315: No Such Thing As Tedious Moss

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I can't cook. You know this.
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B21. Hi, everyone.
James here.

Now, before we start this week's show, which is another working from home episode where we recorded in all of our different homes around the country, I just want to say I hope everyone's all right.

I hope that you're all staying indoors. I hope you're all looking after your family and friends.

But there's just one little bit of news that I wanted to say, which we mentioned last week, but that is that we have re-released the second year of No Such Things a Fish for free on the internet.

So if you go to the place where you normally get your podcasts, you will see episodes 53 to 104 and they were not there in the past. So there's hours and hours of fun on there.
Hope you enjoy them.

But one more thing about that is if you would like something a little bit extra, then you can go to no suchthingasafish.com and you can find the details of our audio cassette.

Now this is not any normal audio cassette. You can't put it in your cassette player if you still have one.
It is a USB and that USB has all of those episodes like I said which are now up for free.

But it also has an exclusive show that we filmed live in the QI offices, so you can see exactly what our office is like.

And I mean, apart from that, it's a really beautiful little cassette, which is really an awesome thing to have on your shelf in your house. So, enjoy this show.
Hope everything's good.

Get the cassette if you fancy it, and we'll see you all on the other side. Okay, on with the podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another work from home episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a Weekly Podcast. My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Chacinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round our 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's my fact. My fact is: NASA fixed its Mars probe by getting it to whack itself with a shovel.

Did NASA send a shovel with the probe just in case it needed something to whack itself with? Like in a cartoon?

And did NASA, once they had it hitting itself with a shovel, did it go, stop hitting yourself, mate. Stop hitting yourself.

So whack is, as James pointed out to me in an email, not the correct term. Technically, it was a little push.
It was a little shove, but it's been reported as a whack by most of the media.

I wouldn't call it a shove. It was a gentle caress.
Yes. NASA fixed its Mars probe by gently caressing it with a shovel.
Stop caressing yourself.

No, really, stop it. We can see the video done.
Oh, shit. Okay.

Sorry. I'll put that away.

So, yeah, so

this is the Mars probe that landed late 2018. It was in November, and it's the Mars Insight mission.
And the idea is that it's going deep into the interior of Mars, which has never been done before.

All previous missions have just looked at the landscape, taken bits of soil. This one's drilling down to tell us about the planet.

As NASA actually puts it on its own website, it's the first mission to give Mars a thorough checkup since the planet formed 4.5 billion years ago.

So it's a beautiful little thing that they're trying to test out here. And as they were using the machine that was drilling down, the drill itself, which is called the mole, suddenly got stuck.

And they couldn't work out why. And this happened in March of last year.

And so for a whole year, they've desperately been trying to work out how we can get this shovel to work again, because it's only gone something like 35 centimeters into the ground when it's meant to go a full three to five meters, roughly.

So they have no idea what to do. And they've been thinking a whole year.
They've had labs set up where they've tested every scenario of what they could do.

And the answer finally that came to them is just give it a little caress.

And it might work. And it has.
So it's working again. Yeah, initially they tried to caress it on the side, didn't they?

Because they tried to move it to the side of the hole which it was drilling.

And that might give it a bit more purchase.

But then they decided they're going to have to push down on it. And the problem is that there is a massive tether.

So the mole is attached to the main probe with like a piece of wire.

And what they didn't want to do was push that and then damage the tether and then not be able to do anything with it because if you damage that then there's no moling there's no no nothing and it's also it's not a drill it's um kind of a drill would spin round right wait james did you just say this is not a drill

this is not a drill um so a drill would spin round um but there's nothing for it to grab onto so you can't kind of spin round like a drill it's kind of an up and down thing so it kind of pulls itself up and then slams itself down and hopefully makes it a little bit in.

And then it keeps doing that again and again and again and again and hopefully gets about three or four meters in there. Do you guys know why it's called Insight?

Because they are sighting the inside of Mars. I think, well, it's a clever double play on words.

So NASA's just full of these stupid acronyms where it obviously gives stuff a name and then thinks, well, we better attribute, you know, something to each of those initials. So it's called Insight.

It stands for Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, geodesy and heat transport and it actually had to have a name change so it used to be slightly more catchy than that it was originally called the geophysical monitoring station which was gems but nasa suddenly went oh god we've already got one of those uh that's in in the working so they had to change its whole name so that it didn't coincide with another one do you know that insight has won an emmy Has it?

No,

it won an Emmy for Outstanding Original Interactive Programme.

So NASA did some coverage of this landing and of its drilling and shoveling and all that kind of stuff. And you could go online and you could interact with

the show. And it won an Emmy for it.
It was a bad year for TV that year, wasn't it? It was a bad year.

And one other thing about Insight, do you know that they have named a rock on Mars? Oh, okay. So when it landed, when the InSight lander landed, it kind of knocked a little rock.

It's only about the size of a golf ball, and it rolled about three feet away. And do you know what they named this rock? Okay.

They named it after a famous thing.

A famous thing.

Did they name it after a rock star? After some famous people. Oh.

The Rolling Stones. Correct! Because

it was a Rolling Stone.

Wow. They've named this one tiny rock on Mars, which is about the size of a golf ball.
They've named it after the Rolling Stones. It's almost more of an insult naming that after the Rolling Stones.

It really is. It's not like naming a star or

a moon or something, is it? And isn't it? It's named after all the Rolling Stones. They haven't picked one.
That one rock is now just the full band. It's called the Rolling Stones Rock.
Right.

Although they could have called it the Rolling Rock or the Rolling Stone, because that's effectively what it is.

But they've just decided Rolling Stones Rock.

Did they observe whether the Rolling Stone has gathered any moss? Well, we might come to moss later in this show.

Spoiler, spoiler.

Just, this was a very, very low-tech solution that they used, the

whacker spade, shovel, mole thing. It's whack-a-mole.
Let's just call it whack-a-mole. We've already got a phase.

Caress a mole, Anna. Sorry.

That's a very different game.

Anyway, this was a very low-tech solution. So there was another one I found during the Apollo 11 mission.

And this was when they'd all got back on the lunar module and they hadn't yet pressed the button to say, take us back to Earth.

And Armstrong was wearing his backpack on the module, and it smashed into the switch. There was one switch they needed to turn on the engine and begin the flight back to Earth.

And he was wearing his big, clunky space backpack, and it just broke the whole switch off.

And they, like, it was fine, because they just shoved a felt-tip pen that Buzz Aldrin had been using. Don't know why he had a felt-tip pen on Apollo 11, but.

you do. If you watch the moon footage, when Neil Armstrong turns round, it says dickhead on his back.

That's what that was for.

He still keeps that pen on him to this day, Buzz Aldrin. He's stopped.
Yeah, he takes it everywhere he goes. Yeah, it's.
But it's still working. Yeah, it's still got the ink.
It's still,

in many ways, is more impressive than the moon bandings.

I don't suppose he still uses it, does he? No, he carries it as his lucky charm. It was the thing that got them off the moon.
So, yeah.

Because when we met him, Dan, you did have the word dickhead on your back, but that wasn't him who wrote it. No,

I'm still trying to find who did that.

It's got similar handwriting to you, James, but I don't want to make any accusations.

It's interesting. I found a fun term for the idea of whacking something to make it work again, which is percussive maintenance.
And

it's a thing that actually is recommended by so many different people, people who work in the electronics industry.

There was a whole thing about the fact that if a soldered connection needed to reconnect, sometimes it would lose its connection and just by whacking it, you could make it sort of reconnect.

So there's been so many examples of percussive maintenance throughout the years. In NASA territory, Skylab, when that went up, there was a bit of a problem on the outside of it.

And the way that the astronauts fixed that was during a spacewalk was to hit it and that made it work again. So that was very useful.

But then there was also this great airplane called the Blackbird, the SR-71 Blackbird. Have you guys heard of this? I think so.
This is a bird. Sorry, this is a plane.
No, it's Superman.

So this is a plane that flew so high and fast that when it was up there, the body of the plane would stretch because of, you know, the materials would stretch. And that would be

on that. Yeah, absolutely.

Oh, God.

Can I just repeat what you just said? You said, so it went so fast that the body would stretch, you know, because the body would stretch.

I didn't expect for this to get picked up. I don't know where to go from here.
That was not an acceptable explanation.

Dan, is it the case that the pilots will be sitting at the controls and then suddenly they go, whoa, and then they'd be sitting in the third row.

Yeah, is it the people who are on the plane are going, I've got a lot more legroom than I used to have?

Well, I thought that was a thing with planes, that when you go to a certain altitude, materials can stretch and shrink. I thought that was a classic thing.

You've got to collect more information on it in order to elucidate it for the rest of us who don't know about it. Well, let's imagine that, let's just accept that this grew and shrunk.

No, we're not accepting it. Okay, well.

I'm ready to accept it. Come on.
Let's accept that this thing is stretched, like stretch Armstrong.

So then the idea was that they built a plane whereby the panels didn't necessarily meet on the ground.

There was a gap between them so that when it got to that height and it stretched, they would lock into each other and then it could continue flying in perfect harmony at that height.

When it landed back on the ground, they would then bash it back into shape of making those gaps again for the next flight.

Hang on, I'm a bit confused now about how if the panels didn't meet on the ground

and then it stretched apart and...

I know what you're going to say, yeah, that's a good question.

Are you sure it didn't squash? It feels like, because it would be so cold up there, because it's a lot colder in the sky, it feels like the materials would shrink. Yeah, it's another good point.

Well it sounds like an amazing plane. It sounds like a hell of a plane.
I'm sorry I didn't get to fly on it.

You know how things, if they go faster than the speed of light, they shrink. Maybe it's that thing.
Maybe it's the Einstein thing. I can only thank you all for trying to help me out with it.

I don't think we're going to get anywhere constructive.

Did you know there's a gorilla suit on the ISS?

Is that? Okay. Yeah.
What for? For fun. They just send one up.
Yeah, and they just wear it sometimes on the ISS.

Isn't that the least practical thing you've ever heard of being sent up there? And so it's not a sort of backup spacesuit. They'd run out of spacesuits.
Oh,

imagine the pictures coming from the next time that people go on the moon and you've got three of them in spacesuits, and one guy's like, oh, for fuck's sake, I'm going to do the gorilla thing, haven't I?

Really enjoy the shorts, though.

Yeah.

In 2013, there was a hole in the ISS,

and it was probably caused by a tiny micrometeorite. The hole was just a few millimeters to a few centimetres wide, and they plugged it using an astronaut's thumb.

So, did the astronaut have to stay next to the wall for the rest of the mission? He's still there.

He's still there, yeah. No, they cut his thumb off and then

no, they eventually used some sealant, but just until they managed to get the correct tools there, he had to stand there with his thumb in the dike.

That's great. Very cool.
What's the story about the Netherlands dike and the person who shoved their thumb in it to stop the whole country flooding? That's what you just said is the whole story.

That's it, that's the story. It was well told, I thought.

Can I just talk about one more lo-fi NASA fix? It's one of the best. It's in 2012 when the ISS was repaired with a toothbrush.

So, yeah, this was that they have four units on the outside that power the ISS, and they're covered in solar panels, and one of them broke. and so the space people, the what do you call them?

Astronauts, the astronauts had to climb outside to fix it, but the bolt was stuck because it had gathered so much space dust that they couldn't quite get a handle on the bolt properly.

And they didn't know how to get rid of the space dust. They were like, well, we need some sort of little kind of brush, sort of hard, stiff.
And they used a toothbrush.

And I don't know how they decided which astronaut sacrificed their toothbrush for the sake of this bolt, but they brushed all the dust off.

And then after that, you're sort of brushing your teeth with space dust, which is probably

worth the sacrifice. Feels like it would be more abrasive than a normal toothbrush.
Yeah. Might help you brushing your teeth with space dust.
It could be the new thing.

Colgate might be about to release the next space dust toothpaste. Here's another tip.
If you have a gap in your teeth, just go up to very high altitude and it'll launch right to go.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that we don't know what the Greek philosopher Plato's real name was.
Plato was his wrestling nickname.

So this is

from historian Diogenes Laertius, who wrote a lot about Plato and he said that his name came from broad-shouldered, which is what Plato means, and that it was due to his physique because he had big muscles, he was known as being a wrestler, he apparently competed at the Isthmian Games.

And we don't really know what his actual first name is.

According to Diogenes Laertius, it might have been Aristocles, which means best reputation, but we don't really have much historical evidence for that. So most people think that probably isn't true.

But we do think that probably he got his name Plato because he was broad-shouldered. Well, so I read there's three possibilities for why he got called Plato in the same category.

One was broad shoulders, one was possibly breadth of eloquence, but my favourite one is that he had a massive forehead. That's the third one.
Did he?

That supposedly had a very wide forehead, and that might have been why he got called there. There was the thing he took part in sounds really intense, this thing called the Pancration,

which is it's it's a kind of fighting where you can do everything pretty much except biting people and gouging out their eyes.

It's a bit like mixed martial arts, and it's so violent that when the Olympics came back, it was the only ancient Olympic event that was not brought back.

And the Archbishop of Leon said, we allow all events to be reinstated except Pancration. And that's what Plato was doing.
He was doing the ultra-violent thing.

Although he was doing the least violent of this admittedly extremely violent practice, wasn't he?

He was up there, but not quite peak. Boxing was maybe the worst.
And then the wrestling was seen as, you know, the wimps element of Pancraton, I think. But you still had people like the other

wrestling nickname I found was Mr. Fingertips, who was a fourth century BC wrestler in the Pancration and he was called Mr.

Fingertips because his strategy was every time a game started he'd bend the opponent's fingers back until they snapped and then that usually would mean that they caved immediately. Wow.

Because that is a pretty basic move in wrestling, isn't it?

It's only one ahead of pulling someone's hair or like kneeling down behind them and then getting someone to push them over. I don't know.
It's pretty good.

It's like if you're doing a thumb war and you immediately break your opponent's thumb, then the thumb war is won at that point. I don't know.

I always think bending people's fingers back is like a Chinese bug. It's a bit cheap, you mean? It's not fair play.
It's a bit playground-y.

Yeah.

It's a seminal move in modern-day WWF and WWE wrestling.

What? Breaking someone's fingers. Holding their hands and gripping them and bending them.
It can lead to 10 minutes. Honestly,

it's a biggie in the world of wrestling.

Is that serious, Dan?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They bend each other's fingers back. Yeah, yeah.
It's a move that you see a lot. It's almost a way of wrestlers during a big match getting their breath back together.
You know,

it's their break moment, but they really bring the theatrics. It just makes it look like you're doing one of those country dances where someone skips underneath the arch that you're forming.

I wonder if, like, you know, modern day boxing and so on, half of the whole thing is the smack talk that happens, you know, the taunting and so on.

I'm just wondering what Plato's smack talk would be like, because he would dish out new philosophical ideas that would crush your whole understanding of the earth.

How could you fight once you've been told about existence and your place in the universe? I don't know. I think it's particularly easy to punch that guy in the face, to be honest.

He might have shouted that you were a featherless biped. That was one of his human slams.
That was

how he defined man.

And I think it was sort of saying we're really no different from creatures in a lot of ways but then he came up against Diogenes the Cynic who said that's a ridiculous way to define man and he brought to Plato a live chicken and plucked it in front of his very eyes.

Wait, sorry, he plucked the chicken live? Because if so, Diogenes has a lot of questions to answer. I think it's better than killing a chicken just in order to pluck it to make a philosophical point.

I think it's tough to pluck a live chicken. Yeah.

I think that's a real skill. If you can pluck...
I've never tried.

Frankly, he should have been called Diogenes the Optimist if he thought he was going to get away with it.

Maybe he was a wrestler too and got it in a headlog or something. That's Plato helped out.
But Plato was forced to amend his definition of man to a featherless biped with broad flat nails.

Then that distinguishes us from the chicken. Does that mean like fingernails and toenails and stuff?

It just means, basically, I think he looked for the first thing that we have that a chicken doesn't. Quite a lot to pick from.
He went for the nails?

Chickens have got nails. But they don't know.
No, but they got bendy, like. Oh, yeah, that's true.
Yeah, they're not flat. Wow, it feels like a bit of a reach from Plato at that point.

Yeah, but here's what I'm thinking, right? He said broad, flat nails. Plato means broad.
We don't know where the broad bit comes from. Maybe he had extremely broad nails.
Wow.

He just had really flat fingers. Maybe that's where he got his name.
Just the first thing you notice about him.

Diogenes, like, if Diogenes was taking the piss out of you, I think that's pretty bad because he lived in a barrel. Yeah.
Didn't he? Did he? Yeah. Yeah, he did.

If someone's coming up to you taking the piss and it's like, mate, you live in a barrel. He lives in a barrel and he's a cynic? Was he Oscar the Grouch? Who is this?

He basically. Oh my god, he basically was.
Yeah. I think Oscar the Grouch is based on him.
I think he was just trying to show the vanity of human vanity, you know?

Yeah, he lived in a jar to tell humans that they were all dickheads. Wait, a jar or a barrel? Because I think a jar is worse.
A jar is smaller normally. Yeah.

It's called a jar usually, but I think it was quite a large one. I don't think he squeezed himself into like a jam jar.

Yeah. But he also

masturbated in his barrel. Oh, no.
Well, I hope it wasn't a jar then, because that would be a hell of a view to everyone passing by.

People didn't find that amusing, and he used to defecate in theatres and stuff, didn't he, Diogenes? What a way.

He was trying to eskew society, I think, is the point. I might be wrong about this because I don't know much about Diogenes, but I think that's what he was trying to do.

And he was trying to go against societal norms. And he lived in a barrel, but then he still needed to masturbate because he was, you know, he had urges.
And he couldn't leave his barrel.

So he had to do it in a barrel. But people didn't like it very much.
Dan, why did you say just that it was so particularly bad to masturbate in the jar?

Well, your barrel, no one's going to see inside. You can do that in private in your barrel.

Your jar? You're David Blaining it. People are going to come and visit to see you, see what you're up to.

Shit, did David Blaine do that? If I'd known that, I would have watched his whole, you know, stuck in a box gig. I'm not sure if he did.
Did he leave the jar to go into the theatre to have a poo?

Or did he have the jar taken into the theatre?

Like, roll it along like a hamster wheel. Yeah, and then

sort of poo out of the end of it. I think this might have been at two different stages of his life.

I think he might have been past his barrel years, so his pooing and theater years.

You've got to keep it fresh for people, haven't you? You've got to keep mixing it up. He famously, the thing about masturbating was he always said,

because

I think he begged for food, baby, and he said it would be better if I could satisfy my hunger by rubbing my belly in the same way that I satisfy my sexual needs by rubbing my genitals.

That was his saying. Wow.
That was his catchphrase.

Pretty bold decision by the Sesame Street writers to face Oscar the Grange on this gun.

There are a lot of unedited scenes in there.

He actually, it's quite interesting. He gave an explanation for the origin of the word cynic, Diogenes.
So someone said, why do they call you Diogenes the Cynic?

And it meant Diogenes the dog-like, as it's from the same room as canine.

And I think he says... I just do a poo wherever I want.

I just shit everywhere.

No, he said it's because I fawn upon those who give me anything and bark at those who give me nothing. That's cynicism.
That's where that's coming from, according to him. That's interesting.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that the first ever internal combustion engine was partially powered by explosive moss.

Wow.

Oh, God.

Now, people who listen to this podcast might not know about Andy's obsession with moss, because we've never let him do a Moss fight before.

But for one of our books, was it the last book we did or the one before?

I think it was the one before. Yeah.
Book of the Year 2018, maybe. We had an article on Club Moss, and it was Andy's absolute fave.

It was the longest article in the book at the time of submission, and weirdly, it was the shortest by the time it actually made it to print.

So...

Revenge time.

So this is an internal combustion engine, you know, powered by small internal explosions. And the thing which provided the explosions was this moss.

The machine was called the Pyrrhonophore, and it was patented in 1807, which I find unbelievably early.

As in, the patent was signed by Napoleon for this machine.

And it was patented by a French inventor called Nicefour Niepce.

And this machine ran a boat. The engine was attached to a boat, and it was full of lycopodium dust, which is from a particular species of club moss.

And

it's very explosive, this stuff,

because it has lots of surface area and it's 50% fat, so it goes bang quite readily when exposed to flame. And there was a boat going around up and down rivers.
That's incredible.

I hadn't, I didn't, because I didn't look into this specific one, and it actually powered a boat. Yeah, but I think it was quite a small boat, wasn't it? It wasn't a huge boat, yeah.

Was it on a model boating pond?

It was a model boat. Was it not? Because I did read one place that said it was a toy boat, but I couldn't tell whether it was or not.
I mean, all boats are toy boats if, you know. If you're a giant.

Okay,

it wasn't a massive boat. I think let's go that far.
Okay. But it wasn't only a centimetre long.
It was somewhere in between the two.

It was somewhere in between a centimetre and the Titanic. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.

That's absolutely clarified that for me. Thank you.

It was pretty clever how it worked, though, wasn't it?

Because it would use the energy from this combustion engine and it would suck water in from the front and push it out the back, and then it would use that movement to power it forward.

Yeah, it was awesome. It's pretty clever.

And just on a little tangent, Niepce, the inventor, it was him and his brother who did it.

Niepce is also the man who produced one of the first ever photographic images 20 years later. Imagine being at the beginning of those two technologies.

Did he use the because photographic flash was in its sort of early days then, wasn't it? And they used all sorts of explosives. And I think they used this in photography, in flash photography.

And I wonder if he used that. Was he a one-trick pony and he only ever used his club mouth?

I don't know. I think his photography, being as it was the very, very first one that ever existed, was before flashes, to be honest.

The first one that he did,

it was called The View from the Window at Les Gras,

and it was in 1826. And the exposure time was eight hours so I think a flash wouldn't have helped much in that case.

Don't blink, don't blink

and the

light was a problem because they didn't have flashes but they used the light of the Sun but obviously the Sun is not in the same place for eight hours and so if you look at this picture it looks a bit like a charcoal etching to be honest it's not a you know it's not 4k but you can see the sunlight on the left hand side and the right hand side because of the amount of time it took to

expose. Can I just say about Club Moss quickly? Oh, yes.

I just want to formally apologize, Andy. It's amazing.

Club Moss is incredible.

I watched an amazing video by a buddy of ours, mutual buddy of the podcast, Steve Mould, from the Festival of Spoken Nerd, where he has powder, a powdered version of it, and showing just how hydrophobic it is.

So the idea is that you could dip your hand into a big body of water. If you have the powder just laying on top of the surface area and come back out, your hand will be sort of latexed a bit.

It looks like you've gone marigold glove, but you'll have a completely dry hand that you can powder off. I mean, it's an extraordinary substance.
I've never heard of that before. That's very good.

And you can set fire to water using it, can't you? Because it's so extremely flammable and it coats the water without, you know, being absorbed by it.

So you can sort of pour water covered in club moss spores out of a jar and then set fire to it and it looks pretty cool. There are lots of uses.

So it was, as Anna said, it was used for flash powder for photographers before they invented flash bulbs. It was also used to coat suppositories.
I'm not exactly sure why.

Is it the same reason as your hydrophobic thing as in basically you don't want everything to stick to it basically? Yeah.

Yes, in fact, it would be that because it was also used as a coating for condoms then, because it was used specifically to stop the latex in condoms from sticking to the rest of the condom.

This is before we had modern condoms. Got it.
You said condoms a lot of time in that sentence.

It felt very racy saying that all those times. I suppose the problem is basically you're using spores and it's not a good idea to put spores in your vagina or anus.
No.

Is that in case you give birth to sort of a moss-human hybrid? No, it's in case it goes off like a flash bulb.

Explodes inside you. And that actually is where the term flashing flashing used to come from.

Because women used to go around parks and then open their big raincoats and it would be like a camera flash. Yep.
That's incredible. Amazing etymology.
I never knew that.

I'm not buying it. I knew you were trying to make me believe that and I'm not buying it, mate.
No, Dan, it's true, it's true.

Diogenes the cynic used to stick his bum out of the barrel and he'd go, hey, look at this, bang.

No, but yeah, James, you're absolutely right. Sticking spores in yourself is a bad idea.
But this moss was even used to coat surgical gloves. So you would literally

decide to go in the internal organs of people. But you wouldn't need the glove, right?

If you were a doctor doing a finger-up-the-bum check, you would just need to coat one finger in this club moss. And you would save it.
What good does that do?

Well, you're saving four unused fingers of a glove. So, you know, that's handy.

From what you're saying, it sounds like if you're a doctor, then you could use a glove five times in five different bottoms because you've got five fingers.

Is that what you're saying? That's literally what I'm saying, yeah.

What would you say? No offense mate, honestly, it's just I only had the middle finger left.

I only had the thumb left. I know I've got broad nails.

They call me Plato.

Do you know some people who like moss? Are the Japanese? Oh,

yes, my Japanese friend is obsessed with it.

That's from data point. Yeah, yeah, she goes around collecting it.

That's so interesting because I read this on the internet and I thought, if I say this, probably lots of Japanese people were writing as they were not obsessed with moss.

So I'm so glad that we have at least one datum. But there was a book written in 2011 called Moss is My Dear Friends, and it sold 40,000 copies in Japan.

And these days, you can get moss-themed drinks, and you can get like a ring which has moss in it. So instead of like a diamond, it sprouts out a little bit of moss.
Cool.

And actually, the Japanese national anthem contains the word moss. Does it?

It genuinely does. It goes, may your world go on for thousands of years until pebbles merge into one giant rock that's covered with moss.
That's great. Beautiful.

It probably sounds better in the original language. I do think so, yeah.

So moss, actual moss, which is a club moss, isn't actual moss, but actual moss is a real lifesaver.

So it was used a lot in the First World War on wounds because they ran out of bandages, so many people were getting injured, a lot of exposed flesh, a a lot of stuff was rotting.

And they suddenly realized they could stuff a wound with moss. And first of all, it's incredibly good at absorbing liquid.
So if you're bleeding, it's very good at absorbing that.

It can absorb 22 times its own weight in liquid. It's twice as absorptive as cotton.

And it's because 90% of the cells in moss are dead. So they're just like water bottles waiting there to be filled.

And also, it makes the environment around it really acidic, which makes it sterilizing. So it also sterilizes wounds.
So if you get a little tuck, just shove some moss in it.

I think, is it a very specific kind of moss that they use? Or can you use any old, you can't use any old moss kind of thing?

It's sphagnum moss, isn't it? Yeah. Sphagnum's awesome.
They used to use it for diapers as well. Ancient cultures would put it sort of in a bag-like

casing and put it around the children. So when they went to the toilet, it acted the same.
It's another reason why Diogenes kept it in his barrel, isn't it?

Sphagnum is really good. So there are about 380 species.
It's a whole genus is sphagnum sphagnum moss.

But in the First World War, they had to harvest it from peat bogs, because peat bogs are largely sphagnum moss, basically.

And by the end of 1916, they were making a million moss dressings every single month. Wow.
So it was a huge endeavor to create all that stuff. Yeah, yeah.

Sphagnum is great. Sphagnum is the main ingredient of peat.
And that is... What's your favourite, Andy? Is it sphagnum moss or club moss or just general mosses in general? Or cake moss.

It's not Kate Moss.

I think it's Fagnum. Imagine Kate Moss.
Kate Moss is your third favorite moss. That is land.

Including Moss from the IT crowd. I think Kate is my fourth favorite moss.
Kate doesn't even list.

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Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Chaczynski. My fact this week is that we have arches in our feet for the same reason that we fold slices of pizza.
If we do that,

is it because feet are so delicious

yeah they're cheesy they're cheesy we don't want to spill any of the cheese it's to stop the cheese falling off yeah

this is a thing that um americans do a bit more than us i think the pizza folding i think maybe because they have bigger slices so you fold a slice of pizza and it makes it stronger and a new study has just been done into foot arches and it's been discovered that this is the reason for one of the arches in our feet and it's actually the lesser appreciated arch.

So this study is about

you've got the big attention-seeking arch, right, which is the longitudinal arch, which runs from front to back. And then you've got the transverse arch, which runs the width of your foot.

And you can really see the transverse arch when you look at the top of your foot. It's the lump on the top of your foot.

And essentially, they've looked at that and they applied lots of pressure to it, these scientists.

They got really, they got cadavers and they put weights on them and then they cut the transverse arch arch to see what kind of weight they could hold comparatively.

And they found that the stiffness of a foot is reduced by 40% when you cut that transverse arch. So it's there for stiffness.

What is an arch made of?

It's bone, ligament, tendini, all that shit. The usual shit that the body's made of.
Okay.

That's really helpful. Thanks, Dr.
Anna.

Well, you know, it's bits of bone and ligament. The foot does have a quarter of the bones in your body.
Both your feet combined have a quarter of the body's bones.

So it's really, really important that our feet are this stiff.

It's one of the things that really distinguishes us from other great apes is that we have the arches in our foot generally, which allow us to be bipedal and to walk and run, particularly over really long distances.

So if you look at the feet of chimps, then they're completely flat. And that means that they can grab onto trees and stuff like that, but they cannot run a marathon.
So in your face chimps.

Well, I know what you're saying about in-your-face chimps, but what I was thinking is, what would you rather have? Feet that let you climb a tree or feet that let you run a marathon?

It depends on what you're trying to escape from.

Yeah, if you're trying to escape from Polar Radcliffe,

probably climb up a tree. Climb a tree.

If you're trying to escape from Tarzan. Exactly.
He'd probably beat you at a marathon as well. Yeah.

Yeah, he definitely would. But actually, I think it doesn't matter whether you've got this thing or not.

So there was a study of people who visited the Boston Museum of Science and they studied all of their feet.

And they found that some, I know, what a weird gig for scientists just to hang around a museum and say, hey, can I look at your feet?

But they found that some people had a mid-tarsal break. Okay.
And what that means is that the middle of the foot bends quite easily as you push yourself off the ground.

So one in 13 people has weird folding ape-like feet.

And if you have this and you walk on a beach, you might see there's more of a ridge in the middle portion of your footprint, which shows that that's where your foot basically folds as you step.

And most people don't know they've got this, which is very exciting. I think it would matter if you were doing a marathon every day.
Yeah, that's true.

If you're kind of doing a lot of long distance running, it would probably start to hurt quite a lot.

Yeah,

although it hurts all the time anyway if you do lots of long distance running, so you probably wouldn't notice. That's fair enough.

Like Anna says though, the arches are for stiffness so if you didn't have an arch going transversely so going from left to right and you had flat feet then you wouldn't have any stiffness in your feet at all and they'd just be like floppy bits of cardboard yeah that would be a problem yeah that's true flopping around so anna also if this applies to american pizzas which are much longer than say a british pizza if you have smaller feet do you need the arch as much I guess you'd need them less because you're bearing less weight.

I mean, it would be proportional. And it's actually a thing called Gaussian curvature, which is something that we briefly discussed years ago on the show when we were talking about corrugated iron.

And it's the amazing effect that

you'll all remember that classic episode.

I think it was in the 60s, so we've just put a load of episodes back up for free, and I think it's one of those. It is.

It will be. Good news, guys.
It was an absolute classic of the genre.

Highly recommend the corrugated iron session.

And we talk partly about how the shape of that makes it stronger and it's the same reason that for instance you can't crack an egg if you squeeze it really really really hard and it's this thing that this guy called

i i mean i think

i can i can you can't i can you can't

look you guys i i haven't has seen an egg for weeks so frankly i can't at the moment i have an egg downstairs can i run down and get it yeah don't taunt me on camera by breaking one of your few available stocks of eggs you won't be able to break it it.

You could break it if you shove your thumb into it, but if you just squeeze it, if I just squeeze it. You won't break it.
Should I genuinely do it or should we forget it and just move on?

I mean, it's an enormous waste of time because you won't be able to do it. Or you'll cheat and shove your thumb in or bang it against the bag.
I'm not going to cheat.

And then you're going to incompetent an egg. That's win-win, isn't it? It's a win-win, you should do it.

You should put your face beneath it so that if you end up with egg on your face, you actually won't end up with egg on your face.

If you do manage to do this at home, you know, try it if you want, as long as you don't waste food. But if you've got an egg that's gone off, do it.

Sometimes you'll get an egg which has got some kind of imperfections in it, and it is possible if your egg is not, you know, if there's a problem with your egg. Here's the caveats.
There we go.

But most of the time, it is impossible to break an egg just by squeezing it. It is cool.

Although, weirdly, I read that a way of really emphasizing the Gaussian curvature, the strength of it, is to have a hyperbolic paraboloid, which is basically having something that's curved in two directions, a bit like our foot and something that uses that is power stations so you know if you look at a power station it's curved uh or the cooling tower a cooling tower yeah um it's sort of doubly curved um because it's uh rounded but it's also got that curve going in it's the opposite of what we have on our feet so in your feet your curves are both going in the same direction good point yeah so if you turn your toes in then it's bending in the same way that the left to right of your foot goes.

I'm not explaining this very well, but it's more like a Pringle. If you think of a Pringle, it kind of, from top to bottom, it curves one way, and then from left to right, it curves the other way.

That's why it's impossible to break a Pringle if you hold it in your hand and squeeze.

I've tried it, I can't do it. This is my problem.
This is my problem with hyperbolic paraboloids. It's always used as the example.
They go, and Pringles use this technology as well.

And it's like, what are you talking about?

The entire selling point of Pringles is that you can crunch them. They wouldn't be nearly as crunchy if they were flat.
Oh yeah, that'd be disgusting. I would hate to eat a flat Pringle, genuinely.

Really?

Yeah, that sounds like an awful... It just sounds creepy, doesn't it? You know what's even stronger? If you have a corrugated iron-style crisp, like a Koise kind of thing.

A corrugated crisp, now that's a strong crisp. I can jump up and down on one of those things for days and get nowhere.

Have you guys heard of Douglas Mawson? No.

I was just studying things about the soles of the feet. So he was an Antarctic explorer.
Well, he wasn't Antarctic, he was Australian, actually, but he was exploring the Antarctic in 1912.

And he wasn't bothering with the pole. He was doing the most ambitious exploration of Antarctica ever, you know, thousands or hundreds of miles at least of Antarctica's very desolate interior.

He was trying to, you know, explore it and map it. Anyway, on his way back with a hundred miles to go, his partner had died.
He discovered that the soles of his feet had completely detached from

the foot above, genuinely.

I don't think... Is that possible?

There was blood and pus spurting out and just all the skin of the soles of his feet had come off. So somewhere there's an actual footprint laying in the snow.

Well, what he had to do was he had to tape the dead soles back onto his feet and put six pairs of socks on and then keep walking.

Wow. Well, anyway, he survived.
He survived and he became a national hero and he lived another 46 years. So the story has a happy ending in some senses.

Yeah. He was lost for ages, wasn't he? He wasn't away for years, and his wife married someone else, and then he returned 12 years later.

That's Odysseus, you're

too fast. Sorry.
Surely when he came back, he would be like an inch shorter than when he left.

I would know my husband anywhere. And he was five foot ten.

You're five foot nine and a half.

um some more stuff on feet yes please yeah our feet are just really good i think we should be more proud of our feet and i think we should just ban trainers this is i've sort of been brainwashed because there was that study that was quite famous in 2004 by that harvard professor and then a book based on it called born to run which is a really good book but sort of about how we are we're born to run and our feet are made for it and if you look at we did in this series of qi the raramuri people in mexico and they can run run for hundreds and hundreds of miles and they just do it in as thin a sandal as possible because the ideal way to run is just to have a very thin surface to protect you from stones or needles and then just use your foot's natural strength.

You can tell how fast a runner you will be by how long your toes are. Can you?

Yeah,

sprinters have longer toes than non-sprinters. And that's partly because if you have longer toes, your feet stay in contact with the ground very slightly longer.

Okay, is it also because because like whoever gets to the end first, it can be any body part, can't it, that crosses the line that determines the winner. So if you have massive clown feet,

that's why so many of the best friend of the clowns.

Oh, it's Hussein Bolt in the leap, but no wait, here's Bobo the clown behind him. He's going up fast.

Hey, do you know,

you know, Einstein famously didn't wear socks? Yeah. Famously.

I think if you asked anyone for one fact about Einstein, that's what they'd say. That's why he won his Nobel Prize for, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's pretty famous, isn't it? He was a non-sock-wearing guy. I had never heard that myself.
And you think it's famous in the context of this podcast? I think, but yeah.

No, I genuinely never heard that, Dan. That's very interesting.

Why did he not wear socks?

Well, we don't know. He never said the real reason, but there is a thought that it's because he suffered from excessive foot sweatiness.

He was famous in the military circles for having sweaty feet to the point where he was not allowed to sign up for the Swiss military because they said that his feet were too sweaty.

They don't ban you from the military because you've got sweaty feet.

He had flat feet, varicose veins, and excessive foot perspiration, was what's on the official report. Maybe he would give away if they were trying to attack somewhere by night, like a surprise attack.

He just gets sweltering.

surely Dan if you have sweaty feet you would wear socks because that's gonna soak up the sweat I would wear socks lined with sphagnum mots which can absorb 30 times or so weight of the water yeah no as I say we he never he never said it was for that reason it just it's an interesting thing to notice I think you wouldn't want to go around with wet socks that would be but then you've just got wet shoes instead right yeah but the sole the that inner padding is a bit more of a I think you could suck more water into that and not be wet.

No, I mean, because the worst thing about wearing no socks and trainers is the fact that it's too sweaty.

Although it does make sense that the military wouldn't allow him in, because that's why Prince Andrew was so desirable to the military, wasn't it?

And the inability to sweat is really something that they do look for. And interestingly, he's very good at holding pizzas when he's in Pizza Express because he's low the calcium curvature.

You're darned in mad.

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

If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M. James at James Harkin.
And Shaczinski. You can email podcast at qi.com.

Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasoffish.com. We've got all of our previous episodes up there.

In fact, we have more than usual amount of previous episodes up there. As we said at the top of the episode, we've just re-uploaded 52 episodes, the second year of fish.
So do check them out.

And as we said last week, guys, we really hope you're doing okay. Scary times out there, but take care of each other.
We'll be back again next week. See you then.
Goodbye.

Can I just say as well, I'm pretty sure Anna has lost signal.

Either that or the Club Moss vagina material is not working very well because she's currently completely still on the zoom really good point i took that took me a long time to notice i wonder how long she's been gone i wonder how much she's not gone she's just stunned

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