as well? No, I love soundtracks because I think when they're well used, when you get, I mean, I rewatch Dawn of the Dead,

which has a really upbeat. And you go, this is far too upbeat for the number of guts that are being eaten. But it works by being this meeting of two very different worlds. But that marriage reminds me of tubular bells. To me, it is terrifying. And that's not a frightening tune.

That's just because it was in the Exorcist and that's actually quite a plinky-plonky, you know, the tune, the terrifying bit from the Exorcist. Like, doo-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee. It's quite hard to hum. But yeah, it's marrying that slightly chirpy with the terrifying. Do you think we're going to get sued

if you think Mike Holfield's going to come in after? He's coming for us. You don't have to run us saying that. Thank God his daughter used to work for QI. She's been on fish. Chat to her. She has, Molly, back in the day. I love that way of how can we get away

with playing a tune and not having to pay copyright by not really remembering it very well and be like, you can't play it. You know, it's that Mike Holfield. Ba-ba-da-da-da-da-da. Just on horror films and their soundtracks, I didn't know that instruments have specifically been built for horror movies.

So inharmonic instruments, basically instruments that do the opposite of what good instruments do and they create notes that don't go together very naturally when you sort of. Oh, all my instruments do that. Yeah, yeah. No, there are many reasons

why you might make inharmonic sounds. But the most famous inharmonic instrument is probably the water phone. And so it's like a bowl and it's got like bronze rods that stick up out of the edges of the bowl and they're all different lengths and like diameters and stuff

and you get a violin bow or something maybe to tap it and you bow the rods and they just make a very nonharmonic sound and it's used in lots of films. It's used in poltergeist, let the right one in, aliens. But what I like about it as well

is that the water phone involves a little bit of water in the bowl, which is why it's called that. It was invented by Richard Waters and used in the horror film Dark Water. Amazing. Oh, wow. Three totally unrelated waters in one fact.

That's so cool. The other thing's the tritone, kind of two notes that one comes after the other and it kind of makes you feel uneasy because you think that should be something next. It's in the theme to the Simpsons. So, you know, when it goes, the Simpsons is kind of you think,

well, where are you going after that? It's weird. It's just kind of a weird kind of two notes coming after each other. Is that the one banned in churches, James? Or is that a different one? Well, that's the one that the internet says was banned in churches for sure.

Whether it was actually banned, I personally don't think so, but definitely Western musicians really shied away from it for hundreds and hundreds of years because they thought it was slightly demonic. It is objectively spooky because I've never thought about it before, but the theme tune to the Simpsons,

which is not a spooky show except for the Halloween specials, is kind of scary regardless of content. I don't know why they did that. Weird. Danny Elfman of Oingo Boingo, which is still one of the greatest names for a band. Really? Yeah.

So funny. Doesn't he sing? He sings that bit of the Simpsons, doesn't he? And as a result, the royalties that he's received ever since are far greater than any other work that he's done, basically. Did I sing it close enough to the actual theme tune that I'm going to have to send him a tenner in the post? Crazy.

Damn it. Like, yeah, I remember doing a thing with, I've forgotten the name, who's the voice of Bart? Nancy Cartwright. Yeah, I remember doing a radio show with her and there was someone in the audience who had a birthday like a little child and they said, oh, can you say happy birthday

as Bart Simpson? She went, no, I can't for copyright reasons. Really? Wow. Really weird thing. That's awkward. Can I tell you guys about the most recent horror movie I watched?

00:44:00,800 --> 00:44:02,160 Perhaps as we're doing that. It was called Slacks, have you heard of this? S-L-A-X-X. Can you guess what the murderer is in this case? I'll give you a clue. It's a non-human. Is it a pair of shoes? It's not.

Oh, it's not a pair of slacks. It's a pair of slacks, but that's not what slacks are. Oh, God, there's trousers on there. It's about a killer pair of jeans. And I was just googling about it to see if there was anything interesting about it and it comes up on a lot of lists of horror movies where the antagonist is a non-human or non-animal.

So there was one in 2001 called The Shaft. Can you guess what the killer was there? Yes, a elevator shaft. Very good, yes. But why is the shaft itself the killer? Well, it was originally called The Lift, but it got remade in America. They called it The Shaft,

and also they were going to call it Just Down. And the tagline for that movie reads, Take the stairs, for God's sake, take the stairs. Sounds amazing. Anyone going to see it, imagining it's a remake of the film Shaft, they'll find themselves very confused. I hope Isaac Hayes still did the music of the wires.

Yeah, that'd be amazing. Has anyone seen the movie? This is relatively famous called Rubber. Is that a tire that goes through the desert and goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a great idea, yeah. It's about a sentient tire that goes around and it has psychokinesis. We never learned why it has psychokinesis,

but it could just look at you and start vibrating and then it explodes you. And there was the final one, which was a Korean movie, I think, and it's called The Red Shoes. Can you guess what the killer is there? Oh, it is. Is this a trick?

Is it Peruvglas? Dorothy, it's Dorothy. It's a pair of purple shoes. Literally no idea why they call it The Red Shoes, but this woman finds a pair of purple high heels and then jealousy, greed, and death follows her wherever she walks in them. Right.

But the original Red Shoes, based on the kind of folktale, which is a Powell and Pressburger film, is a very haunting piece of work. Robert Heltman, famously the child catcher, who for many of my generation is one of the scariest characters in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. You know, come and get your sweeties, children.

Come and get your sweeties. And there's a lovely story of when a friend of Robert Heltman took his kids to go and see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. And then he rang up Robert Heltman and he said, Robert, I've got a bit of a problem. You're coming around for Sunday lunch. And, well, my kids, I've just taken Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

And they were absolutely terrified of you. And he went, oh, yes. He said, well, could you say something to them over the phone now, just so that they know you're an actor and that you're not really the child's catcher? And he went, of course, just bring the children to the phone. And when the children got to the phone,

he went, I'm coming to catch you, Chitty Bang Bang. OK, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts.

I am on at Shriverland, James. At James Harkin. Robin. At RobinInx. And Anna. You can email podcast.qi.com. Yep, you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing,

or go to our website, nosuchthingasafish.com and check out everything that is up there from all of our previous episodes, as well as all of our upcoming tour dates. And if you're online, you're looking at websites,

why not go over to cosmicshambles.com as well? That's Robin's site. And it's a huge network of amazing scientists and general communicators of every field, comedy, geology, blah, blah. They're all their artists.

It's an amazing place, full of amazing people. Check out Robin's live dates on RobinInx.com as well. And go see him for his book tours, his live shows, and his tours with Brian Cox and the guy does a hundred things.

Check it out. It's all up there. Anyway, we're going to be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye. you