523: No Such Thing As A Dice The Size Of The Universe

Transcript

Five years ago, I was paying $65 a month for my subscriptions. Today, those same subscriptions cost $111, and I don't even use half of them anymore.

That's why now I use Rocket Money to manage my subscriptions for me.

The app gives you a list of all your subscriptions and reminds you of upcoming payments so you're not hit with any surprise charges.

On top of that, it also sends you alerts when subscription prices go up, so you always know the price you're paying.

If you decide you no longer want a subscription, you can cancel it right from the app. No customer service needed.

And the best part is, Rocket Money even reaches out and tries to get you refunded for some of the money you lost. On average, people that cancel their subscriptions with Rocket Money save $378 a year.

And overall, Rocket Money has saved its members $880 million in canceled subscriptions. Stop wasting money on things you don't use.
Go to rocketmoney.com slash cancel to get started.

That's rocketmoney.com slash cancel. Rocketmoney.com slash cancel.

Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other.
One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload.

Odoo is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business.

Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com.
That's odoo.com.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, when we were joined by the incredible mathematician, YouTuber, science communicator, all-round smart guy, Matt Parker.

Now, a lot of you will know a lot of Matt's work. He's written a lot of books, things to make and do in the fourth dimensions.
One of his, Humble Pie, was an absolutely massive book for him.

He has a new book out. It is called Love Triangle: The Life-Changing Magic of Trigonometry.

I haven't read it yet, but I can tell you, having read his other books, it is going to be absolutely incredible. And you can pre-order it right now by going to mathsgear.co.uk.

That's M-A-T-H-S-G-E-A-R.co.uk. Don't forget that S if you're in America.

And you can pre-order a signed copy with a limited edition dust jacket. Of course, it will be available in all of the local bookshops and probably in those big online book retailers as well.

A few other things about Matt, he is in a podcast called A Problem Squirred with Beck Hill, who you might remember from a few months ago. She came on the podcast and talked about Cabbage Patch Kids.

Beck and Matt have this incredible podcast. It's definitely worth listening to.

And there is also a podcast of unnecessary detail that Matt does with two other ex-fish alumni, Steve Mould and Helen Arne from the Festival of the Spoken Nerd.

Anyway, I'm sure you're going to love this week's show. Don't forget at the end of it, go to mathsgear.co.uk to pre-order Matt's new book, Love Triangle.

But for now, all that's left to say is on with the podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, James Harkin, and Matt Parker.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order. Here we go.
Starting with fact number one, and that is Matt.

The first computer to ever discover a shape starred in the 1980s sitcom. Well, starred, was in an episode of the 1980s sitcom, Laverne and Shirley.

Wow.

There are a couple of concepts in there I'm not familiar with. I like to pack a lot of concepts into a sentence.
Yeah. Okay, so computer, shape, Laverne or Shirley.

Can we talk about how you discover a shape?

Yeah, oh, good point.

That feels like a bigger question. I also don't know what Laverne.
Is Laverne and Shirley a show you'd recommend? I'm unfamiliar with their non-computer-based episodes.

I used to watch it as a kid. Really? Yeah, yeah.

And it's good, yeah. I mean, it was a spin-off from Happy Days.
Yeah, it's Gary Marshall, who was the

creator of it. He was the Happy Days guy.

Yeah. Apparently, it was a lot of...

Sorry, we're in La Vernon and Charlie territory now. That wasn't the main part of my

apparently they were like really kind of like, you know, they had lots of fights on set and Happy Days, the cast, they used to put glass to the walls to hear the arguments that were going on on the other side.

Yeah, it was all that stuff. Unhappy days.
Yeah.

But it was early 80s, I think, Laverne and Shirley. So that's quite early for...
No, it's not that early for computers, is it? It was a 1980 episode.

And the same computer had previously starred in The Land of the Giants. in 1969.
Wow. And

it didn't get worked for a while then. No, it went out for a while.
So it was in 60s, like sci-fi, and being in a 1980 sitcom was actually like the final bit of its Hollywood career. Yeah.

It's pretty much you've you've as a result of this fact and we will get to the new shape. Sorry, Anna, for

knocking out of this. But this website that you sent.
Starring the computer. Starring the computer is phenomenal.

It's the IMDb of computers and movies that they have appeared in.

And it's run by this one guy who he has this amazing Twitter account where he just constantly puts up photos from movies he's watching going, what's this? Does anyone know?

And that people go hunting to try and track down the exact computer that's in the in the movie so good what was this computer first the burrows 220 okay once you've seen it in laverne and shirley do you think people then go well i want to watch the land of the giants now and i want to watch watch this entire back catalog yeah yeah like imagine with the national well what's good about this computer the burrows 220

really looks like a computer Like if you're thinking 60s computers like with tapes spinning and lights flashing, it's like your classic retro computer look.

Okay.

I read that a similar one, which was the B205. Oh, yes.

Was the back computer in Batman, according to the Zoom?

So that's because I wondered if there were ever computers that played other computers, and I guess that's an example. Like a Mac playing a Dell or something.
Yeah, yeah.

But I wanted to find out more about the Bat Computer, but unfortunately, one of the most popular internet firms in Lagos is called Bat Computers. I don't know if you can do anything.

That's all you get. I did find a few things about the Bat Computer.
And by the way, the Burroughs 205 absolutely smashes the hell out of the 220. It does.
It had way better casting.

Yeah, it's in the top 10 most appeared in movies computers in the world. Same family of computers for the record.
Yeah. One big Burroughs family.
So here we go. A dynasty, you might say.

What you get with the back computer,

the Burroughs 205, is you get the back correction signal, which alerts Batman when he has said something incorrect. You have the back computer input slot, which I remember.

Wait a minute, so they invented the QI Claxon, anyway.

exactly yeah wow there's the input slot where it's just it's kind of like uh where you would it's like a mail slot where you'd put your post in but it's like here's an entire book and you just shove the book in and it computes the whole book really quickly wow uh accelerated concentration switch that's sort of giving it more computing power in order to deal with a problem and special escaped arch criminal bat locator uh which is a preset

computer basically but specifically for like the joker and the riddler that's clever or find my phone app but like find my villain. Yes, exactly.
Yeah. And the bat keyboard.
That's an actual thing.

It is a keyboard which only has, I think, five or six or seven keys on it. And you can make any letter by playing a chord.
Do you know these, Matt? Like chordal keyboards.

So you don't need 26 keys to play all the keys. The first stenographer would use.
I think so, yeah. But it was used for like disabled people who, you know, only had one hand or something like that.

And you could type letters quickly by knowing that if you want to do an A, you might press the first one, the third one, and the fourth one. Oh, that's clever.
Yeah, yeah. Because there's 30.

Well, if you include pressing nothing, 32 options. So that you've got enough for the whole alphabet.
With how many keys? With five. With five keys.

Yeah, five keys would give you 32 options. Right.

Including the null press, which is not using the keyboard. So 31 distinct presses.
And then if you include your nose. Now you can do upper and lowercase.

I do have a keyboard. I removed all the keys apart from the zero and the one on a keyboard.
Because I can type in binary. So I could enter.
i included the backspace i'm not a monster so i could

i can and enter so i could type out i tried doing it on stage i'd type people's names in binary and then hit enter really and it would come up and text

wow um i was looking at that website for all the examples of this b205 which is what the bat computer is oh yeah and one just caught my eye which was sex kittens go to college

the movie i don't know why but um this is an amazing movie because it didn't just have this computer in it, the B205, it also had a robot called Electro in it.

And Electro was an exhibit of the 1939 World's Fair. It was like a huge seven-foot-tall robot.
It could walk by voice commands. So if you told it to walk, it could walk.

It could speak 700 words using a record player. It could smoke cigarettes, blow up balloons, and move its hands and arms.

All the parts of the Turing table.

Wow. So this was like a really famous robot in the World's Fair in 1939.
And then by, you know, the 1960s, it was in Sex Kittens Go to College. That's so good.
What a career decline.

Is it good or is it depressing for that poor robot? Oh, I just love it. I love all the movies.
Like, I didn't read that movie.

Like, there are so many, like, you get big ones, like Austin Powers, the spy who shagged me. It appears in that.
But then you also got Dr. Goldfoot and the bikini machine.

So good. And the Burroughs, by the way, it was a company.
Yeah.

And it was started by William Seward Burroughs, who was a grandfather of William S. Burroughs.
Really?

And he invented, at least this is, I'm sure there are other claims to it, but he invented and filed the patent for the first calculator.

God, you wouldn't imagine that spawning William Burroughs not two generations later, sort of like chain-smoking, romantic. Wife shooting.
Wife shooting. You like to put that further down in CV.

They rarely talk about the fact that he killed his wife. Yeah.
Well, apparently he said that he was trying to do a William Tell thing and shoot an apple off her head and accidentally shot her.

But I'm not sure we all buy that. but apparently that will get you off in court because you didn't go to jail yeah everything was fine yeah so you leave an apple nearby at the scene of the crime yeah

that's what I was aiming for

um another cool pop culture computer crossover came across did you guys know that Steve Jobs is Homer Simpson's uncle

oh what I yes yes this is so weird this fact yeah so weird

um it's so bizarre so steve jobs' dad is a guy called abdul fatten dali steve jobs was put up for adoption um by this guy because his partner's family disapproved of the marriage because he was syrian muslim so steve jobs went up for adoption never met his father actually this guy abdul fattened ali had another kid um also who ended up estranged from him um she's called mona simpson and she married a guy weirdly called richard apple so steve jobs' brother-in-law is called apple um brilliant she married a guy called richard Apple, who is a writer on The Simpsons, and he came up with a character of Mona Simpson, Homer's mum, named after his partner, Mona Simpson.

So Steve Jobs' sister is Mona Simpson, Homer Simpson's mum. Okay.
Yeah.

I followed that, but maybe because I knew it beforehand, I'm not sure if that worked because we got too confused. I'm imagining a very complicated family tree.
Yeah, I'm thinking like the Habsburgs.

Do you know that family tree where they're all kind of internally? Yeah, it is like that.

And also if that like branched branched down to fiction for one bit of it, it's a little bit like Icelandic sagas where you're like, is this true or is it not?

So shapes, you were.

How does a computer? How does a computer invent a shape? Well, this is the problem. So

everyone, and this is a perfect example of what happened in computing. Everyone loves the B205 and all these other fancy computers.

The B220 was like a vacuum tube miscalculation because they barely made any. No one really bought them.
Transistors had come along and and blown these old ones out of the water.

So they were pretty much a forgotten computer until I was reading a old maths paper from 1962. And it was someone called Donald Grace who was trying to find the biggest shape.

What? Now, you're going to need

some constraints on that. Otherwise, the biggest shape is

whatever shape the universe is. But

they were trying to work out the biggest shape that you could fit in like a unit sphere. Okay.
So the biggest shape you can fit in a ball. Okay.

And you can imagine it the size of the universe if you want. No one's stopping you.
Yeah. Or you can imagine it at a nice manageable basketball-esque size.
Okay.

And to make it a bit more manageable, again, they would do it for the number of vertices, the number of corners a shape has. Right.

And Donald specifically was curious, what's the biggest shape with eight?

eight vertices on it okay which some people might think we just work out how to put eight points on a sphere as far apart as possible and join them all up to make a cube and it doesn't work.

That is the best way to position your points on a sphere and that's actually quite difficult to do. That's a whole other, no one has a good systematic way to arrange dots on a sphere.

That's so interesting.

In that regular way that makes a cube. Despite all the funding from big golf.

What is the biggest golf? That's all right.

Yeah, there's no, it's called the Thompson problem. There's no, because it came out of.
Is it named after golfer Lexi Thompson? It's not. No, right, okay.

It came out of Thompson looking at

electrons in an atom, trying to work out how they'd be spaced. And they're like, oh, well, it's easy.
They're just spaced such that they've got as close as possible to the same distance between them.

And they're like, we'll just work that. Oh, that's really hard to work out.
And it doesn't even solve this other problem. So we were a bit, mathematicians were a bit of a dead end.

And Donald Grace was studying at Stanford, studying what would later be called computer science. And they were like, you know what? I'll just see if I can get a computer to solve this problem.

Because if I program a computer to start with eight points on a sphere and work out the shape that they define and then jiggle them all around a bit and see which direction of jiggling increases the volume by the most and then just do that more times than a human ever could you'll eventually evolve your way into the biggest possible shape

yeah okay so I read the paper and I wasn't kind of aware of that at the time I was just looking because I like the shapes I was reading through the paper and there's a line that said, oh, we ran this on a Burroughs 220 computer system.

I was like, that's weird. Like, that's commonplace in modern math research.
But I was looking at this going, that's what, a computer already. And the paper was submitted in August 1962.

How did he have access to a computer? And it turns out they did have a Burroughs 220 at Stanford. They got it in 1960.
So Donald has since passed away.

Spoke to his kids, and they're like, oh, we used to volunteer and go in at night. He would take the night shift in the computer lab.

That meant he could run his code on the computer because otherwise they were not going to waste their computer time for someone finding a big shape. Yeah, exactly.

And he found it. He found the biggest shape and he polished it.
And he's like, I found this thing.

Do you have any idea? Can we explain what the shape is or is it tough?

It looks a little bit like a dice from DD. Is it? Okay.
It's made entirely out of triangles.

But because it's not like an icosahedron, like a D20 or like a D8, that's nice and neat because they're platonic solids. It's somewhere in the middle.
So it's still a lot of triangles put together.

And it looks quite regular, but it's not exactly tidy because that's an awkward number of

so you couldn't roll it as a physical die. It would be slightly unfair.
Yeah. And it's massive.
I mean, it's going to be difficult, isn't it? Heavy.

Can we talk about golf? Yeah, sure. Yeah.

I made a classic error there.

Can I say no?

No, you can't say no, because this is interesting, right? So I learned this from researching for this. I looked at my golf balls, and there's loads of dimples on them, right?

And all the dimples are hexagons. Or are they all hexagons, Matt? Because it's a sphere.
They can't be, right?

And so I found out that every golf ball has 12 pentagons on it.

It's amazing.

That was Anna, by the way.

It's true. I've conveniently.
Was it a weird Star Wars creature that just suddenly came off?

We went to Epcot, Disney World, and I made everyone I was with stop so we could look at the massive Epcot sphere, which is a giant golf ball, I guess.

And I'm like, in there somewhere, I said, are 12 pentagons. Oh, my God.
I'm going to try and find some. But the interesting thing is, well, this is the least interesting part of it.

Now, I think this has improved my golf game because what I do is when I put the ball on the tee, I line up one of the pentagons to where I want to hit.

and it helps me concentrate that that's the part of the ball that I want to hit. Oh, that's great, yeah.

That's like with bowling,

I use the triangle in the middle. Well, you're supposed to, that's what they're there for.
I don't think anyone does those, but I do, I do, and it works.

So, yeah, I mean, that's what that's there for, and that's quite annoying for the golfer behind you who has to wait for you to just constantly go, hang on, I know

there are loads here.

Fini's pentagons,

well, that's amazing, isn't it? Yeah, that's incredible. Pentagons, because you can't put hexagons on a sphere, you can't, right?

And I've gotten very upset because the UK street signs for a football stadium for the picture of a football and they've forgotten the pentagons. It's all hexagons, which is mathematically impossible.

So, well, it can't be if they made the sign work. Well, they just drawn a hexagon kind of slightly distorted grid.
and then cut out a circle of it and put it on the sign.

And we never see the other side. We never see the other side.
Of course.

So

I ran a big petition.

I got 20,000 signatures on a parliamentary petition. So the government has to write to you at that point to say what they're going to do about this important issue you've raised.

And they wrote to me to say they're not going to change the street signs to be correct. They're like, no.

They said that the correct geometry would be so similar to the current signs, there's no point changing it.

And they also said the correct geometry would be so distracting, it might increase the likelihood of accidents. Really?

Absolute bullshit. Make a lane.
We've got an election coming up. Thank you.
I think if any party decides to go for that, we're going to change the shape of footballs on road signs. They got my vote.

Huge majority. Yeah, I completely agree.
Although I did now talk to someone who makes custom footballs. Oh, yeah.
Soccer balls.

And got them to make me a ball where from one specific angle, it looks like the street sign. Oh, nice.
So

someone who runs a company called 12 Pentagons, John Paul, designed this ball where from the front and the back looks like the street sign, but like the equator around the bit is a nightmare of weird shapes to patch the geometric tree together to make it work in physical reality.

Yeah, and you have that. I got the ball.
I took it up to Liverpool Football Club. No.
And yeah, I got their sports analytics team to have a kick around with it. I was not allowed.

They're like, you have to come on a day where we can guarantee there will be no players.

Imagine if Bo Seller played with that ball and it fucked up his entire career.

I can't play with these other balls anymore. Yeah, this is the one.

It'd be great to see a lower league team like in the efl training with that ball yeah knowing the game with that ball then playing a premier league team and just seeing

you deal with the ball yeah the guys at trammir my team are listening give it a go can't be much worse than what's happening this season

five years ago i was paying 65 a month for my subscriptions Today, those same subscriptions cost $111 and I don't even use half of them anymore.

On top of that, it also sends you alerts when subscription prices go up, so you always know the price you're paying.

Go to rocketmoney.com slash cancel to get started.

That's rocketmoney.com slash cancel. RocketMoney.com slash cancel.

Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder? With a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other.
One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting.

Before you know it, you are drowning in software instead of growing your business. This is where Odo comes in.
Odo is the only business software you'll ever need.

It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more.

No more app overload, no more juggling logins, just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part, Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

It's built to grow with your business, whether you are just starting out or already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process.

So you can focus on what really matters, running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch.
So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's odoo.com.

Okay, it is time for fact number two. That is James.
Okay, my fact this week is that the woman who invented the trolley problem was the daughter of a man who made railway tracks for a living.

So amazing. And the trolley problem is the issue where you're in a supermarket and one of the wheels gets stuck and you can't push it in a straight line.

No, it's when your coin won't fit into the slot to release it from the big bunch of trolleys and yeah. I feel like I have to give a little bit more information about the trolley problem.

So it's like a philosophical idea that you've got a trolley or like a trolley car in America, I guess it is, and it's going down some tracks and it's going to kill five people who are working on the tracks or who are tied to the tracks, depending on the version.

But you have a lever, and you can pull the lever, and the trolley can go in the other direction, and it will kill only one person.

Do you pull the lever to kill that one person, or do you just do nothing and let the five people die? And not everyone agrees with what's the correct answer. That's always interesting.
Yeah, yeah.

And that was, so that was originally called the tram problem, which was created by Philippa Foote. She married a guy called Foote, which feels quite rebellious if your dad makes railroad tracks.

That's true. And she is known as the granddam of philosophy.

And her mother was Esther Cleveland, who was the first president's child to be born in the White House, the daughter of Grover Cleveland. And her father was William Sidney Bence Bossan Kwe,

who managed Skinning Grove Steel Works in Yorkshire. And he made a lot of the tracks for the train tracks in the north of England.
And I'm not sure it had any bearing on her philosophical works.

I just like the idea. I bet it is.
I think it's good that she had parents who worked on railroads. Because imagine if her parents were like an accountant and a librarian.
Yeah.

Like, it'd be a very different

hypothetical situation where, you know, five people want to borrow the same book,

but one other person needs it for their

shelf is going to fall on the books. It's going to go one of two ways.
There's five people on one side. You can shove it the other way and get one person.
One side thinking, yeah.

I don't think it would have caught on as the philosophical meme it is today.

Oh, you're right. But Philip Pafut was amazing.
She's incredible.

And it's amazing that all the connections, you know, granddaughter of Grover Cleveland came up with this massive philosophical dilemma, flatmate of Iris Murdoch.

You know, she's like got so many interesting little cultural touch points that I'm just surprised I've never heard of. Philippa Foote.

I guess they all, there seemed to be like a coterie of very interesting female philosophers around about that time, which I suppose was the 30s and 40s. 40s.
She got her degree in 42. Got it.

So around the 40s. And yeah, Iris Murdoch, who I never really thought of as a philosopher, and that's just my ignorance.

I just read a couple of Iris Murdochs years ago, and it makes me feel much more highbrow now having read them, because really, Iris Murdoch books, have you guys ever read her?

No, they're basically about loads of people having affairs. Well, the two that I read, and I think all the rest of them.

But once you know she's a moral philosopher, there's a huge moral undercurrent that you're supposed to think about.

So the trolley problem. So it started as a tram problem with Philippa Foot.
Actually, let's go around the table. Sorry to interrupt that.
Yeah, yeah. Let's go around the table, pull our nut pull.

Great game. Would you pull our nut pull? Pull.
Pull, yeah.

Well, it depends on the phrase. The whole point is you change insignificant details, yeah.
It flips what people will say. Okay.
And that seems to be what happened.

So this one seems to be relatively straightforward, although there's some disagreement, but almost everyone says they would pull.

But then when you add lots of other bits to the scenario, and that seems to have been done by this other woman called Judith Jarvis Thompson, who was the person who made the trolley problem famous, came up with the term the trolley problem.

That's trolleyology is this whole kind of area of study that's because of her and yeah she expanded on it with loads of possible examples I think the most famous is probably the bystander case where rather than being the driver of the trolley you're now just on a bridge and you see the driver of the train faint and then as a bystander do you step in and then that's like are you intervening now well it's slightly different the bridge one's slightly different there's two options that Judith came up with.

One is that you're on the side watching the trolley come and there's a lever that you're able to pull.

So you now need to make the the decision the five people or one people the bridge decision is you're standing on the bridge you've suddenly done an interesting calculation where you realize that if you chucked what they call the fat man yeah someone big at the bridge someone big enough not yourself you've you've diagnosed yourself yeah but there's someone who's big and weighty next to you and you somehow have the skill to throw them off the bridge and stop it would you then do that and that's that's the biggest dilemma because that's taking an innocent bystander and well then there is another another version where the bystander is not just big enough to stop the train but he's also the person who put the five people on the track in the first place so he's the villain so is it better to push him if you know he's a bad guy he's the one who set this whole terrible scheme up did he do it deliberately i need so much backstory now okay well what have the five people done to him oh well that's a good question this is why if they're workers versus tied to the track Yes, you can change it sometimes.

Because are they foolish workers who didn't follow health and safety? Or are they there of no fault of their own?

You're right. They had it coming, mate.
You don't follow health and safety. This feels like a game of pull whenever I go to a pub and you have to work out what rules you're playing before you make it.

Is it two shot curry? Is it two shots in the black? What is it?

But I like the bridge one because a lot of people would, in the standard issue version of this, pull the lever and sacrifice one person to save five.

But then there's the hospital waiting room problem, which is where a perfectly healthy person walks in and sits down in the hospital waiting room and they realize there are five people who all desperately need an organ transplant.

And if they got the organ, they'd all live. So, if we take this one healthy person,

we can take their organs and five people, which in the abstract is equivalent to the same problem, but now it's universally no,

as opposed to almost universally yes. Yeah, and I think this is what befuddled old Judith Jarvis Thompson, and she changed her mind on her solution.

She said you shouldn't push the bystander off, and this was years later, so it was in the 70s that she came up with her.

It was a bit late by then because she's already killed 500 people in the experiment. She suddenly was like, I feel terrible about this.

It's wrong. But she said, it's kind of what you were saying, Matt.

She said, actually, if you're on the bridge and you've got the option to push someone off the bridge to save the five people, but sacrificing them, would you sacrifice yourself?

And if the answer is no, then you've got no right to sacrifice the other person. And if the answer is even yes, you've still got no right because their answer might be no.
Yeah.

Which kind of makes sense. Well, is it absolutely right, Danny, definitively saying that?

My answer to the trolley problem, if I'm on the trolley, I would immediately look out, see if someone's standing near a lever, go pull the lever for Christ's sake, if you want.

Or yell up to the bridge. Are there anyone who's just having a bad time of it? Who just kind of wants to be a hero? You need to be over 16 stone and having a bad time of it.

Judith Thompson was really important in the abortion debate and around road versus wage.

She wrote probably the most famous or maybe the most seminal paper about it with another thought experiment that she came up with, which, and I guess what's quite fun about thought experiments is they're kind of a bit funny.

Abortion often not a funny subject, but

Judith made it for the comedy. You know what? She found the comedy.

And she said,

in defense of abortion, she wrote, imagine this. You wake up one morning and you find yourself back to back in bed with a famous unconscious violinist.

Nigel Kennedy, say? Not say Nigel Kennedy, yet. In fact, because he's probably the only famous violinist you can name.
Not Jack Benny. All right, you can have Jack Benny.
Jack Benny.

This is a game I was not equipped to play.

Vanessa May.

Very good. All right, it can be any famous unconscious violinist.
It's not really important which specific violinist it is.

Or playing the famous violinist tennis.

No, no, no. Please.
I'll go on.

Can't think of one. So the famous violinist has a fatal kidney ailment.
Sorry, that's just the smallest violin playing for me in my sadness of losing.

So the violinist has a a fatal kidney ailment and the society of music lovers have therefore kidnapped you and rigged up your circulatory system to the violinist and this will save the violinist him or her and you go to the hospital and you're like someone's rigged up my circulatory system with this fucking violinist and I don't don't want it there and the hospital's like look we're super sorry wouldn't let it happen um if we'd known about it but now it's happened it's kind of letting him die if we unplug you she says should you have to agree to be plugged into him?

And her argument is, no, you shouldn't have to agree. And the doctor also says, in nine months, it'll all be fine and you'll be unplugged anyway, right? The doctor says in nine months, it'll be fine.

Yes. Although she sort of expands on it a bit, because, you know, if you have a child, often it's not straight up.
So in nine months, it'll be fine, but

you've got to look after the traumatic unplugging. You've got to look after the violence.
You've got to chase a nappy.

I think Philippa Foot's original one was also about abortion, the one with the trolley problem.

Because it had the trolley problem in it, but it also had another quandary, which was a magistrate who executes one man in order to quell a riot in which five innocent men will die.

And so she asked people, should you be able to execute one person to save five people in the riot? And almost everyone said no.

And then you said, but should you pull this lever so that the trolley kills this one person? And almost everyone said yes. And she's like, this is a weird dichotomy of ideas.

And I think, I think maybe that's where her argument came in of one of them, the judges, actively killing someone versus just not saving people, wasn't it?

So she was like, that's quite slightly different. It's very confusing.

And then Daniel Bartles of Columbia University says, this is all bullshit because these dilemmas are really engaging situations that people enjoy thinking about, but in real life, you wouldn't enjoy it at all.

If you had to make that decision, you probably would be a bit stressed.

On Mastodon, the new Twitter,

there's a user called Sidereal who came up with a solution where the trolley is going down and you've got a lever.

And what you do is you pull the lever just when the front wheels of the trolley have passed, but before the back wheels of the trolley have passed. And that will make the trolley car stop.

You can kill everyone.

No, you kill no one.

And apparently, this is how railroad workers stop runaway trains and how railroad robberies used to take place in the Wild West is you would make the tracks change just as the train's going over.

Yeah, right. So that's a way to trick it.
That's brilliant. Did you read the really recent story about a runaway train? No.
No, no. Like two weeks ago, it was mad.
In Japan, it was a freight train.

It had 50 carriages and it went for 80 kilometers on its own, totally driverless at 100 kilometers per hour. So the driver disembarks for like a driver stop at a station

in a place called Jammu and it just started rolling and it kept going. And they had to close all the road crossings ahead of it.
They were like, oh my God, we can't stop this train like quickly.

Make sure pedestrians aren't crossing the tracks. Went for 80 kilometers.
And eventually, I think someone came and put blocks on the track to stop it. Some random time.
And there was no people on it.

The driver had gone and no people. Just shed loads of bricks, I think.

That's the worst case scenario.

Not pillows and marshmallows.

Probably not.

Do you guys know Vsource, the YouTuber

watching? Oh, you're buddies with him. You're amazing.

yeah. Are you? I really want to know your opinion on the fact that he actually tried the trolley problem for real,

which has never been done before and is so weird to watch. I mean, I think he did it.
He's claiming to have done it. Yep.

It's really hard to work out if people are acting or not because you really kill five people or whatever.

Next video comes from jail. Hey, Vsource, Michael in jail here.

Yeah, it wasn't quite that extreme, but basically he took volunteers from the street and told them they were in an experiment about high-speed rail and like we're testing this

train, this automated train. Took them into a switching station and he says, why don't you have a look at how this switching station works while you're here?

And there's a guy who's there saying, hey, this is the button I pressed to put the train on a different track. And then he gets a phone call and has to leave.

So the volunteer is just alone in the switching station and they suddenly see a train coming and they're watching workers on the track with headphones on so they can't hear what's happening and they think that the only way to save these workers is to click that switch they've just been shown and to kill one person but save the other five and it's incredible to watch and it's mad to me that it's was allowed to happen but he took it through this like

went through the ethics boards and seven people did it do you want to guess how many because obviously the other thing about the trolley problem is people always say they'd switch and in real life would you actually yeah yeah um Seven people, how many people do you think click the switch?

I'm going to go one.

Nice. I think just like if you're in someone else's office, you just don't want to touch anything no matter what.

All the other social, like you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, people dying, but the social awkwardness of touching someone's workstation.

And that's how good human beings are.

You're absolutely right. It's two people.
Two people. And a lot of them did say that.
They were like, well, it's not really my, I don't know. These probably got under control.

Yeah. Yeah.
Gosh.

It is part of the dilemma that you sort of think the act of pulling the lever makes you complicit to a murder versus yeah, I hadn't thought of that really, like at that being part of the emotion.

I'm deciding you die. Oh, yeah, whereas if I just don't like if it's your job, then you could be negligent for not pressing it, right?

Because you've let five people die and it's your job and you should have made that decision. But if you've just been left in that real group,

but if you've misunderstood this the situation, you make it worse,

I'm releasing more trains.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that on the first ever road trip across America, multiple bridges collapsed under the weight of the cars and had to be rebuilt along the way.

Wow. Presumably crumbled behind you? Often crumbled with the vehicles on it and they would plunge into a river.
Oh, right.

Because I was thinking, like, Dan, maybe it's like, you know, when you're walking in the countryside and you have to close all the gates behind you, it's just like consider it driving in America

so cows can cross um this was a very specific road trip and it involved a lot of cars so it was 1919 and it was 79 vehicles specifically it was the army motor transport corps and they were driving across america to check out the state of the roads so it was ordered by the war department this road trip and no one had ever traveled from east coast to west coast in america because the roads just weren't weren't equipped for that.

There wasn't an interstate road system.

And so this trip was commissioned to see if the roads were passable. And it turned out not really.

And there were just constant diversions because road, like cars would sink in the mud, or they often had to disassemble covered bridges because the trucks were too tall.

So they'd have to take a bridge apart and then put it back together when the trucks had gone through. And then, if you look up news reports about it, there was a huge media deal.

Every new state they went into, this caravan of cars, everyone's like, hey, so it was always reported in the news, and the news was always saying, you know, 12 bridges repaired today, eight bridges collapsed today, you know, another 12 bridges.

This truck fell and had to be pulled out of a gully.

So, really, if you were a small town, you'd want to divert the roads to your worst bridges so that you're getting free repairs.

What was the date again, Sorry, Anna? I know you said 1919. 1919.
Gosh. And how many cars were on it? It was about 79 vehicles.
Right. And it took a sorrow long time because the roads were so bad.

So it took altogether, they travelled 3,242 miles and it took 62 days, which ended up being an average of about five miles an hour, a bit over five miles an hour. Wow.

They took 20 days longer to do this than the record for running across America today. Right.
Oh, wow.

So then this caused this report to be written by loads of people, one of whom was a chap called Eisenhower in 1919, who went on the Long for the Road trip, wrote a report saying, we've got to fix these roads, became president more than 30 years later.

It was like, they haven't fixed these bloody roads yet. And so he was the one who fixed the roads.
I find it amazing that the interstate system in America is basically an army thing.

It's a defense thing, isn't it? That's why they built it. Is that why they did it initially?

It's actually officially known as the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.
So yeah.

But then after it had been going for 40 years, they claimed that it had saved the lives of 187,000 people. Is that because it's so safe?

It is, because motorways and highways are just super safe compared to normal roads because everyone's going in the same direction. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's so regimented how it works.
So it is. I didn't really know anything about the interstate highway system, but all the rules are exactly the same across the board.

So America didn't have a unified road system by the 1950s.

You still couldn't really cross efficiently from one state to another because it's just not in a state's interest to make the crossing between states good. So the federal government took over.

And yeah, it's super safe, but like everything down to the last detail is the same across the board. So tunnels and bridges are exactly the same height everywhere.

There's the same gradient of slope at the edge of the roads for water runoff. Everything's the same.
That's cool.

Universally across America, still to this day. Just in the interstate highway system.
Yeah. Yeah.
Wow.

And sweetly, Alaska and Hawaii both have interstate highway roads, even though they've got no states to go. Another one in Alaska, and it's not like it doesn't seem the same as the ones in Alaska.

Oh, does it not? Really? No. Okay, yeah, they maybe have played it a bit faster, doesn't these?

With the rules out there, the ones in Hawaii are the ones in Honolulu, they're exactly like anywhere in America for sure.

The average age of bridges in the US is a year younger than me.

Wow. Are we talking like 54, 55?

Slam dog. Slam duck.
And will that always be true? They age with you?

No, they'll change them and repair them and get new ones. They're not going to get older than you, though, sadly, are they?

They're not going to change you and repair you. That's true.
How often do you remove a bridge, though? Like, how many bridges are we losing?

I guess if they totally replace one, that would reset the clock. Well, a third of them are classified as structurally deficient in the US.

So they are having to replace them. Right.
But they've kind of kicked the can down the road for years and years and years. And now who has a longer life expectancy? Meo or the bridge.

The The average bridge or you? I reckon the bridges probably don't drink as much as me. Right.
But I get a bit more exercise. Who would you save in the trolley problem?

There's a trolley that's going to kill a bridge. There's a bridge on top of a fat man.

Do you push them off?

I would love to see a website where it's you and listed all the other bridges of America. And let's see who wins.
Let's see who makes it to the end.

This is a terrible memento, Maury, which I wasn't expecting.

That would be a great update. The James has outlived another bridge.

Bridges, I'm not surprised, collapse with cars. Engineering and designing a bridge is complicated.
Yeah.

And more engineering is kind of experimental. I mean, less so now we've got computers.
Now we're in the post-Burrows 220 era.

But back in the day, you'd build a bridge, you'd over-engineer it a bunch and hope it stays up. But it's only really as good as the load cases that have been over it so far.
Right.

So when they wheeled out cars, I'm not surprised this is a whole new load case. A bunch of bridges failed.
They built a bridge in the north of England in 1846. It was a railway bridge.

And it was fine. It was like longer than they'd ever built before.
So they tensioned it up to make it extra, you know, stiff.

Trains were going fine over it. And then they added a bit more rock and aggregate to the top of it to kind of protect the sleepers.

And that additional mass opened up a new mode of movement for the bridge that they'd never seen before and the next train that went over the middle of the bridge was long enough that the middle bit could twist oh my god and they just they'd just never seen that happen before because no bridge had been big enough or had that load that's now alton towers

what happened uh the a lot of injuries five people died oh the first Train that went over after they'd added this extra rock caused it to twist in a new mode in the middle of the bridge that hadn't been seen before.

That's extraordinary. It'll happen every now and then.
We'll build something bigger or different to before. Yeah.
And until you test it, we have no.

I mean, now, obviously, with computers, we can do a lot more modeling and testing in advance, but particularly historically, it was a builder and survivor by trial and error. Yeah.

Whenever I'm on Instagram and I'm just scrolling through videos, there often is an advert that comes up for a game where you have to build a bridge and you have to put the positions of the

steel underneath it. And I just watched this ad for minutes on end because every conceivable way I think a bridge should be built, it collapses and flips and crashes.

Thank God you're not a civil engineer. Not the first time I thought that, do you understand?

Just saying, yeah, Matt's right. It's more complicated than we realised.
Yeah.

Like the, it was kind of a big deal at the time, although I have to say, I've forgotten about it until reminded researching this, but like the Millennium Bridge was a big case, wasn't it?

And exactly as you say, sort of untested. It was a huge deal.
So for foreign listeners, it was a quite beautiful bridge across the Thames in London that was opened in the year 2000 in the summer.

And I think it closed after two days because it was wobbling, wasn't it? It was moving about seven and a half centimeters backwards and forwards. And people felt like...

It didn't sound like a lot, but if you're standing on this bridge. That's earthquake levels.
Yes.

It's noticeable. And it's because it was able to move from side to side.
And what I really like about it is Londoners called it the wobbly bridge.

They didn't call it the bouncy bridge because it wasn't going up and down. It was very specifically going side to side.
It had this lateral back and forth.

They accidentally, when they built it, tuned it. I say tune it.
It wasn't deliberate. It ended up being tuned to be able to resonate at about one hertz.

And when a human walks, we take about two steps. a second.
So we're basically a mass going backwards and forwards at a rate of one hertz. Right.

And people walking across the bridge are naturally walking at a hertz with their bodies moving backwards and forwards once a second, and it would cause the bridge to move a little bit.

But then you had the synchronizing effect where because the bridge is moving slightly, people are more likely to step in rhythm with it. Yeah.
Oh, yeah.

We're all natural dancers. We're all natural.
We're all dancers.

So yeah, then it makes it worse and worse. I feel like is it the same as on a trampoline? You know, when someone's bouncing and you automatically bounce in sync with them to make you more comfortable.

So it's quite cool to imagine everyone on Millennium Bridge was walking exactly in step. And then all vomiting.
Yeah.

yeah you got seasickness going over a bridge is is it the case that they had to fix it was it dangerous because

you could break the bridge uh it could have got worse and worse so at the levels it was happening it wasn't dangerous but no one wants to be on a bridge wobbling backwards and forwards it genuinely made people feel sick that's why they had to fix it this is my new entry for how i'd solve the trolley problem i would yeah i would be on the bridge i would see the trolley coming and i'd say everyone let's let's walk and sink and let's down the bridge shake the bridge shake the bridge it cost an extra five million to fix.

It was like on an original budget of 17 or 18 million to build it. It took them two years and £5 million to.

They had to add extra damping to take out those frequencies. Yeah, yeah.
By doing that, they increased the damping below one and a half hertz by about 15, 20%.

And that was enough to stop that runaway feedback group. How interesting.
So if you got a load of shorter people with shorter legs walking along, might it happen again?

If you were able to walk at a frequency

that

would it be faster or slight like like race walkers if you're not you'd have to the way it's been designed now you'd have to be running okay you'd be at a higher frequency to cause a problem but you'd have to have a lot of people running at once to fall in in sync i guess right so if the london marathon changes the divergence

but they do this like people who work on designing football stadiums have to make sure the stadium is not accidentally tuned to any of the frequencies where a concert that's put in the stadium

might match to. Yeah.

But what do you mean? Because then the actual structure could vibrate.

There's video of people dancing in a stadium. Oh, no, it was a football chant that people were doing, and you can see the whole structure starts to go up and down because they've hit that resonant

frequency. So every engineer on a stadium has to go, the referee, the wanker.
Okay, don't do it to that one. Not that one.

The famous one up near where I live is the Broughton Suspension Bridge between Manchester and Bolton, which collapsed in 1831 and was supposedly because people were marching across it and that resonance caused the bridge to collapse.

I think that's the first, in my research, that's the first bridge that collapsed.

Yeah, resonance. Supposedly, yeah.
And

the military from then on were always told to break step when they cross over a bridge. It is sensible to not walk exactly at the same pace if you're going over a bridge, I think.
Yeah.

Actually, for the British Army, at certain points, you have to stop playing the music. So,

you know, the trumpeters have to shut up as you go over a bridge. So, you can all walk really carefully, not coordinating with anyone else's walk.

Everyone walk totally randomly, different to everyone else walking randomly. You could just put some music that's really difficult to dance to.
Yeah,

something like some Shostakovich, some really sort of get all three of the best-known violinists.

Five years ago, I was paying $65 a month for my subscriptions. Today, those same subscriptions cost $111 and I don't even use half of them anymore.

On top of that, it also sends you alerts when subscription prices go up. So you always know the price you're paying.

Go to rocketmoney.com/slash cancel to get started.

That's rocketmoney.com/slash cancel. Rocketmoney.com/slash cancel.

Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder? With a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other.
One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting.

Before you know it, you are drowning in software instead of growing your business. This is where Odoo comes in.
Odoo is the only business software you'll ever need.

It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more.
No more app overload.

No more juggling logins, just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part: Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

It's built to grow with your business, whether you are just starting out or already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process.

So you can focus on what really matters: running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch.
So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odo.com. That's odoo.com.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that in the board game Rising Sun, players are able to collect monsters that are inspired by both Japanese mythology and, by complete accident, a New Zealand farmer.

This is the board game, which they put on Kickstarter. They needed 300,000 in order to get the game going, but they ended up getting over $4 million.

And so they had all this additional money. And I'm like, like, well, we might as well add a farmer.

That was a stretch goal. Yeah.
One guy from New Zealand gets to pick a monster.

So, what they did was they said, okay, well, as we've got all this extra money, what we're going to do is we're going to produce more characters. So it's like a bonus pack that you get.

So one of these monsters is called the Katahi. And basically, it's described as a Manawa Bradford, a spirit monkey that is very hairy and gets engulfed in rage.

Are you the New Zealand farmer, Dan?

I've never seen you consumed consumed with rage. No, no.
No, but you have seen me naked.

Which made him pretty angry, actually.

But yeah, so then what happens is the game comes out, all these characters are out there, and then there's this guy who's online who says, hey,

I'm actually from Japan and I've never heard of this character. Does anyone know anything more about it? So it sparks off a big, you know, hunt online for people to try and get to the bottom of it.

Someone eventually discovers that there's a Wikipedia page, legendary Japanese monsters, that has all the characters on it. And in there is an entry for this katahi.

And a guy in New Zealand, 19-year-old, and his buddy dicking about online, went to this page, and they named it after him. And it just sat there for over a year.

And the makers of this game went onto Wikipedia, cut and paste all of the characters on there, didn't do any additional research

and ended up using him. And so he's immortalized in this game as a Japanese.
Japanese mythological character. Awesome.
Yeah.

That's just going to encourage more people to edit Wikipedia in the desperate hope they'll make it to a board game. Yeah, that's true.

And there's this great line which says someone was describing it saying, This is the most exciting thing to happen in Danaverk, which is the rural town where he's from in New Zealand, since someone tried to open a brothel there in 2008 and it lasted precisely three weeks.

I think,

I mean, people got really moralistic about it. One woman said she'd sit outside the brothel every day knitting to shame anyone who came in.

And she also said, I can't see any of our men paying $100 a bonk, which I can see a lot of her men reading that and going, can't you love? Okay.

I know, I know. She's from the 50s.
One of the district council chiefs said that brothels were a legal business and the only thing that they could do was impose environmental conditions on it.

And his name was Roger 20man,

which

sounds like something on the men hour around the brothel.

Have we ever mentioned the Anton Deck Saturday Night Takeaway board game? I don't think so.

You say that as a, we must have mentioned it. That's what we're playing too.
Yeah, we mentioned it in pretty much every episode. I don't know what you're on about.
This came out in 2017.

It was an Anton Deck board game called Saturday Night Takeaway based on their TV show and it was basically a quiz. So you would play the board game and get asked lots of trivial questions.

Sounds good. It was in theory good, except it was just riddled with mistakes.

One question asked, where is Stonehenge located? It said Somerset.

They said that Albert Einstein died in 1949 instead of 55, which is, I guess, you know, you're not going to automatically know if that's right or wrong. How about this one? True or false?

This is not the question. I'm rephrasing the question here.
True or false, the moon is the same distance from London to Australia.

That is incorrect. Incorrect.
Yeah. And it's incorrect that they said that.
They

were 10. Yeah.
They said it was the same distance as London to Blackpool.

So, in answer to how far away is the moon, they put 225 miles as the correct answer. It's supposed to 238,000 miles

the short-lived TV game show Color of Money

I only know it from the game in pubs

you could choose from yeah they hired a mathematician to analyze the game for them and the mathematician ran the numbers and came back and said this is a terrible game no one's ever going to win And they're like, oh, no, but I tested it when I was home with the family and my grandma won and everyone had a great time.

And so they put the game into production and basically no one won.

And that was it for the game. And it was good.
That sounds like a good thing for the production company, though, right? Oh, if it doesn't make sense.

No one wants to watch it.

Did they ever think of putting that grandma on the show? They should have. Lucky grandma.

That's what you're going wrong.

Sweep up. Take it all out.
It's like the fruit machines, Pokies. You can tune the payout rate.

Like, it's not doing, you're pulling the lever, but it's just hitting a switch that's then spinning the things. Yeah.
And the payout rate is programmed in to be once every kind of so often.

It's not even doing something particularly randomly, it's evening out the payout rate. Right, so you just have to watch, and once it's been long enough, then you go on.

When I used to work in a bar, we would watch it, and if no one won all night and people were playing it all night, then once everyone else had gone home, we'd put all our tips in and lose all our tips.

But then we were just terrible at those like, for instance, there was a QI quiz machine game. Oh, yeah.
And have we said this on here? I don't think so. I don't think so.

So there's a QI quiz machine game.

And before it went out, they sent me all of the questions so that I could check through them to make sure there wasn't any mistakes and make sure that it was kind of QI as it should be.

And there was probably, I think it was 20,000. It might have been more.
Anyway, I had a database of all the questions and they put one in the pub next to where we worked. Yeah, next door published.

I like the pub down there. brilliant.
This is, we're going to clean up here. And so we went and played, and we just lost all our money.

Just couldn't win. We just hit every clack suddenly.
It's ridiculous.

Oh, my God. On Japanese games, in the 1980s, and I think it was 1985 or 1986, did you know that almost half of Japanese people owned a computer domestically?

When in the US, for instance, that was about 9%. In what year? I think it was 1985 or 6.
I was trying to write this down. I just read it this week.

But that's because they all owned Famicon, which was Family Computer, which was the Nintendo console thing, and they were all playing Nintendo. In 1990,

I only knew one person who had a computer in Bolton. Yeah, there you go.

And it was called, interestingly, everyone called it Family Com, and they still do, and it's still always called FamilyCom, but the name is Family Computer, because they weren't allowed to trademark it as FamilyCom because there was an oven released a couple of years earlier, which was Family Convection Oven, oven which was family con

and so

i'm just on board games um cool new weird board games which are always fun people always coming up with them these days um have you guys heard of consentical

no and i already regret half hearing about it

yes you can touch my balls

so it's a cooperative card game for two players and it's about a consensual crucially sexual encounter between a curious human and a tentacled alien. Oh, okay.
Wow, consenticle.

And the way it works, I see, like tentacle. Yeah.
Tentacle. Not testicle.

That stands like that. I see consent tackle.
Consenticle is a testicle one. I think consent tickle is the one where it's you as Mr.
Tickle had that.

There are lots of variations. It's like the trolley problem that you

built on a lot.

Anyway, it sounds super fun. So you've got these cards, which are things like things that you might want to do to this alien that you fancy with tentacles.

So like wink, gaze, envelop, bite, lick, penetrate is one of the cards. And you convey which card you want to mutually put down with faces and gestures.
So you make a certain face.

I'm looking at Matt and it was like very awkward.

Don't want to be thinking about that. Not me.
I'm looking at their plant over there.

A lot of copies of those QI books over there.

That look says penetrate on that plant.

There's a famous, is it by Hawkersai? There's a famous painting of a woman having sex with a

octopus. Yeah, with an octopus, yeah.

And a load of octopus scientists looked at it and said it didn't look like the octopus was enjoying itself. Very really.

Because apparently octopuses have ways of changing their body whenever they're mating and stuff like that.

I think there was a exhibition at the British Museum that had a bunch of these were effectively a monster erotica paintings.

And in the year that they were there, if you go to the website and you looked at the data, there were more searches for that exhibition than there were for the opening hours of the British Museum.

Well, then that is what inspired this game. You know, it was like, stop having this non-consensual sex with octopuses.
So, what happens?

Sorry, you put the cards down, and I would need to convey through a series of looks and gestures what kind of sex move we should make with each other. And then we would

look at the table.

The plant's over there if you need it.

And then you would play a card and I would play a card and we would hope that our cards mutually matched each other and built trust between us

rather than being non-consensual. It's snap, yes.

Sexy snap. Sexy snap.
It's snap.

Snap.

Here's a really random thing that is a board game I'd love to get my hands on.

It's a game which you can get in Sierra Leone, which is essential to be played by anyone who's trying to obtain a driver's license.

Supposedly Supposedly, it's a monopoly, but it's just the only piece is the car.

I think you go around the bod, and whatever you land on, it asks you a question about the highway code. Yeah.
Right. And you have to play it for two to three months.

And then you do the test, and the game supposedly gets you ready for the test.

That's so good. I could do with that.
I'm learning to drive at the moment, and I'm dreading the theory test because that's a big old book to read, that old highway code.

So a board game would be amazing. There you go.
If you're listening, please, God, make the board game because otherwise...

Please make it as difficult as possible

and not the fuss.

Did you guys ever play the game Guess Who? Yes. Yes, still play it.
Good on you, mate. It's not going to help me party tests.

That was invented by this couple called Aura and Theo Costa, who created a game called The created a company called Theora. It was invented in the, I think it was the 60s.

Theo was actually a classmate of Anne Frank. Went to school with her.
No.

Yeah. Interestingly.
His original name was Morris, but he was brought up in the Netherlands when it was under German occupation, so changed his name and like hid his Jewish identity.

And yeah, they married and they became amazing game designers. They designed loads of extremely popular games, one of which was Guess Who, and they died.

One of them died in 2019, one in 2021, I think, both aged 90. And their gravestones are the guess who

popped off. You can't flip their gravestone down.
You can't flip them, sadly.

That would be so cool. But no, you can't.
What is it? What do they have? They just have the same design as the guess who

are quite similar to an actual gravestone. So

optimal guess who.

You want to be able to split

the remaining possible people as evenly in half as possible. Yes.
Because you want to basically do a binary search. You want to split it in half each time.
Yeah.

And that's the fastest way to get to the final answer.

And the way you need to do that is by stacking your conditions at once which a lot of other people will claim is cheating or making the game not fun anymore but you can say like if it's a man do they have glasses or if it's a woman have they got a hat and there's still a yes or no right response but now you've used the categories to better split the that is optional so much better than the way we play it yeah that's brilliant we always say does your guy like peas and you just have to make a judge deep into their eyes.

Would you trust them with the trolley problem? So roughly, how quickly do you destroy the seven-year-old you're playing?

I wonder, have mathematicians had a go at the other game invented by Aura and Theo Costa, which is the, and they made it in the 1970s, the popping out rubber spheres game that's become really popular recently.

I've only seen it because suddenly I'm surrounded by young children. Yeah, we've got a few at home.
Yeah. Yeah.
Do you guys know what? Pidginity toy thing. Yeah.
Yeah, and people are into it.

I thought

it was. I thought thought only babies were into it, but apparently it's

that they were invented by someone who was inspired by a field of breasts. You're absolutely right.
And that is

wow. Yeah.

She was actually sweetly and darkly inspired by her sister who very sadly got breast cancer.

And she had a dream around that time of a huge field of her sister's breasts and woke up and went to the game designer and was like, make me a field of boobs. Wow.
Oh my God.

I had a dream last night where there was a referee in a football match and he tried to send one off, but he pulled out a rice cake instead. Oh yeah.
Can we turn that into a game?

Not all dreams are going to be money spinners.

That should have been her tombstone, a giant rubber gravestone that you could push down

into the ground. But then what if she pops it back up from the game?

That is scary.

Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our various social media accounts.

I'm on Instagram on Schreiberland.

James. My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.
Matt. I'm stand up maths pretty much everywhere.
Yep. And Anna?

You can find us on Twitter on at no such thing or on Instagram, no such thing as a fish, or you can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep, or you can just head straight to our website, which is no such thingasafish.com. You'll find all of our previous episodes up there.

You'll find a link to Club Fish, our secret members' club, where we have lots of bonus episodes.

But most important of all, you should find yourself to a pre-order link for Matt's new book, which is coming out this June. You were saying June in the UK, August in the US.

And where's the best place for them to go?

If you go to maskia.co.uk, you can get the signed pre-ordered copies by me, but you can support your local independent book shop or anywhere else online to pre-order it. Remind us what it's called.

It's called Love Triangle. Okay, that's it.
We'll be back again next week with another episode, and we'll see you then. Goodbye.

California has millions of homes that could be damaged in a strong earthquake. Older homes are especially vulnerable to quake damage, so you may need to take steps to strengthen yours.

Visit strengthenyourhouse.com to learn how to strengthen your home and help protect it from damage. The work may cost less than you think and can often be done in just a few days.

Strengthen your home and help protect your family. Get prepared today and worry less tomorrow.
Visit strengthenyourhouse.com.

This is Bethany Frankl from Just Be with Bethany Frankl. Let me tell you something: most dog food, scam.
Kibble, trash, garbage, and there are so many bad ingredients.

I prefer to not put ultra-processed junk in my body. So, why would I want to give that to my furry babies, Biggie and Smalls? Fun, beautiful fact.
My former dog lived to 18.

So, my dogs love just fresh from just food for dogs. It is real food.
It is made with human-grade ingredients, balanced, healthy, and here is the kicker. It's shelf-stable.

You can throw a pouch in the purse in the car in a weekender bag, and your furry friends eat fresh wherever you are. You will notice the difference.

Biggie and smalls have shinier coats, more energy, and at mealtime, forget it. Tails wagging like lunatics.
And I don't have to stress about preservatives or fillers.

It's the only fresh dog food that actually fits into my life. No cooler, no fridge, no gross messiness, no problem.
Just fresh, try it, and you tell me I'm wrong.

Go to justfoodfordogs.com and get 50% off your first order. No code needed.
Just do it now, justfoodfordogs.com.

From the trusted Azure Standard family comes Azure Well, supplements made with clean, powerful ingredients that honor your body and your values.

With no fillers, no shortcuts, and no compromises, Azure Well is wellness you can feel good about. Visit AzureLivingwell.com to start your journey and discover the difference real purity makes.

Plus, use code iHeartAZ15 for 15% off your first order. That's A-Z-U-R-E Livingwell.com.
Code iHeartAZ15. Clean supplements made made with purpose.

New customers only first order a minimum of $100 terms apply.