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0:00
Hi everyone,
0:03
welcome to
0:05
this week's episode of
0:08
No Such Thing as a Fish. Before
0:10
we start, a little bit of news
0:13
that is very important to Anna and
0:15
I, and that is that our new
0:17
book is finally out in paperback.
0:19
Woo hoo! I know that
0:21
might not seem like a big deal
0:23
to you, but honestly, this is a
0:25
real chance for us to get more
0:27
people reading this book. One very
0:29
interesting thing to say is that the book
0:32
has had a name change. What
0:34
used to be called Everything to Play
0:36
for is now called A Load of
0:39
Old Balls, the QI History of Sport
0:41
by James Harkin and Anna Tyshinsky. A
0:43
lot of people have said to us, why did you
0:46
not call it that in the first place? I'm not
0:48
sure if they're being rude, I hope not, because it
0:50
is a book full of the most interesting facts
0:52
and stories about sport that you
0:54
can possibly imagine. Even
0:56
if you're not into sport, probably this
0:59
summer you will notice that everyone's off
1:01
watching the Euros, everyone's off watching the
1:03
Olympics, perhaps you don't really have much
1:05
to say to those people when it
1:07
comes up at a dinner party, will
1:09
read our book and you will be the
1:11
pinnacle of all sporting knowledge and all
1:13
quite interesting sporting knowledge at that. As
1:15
you imagine from me and Anna, it's just full of silly
1:18
stories, fun facts. We
1:20
spent so much time doing loads of in-depth research
1:22
in there that even if you are the kind
1:24
of person who's watching every single sporting event this
1:27
summer, there will be loads of stuff in there
1:29
that you didn't know. So
1:31
if you go to anywhere where you would
1:33
normally buy your books, then look for A
1:35
Load of Old Balls, the QI History of
1:38
Sport or search for our names, James Harkin
1:40
and Anna Tyshinsky and you will
1:42
find that book. Please do buy
1:44
it, it would mean the world to us if you did.
1:46
Of course we're going on tour, don't
1:48
forget that. All in Scotland,
1:51
Wales, England, Ireland, New
1:53
Zealand, Australia. Do get your
1:55
tickets very, very soon. A lot of them
1:57
are sold out. I know we've got quite
1:59
a few tickets left for... the Scottish dates
2:02
in Edinburgh and Glasgow and I think quite
2:04
a few for the show in Cardiff. So
2:06
if you're in any of those cities then
2:08
do get your tickets but actually
2:10
you know go to nosuchthingsoffish.com/live and you
2:12
will see all of the dates where
2:14
we're playing and hopefully one of them
2:16
will be near you. Okay
2:19
not much more to say apart from
2:21
on with the podcast! Hello
2:43
and welcome to another episode of No
2:45
Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly
2:47
podcast coming to you from the QI
2:49
offices in Holborn. My name is Dan
2:51
Shriver and sitting here with Andrew Hunter-Murray,
2:54
Anna Tyshinski and James Harkin and once
2:56
again we have gathered around the microphones
2:58
with our four favourite facts from the
3:00
last seven days and in no particular
3:02
order here we go! Starting
3:04
with fact number one and that is my fact. My
3:07
fact this week is that snooker
3:09
games on cruise ships are sometimes
3:11
played with flat balls. Are
3:15
we talking about the balls on the table are
3:17
they? The men playing um yeah
3:20
this is this is obvious when you think
3:22
about it. Oh it's so obvious. It's so
3:24
obvious when you don't really know how you
3:26
could play snooker on a cruise ship with
3:28
a ball shaped ball actually. Well on a
3:30
rough cruise ship. We'll get to that in
3:32
a sec because you can and there's a
3:34
pretty awesome way that you do that but
3:36
this I got from a book that's written
3:39
by an Australian comedian called Hung Lee it's
3:41
called The Crappiest Refugee. He tells the story
3:43
of from immigrant boat to cruise ship comedian.
3:45
Anyway he wrote this book and inside the
3:47
book uh he mentions that he's
3:49
seeing a bunch of guys playing on a
3:51
pool table or snooker table and they are
3:53
hitting with puck like objects because obviously in
3:55
the rough seas the balls are going to
3:57
be rolling around and so there will be
3:59
cruise ships out there that are... have these
4:01
tables on them. And the idea I think
4:03
is like, you know, air hockey. Yeah. It's
4:05
those kind of like puck things. Isn't it?
4:07
Exactly. Now to your point, Anna, a modern
4:09
day cruise ship does have pool tables or
4:11
snooker tables, billiards, but they
4:13
use gyroscopic technology. What? So it's amazing.
4:15
It's honestly, I've watched videos of it
4:17
online. It's so cool because basically while
4:20
the rest of the ship is moving,
4:22
the pool table isn't. That's insane. Just
4:24
the top of the pool table. High
4:26
end. Yeah. High end cruise ship. It's
4:28
insane. It is incredible. I've read stories
4:30
of people finding it so fascinating that
4:32
like staring to fire, sometimes people will
4:34
just go and sit and watch it
4:36
as it doesn't sway. There's even stories
4:38
of crew members that when they get
4:40
particularly sick, they'll go and sleep on
4:42
the pool table. No, because the seasickness is getting
4:44
to them. It's not moving so you
4:46
can have a restful night. That's a question. Why
4:48
isn't every bed on a boat? Probably
4:52
price cost. Yeah. How good
4:54
is the correction mechanism? Like if you have a
4:56
Titanic situation, how long can you continue with your
4:58
game of snooker? So it goes vertical.
5:02
I met someone who was a dancer on cruise ships.
5:05
Oh yeah. This sounds like a good addict though. She
5:08
did the musicals because they
5:10
often have a theater on board, sometimes a
5:12
show. And she said that the most
5:14
difficult one she'd ever done was Starlight Express where you're
5:16
on roller skates. She
5:19
said in rough weather, you would set off across
5:21
the stage and you didn't know how soon you
5:23
were going to arrive because it might be that
5:25
you caught the ship moved with you and suddenly
5:27
you're there thinking half a second or you're going
5:29
against it and you just roll backwards. So
5:32
yes, snooker. It's a good sport.
5:34
Mostly not played at sea. Largely
5:37
it's a land-based game, isn't it?
5:39
A land lover's game. I did watch a TikTok
5:41
yesterday just coincidentally of people playing on the
5:43
beach. That looked really cool. Snooker. It was
5:45
poor actually, but they kind of dug holes
5:48
for the pockets and then we just hit the
5:50
balls. Oh, so they played on
5:52
actual sand. Yeah. There's no facts to this, but
5:54
it did look pretty cool. I'm amazed that snooker in any
5:58
form has made it to TikTok because snooker is famous. Quite
6:00
a long game to watch. TikTok is not
6:02
a long format. Andy, honestly, if you could
6:04
see my TikTok, it's just snooker, golf, cricket.
6:07
It's the dullest TikTok, because it just suggests
6:09
things that you like, doesn't it? And it
6:11
just works out what you like. I reckon
6:13
if you were on TikTok, which I bet
6:15
you're not, but you would just get Moss
6:17
video after Moss video. Yeah, that sounds very
6:19
kind of me. It's amazing how it works.
6:21
But it is very slow, isn't it? Or
6:24
rather, it takes a long time. You play lots of frames in
6:26
the course of a match. And it's
6:29
interesting, because for anyone who doesn't follow snooker, only
6:31
one person is playing at a time. That's
6:33
weird. Well, you play a frame,
6:35
right? Well, no, but you play until
6:38
you mess up. And then the other guy gets to
6:40
have a go. But whoever your opponent
6:42
is, they have to stay in their chair. They
6:45
just stay in their chair watching you, and you could be
6:47
playing for hours if you don't make a mistake. It's
6:49
just psychological torture. Are there any other games which
6:51
are like that, where I know tennis, you're only
6:53
playing when your opponent is not playing. Well,
6:56
usually it's quite soon before you're playing again, isn't
6:58
it? I don't know, actually.
7:00
But that is one of the main things about
7:02
snooker is the psychological angle of it. Yeah, although,
7:05
Ronio Sullivan said he likes it, obviously, because he's always
7:07
going to be... Who? Ronio
7:09
Sullivan. Who's Ronio Sullivan? I think he's a famous snooker
7:11
player. I would say Ronio Sullivan and Don Bradman
7:14
are the only two people, I don't know what
7:16
James thinks about this, but who have excelled everyone
7:18
else so much in their sport that it's like,
7:20
whoa. So Ronio Sullivan is the
7:22
best snooker player ever. And
7:24
he hates the fact that it's so slow,
7:27
for instance, because he's this mercurial, crazy character
7:29
with an amazing history. And he likes snookers
7:31
to be super fast. So I think he's
7:33
got pretty much all the records for fastest
7:36
break. But yeah, he's amazing. And he's got
7:38
such an interesting history. His dad
7:40
went to prison for murder when I think Ronnie
7:42
was about 16. Yeah, he
7:44
was a millionaire though. Was he?
7:46
Even though his dad went to prison
7:48
for murder, he was from a very
7:51
affluent background. Interesting. His dad ran a
7:53
lingerie shop or something like that? I believe
7:55
he may have called them lingerie shops in the newspaper
7:57
ads, but I think they were sex shops. I
8:00
mean, Pate's a patata. Sure. You
8:03
say, Pate, I say, vibrator. Yeah,
8:08
so I think some of the other Snook players
8:10
who came from less affluent backgrounds kind
8:12
of point to that and say, you know, we're
8:14
working class, but Ronnie actually was quite rich when
8:16
he was growing up. Interesting, because it
8:19
was heavily embedded probably in that gang culture a
8:21
bit. It was one of the Cray brothers, the
8:23
third Cray brothers' driver, who he murdered in a
8:25
nightclub, I think. Sorry, the third Cray brother. Yeah, the... I
8:27
don't know if there was a third Cray, but do you hear about
8:29
the Cray twins? I know. He was very much the... It's
8:32
like the third chuckle brother. Yeah. He and the
8:34
third Cray brother must have, like, given each other a ride
8:36
look sometimes across the Eastern clubs.
8:38
They both have that picture of Bramwell Bronte
8:40
in their house. That's so neat. Imagine
8:45
a joke that has the Crays, the chuckle
8:47
brothers, and Bramwell Bronte in it. We've got
8:49
the Jonas brothers as well. They've got the
8:51
extra brother who's called Bonus Jonas, who is
8:53
the one that just isn't in the band
8:56
and does his own thing at the time.
8:58
Yeah, Bonus Jonas. Snook
9:00
has got fairly sort of poshish sort
9:03
of foundations, doesn't it? Because it was
9:06
invented by, supposedly, this is the big
9:08
story, by Neville Chamberlain, not the Prime
9:10
Minister, but apparently a cousin. The
9:13
reports are a bit dodgy, but apparently he was
9:15
in India in the 1800s and
9:17
he basically incorporated two existing games. There was
9:19
one called Blackpool and there was another which
9:21
was called Pyramid. And so one was played
9:24
entirely with red balls and that was in
9:26
a pyramid shape. So he was like, I
9:28
love the pyramid shape. And then the other
9:30
one had all the other color balls in
9:32
it. And he brought that over, smashed them into
9:34
one big game with the pyramid, and then just
9:36
kept yelling snooker at people as they were playing.
9:38
And by the end of the game, he'd called
9:40
everyone snooker. And so it stuck. Why did you
9:42
call someone? What did it mean? Did it mean ticket?
9:44
I think it was a sort of term
9:46
for an idiot, someone who was incompetent at whatever
9:49
task they were doing, a rookie.
9:51
I see. It is weird though, because he said
9:53
he invented it in 1875. He
9:55
only said that in 1938, which is
9:58
a substantial amount of time later. as
10:01
what? 63 years later. 63 years later and
10:03
he was an army officer already when he
10:05
invented this so he must have been knocking
10:07
on. But the claim was accepted and I
10:09
think it's sort of widely accepted
10:11
that that's that's where that is where it comes from. But
10:14
also the other weird thing about Snooker, that name thing
10:16
you were saying Dan, is so if you snooker someone
10:18
is it that I need to hit a red next
10:20
but I'm behind the yellow or whatever? Precisely. So that
10:23
is unusual as well because it's
10:26
a move in the game where you've messed things
10:28
up for someone else. Yeah. Which is, is that
10:30
in croquet like that? It's a bit
10:32
like that. Yeah, you can croquet someone. Croquet
10:34
and croquet someone. I think there is a
10:36
connection between croquet and snooker really. I think
10:38
snooker kind of grew out of croquet like
10:40
games. Yeah. And that's why the table's green
10:44
because it was like originally played
10:46
on grass. The bays. Which has
10:48
to have, do you know the difference
10:52
between the bays in snooker and pool? I
10:54
got a bit too into table makeup actually.
10:56
Oh, wow. Is it the nap? Yeah,
10:59
I'm just gonna almost disqualify you from answering
11:01
this question James. Full
11:03
disclosure, I am very much into
11:05
snooker. Yeah, you're not allowed to answer any
11:07
more quiz questions in this section. What's the nap?
11:10
So the nap is the way that the
11:12
kind of hairs on the substance that the
11:14
table is made of bend. So basically in
11:16
snooker you have to have a nap. And
11:19
that means that it's a little bit like if you
11:21
imagine a velvet surface. In fact, if you look at
11:23
those cushions over there. I'm having a nap listening to this. Andy,
11:29
this is fascinating stuff. Sorry, go on, go on. Okay, if you
11:31
look at those cushions over there, they're velvety. You stroke
11:33
them one way and they look smooth. You stroke them the
11:35
other way and they look rough. Oh, okay. Yeah. And that's
11:37
like a snooker table. It has to have that effect
11:39
and it really affects how the ball travels because you
11:41
can imagine if the little hairs, fibers are standing up
11:43
a certain way and depending on the angle at which
11:45
it's hitting them, you really have to work with the
11:47
nap. So if you aim for a shot in
11:49
the middle pocket, you have to aim slightly outside
11:51
the pocket because the nap will make it naturally
11:54
bend towards the pocket. So interesting. So part of
11:56
the gameplay is literally getting your face close to
11:58
the table and seeing how the nap. No,
12:00
it's always the same. It's always the
12:02
same. Well, I actually read in a
12:04
really furious blog that a man who has
12:06
heard of people who install their own tables
12:09
putting the nap on back to front, which
12:11
is obviously an absolute disaster. Doesn't it just go the
12:13
other way then? Or do you mean upside down? No,
12:15
I think he means it goes the other way. So it will
12:17
go slow and it should go fast. But you would be
12:19
used to it. Like you would be very much
12:21
used to it being one way. I got a
12:23
question. Are you allowed to comb the table before
12:25
your pot? So
12:27
before every frame, yeah,
12:30
probably someone will come on and give the table a
12:32
quick comb. And also you
12:34
are allowed to kind of flatten. If you see a
12:37
bit, you are as flat. Mid
12:39
game. Yeah, mid shot like not mid shot. But
12:41
just before your shot, you're allowed to. A bit
12:43
of the rugs rocked up. Yeah, you are. You
12:45
are smoothing it out. Well, it would be like
12:47
curling, wouldn't it? That
12:50
would be a game. So
12:52
actually, Snooker isn't played on a Snooker table.
12:54
He's played on a Billiards table. What?
12:57
Because Billiards was invented before it. And then Snooker
12:59
was played on the Billiards table. And we still
13:01
call it a Billiards table rather than a Snooker
13:03
table officially. So what gets played on a Snooker
13:05
table? There's no such thing as a Snooker table.
13:08
Well, it's just another word for a Billiards table,
13:10
I guess. Right. That's great. And what's Billiards? So
13:13
Billiards is a game where you have three balls
13:15
only on the table. And the rules say you
13:17
get a point by either potting one of the
13:19
balls or by hitting one ball onto
13:21
the other. Right. And then if you get a point,
13:23
you get another go and you get another go and
13:25
another go and another go until you stop getting points
13:27
and then your opponent comes on the table. OK,
13:30
so a bit like Snooker, your opponent sat there
13:32
for quite a long time just watching you play.
13:35
But in 1907, a new technique was
13:37
discovered where, you know, the pockets in
13:40
Snooker where the ball goes into. Yeah.
13:42
What this guy called Walter Lovejoy managed
13:44
to do was to get two balls
13:47
stuck in the pocket. And so
13:49
he could just tap these two balls every time.
13:51
And they would always hit the cushion or hit
13:53
each other. And you could do that again and
13:55
again and again and again. And there
13:58
was a game a bit later between. Tom
14:00
Chapman and Tom Rees, where Tom
14:02
Rees managed to score 499,135 points by using this technique over
14:08
85 hours and 49 minutes
14:10
of play. Wow. Oh, what a tedious
14:12
person. Is
14:15
it illegal now as a technique? It's illegal
14:18
as a technique. And also, like, this record
14:20
was never in the record books because all
14:22
of the fans went home, the referee went
14:24
home and even as a pony. Wow. That's
14:28
so good. I worry about this guy's home life.
14:30
It sounds like you didn't have much to go back to. I
14:32
think it's great. I didn't know that Pocket Billions
14:34
was real. I thought it was a vulgar
14:36
euphemism all my life and actually it's a proper game.
14:39
And what is it? It's just a smaller version of Billions.
14:41
Oh. Or it's slang for messing
14:43
around with yourself. I would stop playing
14:45
Pocket Billions is what you'd say to someone. Yeah. If
14:48
they were masturbating in public. Yeah, right.
14:51
Okay. Just
14:53
don't get them mixed up. That's how I saw it. I
14:55
was getting away with it all the time. Stop
15:12
the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi,
15:15
Daniel Schreiber. Do you like wine? James
15:17
Harkin. I love wine. Oh, well, have
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I got the deal for you? What's
15:21
your favorite kind of wine? Oh, I
15:24
love a white or a red
15:26
or that pink, you know, the pink one into
15:28
that. Yeah. But the thing is you like me,
15:31
probably know that you like wine, but you don't
15:33
know specifically the kind of wines that you like.
15:35
Oh, maybe there's one that you get all the
15:37
time, but you'd like to open up your world
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less than six pounds of
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bottle. All right. On with
16:50
the show. On with the podcast. Okay,
16:57
it is time for fact number two, and that
16:59
is Anna. My fact this week
17:01
is that one of the major battles in
17:03
the Cold War was to see who was
17:05
better at squashing metal. Was
17:09
it to get rid of the Iron Curtain?
17:11
Brilliant. Oh, my god. Oh, my god.
17:13
Lovely. This is the heavy press
17:15
program, which sounds kind of like
17:17
a raunchy sexual program, but it
17:19
wasn't. You get turned on by very different things to
17:22
me, Anna. No, I'm without it. But
17:24
she's coming around to my place for a heavy press. No,
17:29
I'm just going to say how do some pocket billions. The
17:35
heavy press program was launched by the US in response
17:37
to the fact that the USSR in the 1950s, it
17:41
believed had got very good at squashing
17:43
metal. And the good thing about squashing
17:45
metal is that it was a much
17:47
better way of making airplanes. So meant
17:49
that you could put a huge ingot into a
17:52
machine and squash it into the shape you wanted
17:54
for a big bit of wing or something. And
17:56
that would mean that it would be a lighter
17:58
aircraft that if you just. nailed together lots
18:00
and lots of little bits, which is why you were making
18:02
the plane. I've seen images of this thing and
18:04
it's so impressive. It's a ginormous structure, the one
18:06
in America that we're gonna get onto, which
18:09
is a very famous one called the 50. You
18:11
say it's very famous, but I think it's only known
18:13
because there's this one guy who's just written a series
18:15
of amazing articles about it. It's one in the Atlantic
18:17
and other New York Times, who's just really into it.
18:20
And that was in Cleveland, Ohio. It still
18:22
exists today. So I think they made 10
18:25
machines in the US and they made
18:27
four pressing machines, whether you squash metal
18:30
and six extrusion machines, where you squeeze
18:32
it like toothpaste. And
18:34
I think eight of them are still going today.
18:36
It's nuts. At the moment, every single
18:38
US military aircraft contains bits made by this 50
18:41
machine. By this one machine, yeah. I mean, these were built in the
18:43
50s. They're still
18:45
going today. The engineers of the 50 think it's gonna be going
18:47
in total for about 110 years. Wow,
18:50
completely. Can I ask why it's called the 50? I
18:52
think it was because it would exert 50,000 tons of
18:54
compressive force, which is the equivalent of being
18:57
able to lift up 500 blue whales. Wow.
19:00
And it's massive. It's 87 meters high,
19:03
so it looks huge. It's
19:05
so cool. Honestly, there's
19:07
really a work something in me, this machine that's
19:09
really like brought my inner
19:11
Clarkson to the fore. It's just really
19:13
the most amazing machine in the world.
19:15
It's just so cool. It is. I
19:18
think it's the size and the majesty of them. And there are lots of them.
19:20
So there are those in the US. And then, well,
19:22
as I said, in the Cold War, the reason
19:24
it became a fight was because Germany was actually
19:26
the best at making them. So Germany had all
19:29
this technology in the Second World War for pressing
19:31
metal that no one else had. And as part
19:33
of the agreement after the Second World War, we
19:36
divided things up and the USSR got
19:38
their biggest heavy press. So they got
19:40
the 30,000 pressing machine, 30,000
19:43
ton pressing machine. Whereas I think America only
19:45
got about 10,000 ton one. And
19:47
I ended up reading all of these CIA documents
19:50
spying on how Russia was using them and saying,
19:52
oh, what are they doing with this thing? They're
19:54
incredibly boring. Aside from the word secret at the
19:56
top. But yeah, they had
19:58
to transport it back in four specially. made train
20:00
carriages from Germany to the USSR. But yeah,
20:02
America were like, oh no, they've got this
20:04
now. We'll have to make a big one.
20:07
But it's all, and it's partly, it partly relates back to
20:09
the First World War, right? So in the
20:11
First World War, again, lots of post-war
20:14
reparations, Treaty of Versailles took a lot of things away from
20:16
Germany. And there was a shortage
20:18
of various key materials for the German economy and
20:20
for the armaments and all this. So they developed
20:23
the technique of press forging, which is where you
20:25
press down on the, just because it's more efficient.
20:28
And the one thing they'd been allowed to keep,
20:30
or one of the things they were allowed to
20:32
keep was their magnesium, right? The
20:34
Allied powers said, we're not interested in your
20:36
magnesium, so you can have that. But the
20:39
problem is that the previous method of forging
20:41
things is basically big hammer, smashes down, smashes
20:43
off. Does it not explode if you hit
20:45
magnesium now? It's, well, if you put, I
20:47
think you put water on it, isn't it?
20:49
But it does crack. It doesn't forge well
20:52
under the current forging conditions. That's why Germany
20:54
invented the technique of press forging because they
20:56
were working with the materials they had. And
20:58
also they had to be as efficient as
21:01
possible. So- Once again, shot yourselves in
21:03
the foot with Versailles, didn't you, allies? But
21:05
then actually, playing the long game,
21:08
you got the technology back. So
21:10
sort of a nice go draw for the Treaty of Versailles.
21:13
I think that's right, yeah. I think the Treaty of Versailles
21:16
is a foe of the podcast because we give it a
21:18
right kick, you have this show, don't we? True. The
21:21
highest pressure ever achieved is
21:24
770 gigapascals, which
21:27
is more than twice the pressure in the inner core
21:29
of the earth. Okay. Yeah.
21:32
What did we do it for? Well, it's just scientists, isn't it? Ah,
21:35
thanks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They wanted to
21:37
see what happens if you squash osmium,
21:39
really, really, really a lot. And who's he? Richard
21:42
Osmium. He's the Roman
21:45
Richard Os- Yeah. It's
21:47
the chemical element osmium and they really, really
21:49
squashed it with all this pressure. And they
21:52
found out that it does not change its
21:54
crystal structure. Huh. Wow. Yeah, sometimes you're gonna
21:56
go through that experiment to find out. You're
21:59
fancy to find out. As in- It's important to find out
22:01
nothing, to find out something. I wonder
22:03
if it's especially tough, Osmium, or it has a
22:05
special... Is it especially dense? OK, that's cool. Surely,
22:07
otherwise it seems silly if it's just... They
22:11
didn't like, we'll start off by squashing a flam. Let's
22:13
see. The
22:15
biggest press now, I don't think gets much
22:18
press. Mm. It's in
22:20
Vienna, and it's made by an Italian
22:22
company, who would have thought? I
22:25
think... Not me. I
22:27
think it's something nothing. I don't see any reason
22:29
why the Italians wouldn't be good at pressing. I
22:31
suppose most industrial things like that are Russia and
22:34
China, sometimes America, and they do have the other
22:36
big ones. But an Italian company have made it
22:38
in Vienna, and it's called Tyson. Is it
22:40
to make lasagna sheets? It
22:43
is. They can make a meatball that is as dense as
22:45
the sun. And,
22:49
yeah, that exerts 100,000 tonnes of force, which
22:52
is the equivalent of being able to lift up
22:54
100 Eiffel Towers. Wow.
22:57
Wow. Which is impressive. That is a lot of... It
23:00
is amazing. Is it used for the same, just making
23:02
sheets of metal for airplanes and stuff? Yeah,
23:04
they do lots of stuff with oil and
23:06
gas industry, and wind turbines, and nuclear and...
23:08
Yeah, right. ...little things you would imagine need
23:10
loads of metal. I was reading
23:12
into humans crushing metal. Oh, yeah. Because that is...
23:15
Yeah, it's a thing, and it turns out there's
23:17
a lot of Guinness World Records for people who
23:19
have done that in the past. So one
23:22
of the records I found was
23:24
the most cans crushed with shoulder
23:26
blades in one minute. OK.
23:28
Now, this is your back shoulder blades. Yeah.
23:30
So you're sort of moving them together to
23:32
create the crush. What do you reckon in
23:34
one minute? Well, OK, question.
23:37
Yeah. Is someone putting the
23:39
cans in your shoulders after you have
23:41
to place them there yourself? Because
23:43
that feels tough. So the records
23:45
held by Fabrizio Melito. And
23:48
another one for the Italians, sounds like. Exactly,
23:50
yeah. Crushing metal is just their forte. And
23:52
it was his brother Frank who would replenish
23:54
the can in between the shoulder blades to
23:56
be crushed. Yeah. 84. far
24:00
off 68 68 that's
24:02
10 more than someone managed to do it with their
24:04
head in one minute 58
24:06
achieved with their head. It's interesting because if
24:08
you ever crush a can these days, it's
24:10
really easy. It's very and that used to
24:12
be seen as like a Popeye or a
24:14
manly raw kind of thing. It turns out
24:16
that that did used to be that because
24:18
cans were 40% stronger back in
24:21
the day in terms of the material and the strength
24:23
and the thickness. This really shows how old I am.
24:25
I remember when aluminium cans came in and
24:28
that they were much easier to crush. It used to
24:30
be that you could buy cans of pop and some
24:32
of them will be aluminium and some of them wouldn't
24:35
be. The aluminium ones were way easier to crush. Were
24:37
the previous ones steel? I suppose
24:39
they must have been. I'm not really sure
24:41
but I just remember Blue Peter had a
24:43
thing where everyone had to crush cans and
24:45
send them for recycling in their 80s. Nice.
24:47
And so we were all into can crushing
24:50
back then. Before Tamagotchis that was what it
24:53
was. Can I read an
24:55
introductory sentence to you? Yeah. Is it
24:57
from your new novel? No,
25:00
it's from a piece about another kind of forging which is a
25:02
thing called drop forging. And it's in
25:05
Kudahy. I'm sorry I'm sure I'm pronouncing
25:07
it wrong Milwaukee. It begins
25:09
like this. Tucked away in a Kudahy warehouse.
25:11
Something big has been pounding away since 1959.
25:16
But this is a huge great hammer. And
25:18
this is the kind of thing where you
25:21
just have a giant hammer to smash down
25:23
on your metal and get it into the
25:25
shape you want. And this one it weighs
25:27
one million pounds and it
25:29
goes five floors above ground and
25:31
also five floors below ground. So
25:34
it's called a counter blow hammer which is
25:36
meaning that you are whacking above sides.
25:38
Oh right. Yeah. That cool. At the
25:41
same time. Like a crocodile. It's so
25:43
cool. It's just like flames and fire
25:45
inside it and it's just mashing away
25:47
at these other things. Right. Basically that
25:50
hammer, that gigantic hammer has been in
25:52
operation so long that you've got multiple
25:54
generations of the same family who've been
25:56
operating that hammer. It's been going since
25:59
1959. So
26:01
there was a guy interview for this article saying, yeah, my
26:03
grandfather worked on this hammer. I know.
26:05
What would happen if you put just a person in there? Oh,
26:07
they'd be in trouble. They'd be in
26:09
such trouble. They get just squished. They get. But
26:11
I'd love to see what that like, does it
26:14
look like a little bit too. It's not like
26:16
when you frame Roger Rabbit. It's not that bad.
26:18
You would not love to see that. I can
26:20
say. It's become a perfect two dimensional
26:22
human. It's a shame that's
26:24
not on the list of options for like, you
26:26
know, you've got classic burial cremation, obliterated
26:29
fine, mashed hammer. The
26:31
flattening. Can I tell you
26:33
one thing about a cool destruction engine from the
26:35
19th century? This is great. This
26:37
is, there was a great new
26:39
scientist piece about it. And it was, it was called
26:42
the Victorian Monster Destruction Engine, not its official name. But
26:45
it was made by an engineer called David Kerkolde,
26:47
who was Scottish. And he
26:51
was the chief engineer behind
26:53
this machine, which existed to
26:56
smash metal, to tear
26:58
it, to twist it, to crunch
27:00
it, to bop it, you know, to do all
27:02
of this. And
27:05
it was, it was because before his
27:07
work, you could not test the components
27:09
of a bridge, say. So, you know,
27:12
you just have to trust that the bridge you were
27:14
building was strong enough. Yeah, you've got some rivets. You
27:16
need to know whether they're gonna hold. If you put
27:18
a load of pressure on it, how do you do
27:21
that? Exactly that. And he built this gigantic machine. It
27:23
was 116 tonnes, which at the time was huge. And
27:25
its entire job was to tear things apart. And it
27:27
could measure the tonnage at which, or the force that
27:29
needed to be applied before things broke. And this
27:32
changed engineering because, you know,
27:34
there was the Tay Bridge disaster in Scotland.
27:36
Yeah. And they went down to
27:38
the riverbed after this awful disaster had happened. Lots
27:40
of people died. And it was a really tragic
27:42
event. A really bad bit of poetry was written
27:45
about it famously by Lekonigal. That's right. The
27:48
Tay Bridge disaster disaster, it became
27:50
known. And they went down and they
27:52
got some of the lugs that had attached the bridge
27:54
rods to the supporting columns. And it was found that
27:56
they broke at 20 tonnes of pressure rather than the
27:58
60 that they should have done. done. So
28:00
that, you know, ruined the career of
28:03
the engineer who had said, no,
28:05
these are fine and these are strong enough
28:07
to support the bridge. So I feel like
28:09
they should have used buttresses as many a
28:11
wise man confesses. It's a line from
28:13
the poem. It's genuinely a line from the poem. That's good.
28:15
Of all the poems you could have memorised. But
28:20
yeah, he made loads of bridges as well, didn't
28:22
he? Like, and they were shipped all over the
28:24
world because he was the first person ever to
28:26
test these things. So the Sydney Harbour Bridge was
28:28
all tested. But in his one machine, various
28:32
bridges in London, Hammersmith Bridge. The
28:34
family thing, like the Generations Festival of Britain in
28:36
the 1950s, some of their structures
28:38
were tested by his grandson. And I
28:41
love this. It was certainly
28:43
in 2014 there in a museum in Southwark.
28:47
And they used to be on
28:49
the top floor, a museum of fractures, which was
28:51
a collection of broken pieces of metal. But
28:53
tragically, during the Second World War, a bomb fell on
28:56
it. And
28:58
all the pieces came back together. What
29:01
am I supposed to do with these? I'm
29:03
going to find a pristine Spitfire. OK,
29:12
it is time for fact number three,
29:14
and that is James. OK, my fact
29:16
this week is that in 18th century
29:18
America, you could tell a merchant from
29:21
a lawyer just by looking at their
29:23
handwriting. So
29:25
the lawyer would put little hearts over the
29:27
eyes. This is
29:30
insane. The merchant was dollar signs. Yeah,
29:33
it's crazy, isn't it? I just didn't know this.
29:35
It was in an article in The Atlantic. I
29:37
read it, an article by Rachel Gutman Way. And
29:41
she wrote that there were different font types for
29:43
different jobs. The
29:46
handwriting of the merchants apparently was supposed to reflect the efficiency
29:48
and speed with which they worked. And
29:50
lawyers would have different scripts. Aristocrats would have different
29:52
scripts. And what would happen is it was you'd
29:54
be in your guild or whatever, or you know,
29:57
you'd be in your guild. you
30:00
would be taught to do this job. And when
30:02
you were being taught it, they would teach you
30:04
particular ways of writing. So as the years went
30:06
on, it would kind of get more and more
30:08
enforced this style of writing. Because
30:11
doctors are the only people today who've reputedly
30:13
got a particular kind of handwriting, which is
30:15
terrible. Yeah. I don't think that's
30:17
a font, is it? It's a band script. I
30:20
feel like journalists, I've seen journalists doing fast writing.
30:23
Short hand. Yeah, shorthand, which feels very them.
30:25
And that's a sort of separate language. Yeah.
30:28
It's a no take. But the English language written in.
30:30
Yeah, so you would write the same words, but you'd
30:32
be able to read them and you'd be able to
30:34
say, this person is a merchant, this person is a...
30:36
Could you masquerade? If I was a merchant, wanting to
30:38
pretend to be a lawyer. I suppose you could, but
30:40
it's a bit like forging signatures. Is
30:43
I guess it's difficult, right? Because your
30:45
signature you do naturally without thinking, whereas
30:47
to forge it, it takes time. And
30:49
sometimes it's not very easy to do
30:51
it exactly. And you probably need other proofs
30:54
that you're a lawyer. It probably wasn't that
30:56
people would hire a lawyer by saying, can you just
30:58
write your name? It looks like
31:00
a lawyer's handwriting to me. I'm in a Mrs. Doubtfire
31:02
scenario in my head. I'm like, I'm the aristocrat and
31:04
the nanny in this, what
31:06
I'm trying to do. Right. Well, one
31:09
thing that might work there is that
31:11
men and women had different handwriting as
31:13
well. Yeah, so interesting. So men had
31:15
more masculine handwriting, they were taught, or
31:17
muscular handwriting. What does that even mean?
31:19
Well, muscular handwriting, according to someone called
31:21
Carla Peterson, who is a professor of
31:24
English at the University of Maryland, they
31:26
used more pressure on the pen. Just
31:29
holes in the paper. 50,000 tons
31:31
of force on every letter. And
31:34
women had more like an italic
31:36
cursive handwriting. What I thought was
31:38
so interesting about this fact is that I
31:41
hadn't really considered until now the fact
31:43
that we were all taught a font.
31:45
So basically the handwriting equivalent of font is
31:47
script. And we were all taught a script. And
31:49
of course we were. And when you see, you
31:51
know when you see writing from the olden days,
31:53
like if I look at collections
31:56
of letters written by, like my grandparents had old
31:58
letters written by their grandparents from the... the
32:00
handwriting is so different. And
32:03
that's because official styles changed.
32:06
And so there was this thing called Spencerian
32:08
scripts in the 1900s, which President Garfield called
32:11
the pride of our country. It's that big.
32:15
America's done so much stuff. That's the
32:17
biggest one. It's not the biggie. That's the
32:19
biggest Spencerian. The guy who came up
32:21
with this, Platt Rogers Spencer, said he was inspired
32:23
by pebbles on a beach and is sloping. It's
32:26
got to be at an exact angle of 52 degrees.
32:30
Sloping forwards and slightly
32:32
rounded. Okay. And was that
32:34
like basically Americans would write like
32:37
that? Yes. Because I know
32:39
like for instance, my wife writes in a Russian
32:41
font, which is different than an English font for
32:43
sure. Yes. Yeah, yeah. There's
32:45
lots of chat about the different ways that different
32:47
European countries still write. So Platt Rogers Spencer
32:49
spent so much time trying to get it
32:51
to be the standard writing style they were
32:53
teaching in schools and so on. To the
32:55
point where it feels very missionary. When he
32:57
died, his sons then took textbooks of it
32:59
and they sort of went out and campaigned
33:01
for it to be changed. Have you tried
33:03
this font? Style. And go to schools and
33:05
hand them. And then sort of people start
33:08
reading the books. No, don't read the words.
33:10
Just look at the letters. Yeah, exactly. So
33:12
weird. Yeah, and then it did get taken
33:14
over by a thing called Zainablozo method. And
33:16
then that eventually got taken over by another.
33:18
So we've got generational changes within how we write.
33:20
You can tell when texts come from, right? Because
33:22
you can, I like, there's a thing called paleography.
33:25
Is that it? It's old writing and it's the
33:27
study of old writing. You do courses in it.
33:29
Because if you look at a text from hundreds
33:32
of years ago, even if it's
33:34
in English, it's gonna be really hard to
33:36
decipher. It's hard to recognize time travelers, I
33:38
suppose. Is that they have different handwriting to
33:40
the rest of them. Yes, it'd be so
33:42
obvious if someone suddenly started writing in that
33:44
Gothic script that as you say, you can
33:46
barely read it. It looks so different, doesn't
33:48
it? So hard to distinguish. I was thinking
33:50
people from the future might write, like for
33:52
instance, in capitals or something. Hello.
33:56
Busted. And
34:00
just very quickly before we wrap up
34:02
on that, that did go out and
34:04
these other fonts took over, but it
34:06
did embed itself in society and we
34:08
see it virtually every day. So it
34:10
was a win for Platt and Roger.
34:12
Disguessable. Oh yeah, should be.
34:14
Think of ingredients lists on packets of
34:16
food. Oh, they're always in handwriting, aren't
34:18
they? Okay, okay, okay. I was just
34:21
warming up. Something
34:24
that's in handwriting. Yeah. Okay, that we
34:26
see something on a bank note,
34:28
like the... I promised to pay the bearer.
34:30
No, it's a logo. It's
34:33
a logo in the handwriting. Tabries.
34:36
That's a great call. It is a food and
34:38
drink product and it is not anything that you've
34:40
said. It's a drink. Cocoa. Cocoa
34:43
cola. Cocoa cola. That
34:45
lovely... You're right, that rounded cursive.
34:47
That rounded cursive. I forgot what the question was. So
34:50
it was basically phased out, Spencerian,
34:53
but he managed to have an
34:55
impact saying, Ford Cars is also
34:57
the way that Ford is written,
34:59
is based on Spencerian. That is
35:01
great. What a legacy. That's a... Great
35:04
legacy. That's kind of time travel, but the
35:06
normal way round, you know, like a survivor. It's like
35:08
those animals that you find, which, oh, we thought you
35:10
went extinct 130 million years ago, but
35:12
here you are swimming around. I can see the
35:14
count of handwriting. Yeah, it's a coca cola count.
35:17
Did you set me up
35:20
for that joke on that?
35:22
No. Because you felt
35:24
like it. Like I walked straight into a bird trap there.
35:27
We should probably say that handwriting evolves for
35:29
practical reasons. So it was all about these
35:31
people saying, this is a quicker way to
35:33
write. And this is an easier way to
35:36
write. This is an easier way to teach.
35:38
Or the reason that Gothic, which was invented
35:40
in the 12th century-ish, that was quite squashed
35:42
up. And it was because
35:44
there was parchment shortages. And so you could fit
35:46
much more on the page. So
35:48
it's all practicalities, which feels relevant when
35:50
it's enforced today, because people say, isn't
35:53
it sad that no one learns the proper cursive
35:55
anymore? There are a number of American states that
35:58
enforce it legally. And there isn't. really
36:00
evidence that there's particularly a purpose.
36:02
Because it is just joined up handwriting, right? Yes. I
36:05
can tell you a lot about someone, their
36:07
handwriting. Well, no, it can't really.
36:09
But it can tell you how drunk they are. Well,
36:11
that's good. Of all
36:13
these kind of graphology things, which is
36:16
you're supposed to be able to tell
36:18
people's personality or whatever from their handwriting,
36:20
most of it does seem to be
36:22
made yuppie, but definitely for sure. The
36:24
height of ascending letters, height of descending
36:27
letters, spacing between words, tremors.
36:30
A bit of sick on the page. The
36:34
height of the upper and lower case letters, all
36:36
changes, depending on how much alcohol you've had. That's
36:38
good. That's very good. That's got
36:40
to be one of the most pointless studies
36:43
ever done to conclude handwriting declines with alcoholism.
36:45
Did you find the BIG? No.
36:48
Notorious? Notorious British Institute of
36:50
Graphologists. They're real. They're
36:56
pretty hardcore on them. They are. That's
36:58
really funny. And their claim, and I think I'm not,
37:01
I don't think it's backed up by solid
37:03
evidence, is that it's better than therapy. Because
37:05
actually with therapy, you can only know what the
37:08
client has told you. Okay. Whereas
37:10
with graphology, you just look at the writing and
37:12
you say, well, that's disgusting. I can't believe you
37:14
had that dream. Or whatever. You're not a merchant.
37:16
You're a lawyer. We
37:19
did a debunk of graphology on QI
37:21
once and got very angry emails. And
37:24
letters, didn't we? We
37:28
got one letter from a graphologist saying
37:31
that some of the evidence
37:33
is if you get a pen and put it in
37:35
your mouth and try and write something on a piece
37:37
of paper, you'll use the same
37:39
movements as if you were to do it with
37:41
your hand. Like so Andy would write
37:43
it with his same sort of spidery handwriting with his
37:45
mouth as he would with his hand. And
37:48
that's evidence that it's coming directly from
37:50
your brain as opposed to being something
37:52
in your hands or whatever. And it's
37:55
inherent in yourself, the shape of your
37:57
letters. Is that claim true?
38:00
in either sense. Like, is it true that there's any
38:02
correlation between mouth and hand, or that you could draw
38:04
that conclusion? All I'm giving is both sides of the
38:06
story, like I'm on the BBC. Good
38:08
on you mate. But no, that's what they claim. But
38:11
of course, you know, I think these days we think
38:13
that it's nonsense. Unless you're listening to this podcast on
38:15
BBC sounds, in which case the jury's out. I
38:20
do wonder if we were able to bring
38:22
back certain people from history and just say,
38:24
oh, I love your book, or that, and
38:26
they go, that's not what that's called. And
38:28
it's because they're bad handwriting. There's a few
38:31
cases where people claim this is a thing.
38:33
So apparently, Beethoven's piece for Elise, apparently
38:35
that's not the title. What?
38:37
It's called Furry Leaves. Yeah,
38:40
it's got a pallet for Therese. No.
38:42
Yeah, it's Theresa. It's either that. No
38:44
way. Yeah, but his handwriting is so
38:46
dodgy that it just, it's, well,
38:48
we'll just go with Elise. Are
38:51
all the notes different as well? That's
38:55
so funny. Well, if you're worried
38:57
about bad handwriting, which I always was in exams,
38:59
because I have quite a legible, small handwriting, and
39:02
I always thought they're never going to read this
39:04
gold. I happened to be
39:06
on the OCR, which is one of
39:08
the famous exam boards, OCR exam board
39:10
page, FAQs page, and they clarified examiners
39:12
are experienced at reading a wide range
39:14
of handwriting. And if one examiner can't
39:16
read it, it gets passed to another
39:18
one. And so on. So I think
39:20
if your handwriting's bad, it just goes,
39:22
gets passed to 20 different examiners. So funny.
39:25
I know where it would end up. Where?
39:27
At the very end, there is a lady
39:29
on the Isle of Man who runs a
39:31
firm called Transcription Services, and almost no one
39:33
does what she does. She
39:35
is just phenomenal at reading handwriting.
39:37
Really? Specifically old writing, like
39:40
the work by William Weiswirth, the Bronte's
39:42
John Dunn, it's all passed to her
39:44
in the Isle of Man. And she's,
39:46
she's just amazing at it. And that
39:49
is paleography. Yeah, one person
39:51
who was really difficult to decipher
39:53
was Catherine Mansfield. I was reading
39:55
about the New Zealand short story
39:58
person. Her handwriting was so
40:00
bad that when she died
40:02
and left 53 handwritten notebooks,
40:04
it took decades to decipher
40:06
them. And the person
40:08
who was doing it once spent an entire
40:11
week trying to decipher a single word. Oh,
40:13
no. No. So
40:16
the way you write can kind of show where you're from.
40:18
I saw this is really interesting. So the way you write
40:20
a T, for instance, which bit do you write first? The
40:24
width. Don't even know. I go the top. I
40:26
don't do the cross, basically. You don't cross your
40:28
Ds? No, I do that first. I'll
40:31
cross your T's, imagine that.
40:33
I'll see you tomorrow. See
40:38
you, Layla. So
40:40
presumably, oh, Dan, actually, what do you write first?
40:43
Well, you write all in capital. No, no,
40:45
but who writes the cross bit first? Well,
40:47
what's the cross bit? Do you mean the
40:49
cross your T's? What the bit that goes
40:51
across? I do. I do. You write the
40:53
cross first. Okay, if I was writing that
40:55
in lower case, I go, Guys,
40:58
do you know what's so fascinating about this? Right?
41:01
Do it again. What can Dan also write that none
41:03
of the rest of us can? Brilliant books
41:06
about weird beliefs. I
41:09
don't think he can write this. What can he speak and
41:11
where was he brought up? Oh, Mandarin.
41:14
Australian slang. Mandarin. Australian
41:16
slang, yes. Mandarin writers
41:19
write in lots of little short
41:21
dashes. And so it makes sense for
41:23
them to write when they learn English. They tend to
41:25
write the cross of the T first, because
41:27
it's lots of little figures. How interesting. We would always
41:29
write. And there's lots of little stuff like that. In
41:32
Koreans, they write nine backwards. Do you write your lines
41:34
backwards, Dan? No, I, well, I don't know. You might
41:37
tell me now that I do. I write it like that.
41:39
No, that's like everyone writes a nine. That's normal.
41:41
I wonder if I've got a cultural mesh going
41:44
on, because I will start that like that, but
41:46
then I'll do that to end it. Wow. Yeah.
41:48
Mmm. Gosh. It's interesting, because
41:51
I've never seen you write in lower case before. Yeah.
41:53
I didn't know you could. I
41:55
am capable. Wow.
42:00
I'm so sorry. What
42:03
do you think the school I went to taught? Well,
42:06
let's not go there. Okay,
42:14
it is time for our final fact of the
42:16
show and that is Andy. My
42:18
fact is that the sun is surrounded by a
42:21
layer of moss. Oh. Hey.
42:24
Is it? No, I mean,
42:26
it obviously isn't happening. So
42:28
this is a thing which industry
42:31
experts, sun
42:33
experts, astronomers, big science
42:35
brains, they
42:38
call moss. I love this. So this
42:40
is in the sun's corona. We're outside the
42:42
sun itself. And there are areas
42:44
where the sun's magnetic field bursts out and
42:47
the gas that makes up the sun
42:49
flows around these huge loops and then
42:52
spears back down into the thing. It's
42:54
all really, it's awesome. Anyway, and the
42:56
moss is these sort of lacy patterns
42:59
around the corona and around those coronal
43:02
loops, around the feet of them, if you like. It's
43:04
a term that NASA uses and lots of other astronomers
43:06
use it. Coronal moss. I love the
43:08
sexy words you can use for lace-like structures to
43:10
use moss, I feel like. Yeah.
43:14
Yeah, what would you have gone for? Well, lace. Lingerie.
43:17
Lace. Yeah, negligent. That's
43:19
quite a cool, yeah. I
43:21
do think of it when I was reading about it.
43:24
Yeah, you've described it pretty well there. It looks like
43:26
a rainbow if you look at these coronal
43:28
loops. And the moss is sort of at the bottom
43:31
of them, so it's like the gold at the bottom
43:33
of a rainbow. Very nice. Lovely.
43:35
What's really weird is I read
43:38
that this is the case. There may be other
43:40
reasons for it, but the reason those loops come
43:42
out at all is largely to do with the
43:44
rotation of the sun. Right. Yeah,
43:47
so you've got basically, it takes 25 days
43:49
at the equator to rotate, but at the
43:51
poles it takes 33 days. So
43:54
you have this bit overtaking the outside
43:56
and it sort of snaps and it
43:58
creates these big loops. of running
44:00
past itself in a, it's
44:02
the weird rotation, the double rotation of the
44:04
planet. Yeah, well, because it's all gas, so
44:08
it can, it kind of feels
44:10
natural, right, that it would rotate at different
44:12
levels. But yeah, that chaos that's generated. Yeah.
44:15
But it seems like we still don't know
44:17
a lot about the sun, which is quite
44:19
exciting. And they're still discovering stuff about it,
44:21
aren't they? I mean, this is all linked
44:23
to that eternal mystery, that why is the
44:25
sun's atmosphere, the bit just above the surface
44:27
of the sun, so hot? I think we
44:29
might have mentioned before. It's hotter than the surface
44:31
or even the core. It's the hottest there, is that what
44:33
you're saying? It's hotter than the surface, definitely. I'm not
44:35
sure if it's hotter than the very core. Yeah, it's
44:37
so much hotter. So the surface of the sun
44:39
is about 6000 degrees Celsius, I think
44:42
we can all agree, very hot. Yeah. But
44:45
the corona, the atmosphere
44:47
is 1 million and
44:49
6000 degrees Celsius. It's a million degrees hotter. And
44:52
do you know, they've even NASA says that there are flares,
44:54
which they think might be between 10 and 40
44:56
million degrees Celsius. World's million
44:59
degrees. So the sun's rotating, producing magnetic
45:01
field, right? Yeah. And then these
45:03
lines of magnetic force, they get tangled, and they
45:05
build up pressure and they snap. And most of
45:07
the energy goes outwards. But some of it goes
45:10
back inwards, into
45:12
the sun. And the particles
45:14
in the sun's lower atmosphere, they build up
45:16
this pressure wave, and it penetrates deep into
45:18
the sun. And it becomes a
45:21
sun quake. Just everything starts sounding like
45:23
a cool title for a metal album.
45:26
Sun quake. I've
45:28
been going around singing sun quake. There's a
45:31
group called the solar wind sherpas, who also
45:33
sound pretty cool. Sorry, they're banned. No, they're
45:35
a group of scientists, but just anything sun
45:38
related, like coronal moss, or whatever. That one
45:40
doesn't quite work. No matter how much you
45:42
put that voice on. Okay, okay, okay. Quite
45:47
similarly, you get solar rain, which
45:50
is actually lumps of plasma that fall down
45:52
from these coronal rainbow loops. And when they
45:54
splash into the chromosphere, the bit in between
45:57
the atmosphere and the surface, they make a
45:59
big splash. and they send up
46:01
loads more plasma. We are Chromosphere.
46:03
This is our album, Solar Rain.
46:05
You see? We are
46:07
the solar hedgerow. What about that?
46:11
That's a bit rural. Bit rustic, but
46:13
nice. Yeah, maybe like the rehearsals. I
46:15
mean, it's not that interesting. It's just
46:17
like filaments of mossy-like stuff from the
46:19
sun that create loops that go in
46:21
like a line, like a hedgerow mic.
46:24
But it is an official term, apparently. That's cool.
46:26
Do you know who is the first person to
46:28
take a photo of these filaments on the sun?
46:30
Ooh. Oh,
46:33
it's someone we've heard of. Oh, no. OK.
46:35
OK. That narrows it
46:38
down. That narrows it down. You're right. Sarah.
46:40
You might have come across her name. Annie
46:42
Maunder, she was called. And
46:45
she was married to Edward Walter Maunder.
46:48
And she was probably the last of what was
46:50
called the lady computers. So
46:53
towards the end of the 19th century, this
46:56
is obviously there were computers for the
46:58
space race and stuff like that. But these
47:00
were women who would do the calculations when
47:02
astronomers would come up with loads of data.
47:04
They would give them to the women. And
47:06
the women would work them out and work
47:08
out what was going on. Amazing. And
47:11
also the Maunder minimum is named after her,
47:13
which you might have heard, which was a
47:15
time in the 17th century when old sunspots
47:17
disappeared. Was that when it got
47:19
very cold? Yeah, the little ice age. Exactly.
47:21
Was that the Maunder minimum? That's the name
47:23
after that. And her husband as well. Yeah.
47:25
Yeah. Nice. That's awesome. So she's coming through
47:27
data to find all this stuff. So amateur
47:29
photographer on the side. She was also a
47:32
photographer on the side. Yeah, yeah. And
47:34
she and her husband did photographs of the
47:36
sun. And we're doing it all the time.
47:38
Basically, whenever there was a clear day, they would go out
47:41
and photograph the sun. How do you photograph
47:43
the sun with that? You need a special filter to stop
47:46
hurting your eyes. There are lots of different ways of doing it.
47:49
Like for instance, you can do it with a pinhole
47:51
camera. I
47:53
think you could largely just point it in the
47:55
direction and press your snap, can't you? I think
47:57
if you do that, if you send the photo.
47:59
those taboots, you're going to get a sticker on them. In
48:04
Britain, you can photograph the sun pretty easily. There's
48:06
a sort of vague white dot on the
48:08
screen by cloud. That reminds me of
48:11
the warnings when there are eclipses about what they can
48:13
do to your eyes. Have been sort of mad to
48:15
varying extents over the years, but I was reading about
48:17
the eclipse in Melbourne in 1976. I
48:20
think it was when there was this
48:22
doctor who sort of spread panic around the city
48:24
saying there could be an epidemic of thousands of
48:27
kids being completely blind, because all you need to
48:29
do is look at that for a couple of
48:31
seconds and you can go blind. Now, it's not,
48:34
it is exaggerated, this scaremongering, but it
48:36
scared Melbourne into watching it from inside.
48:38
So 2 million of the 2.5 million
48:41
people there watched it on their tellies.
48:43
It is a problem, I think, with
48:45
the eclipse, which is it is bad for
48:47
you, and you can't say it's not bad
48:49
for you, but pretty much all the time,
48:51
everyone says it's worse for you than it
48:54
actually is. Okay. I think that's the problem.
48:56
So when Trump famously looked at
48:58
the sun, that wouldn't have done... It depends how long
49:00
you do it for. I think you
49:02
can tell if it's doing damage. Bloody left-wing media spinning
49:04
these stories to make him look bad. We're
49:07
not saying you should go and look at the sun. That's
49:09
the problem, is you can't say that. You can't say, go
49:11
out and look at the sun. It's brilliant, I did never
49:13
look at the sun. I'm just saying, give Trump a break,
49:15
that's what I'm saying. But, yeah, it's
49:17
like you've looked at the sun every now and then, by
49:19
accident for a second or so, right? And you're like, oh,
49:22
that hurt my eyes, but you didn't go blind at any
49:24
stage. No, because it's the eclipse. Isn't there a risk that
49:26
people are going to try and look for longer than... The
49:29
tiny, tiny glimpse that... There is, but
49:31
it feels so much common sense that the only
49:33
people who do get in trouble, and I think this was true
49:36
in Britain when we had it in 1999, are
49:38
people who are on lots of drugs. So there was a
49:41
girl who'd taken lots of speed, who stared at the eclipse
49:43
for half an hour, and she did have some permanent eye
49:45
damage. Isaac Newton, there was a story that he
49:47
stared at the sun and that sent him partially blind. That
49:49
was deliberately for an experiment to see what would happen if
49:51
he stared at the sun. So you can be very, very
49:53
clever and also very, very stupid. So I think it's just
49:55
good to worry on the side of the course and say,
49:57
never look anywhere. I think that's fair. I
50:00
think one bit of good news is if
50:02
you do go blind for staring at the
50:04
sun for too long, is that there's a
50:07
new invention that allows blind people to enjoy
50:09
eclipses. Ooh, that's cool. Really? Yeah, it's called
50:11
light sound, and it sort of measures and
50:13
translates the sky's brightness and turns it into
50:15
music. And so you can like
50:18
put your headphones in and apparently it gives a
50:20
really good impression of the change of the sun
50:22
and the change of the brightness that's happening. How
50:25
interesting. That's so cool. That's amazing.
50:27
That's awesome. Milosevic scared
50:30
his people underground.
50:32
Slobodan? Or that's the one
50:34
you're... Or Aston Villa Stryker Savo Milosevic. I
50:37
think it was Slobodan though, of course I haven't written
50:39
it down, but whichever one was ruling Serbia in the
50:41
90s. Yeah,
50:43
he said that it would make you
50:46
urinate really frequently and get heart palpitations.
50:48
And everyone literally went inside, pulled
50:50
all their curtains down. They were calling helpline saying,
50:52
is it safe to watch it on tele? Wow.
50:55
That like no one went outside public transport
50:57
all stopped. So the whole of the rest
50:59
of Europe flooded outside to watch the eclipse
51:01
and all of Serbia retreated underground and indoors.
51:04
Did he have motives that we know now?
51:06
Was that a weird, the urination thing? Well
51:09
what was, where did that come from? No, I agree, I
51:11
don't know. I don't know why. There was
51:13
actually a paper saying what were his motivations
51:15
and I couldn't download the full thing. So
51:17
we'll never know. No
51:20
one, apart from people who can afford 24.99, we'll
51:23
never know. But
51:26
I can tell you that he, animal rights activists sent
51:28
sunglasses to the chimps in the zoo. So scared, were
51:30
they? Golly. I
51:33
think one of the coolest things I read as part of this
51:35
research is that you got the sun, we're
51:38
just staring at it. We're trying to work out what's going on
51:40
with it. We got nothing to compare it to. Don't stare at it.
51:44
But we got nothing to compare it to. And that's
51:46
not true anymore. It's not been true for a while
51:48
because the Kepler space telescope back when it was operating
51:53
monitored 150,000 stars in the Milky Way and
51:56
they found 369 suns that are... incredibly
52:00
similar to ours. And so now we
52:02
can look at other case studies, as
52:04
it were, and go, oh, this
52:07
is interesting. That sun is very active at the
52:09
moment. And it wasn't 10, 11 years ago. That
52:12
must mean that it's running in phases. And
52:14
so we can learn via these suns that
52:16
are billions of miles away about our own
52:18
suns. Yeah, because there are a lot of
52:21
scientists that look at our sun as a
52:23
curiosity compared to other suns in that they
52:25
say it's spectacularly boring in comparison to all
52:27
the other suns that we're seeing in the
52:29
universe. And they partially wonder if that's
52:31
why we're here at all. Yeah, that must be
52:34
right. Because if it starts spitting out stuff at
52:36
us every two or three years, we're going to
52:38
die. Exactly. So our sun is just not that
52:40
active. And that's been incredible for us. It
52:43
has. And I think actually with the election
52:45
coming up, sometimes you want a boring centre
52:47
of your universe, don't you? Because it can
52:49
be relied upon to not
52:52
destroy you. And that is a party political
52:54
broadcast for Keir Starmer. I
52:57
don't know what you're talking about. We actually had
52:59
someone right in who was a space weather forecaster.
53:01
Oh, I know. The fish inbox. Really? This is
53:03
cool. It's called Gavin Medley. What? Dark
53:06
with no weather again. He
53:10
works at the LASP, which is the
53:12
Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the
53:14
University of Colorado. And he
53:16
was writing about the, you know, the sun emits
53:18
a giant electromagnetic storm. We won't get
53:21
warning before it hits us. Yeah.
53:23
There are space weather instruments that
53:25
sit on spacecraft at
53:27
Lagrange points and they just sit there
53:29
in gravitational equilibrium. And one of
53:31
their goals is to collect data to predict and
53:33
wall about solar storms and flares, which can take
53:35
down our electrical structure. And that's how we knew
53:38
like a few weeks ago when they had that
53:40
big solar storm that people in London couldn't see,
53:42
but everyone else in the country could see. Yeah.
53:44
The aurora. The aurora. We know about that because
53:46
of those. Yeah. By the way, we're in the most exciting year
53:48
for the sun in 11 years. Loads of
53:51
sunspots. The sun switches poles every 11 years.
53:53
Yeah. So the most boring year was 2019. And
53:57
that was hardly any sunspots because the poles were just
53:59
like perfect. perfectly aligned north and south. And now we're
54:01
in the most feisty it, which I think might be
54:03
why they've discovered this thing that your main fact was
54:05
about. It's because it feels like as a scientist, it's
54:08
the most thrilling time to look at the sun because
54:10
so much mad shit's going on there. So
54:13
if one of these big coronal mass ejections
54:15
hits us, we're kind of buggered
54:17
a little bit, right? All of our electronics
54:19
are gonna fry and until they fix it,
54:21
it's gonna be pretty tough. And
54:23
we knew that this big one was coming a few
54:25
weeks ago and I was in Wales in the middle
54:27
of nowhere. And so I got a load of cash
54:29
out of the cash machine just in case. No, no,
54:32
no. And all of our machines got
54:34
back genuinely. Just subtle prepper. I love it. Your
54:36
cash is no good in the after times. But
54:39
it'll get me home. Like all I had to do was
54:41
get home. I have an electric car, right? So
54:43
if I'm stuck in Wales with an electric
54:45
car and all the electrics are fried, I
54:47
am kind of buggered. You're not necessarily buggered
54:49
if you have to stay in Wales, James, come on. Good people
54:51
of Wales. Great place to be stranded for a while.
54:53
No, it's a great place to be, but it's not
54:55
ideal for the rest of my family if I'm in
54:57
Wales. James's electric tin opener is in London. That's what
54:59
he's getting back to. Oh,
55:02
he brings that one in. I keep that in
55:05
a lead-like case, in case of a coronal mass
55:07
ejection. But
55:10
there's a theory, right? So we
55:12
could fire out a big loop of
55:14
wire into space. So the
55:16
entire earth is covered by one wire.
55:19
And then when the coronal
55:21
mass ejection comes in, which is basically charged
55:23
particles, then the wire can kind of ground
55:26
it and it won't fry all of our
55:28
electric. Wow, that's interesting. It's a really good
55:30
idea. No one's really taken the idea seriously,
55:33
but they reckon that the loop would
55:35
cost about a hundred billion dollars to
55:37
make. But if we did
55:39
get hit by one of those coronal mass
55:41
ejections, which will happen sometime, the cost will
55:43
be way more than that. Yeah. It'll
55:46
be way, way, it'll be in the trillions. It'll fuck
55:48
up our economy for years. Actually, a
55:50
hundred billion sounds a lot, but actually,
55:53
you know, a lot of things, when you read about it in
55:55
the paper, it's like 600 billion. You're
55:57
like, okay, yeah. We club together. Well,
56:00
how much did you get out of the cash point the other
56:02
day? There's a big
56:04
queue behind Jake. The
56:09
limit's 200 a time. It's
56:11
only 20 million a time they let me take out. Okay,
56:20
that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank
56:22
you so much for listening. If you'd like to
56:25
get in contact with any of us about the
56:27
things that we've said over the course of this
56:29
podcast, we can all be found on our various
56:31
social media accounts. I'm on at Shribaland on Instagram,
56:34
Andy at Andrew Hunter M on X. James,
56:38
no such thing as James Harkin on
56:40
the TikToks. And
56:43
Anna, you can get in touch with
56:45
all of us by going to at no such
56:47
thing on Twitter slash X or going to add
56:50
no such thing as a fish on Instagram, or
56:52
you can email podcast at qi.com. Yep,
56:55
or you can go to our website, no such thing as a
56:57
fish.com. All of the previous
56:59
episodes are up there. There's a link
57:01
to the portal to the gateway of
57:03
club fish, our secret private members club.
57:06
And there are also links to our upcoming tour,
57:08
Thunder Nerds. We're heading around Europe. We're going to
57:10
Ireland. We are going to Australia. We are going
57:13
to New Zealand. There are all the links up
57:15
there. We put on a couple of extra shows,
57:17
one in Sydney, one in London. If you missed
57:19
out on tickets for those, do check it out.
57:21
It's all up there. Otherwise, just come back here
57:24
next week. We'll have another episode waiting for you.
57:26
We'll see you then.
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