StarTalk Radio - All Pain, No Gain with Charles Liu

Episode Date: May 13, 2022

How fast does cheese roll down a hill? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly walk us through the physics behind the weirdest sports: cheese rolling, belly flopping, face slapping and more with astrophysicist Charles Liu. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free.Thanks to our Patrons Scott Schekk (shek), Kristine May, Jacob godman, Chelsea Dolloff, Daniel Lopez,Dustin G, Michael McManus, Genesis Martinez, Kinetik Plastik, and Pavel Bains for supporting us this week.Photo Credit: Coyau / Wikimedia Commons Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Sports Edition. We're gonna talk about the science of the weird in this episode. More on that in a moment. Let me first introduce my co-host, Chuck Nice.

Chuck, you baby. Hey, what's up, Neil? Always good to have you. Actor and comedian. We get to say actor now, along with comedian. You're acting and stuff. You can tell us.

You can get our permission. Acting like a comedian. That's what I say. Oh, that's how it is. Acting like a comedian. Next time, you need our permission, you know, if you're going to start acting. So, also, I got my co-host, Gary O'Reilly.

Gary. Hey, Neil. Yeah, you're stateside, but you're fundamentally a Brit. You sound Brit. You talk Brit. You think Brit. If it walks like and talks like, it must be. But we've got you because of your professional experience as a footballer,

a soccer player in England. It's great to have you as co-host, as always. As always. So tell me about the sports of the weird, Gary, because I looked at the notes and said, I don't know what the hell Gary cooked up for this show. So take us in. I know. There's a lot in the recipe here, Neil.

Hopefully it'll all come through. And, okay, in this episode, you'll hear me mention Queen Elizabeth II, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sir David Attenborough, who is royalty as well, the Wu-Tang Clan, Squid Games, and cheese. So you see, sports, it's a human thing. No other species on this planet invents a pastime

and then organizes it into a championship or a tournament. The ancient Greeks, well, they had the Olympics. And every village and town around them was. Wait, wait, wait, Gary. Even humans don't have that list of objects and people and phenomena and then connect them in any way at all. You're telling me you're connecting those in this episode? Yes.

Okay. And you'll see as we go along. Now, it's all about finding out the fastest and the strongest and, you know, who can throw the furthest, all of that sort of thing. But there are sports that didn't make it onto the Olympic playlist. So if I mention a couple, extreme ironing. Oh, I love that. All right. Or mountain unicycling. So this, Chuck, really, basically what I'm saying is the Brits are mainly responsible for all of the silly, weird, and wonderful sports that are out there.

And we are going to look with our best friend, Charles Liu, at the science that's going to be buried in there. So, Charles Liu. Chuck Liu! Welcome back. Wait, wait, we have Charles Liu! Oh my gosh! Oh, geek and chief.

Hello. Geek and chief, Charles. It's a great pleasure to be here as always. Thank you. Great to see you guys. To be back. Yes. This is like your 50th appearance on the show.

Something like that, yeah. Clearly, we can't do the show without you. So you're our geek and chief friend and colleague, a professor of astronomy and physics at the City University of New York, Staten Island. Yep. And Chuck, always good to have you. Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here. Charles, always good to have you. Wow.

Charles in this episode. Charles. That's right. In this episode, I'm Charles because the true Chuck, there is the one true Chuck when it comes to StarTalk. That would be Chuck Norris. That is Chuck Nice right there. Great to see everybody. So, yeah, yeah. So, all good. And like I said, as our geek in chief, however geeky I think I am, you're geekier. So that's why we have you on here in the geek spectrum, which knows no bounds. You speak so kindly of me, sir.

So, Gary, what's the first sport you've got lined up here, Gary? All right. So I have to go straight for a British sport. Cheese rolling. Oh, yes. On Cooper's Hill in Gloucestershire. Thought to date back 600 years and be rooted in pagan rituals. All right.

So here are the numbers, so pay attention. Cooper's Hill is 200 yards long. It has a gradient of 50% and it's near vertical in places. The original wheel of cheese weighed between seven and nine pounds, but it is now fake cheese made of foam for the safety of the spectators, which is a bit sad. The cheese has been clocked at 70 miles an hour and the object of the race

is to get to the bottom of the hill first and probably still be alive. It has been dubbed the world's most dangerous foot race. Charles, take it away. Oh my God. Wait, wait, wait, just to be clear. When you say the cheese is going 70 miles an hour, it's rolling 70 miles an hour.

Yeah. Someone's taken a speed gun and clocked it. Yeah. It's a classic freshman physics problem, Neil. Remember all those days? You roll a wheel of cheese without slipping down an incline of 50% at 200 yards at the bottom. What is its velocity?

Remember those things? Right, right. But you had to know how much did the thing like to roll. That's right. There's the moment of inertia, I guess they called it. Yes. The disk of the moment of inertia, and then you have to figure out how much of the kinetic energy goes in the rotation

and how much of it goes in the translation down the hill. There's this magical thing called rolling without slipping, which allows you to make some of these really cool calculations. If you start sliding, then bets are off. But we're assuming that these cheeses roll, right? They're not just like slip sliding away down the hill. No, they're bouncing, Charles, because this is not a perfectly level... I would say bounding. They're bounding down the rectangle. We'll take bounding. Okay, it's get along little cheesies. Okay, we're moving along.

Here's your take. It's 200 yards long, right? Which is 600 feet. And a 50% grade, roughly, that means what? It's a square root of 2, right? 0.7 is the height. Is 50% grade a 45 degree angle? Correct. Is that right? That's what it is. Yeah, okay. So square root of 2? 0.7 is the height. Is 50% grade a 45-degree angle? Correct. Is that right?

That's what it is. Yeah, okay. So square root of 2 out of the... So of 600 feet, right? So that's about 400 feet or thereabouts. Now, if you remember your physics from, like I said, one half AT squared, how long it takes to fall 400 feet, the answer is about four seconds.

Okay. So the acceleration of gravity going straight down, about four seconds, at each second you go 32 feet per second faster than you did before or about 22 miles an hour faster, which means that if you've just fell straight down from the top 200 yards all the way vertically, like off a cliff, you know, Wile E. Coyote kind of falling,

when you hit the bottom you'd be going around 80 to 90 miles an hour. Okay. But you're rolling. Okay. So some of it is going into your rolling. Some of it is going away. And some of the times you're bounding, then you're not constrained by gravity at all. So 70 miles an hour actually makes sense. You could actually get to that speed. Now, a human being couldn't do that because we don't roll without slipping. When we roll, we slip badly. That's how we roll. What? That is how we roll. Score one for Chuck.

Good job. Man, that was a good one, Chuck. I wish I thought of that one. That's how I roll. I don't know how you roll. Now, a person running, right, Usain Bolt on a flat field will run 200 yards at a speed of about 20 to 25 miles per hour. That's about right. Yeah, you get that gravity assist a little bit.

Then it's a matter of trying to figure out whether you can plant your foot and rotate your speed fast enough, kind of like the flash or or you know or the roadrunner or something right yeah meet meet you know you have to make sure that your feet are synced with how fast you're falling combined with how fast you can turn so you could probably wait wait do you say something very important there charles what you're saying is as you're running you i mean this is so obvious that to say it it's like what is that what we actually do what you're running, I mean, this is so obvious that to say it, it's like, what? Is that what we actually do? What you're saying is when I leap, I have to make sure that when I come in contact with the ground again, it's the bottom of my foot that's doing it. Correct.

And not my knee or my elbow or my head. Or my chin. Right. Okay. That's why you have the ambulances waiting at the bottom of the hill for this one, right, Jerry? Oh, for sure. So the answer is, you know, you have to time your motion of your feet to compensate, not just for your regular running, but when you're falling and then you've got to know where your foot's going to land. And so that's another physics problem.

Fortunately, human beings are great at physics, not necessarily great at writing down answers on a piece of paper, but great at sort of calculating where our foot needs to be at any given time to reach the ground just as we are reaching the ground. You mean physiologically,

we're good at that calculation without even knowing we're doing the calculation. Our brains just do it for us. And it's the translation onto, you know, your calculations with an equation or a piece of paper or a laptop. That's why babies look like they're drunk when they're walking. Right. Yeah.

Oh, wait. No, you mean babies aren't just, wait, babies aren't actually drunk when they're rolling? If you actually watch people chasing a wheel of cheese down Cooper's Hill, they are not smoothly running. Right. They are flipping, slipping, sliding, banging into each other and things because this is a natural hill. So it's got

all sorts of divots and bumps and lumps in it. So it's just hilarious to watch. Is the idea that your wheel of cheese gets to the bottom first, and then you also have to be the first human at the bottom of the hill? Yeah, that's it. It's a complicated set of rules. They throw the cheese over the edge first, and then a second later, everybody chases it. And whoever gets to the bottom first goes home with a big cheese. Yeah, you get to go home with the cheese you came with.

No, wait, if somebody else's cheese wins. There's only one wheel of cheese. Yeah. And you get to go home with the cheese you came with. No, wait, if somebody else's cheese wins. There's only one wheel of cheese. Yeah. And you get to the bottom. Do you take home their cheese wheel? Oh, there you go. No, no, there's only the one. If they have a race, there's only one wheel of cheese.

At a time. You don't bring your own. Okay, so it's just one giant wheel of cheese. It's a poor country. They can only hold one wheel of cheese. So it's not wheels of cheese racing against each other. Because you could, if you know physics, you could fix that one, make your wheel come in first every time. How?

Charles, what would you do to your wheel if you would? Oh, well, you want it to have the most amount of its kinetic energy going down the hill and the least amount of it spinning, right? Okay, yeah. Yeah, which would mean, wouldn't you want to like squish the cheese to more like a bowling ball rather than a wheel? Into the middle, right, okay. Yeah. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Bowling ball filled with cheese. There you go.

Wait. Yeah, what's the moment of inertia of a sphere again? I think it's two-fifths m r squared. Two-fifths. Okay, two-fifths of the rim. If-fifths. Okay, two-fifths of the rim. Yeah, so let me give you my equation.

Here's what you do with the cheese. Uh-oh, Chuck's got an equation. You eat it. You eat it. Just eat it? Just eat it? Yeah, screw this game, guys.

I'm hungry. But the cheese is like 70 pounds, dude. Okay. There's plenty for all. Okay, so it's not a race. Gary, can you eat a wheel of cheese after you roll it down a hill?

Is it still edible is my point. Yes. Okay, well in that case. You got to wrap it really careful. Oh yeah, they do. They put a wooden sort of case around it. I was wondering, it's probably not brie. Protect it.

Because brie. That would be a mess. Now of case around it. I was wondering, it's probably not brie. Protect it. Because brie... No, it's a... That would be a mess. Now you've mentioned it, it will be double Gloucester, which is a harder cheese. Oh, good, double Gloucester. And therefore, not likely to end up...

Wait, is this just what we would call cheddar? And you'll call it double Gloucester? No, double... No, no, no. Oh, gosh. Sorry. Don't mess your cheeses up. Cheddar, double Gloucester, red Leicestershire.

It's all... It sounds like firm cheese. Okay, got it. Cheddar, double Gloucester, red Leicestershire. It's all cheese. It sounds like firm cheese. Okay, got it. Yeah. So I had it wrong. We're not racing cheese wheels. You're racing people down the hill. And then it's not a straight line.

And it's not a thing. And Chuck, getting back to your Usain Bolt reference, Usain Bolt might not win that race because it's not a straight path. Correct. It's like a cross-country run, but at a breakneck pace and where you can possibly actually break your neck. That's about right. I'll tell you.

When you explain it that way, I want to watch this sport. Damn. Okay. All right. And this has been going on for how long? About 600 years Now, if they use the same wheel of cheese That's one hard cheese that's lasted for 600 years

That's like, not double Gloucester That's like quintuple Gloucester By then No, that's not going to be happening Definitely evidence that there was no cable television back then No HBO for sure Exactly Alright, so Gary Definitely evidence that there was no cable television back then. No HBO for sure. Exactly.

All right. So, Gary, what next sport? What next crazy-ass sport you have from your home country? Okay. We're moving out of Britain, but not too far. We're going to Norway. There is such a thing as the World Belly Flop Championships. All right. Okay.

Wait, wait, okay. I don't have time. Wait. We have to put that in the next segment. Okay. Don't even start that until we have a fresh segment to put that in.

This is StarTalk Sports Edition. Weird sports from throughout the world. Brought to you by Gary. I got nothing to do with this one. Oh, it's all me. This is all Gary. All right, we'll be back in a moment. We're back.

Star Talk Sports Edition. Gary O'Reilly has called from throughout the world, specifically his part of the world, crazy-ass sports. Yep. Gary, I think you made this episode take place so that one day we will look at curling and say, hey, that's a good sport.

I think you're trying to reset, you're trying to recalibrate how any of us have ever looked at the sport curling. We've got a geek in chief, Charles Liu, who's always good to take us to places we didn't even think of going. And, of course, Chuck Nice. So keep it going, Gary. All right, so the World Championships of belly flopping is a thing.

But it's really taken on a massive interest in Norway, where it's known as dodzing, which translates, apparently apparently into death diving. Right? Now this sounds weird. It was invented in 1972 by Erling Bruno Hovden. You start on a 10 to 14 meter diving tower. But just to be clear,

1972 was before lead was banned in drinking water. And in household paint. That's one year before the laws went into effect, at least in the United States, of banning lead and leaded gas. But go on. Could be anecdotal, but could be a connection. I'm just saying. Put it out there. Just saying.

So you're diving off of a tower into a swimming pool at 32 to 45, 46 feet high. There's classic belly flop, arms outstretched, legs outstretched. You just hit the surface of the water. Then there's freestyle, where in midair, you have stunts. And then just as you're about to impact, you just curl up in a ball and cannonball through this. Because it's not a belly flop, that's a cannonball. It's not a belly flop, that's a cannonball. No, but there's classic belly flop.

Okay. So there's two different events. You can enter the classic or go for the freestyle. Oh, so the freestyle. Oh, okay, so the freestyle is it, it's not how much splash you don't make, it's how much splash you do make.

And it's, no, it's the mid-air stunts. You have to perform a mid-air stunt and hold it for as long as you possibly can. So, I mean, this, a dodds is the dive. You have to perform a mid-air stunt and hold it for as long as you possibly can. So, I mean, a Dodds is the dive. There is an international Dodds Federation, although the delightful people of the Norwegian Swimming Federation do not recognize it. The World Championships will attract something like 3,000 paying spectators.

So, it's quite a thing. If you see it, it's really... I mean, I suppose Norwegians are famous for ski jumping. So this is basically how to ski jump without skis. So Norwegians have some of the highest per capita income in the world. Well, there you have it. So is that it, Chuck? Because survival is not a thing they got to worry about. So they have to introduce ways they might die just to bring excitement to their life.

So, Charles, if I take a running jump as, say, like a man of 170 pounds or something like that off a tower some 30, 40 feet high, what sort of force am I going to hit the surface of the water? high. What sort of force am I going to hit the surface of the water? That's a good question, but you have to be a little bit careful about this because it's not so much the force that matters, right? The amount of force you're experiencing from gravity is a constant amount, right? Your mass times the acceleration of gravity, 9.8 meters per second. Rather, it's the momentum you have when you reach the water and how much time it takes for you to slow down. Right. And then that leaves you with the thing called impulse. So the amount of force you experience is if you have a whole bunch of momentum and you're falling and in a very short time or a very long time, you reduce that momentum to zero,

right? So that's why, for example, when you're on the side of the road, you have these crash pads or near the toll booths or something like that. The slower, the longer it takes for you to stop, the less force you will experience at any given time. So it's a combination of speed. So that's why high jumpers have big pillows on the other side of their... Exactly. You want to slow down their fall, not so much to sort of stop it. So it's not just the amount of force, which would be the mass of the individual. Well, 170 pounds is what, about 80 kilograms or so. I got to say this just so that Chuck doesn't have to say it. So there'd be another Olympics where you

have the pole vault and they land on cement. That's a different sport. Did the Norwegians invent that too? They are tough people. I thought the ski jump was already bad enough. I don't know if they invented them, but imagine going down a hill in your skis through the air, like 300 feet, and then landing. Right, right. That's really amazing. Those guys are very impressive.

So, yeah, bottom line is, if you're belly flopping, right, you are hitting not only quickly, you're stopping really fast, but you also have a large surface area on which that you're hitting. So every single spot on your skin gets smacked. Those good divers, well, I don't want to say good, those professional divers or Olympic divers, they're always trying to be as vertical as possible. Right. As little splashes. Right. That's right. So that when you hit, you have the smallest surface area sliced through, and you don't actually feel a lot of pain. Then you let the water stop you. And the underwater cameras, they go down 10 feet or something.

That's right. So over that 10 feet, they're slowing down. That's right. So now at what point does the water itself offer enough resistance to just break you in half or like bust your bones up? I mean, there's got to be a point where that water becomes as hard as cement. The Golden Gate Bridge. People don't survive jumping off that bridge.

Right. It's a surface effect, as it turns out, basically. But the way materials work, because you're going from low density into high density, even if that water is liquid, when you hit, you can have a substantially strong amount or 40 feet, Gary, you can break bones. You can snap joints if you're not careful. So those belly floppers aren't just playing around. They're probably being very, very careful that they hit with the soft part of their torsos so they don't actually hit with their head and their chin going up against the rest of their body and thus snapping something like a spine. I mean, the record is over 100 feet. That's crazy. With the record for someone who lived? Right. But that's not the classic

belly flop, right? Oh, I hope not. I'm sure that's the curling into a cannonball at the last moment. You could probably hit with your buttocks or something like that. And you're much less likely to break something that's irreparable. But you can't sit down for at least a week. Yeah, so it is interesting. So in the cannonball, if you hit butt first. So Charles, is a fat butt or a narrow butt better for a cannonball land? Oh, well, there are two actors at work there, right?

Because when you're talking about… I mean, the left butt cheek and the right butt cheek. The left and the right. Yeah, exactly. If you're hitting, trying to minimize your cross-sectional area hitting the water, then you want that narrow tuchus, right? On the other hand, the tuchus has substantial padding, and that will slow down your time of deceleration, right? The amount of time it takes for you to reduce your speed, just like a bumper on a car would. So you may want more bumper to slow you down,

and thus you may not want to hit directly as tail-on as possible, but just a little bit off to the side so you get that nice fatty cushion. I don't know. Doesn't that dissipate the energy better? Yeah. I'd have to do the calculations. I think that would be a lot of fun to do. Okay. So, Gary, this is now a 50-year-old sport.

Does it make money? Is it? Gary, this is now a 50-year-old sport. Does it make money? If there's 3,000 spectators turning up for the World Championships, I'm guessing they make money. Because there'll be all the sort of merchandising. It appears it's on TV. So they're selling the TV rights. They're selling out spectators in stadiums in Norway. So, yeah, the world champions are belly flopping.

It's on. It's out there making money. Norway television must really suck if this is. If that's a primetime special. Right, if this is a primetime sport. Okay, Chuck, let's just get this fair. The winters in northern Norway are long and dark. And in the summers, up in places like Narvik,

the sun will not set during summer. So there's a lot of difference. So the summer is the opposite of the winter. The days are long and it never gets dark. Yeah, because in the winter, the nights are long and it never gets light. Right, so that all switches out. That's about it. So, Charles, any fast calculation in your head about whether a 300-pound fat person relative to a 130-pound skinny person would do better in this kind of event?

Oh, gee. Calculate real quick. Because we think, you know, with a lot of fat, it protects your inner organs, right? On a fall. If in the classic, in the classic where you're actually landing on your belly, you do want more subcutaneous belly stuff to slow you down. In the classic belly flop,

as long as you have good technique and you're landing on your belly properly, right? Without like bending your spine too much that you wind up snapping it or something, then you probably want to be larger and have more fat. So that would take the energy of contact and dissipate it into your fat without breaking your ribs, for example. That's right.

That's exactly what you would want. On the other hand, if you were that cannonball thing, you do your tricks in the air, then you curl into a ball and drop in, I think being thin would be better because then your profile going in will be smaller. Right, and if you're heavy going into the cannonball, it'd be like in all of the water parks

with the fish show, with the, you know, the porpoise shows. There's a splash zone. Yes, that's right. First 10 rows. Watch out. Yeah, yeah. You would wind up there's a splash zone. Yes. First 10 rows. Watch out. Yeah, yeah. You would wind up producing quite a splash.

No question about it. So, Gary, anything else you want to add to this before we go on to the next sport? No. I think we've covered it. Allow me to say, allow me to just, a shout out to the Norwegians, okay?

At this moment, the Norwegians, okay? At this moment, the Norwegians, they have this fascinating sport, which is still intriguing to all of us on this panel, but they also have the world record for the 400-meter hurdle, and they have the highest-ranking chess player there ever was. And this is a country of how many people? Eight. Eight people? Eight. Eight people? Eight people?

Is that right? Yeah, that's right. Eight people. You know, no more people. A few million. Like somewhere between like a five million people maybe? As many as in a metropolitan area of a city in America. So that's, you know, they're doing something right.

You know, give them their belly flop if the rest of this is going down the way it is. Yeah. Hooray for Norway, I say. Yeah. All right. So, Gary, what sport is up next? Face slapping.

Uh-oh. Uh-oh. All right, all right. Yeah, there it is again. Okay, we're going to take a break, and we'll come back. We'll come back and talk about face slapping as a sport. Face slapping as a sport on StarTalk Sports Edition when we return.

We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition. Odd, unusual sports, all of which Gary invented. Yeah. With my Norwegian chums. Yeah, we talked about cheese rolling. We talked about... Belly flop We talked about belly flopping.

And what's the next topic here, Gary? Face slapping. And I do not have an origin as national identity for this thing. It's been featured in Squid Games, the Netflix show. Get out. Yeah. So here we go. They love it in Russia. Get out.

Yeah. So here we go. They love it in Russia. One of their slap kings, that's the official term, is Vasily Chemostitskaya, or affectionately known as Dumpling, who weighs in at 370 pounds. It's open to both men and women,

but they don't hit, you know, you say, you know, women slap women, men slap women. The rules are simple. You get five slaps each. That's if you get that far. And if you evade a slap, you get a foul, two fouls, and you're out. You can only use the upper part of your palm and cannot touch the jaw, temple, or ear. What's left on the face to slap?

The cheek. The cheek right here. Yeah. But the cheek is connected to the jaw. But you don't hit the jaw. You can only hit the cheek. The cheek right here. Yeah. But the cheek is connected to the jaw. But you don't hit the jaw. You can only hit the cheek. Okay. Okay. Yeah, it makes sense because you don't want to break the jaw.

Charles, you sound like you would help write the rules. I thought you were as new to this as the rest of us on this call. All right. Go on, Gary. What else? So, we've got someone who's 370 pounds. His arms are probably like my legs.

And he's going to slap me in the face. And I'm standing there and letting him do it. Ouch. So what determines who wins? Oh, if you just say, I've had enough. You have to stand your ground and be slapped. But wait, you only get five. And then it's your go.

You only get five shots, didn't you just say? So anyone can handle five shots. Oh, not when someone has meat hands coming at you. 370 pounds. Because you've got a straight arm lever. You've got a gigantic hand that's coming at you. I can't imagine what sort of speed. But I don't like the idea of that at all.

Here's how this game works for me. I get to go first, and then I quit. I go first, and then I forfeit. I lose. That's it. All right, I lose. I'm so broken up. You know there's going to be someone

who is so determined not to quit, they'll stick it out. Unless they get knocked out. These are crazy people. Right. These are people who like... And what country leads this? I don't think there is a leader,

although it is popular in Russia. Man. Wait, wait, wait. So is this a spectator sport, Gary? Yes. They have championships. Although the prize money isn't enormous,

you get to walk out there with about $1,000 or something like that, and they'll have championships based around places. Obviously, there's weight categories, I would imagine. The 370-pound giant pitching up against the 100-pound weight clean. Right, you don't want anybody slapped into orbit. That's exactly it.

Are you allowed to enter other people? As attackers or as targets? Well, yeah, as targets. Well, I'll tell you what, Gary. A thousand bucks or so can certainly buy you a lot of ice packs. Just exactly the right amount of ice packs. That's right. That's right.

But I would not necessarily discount a thin person or a lightweight person doing poorly compared to a heavyweight person in this kind of competition. Why? Well, think about it. It's arm speed, right? The arm speed is what matters more than anything else. The kinetic energy is one half mv squared, right? V, the velocity, it increases much faster than the mass, which is all increases linear. So if you can be really fast, then you're good. Not to mention, let's say if you are thin, you might be more limber in your joints. And thus, when you get struck,

you might be able to absorb it a little bit better by allowing your face and your joints to change. It's increasing the amount of time your body has to absorb the force and therefore experience less force. As we talked about earlier. And just to emphasize a point Charles made, the most lethal

bullets fired out of a rifle are not the fattest, heaviest bullets. They're very small. You know, the M16 rifle, high velocity, high muzzle velocity, is it like a .22 caliber, somewhere around there? Yes,.223. Yeah, so basically a.22 caliber bullet.

So they said, let's give up some mass, but put it all into velocity. And that's what makes it so lethal. So very good point, Charles. So Charles, what if you have less nerve endings in your cheek? I mean, how many nerve endings in a human cheek? Answer, please. Oh, millions.

Yeah. But yes, if you were somehow genetically predisposed that you had fewer cheek nerve cells, then you might tolerate the pain a little bit more, right? But I'm thinking more along the lines of the damage that it would do to your face, right? How many blood vessels would break the millions of capillaries that are in your cheek muscles, all those kinds of things. And so in that sense, you can imagine a very not heavyweight person, but with a lot of cheek fat. And that would make you a very strong candidate in this kind of contest. So the similar thing to the belly flopping,

so the dissipation of energy through the cheek. Gary, you got one more sport I think, is that right? Yeah, let's do another one of the finest sports ever created by the Brits. Shin kicking. From slapping the kicking.

Oh, man. Why do these sports have to be so violent? What gets you ready for soccer? Because they're kicking each other. Why can't you just do something like carry your wife or something? Wouldn't that be a better sport? There is that. The Finns do that.

There is a wife-carrying competition. What? Really? Yeah, it's over an obstacle course. Is this before they're married or after they're married in preparation for the threshold for the wedding night? You don't actually have to carry your own wife or have a wife. You have to have a young woman or a woman over the age of 17

who you carry over, I think there's two dry hurdles. I would just assume they would be marrying over that age anyway and that wouldn't have to be a rule in the sport. But go on. That's a rule. The rule is, in wife-carrying, the woman must be over 17 years of age. And you throw her over your shoulders.

There's different styles. Like a sack of potatoes. Okay. Well, no, I'm not referring to young ladies as a sack of potatoes. Well, like a mink stole. Okay. Then there's the fireman's carry.

Then there's a thing called Estonia style. What's that? Oh. Okay, so basically the woman is over your shoulders and her legs come over the front of you. And you hold on to those. And that, I suppose, Charles, is kind of like a counterbalance, a lever.

Yes, that's right. Wait, wait, wouldn't that just call it a piggyback ride? That's just a piggyback ride you give your kids. No, no, it's the reverse piggyback. Oh, no, the woman's upside down. Okay, I thought this was a family show. Because I... Let me tell you what you just described.

Chuck! Come on, Chuck. I didn't invent the sport. Get your head out of the... I was going to go for shin kicking. Charles wanted to do one thing. These are your sports and all. So how did this begin? I didn't invent the sport. I was going to go for shin kicking. Charles wanted to do wife carrying. These are your sports at all.

So how did this begin? The wife carrying thing. No, no, no. Just go to the shin kicking. Go ahead. All right. So shin kicking is another British thing. It's in the same part of the world as the cheese rolling.

So obviously they definitely don't have cable TV. It goes back about 400 years to a thing called the Cotswold Olympics, and that's Olympics spelt with a K. It should be, on the surface, the stupidest sport anyone could ever, ever have invented, but there's something going on with it. It takes place in the beautiful area of the Cotswolds. They have banned steel toe caps. Person, place, or thing, the Cotswolds. It's a place of the Cotswolds. They have banned steel toe caps.

Wait, wait, is that a person, place, or thing, the Cotswolds? It's a place, the Cotswolds. It's an area of Britain just to the southwest. Forgive my American geographic ignorance. I think there's a cheese named Cotswold, isn't there? Yes, there probably will be. It does have a deeper meaning, and it's strange, but if I explain it, maybe then you'll have a better understanding.

Shin kicking is absurd, right? But not without this meaning. It's about standing your ground. It's about stubbornly resisting the assaults that come your way and giving back as good as you get. Okay. Okay, so it's about revenge. It's a bit weird.

There's rules. Wait a minute. There are rules. You stand there, stand your ground. You kick somebody in the shins, and then how much time do they get to recover? Because I've never been kicked in the shins. I've never bumped my shin on a coffee table.

I've never even kicked in the shins. I've never bumped my shin on a coffee table. I've never even scraped my shin without immediately pulling it up to my chest and writhing in pain. So how much time do you get to recover? It's an ongoing bout. So each, here we go, this is the quaint British tradition. Each person has to wear, there's two people in a ring to begin with, right?

A circular ring. And there's a judge outside. And they both have to wear white coats. They have to hold onto the collar of their opponent. And if they get them on the ground, they win and there are three, count them, one, two, three rounds. And you can only kick between the knee and the foot.

Okay. So it's like wrestling with kicking you're you're you're holding the person like those i forget the hold that you when you see those guys wrestling they start off with their hand on the neck yeah and then you and then you get to kick the guy and if if somebody goes down that's then they win yeah you you ground your opponent you get a point. And you get as many, whoever gets the most points after three rounds wins. Or if someone says, you know what, I've had enough. My shin's really hurt now. I'm going home.

It still sounds like, Gary, that people they need more streaming TV services. Yeah! They're a lot of bored people and the twisted mind that came up with this, I don't quite know, but it's a thing, shin kicking. I hope they're allowed to wear shin guards.

That'd be okay. Do you know what they do? Okay, so they wear trousers, and they stuff hay down the legs of their trousers to give them some protection. So it's not the least bit uncomfortable either. The tried and true tradition of stuffing your pants. Yes, I understand. See, I would have stuffed a metal plate down my pants.

That's what I would have done. This is 400 years old. The excess of ready-made metal shin guards wasn't really there. That blacksmith would have been my friend. I'm with Neil on this one. Head on top, metal against the skin. There are so many more weird sports. There's a sport called goanna pulling.

Okay. The Aussies came up with that. Aussie, you mean like Australians, not the Aussies like Aussie and Harriet. Right. Okay. No, the Australians, the down-unders. Then you've got chess boxing.

Okay. Which has become, yes, you heard me. No T in there, Chuck. Chess boxing. So you have a round of chess. They play blitz chess, right? So you have a round of chess, and then they go and have a three-minute boxing round. Come back a round of chess and then they go and have a three minute

boxing round come back round of chess three minutes and they alternate so you win by checkmate or knockout

wow okay it really you have to have I think it's called an ELO isn't it the chess sort of gradient system

you have to have 1600 and above it's pretty good as a chess yeah and have been at least have 50 amateur bouts as a boxer

to compete professionally. So this guarantees that you will lose your cognitive ability. Exactly. So there'd be good data there.

Find out what happens to your chess rating every time you get knocked out. And then this is important concussion data. Oh my gosh. I mean, the thing is, science has taken an interest in chess boxing because it's the ability to flip-flop

out of a physical, strenuous demand, like a round of boxing, and then sit down and be calm, cerebral, and focused. Into an analytical strategy game. Wow. Yeah. Okay. I don't know any real-life situations where you might have to do that.

I think it's how the brain works and copes with stress and moving in and out. But right now, I got to do some calculus. That's what happened to me all the time in high school, Chuck. I don't know what's wrong. Nice. Well played, sir. Well played.

Says the geek in chief. So, guys, we got to land that plane. So, Gary, there's probably a longer list than we were even able to get to today. Oh, gosh, yeah. I mean, okay, Conkers. We're out of time, Gary. No, no, look, I've got to drop some names here.

Just in case the ones we've already discussed are not weird enough. Okay, go. A favorite of Queen Elizabeth II and Sir David Attenborough. So I got those two names in. And Arnold Schwarzenegger is a big fan of face slapping. Okay. And the Wu-Tang Clan

have a song about chess boxing. What? Nice. There you go. All connected. By the way, we've had the jizza on StarTalk. That was many years ago

in our early seasons. So we get around on this show. So what's the favorite sport of Queen Elizabeth? She was a big fan of conkers, which is a horse chestnut. You know those things in the autumn that fall off? On a string.

And you drill a hole, you put a string through, and then you try and smash your opponent's conker with it. Conkers. What's a conker? Another British sport. What's a conker? It's a horse chestnut.

What do you mean? You have to smash their conkers with your conkers? Yes. Oh. Interesting. Again. You had me at horse chestnut. I would have more fun swinging cantaloupes at one another

and having them smash. That's the Gallagher version. Good one. Now explain to everyone who Gallagher is. Yeah, you got to look up Gallagher. There's no explaining him. Look him up. If you don't know who Gallagher is, kids, just go to YouTube.

Yeah, look up any Gallagher clip. It'll say exactly what you got to say. You'll see it. My favorite line from Gallagher, and then we got to call it quits. He was the one that came up with, which was later then repeated by other comedians. I think he said, if pro is the opposite of con,

then progress is the opposite of congress. Oh. Yeah. And God, that saying just keeps getting better with each one. That came out of Congress. Oh. Yeah. And God, that saying just keeps getting better with each year. That came out of him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, guys. Gary, we got to do this again

because apparently we did not exhaust your list. Yes, we have. This has been StarTalk. The Weird Sports Edition. And Charles, always good to have you, man. Pleasure. All right, guys. That's has been StarTalk Sports Edition.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here. Keep looking up.