313: No Such Thing As A Dangerous Coconut

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Hi, guys.

Just before we start this show, I wanted to say: hope you're all doing okay in this bizarre situation that we've all found ourselves in.

And I hope you're staying safe and washing your hands a billion times a minute and not going near anyone else.

And there's really nothing that we can tell you about this virus that you can't already learn from the news and the medical advice and all of that jazz.

But what we can do is we can still share with you our four favorite facts from the last seven days and fill your head with distracting nonsense facts which hopefully will distract you from the fact you're stuck in a house with your spouse or your kids or your mates and you now all want to kill each other and will distract you even from the slightly more disconcerting global events.

So as long as you guys continue to listen, we am afraid are going to continue to podcast every week starting now.

Okay, on with the show.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Colvert Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

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 my fact this week.

My fact is computer pioneer Charles Babbage once cooked himself in an oven for four minutes at 265 degrees just to see what would happen.

Wow.

What was he trying to make at the time?

Cooked Babbage.

Babbage cabbage confusion.

Yeah.

So this was as a result of an artistic friend of him called Sir Francis Chantery, who was a sculptor and he made big bronze statues.

And he was doing a particularly big one.

So they had to build this giant oven for him to build it, to cook it in.

And so Babbage heard about this and he was really intrigued.

And he went to see it.

And while he was there, he was sort of talking to them.

And they said, why don't you go inside?

It'd be interesting, right?

And Babbage said, yeah, that would be interesting.

So he went along with another guy called Captain Cater.

And his description, which he wrote in his memoirs, says, the iron folding doors of the small room or oven were opened.

Captain Cater and myself entered and they were closed upon us.

Then, the further corner of the room, which was paved with square stones, was visibly a dull red heat.

The thermometer marked, if I recollect rightly, 265 degrees.

He talks about his pulse quickening, he talks about the perspiration, and he says it was fine.

He says it was absolutely fine.

What?

Well, he was only there for how long?

Four minutes?

Four or five minutes, six minutes.

He wasn't sure.

The heat sort of made him a bit dozy, probably.

There's one other thing he says.

Someone didn't go in with them.

He says, Sir Thomas Lawrence, who was suffering from indisposition, did not think it prudent to to join our party.

In fact, he died on the second or third day after our experiment.

Oh!

So who got it?

Wow.

Poor Thomas Lawrence.

Never got to go.

It wouldn't have mattered if he had gone in the oven, probably.

Well, maybe he should have gone in.

You never know.

Perhaps that had some healing properties.

Maybe.

This is not sound medical advice.

This is amazing.

And he went in other hot places.

Well, it's thought that this was in preparation for his next big trip, which was.

Which was he went down a volcano and

an active volcano.

He went down Vesuvius, one of the most famous volcanoes,

celebrity volcanoes.

Did your mate who died die from falling into a volcano or what?

Like

it doesn't, I don't think so, no.

But he was obsessed with, he wanted to experience an earthquake.

And he once found out, he was in Italy at the time, and he heard a town had been destroyed by an earthquake.

And he rushed there just in case there were some aftershocks he could feel.

But he said, My passion was disappointed, so I consoled myself by a flirtation with a volcano.

Oh, and he didn't feel the earth mood.

So did he go and like dip himself in lava?

What happened in the bottom there?

He went into the crater.

You know, there are bits

sort of in the lip of the crater of an active volcano.

So he went in, he saw the lava below him, and he observed the bubbles of it swelling up.

And because it was active at the time, he made a measurement of the eruptions.

He said, right, those are every 10 minutes.

And he said, well, okay, so I can go in for up to eight minutes and he did he went in for six minutes and he was lowered by rope was yeah yeah it's extraordinary

and did he eventually throw the ring into the lava

one thing he put he put his cane down in a specific spot and it happened to um hit i think a bit of lava so it burst into flames he had a flaming cane as he was trying to put it out yeah okay so first of all no second of all because we've already done some stuff but who was charles babbage that charles babbage computer pioneer He's historically linked with Ada Lovelace, and he was the person who dreamt up effectively the original computer.

He's known as the father of computing, and it was something he never got to fully make in his lifetime, though in the hundreds of years since, we've actually finished his plans and shown that his plans did work.

So he was a genius.

This guy was a proper genius.

Although you say he was a father of computing, but I quite like the description that is uncle of computing

because he didn't spawn anything.

And I hadn't quite realised this about Charles Babbage.

So he made this very famous difference engine, or he designed this difference engine in the 1820s, early 30s.

And that was essentially going to be a big calculator.

And then he thought, no, no, I want to do this analytical engine, which was going to be a big computer.

And kind of the difference being, I think, about memory and storage, the ability to, you know, build on stuff.

Well, so, for instance, the difference engine could only do certain things, but the analytical engine you could program to do lots of different things.

Yes.

And that's where Ada Lovelace came in with her ability to program.

But But he did all this, never got made because the government stopped funding him because he kept not completing stuff.

And essentially he had zero impact on computing.

So he's not the father.

He didn't spawn anything because everyone was just like, well, that was all pointless.

It got sold for scrap or used up as scrap.

I wasn't.

Only one of the computing pioneers in the 40s knew about him.

Really?

No one else did.

And it was only in the 1970s when they're going through his paperwork that they actually discovered, oh, yeah, Babbage was sort of onto this.

Yeah.

There's something similar.

It's amazing, isn't it?

Yeah, he got two the equivalent of two million dollars from the government to make this difference engine.

And then there was a change of government and he insisted on meeting the new Prime Minister, who was Robert Peel.

And he basically just turned up and yelled in his face, Give me more money, give me more money.

And then Peel went, Okay, fine, I'll I'll talk to Parliament and so Peel went to Parliament and sort of discussed this idea of giving him more money and everyone just decided to make jokes at his expense.

It's like, oh, the first thing it's going to calculate is when it might finally do something and stuff like that.

So, yeah.

Sounds like it's up there with the banter you see in the House of Commons.

And then he tried to become a politician, didn't he?

Yeah, but he couldn't get elected because basically everyone said, you just took two million dollars for nothing.

Yeah.

And they would heckle him during his speeches about this, whatever project he was doing and why he was losing this money.

And it infuriated him so much that he would abandon whatever political speech he had just to yell back at them, going, you don't understand what I'm working on.

I'm a genius, kind of thing.

And then to get more money, he came up with this brilliant scheme because he couldn't get any more money from the government.

So he thought, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a computer that can play knots and crosses and I'm going to go around the country and play knots and crosses against people for money and get all their money off them.

Did he really?

Yeah, and then Ada Loveless said, no, that's a stupid idea.

Yeah.

He's extraordinary.

He had so many of these little plans and ideas that took him away from this great big idea that he was trying to work on.

There was a crazy one I read about where he was at the ballet and he was watching this show and he got really bored and he thought this is just too boring.

I could do better than this.

So he dreamt up.

We've all thought it was a ballet idea.

He dreamt up an idea which was called the rainbow dance and he actually had this rehearsed.

He had 60 female dancers all represented.

They were dressed in white and they represented fireflies and they were all dancing and in the background there was a huge projected hydrogen blow lamp that had color filters on it.

So he would put different colors projected onto each of the dancers on the stage.

so it would look like what he called the rainbow dance.

That's

really cool.

It sounds really cool.

The problem was that it was extremely dangerous.

So, when they did their first rehearsal, they had two fire engines standing by because they were worried that the theater would burn down.

And eventually, the theater owner said, I'm not doing this, I'm not putting this live flame in this theater while you try and do this.

We'll kill everyone.

So, it was never performed.

So, the difference engine, the first one he designed that would have been a calculator, basically.

I didn't know why it was necessary to build build it, but it's so before that you just had to use, if you were doing calculations for various reasons, you had a thing called a ready reckoner, which was a table of basically sums that other people had done, but they'd done them by hand.

And these were the early computers.

The computers were the people who were sitting in rooms doing basically boring wage slave work with these primitive devices.

But they had loads of mistakes in them because it was really badly paid and it wasn't interesting work to do.

Okay, I read this in two different places and I can't quite believe it, but allegedly the first computers doing these ready reckoner tables were French hairdressers who had been left out of work by the French Revolution.

Well because everyone had their head chopped off and didn't need a hair cutter.

Or maybe, like if you had long hair in the French Revolution, you would just put your head just at the edge of the guillotine so it would cut cut the um long bit of your hair off.

Well I hope no one noticed it was just the hair that gone knocked their head.

They wave the hair around to Yeah we've got him

slink off back down the ladder.

So I have no idea why these French hairdressers were left short of work by the revolution.

It was definitely true that the French were the best at having logarithm tables and trig tables and stuff like that

and that was why he wanted to do this difference engine because maybe it might help us catch up with the French because it gave them an advantage in warfare because it's good for working out which directions to go in your ships and it's good for building bridges and building things.

Is it true?

I read somewhere, actually no, this was, I remember this was on a QI episode, Daro Breen made this point that when he did the plans, he left sort of like mount weasels in the plans so that no one could build them.

So we need to explain what a mount weasel is.

Yeah, so a mount weasel is in a map.

When you want to have copyright over a map, you put in a fake town or a stop or it's just a little detail that means it's you.

If anyone copies it, you know that they copied it you can prove it by saying this place doesn't exist we created it for our map and so that's the same thing he put a few mount weasels but these mount weasels were designed to kill the machine so it's like a virus basically

is that just an excuse for cocking out there

I think it's yeah yes I must say if we get any facts wrong in today's episode they are mount weasels

my six years of this podcast have been mount weasels I think a friend of mine has just written a book about dictionaries.

It's not out yet, but she's called Ellie Williams, and it's a book about Mount Weasels, basically.

And apparently, I think one of the first ever Mount Weasels was someone in an encyclopedia.

It was an entry about Miss Somebody Mountweasel.

Oh, I don't know where it comes from.

Yeah, and she was a sort of, she was an intrepid pioneering journalist.

She used to have sex with weasels.

That's right, she did, yeah.

And

that was the clue that it wasn't really.

And in the original encyclopedia biography, I'm going off memory, so it's slightly wrong, but it's something like she was killed by an explosion when she was working for Shrapnel magazine or something.

They made up this really fun fake biography for her.

But talking about viruses and bugs, it would really be, if we're talking about actual computer viruses, kind of the Ada Lovelace department that was responsible for those because she joined him, essentially, didn't she?

So she was Byron's daughter, and she at her coming out ceremony,

when she was 18 or whatever, she met him.

Coming out had a different meaning in those days.

It had a different meaning, yes.

What's the meaning?

I actually took it to be...

No, no.

So, people, when they sort of came of age, young ladies, they could be presented in society, posh young ladies.

And it was basically saying, My ladies, my daughter's on the market now.

Have your, you know, have a go.

And so.

Do you think you're hard enough?

Yeah.

Anyway, she bumped into Charles Babbage, who was impressed, joined him, wrote loads of code for his engine.

So I was reading a blog by a coder, a modern-day coder, he wrote this a couple of years ago, and he actually ran her code.

It was a code for working out Bernoulli numbers, and he ran her code through his computer, and it didn't work.

And he went back through her code, and I had a bug in it.

What's a Beringie number?

Oh, God, don't ask.

Don't ask that.

You know what?

I was really gonna, I thought, you know what, I'll just have a really simple way of explaining Bernoulli numbers.

And I started looking into it, and boy, is it complicated.

Yeah.

Cool.

Oh, my days.

It's about number theory and powers of numbers and adding them all together and them having certain relationships between each other.

Okay,

sounds hot.

It's, yeah.

It's sexy stuff.

But yeah, so that's the first ever bug.

How cool must that have been for that coder who found the first ever computer bug?

That is amazing.

I know one of us he might have struggled to get along with

based on something line in his biography.

Who Babbage?

Yeah.

Okay.

Did he hate men with beards?

No.

You're looking at me.

You said the whole time you were looking at me.

Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

Glasses.

It's not glasses.

Did he hate Nardners?

He hated puns.

Sorry, no.

He wrote that puns are detestable because they just rely on one word sounding like another word.

He would have hated the Babbage Cabbage joke at the top of the show.

The best thing about Babbage, which is...

always comes up with QI research is how much he hated noise.

Yes.

It's so good.

Like he just

he was just so anti any noise in London whatsoever and that he had made lists of whenever there was any noise that put him off his work he detailed 165 interruptions that he suffered over 80 days he made a list of encouragers of street music which included tavern keepers, public houses, gin shops, children,

visitors to the city from the country.

And then basically his neighbors hated him so much that they just started playing tin whistles outside of his house and stuff like that.

Yeah, I mean, it sounds London sounds horrific back then.

And he had it in, especially for organ grinders.

He said there are a thousand of them, and he was a bit xenophobic about it.

He said they're all Italian organ grinders who've come over here to destroy the peace.

And he spent all this money on lawyers.

He went to the Home Secretary and he got the law changed.

He actually campaigned for and won a change in the law.

He was the Nigel Farage of the early 19th century.

I don't think we can.

Can't go that far, can we?

Babage, farage, funny.

It's not a big leap.

Yeah, so like, and like I said, people would like tease him because they hated him about them just him always saying, turn it down, turn it down.

And so at one stage, there was a brass band that played outside of his house for five hours.

Children would follow him down the street, making loads of noise.

And he said,

he was quoted as saying, in one case, there were certainly above a hundred persons consisting of men, women, and boys with multitudes of young children who followed me through the streets before I could find a policeman.

So he was just followed by a hundred people making a load of noise.

He's like the opposite of the Pied Piper of Hammond.

He's not playing an instrument.

Everyone else playing instruments at him as they chase him down the street.

He's so good.

Wow.

Oh my god.

He also believed in ghosts.

So he started a ghost club at university to prove their existence.

And the other club that he set up with the same sort of group of friends was the Extractors Club.

And the the Extractors Club was dedicated.

He had a lot of fans.

He wouldn't have liked that.

He wouldn't have liked that.

Yeah, the idea was that they were dedicated to liberating any one of their members from a madhouse should they be committed.

Why is that necessary?

I guess they were coming up with so many odd ideas, trying to summon the devil.

Maybe it wasn't funny.

So just quickly back on the relationship with Ada Lovelace.

So she was obviously very famous at the time and very high in society.

And he was an inventor who was obviously a bit of a genius, but was not very good at completing his inventions.

And so she decided to write him a letter saying that I would like to kind of go into partnership with you and I'll make sure that you get everything done.

But you just have to do it, basically.

And she wrote to one of her friends, if he does consent to what I propose, I shall probably be enabled to keep him out of much hot water and bring his engine to consummation.

I shall be,

I will be willing to be his whipper in during the next three years if I see fair prospects of success.

And she gave him all these lists of conditions that he would have to do if they were going to go into partnership.

And then Babbage read her letter and then wrote his own notes on that, saying, Saw AAL this morning and refused all the conditions.

Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the Manchineal tree is so toxic that if you park under it and it rains, the drips from the branches can strip the paint from your car.

So, this is a tree.

You get it in the Caribbean.

I have seen it, I have to say, when I was in St.

Vincent and the Grenadines.

And when you you see it, there's always, or the ones that I saw, there was a big red mark on it saying, don't go near this tree, and a sign saying, Don't, whatever you do, don't go near this tree.

Although it was in quite small fonts, you had to get quite close to the tree in order to read it.

But this is probably the most poisonous tree on earth.

And it says so in the Guinness Book of Records, that it's the most poisonous tree.

And everything about it is poisonous.

So if you eat the fruit, it's terrible.

If you burn it and breathe in some of the smoke, it's terrible.

And it has this chemical called called Fourbole, and it's very water-soluble.

So if water goes onto it, the chemical can get into there and it will drip on you, and it can cause terrible rashes on your skin.

And it's so strong, apparently it can rip the paint from your car.

It's extraordinary.

Yeah.

It's so cool.

Although lots of them in Florida are painted with a big X, which to me looks like the treasure.

So I would be tempted to go there and spend ages digging around, eating the roots, probably.

The obvious thing would be get rid of them, right?

That sounds like, why don't you just chop them down?

But apparently they choose not to purely out of they help with erosion from the coast as it's coming in.

It's very good for protecting other trees.

Also, I don't think we just destroy every bit of nature that's dangerous to us.

Yes, we do.

So I mostly got interested in this because I saw this article in the BMJ from a few years ago called Eating a Manchineal Beach Apple by Nicolette H.

Strickland, who is a consultant radiologist.

And she and a friend were holidaying in the Caribbean and they saw a piece of fruit on the floor and thought, oh, that looks nice, and then decided to eat it.

She sounds like a woman after my own heart, actually.

And so they ate this stuff and got extremely, extremely sick.

But luckily, she's a scientist, so she could write it up about what happened.

She said it was incredibly painful.

She could hardly swallow.

The pain was exacerbated by most alcoholic beverages.

I love the way that she's tried all the different alcoholic beverages, although it was mildly appeased by pina coladas.

So if you ever do have one of these, then have some pina coladas and that'll make you feel a bit better.

That's the song, isn't it?

If you like pina coladas and getting caught in the rain, don't park under the matchameal tree.

It's also, it's a it could it was used as a useful thing for indigenous people who were living, say, in Florida at the time where the tree is.

There's a story, it's a bit of a myth of a story,

but it's one of those ones that sits 50-50 on the side of we're not quite sure if it's true or not.

There was a guy called Juan Ponce de Leon, who was an explorer, and he tried to colonize a specific bit of Florida.

He was initially, it was said, legendary looking for the fountain of youth, which was said to be in Florida.

So he returned there after a few trips, and he brought 200 people, and he had priests, and farmers, and artisans, and 50 horses, and so on.

And he wanted to properly colonize this place.

And they were attacked by the local people who wanted them to go away.

And what they would do is they would dip the tips of the arrows in the machineal sap and fire at them.

So even if it sort of pierced them just a bit, it would go inside and give them a poisoning.

And supposedly, that is how this leader, Ponce de Leon, died.

He took an arrow to the thigh, and they retreated.

So they actually, it worked.

We need some pina galadas under here now.

I read that that was just a slight attempt later to slander him, saying he was looking for the fountain of youth, because it was basically saying this guy's an idiot.

Right.

Oh, really?

Yeah, so like some lots of sources say it was, I mean, what he was definitely searching for was an island called Bimini, and the King of Spain had granted it to him, but he hadn't said where it was.

I don't know how this came about.

Basically, the King of Spain said, you can have it if you can find it.

And so

he was, but he was definitely colonizing Florida at this point.

What an easy trick for a king or queen.

Oh, you can have bibbly bobbly poo.

And that's my debt paid off.

Dave's going, excellent Mount Weasel, sir.

But yeah, apparently as well, it would aid people who sort of were shipwrecked sailors, for example.

If they didn't want to die a gruesome death, they would know just eat that and end your life early.

It was sort of used as a suicide assistant as well.

Again, these are reports from the annals of history.

Can't be sure if they're true.

You could rub yourself all over with lime juice, apparently, to stop the toxin corroding your skin.

This is based on an account I read in 1821, and so I maybe check the updated medical advice.

But that's what the local Carib people used to do.

So they'd sort of cut the trees down and they wouldn't really be wearing clothes, but they would cover themselves head to toe in lime juice.

Which I think there's a lot of limes.

That is a lot of limes.

To cover a whole human body.

They're small, aren't they?

Limes are small, yes.

Yeah, that's a human bodies.

Much, much smaller.

Are they used in fishing?

Because you can drop the poison into a sort of pond or a lake and all the fish just sort of go belly up, float to the top.

Yeah, but I'm not sh so th again, this was in this account, but it seems very risky to then consume the fish that have consumed this highly

treaty.

Because it might be concentrated in a a bit of them.

You would have thought the whole thing.

Although fish is often served with a little bit of lemon, so if you coat all your fish in the lemon, maybe it's very savory.

Maybe that's why.

It's made into furniture as well, isn't it?

You're kidding.

Yeah, so so they use the tree but so they they have a special way of removing any poison elements.

Okay, but yeah, so.

Yeah, if you dry it out,

you light fire all around it before cutting it down, before harvesting it.

And that just dries it all out, and then you can cut it down relatively safely.

You have to wear a big mask.

Interesting way of potentially killing someone because it would just look like a normal bit of furniture.

You know, have a seat.

They have a seat.

Yeah.

They'd have to sit down with a bare bottom, though, wouldn't they?

That's how I conduct all my meeting shots.

Thank you for coming in, trousers off.

Thank you.

Have a seat.

Have you heard of the man-eating trees of Madagascar?

So these were written about first in 1874 in the newspaper The New York World, which was quite an unreliable newspaper, partly because it published this account about the man-eating trees in Madagascar.

And it describes this human sacrifice done by a tribe called the Mkodo tribe, who took a woman to this tree and they leave her by it for a bit.

They put her on it, and then its branches all coil round and devour her.

And this is complete yellow journalism hoax stuff.

It's not real at all, obviously.

But a book was written a couple of years later called Madagascar, Land of the Man-Eating Tree.

And in it, I just really like this author kind of using the story but then disassociating himself from it.

He said, I do not know whether this tigerish tree really exists or whether the blood-curdling stories about it are pure myth.

It is enough for my purpose if its story focuses your interest on one of the least known spots of the world.

It's such baloney.

Wow.

He's just saying it's not true, despite the fact it's the title of his book.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a so-meta that you're now then repeating the fake thing with the same fascination.

I get people interested in Madagascar.

That's all I'm interested in.

Wait, what's the title of his book?

It's not the man-eating tree of Madagascar, is it?

Yeah, it's Madagascar Land of the Man-Eating Tree.

I'm actually

on his side.

I reckon a few more people visited, boosted the tourist industry back in when was it he was writing?

The 1870s.

Boosted the Madagascar's tourist industry in the 1870s.

Yeah, because

there's like a butlin' zone now, isn't there?

Actually,

can I just mention one more dangerous tree?

Yes, please.

So there's one more dangerous tree that's probably the most well-known tree for being dangerous, and that is dangerous because it knocks you on the head.

Oh,

the coconut tree.

Do you know why the coconut tree has quite a bad reputation?

So people say, like, in gales, people sort of flock inside because they're going to get knocked unconscious by it.

And loads.

You know, there's that fact about...

about yeah that i thought it was like in papua new guinea like 10 of the people who were in a and e had been hit by a coconut or something

so this is all the fault of sharks because uh there was so um who i think um straight dope and um Snopes looked into this, but there was the myth that increased, like rocketed after 2002, and it was propagated by this shark expert who did that famous comparison that said falling coconuts killed 10 times more people or 15 times more people than sharks do trying to say look sharks aren't that dangerous fair enough but he was basing that on a nonsense made up study by an insurance company holiday insurance company that was saying 150 people a year are killed by coconuts and it was actually based on two anecdotal potential deaths by one traveller and then coconuts have this terrible reputation

pointless dude i'm so sorry i'm going to take my coconut helmet back to the shop tomorrow

Just saving you all a bit of a hassle.

Well, there's that thing, so Queensland, do you remember in Australia?

Queensland removed all its coconut trees from beaches in 2002 because of the danger posed.

See, I told you, people do that for dangerous trees.

They do.

You're right.

They don't.

It's not just me, but I'm Australian, so maybe it's Australians.

I would genuinely just give people helmets which have a massive blade, like an axe blade on top.

That way, you just get two coconut halves and you're fine.

Does it not maybe make the whole of the earth a little bit more dangerous if everyone's walking around with blades on their heads?

Maybe.

Maybe.

What you take with one hand you give away with the other.

Yeah, coconut deaths would drop, but I think Axe Helmet

would rise a bit.

Yes.

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

My fact this week is that cryonic freezing chambers are built to store up to four bodies and five heads

Wait a minute

So that means there's something not quite added up here This is like a future game show right where they battle out five heads for the four bodies who's gonna be placed on the head yeah oh what you mean like musical chairs yeah last remaining head out of the game

It's much like that.

How does that work?

Well, this, I will say, at the top, is a very morbid fact.

But basically, you can get cryonically frozen.

A few hundred people have done it so far.

And you've got two options.

You can go whole body, head to toe, or you can do just head.

And it's actually a bit cheaper to do just the head.

So

it's that much cheaper, though.

It's not enough cheaper, is it?

You're right.

I mean, so full body, or one I got, full body cost $215,000 from the source I was on.

I've actually got a better deal.

Oh, okay.

$200,000, but okay.

Okay, and then the one, and then the head is $95,000.

But that's half as much.

Now, the head is the bit I would want to keep, but I think you should pay a quarter as much.

You're storing so much less.

You're using so much less.

It's way more important, though.

It's about demand, isn't it, Andy?

It's not about space.

Yeah, come on, mate.

Well, you're using less dry eyes.

I just think there should be better deals.

Well, I agree.

I think maybe when demand does go up, maybe the price will come down.

But yeah, at the moment, you can do either.

And also, another weird thing about the storage is everyone's upside down, which is truly bizarre.

So you've got all these bodies in a tank and they're still with their heads at the bottom.

And apparently that's that's because if there's some sort of an error, there's some sort of a leakage and the body starts to thaw, it'll come from the top, and then the feet will thaw first because you don't want your head thawing first.

Because, as Andy said, that's for some of us is the bit that we like the most.

This is only in the Russian one, isn't it?

No, they're all upside down.

They're all upside down.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the Russian one is the cheaper one, by the way.

Okay, maybe the one that you have a good deal at, Anna, is that right?

What was your prices?

My price was 200 grand.

That was Alcor in America, but the Russian one does do a bit more budget.

The Russian one is $36,000

for full body and $18,000 for just the head.

So it's a lot cheaper.

Oh, my God.

But the bad thing about it is you don't have your own fridge.

You have to share fridges with other people

and sometimes with like pets and things.

I read that.

It's unbelievable.

Also,

you're not in a separate.

This is Creo Russ is the name of the firm, isn't it?

Yeah, like Toys R Us.

And actually, because it's Russian, the r will be backwards

um but you're not even so you're not only not in a separate chamber you're just in this place in a sleeping bag apparently yeah just upside down in a sleeping bag with some dog next to your head

it's the same in the american ones completely except there are just more people in the russian ones so you do have to share with a few people

okay yeah it's more like you know i thought yeah like i thought you've got your own tube basically in the American ones.

Oh, I thought the American ones, it was in, I think it's in the tube that you have the four bodies.

And they do, even for the heads, they put that in its own special sleeping bag.

I just quite like that it's a sleeping bag that it's going in.

So nice.

Yeah, and it's because they sort of say that to reanimate the body is going to be a lot harder, like with the theories of, you know, why just use your head as opposed to the full body.

That's one of the things they say.

You know, we'll probably grow you a new body is what they say, or we'll 3D print you a new body.

You know, who knows what the technology will be.

That's not the worrying bit.

You could be a robot.

You could say that you can say any bollocks to people who've just given you 200 grand and are going in your freezer.

I mean, yeah, I think.

Because we are saying this is pseudoscience, right?

Is that what we're saying?

I don't.

So I kind of agree with...

There's one scientist, I was reading an article by one scientist online, who I agree with who was saying, essentially, it's not pseudoscience.

It's like science that is very unproven at the moment.

And there is evidence that you can reanimate certain animals, but it's extremely unlikely we'll be able to reanimate ourselves.

But on the other hand, even if there's only a 1% chance,

you know,

why not take it?

Well, one reason you might come back to life forever.

Yeah,

I mean, it seems like it's worth doing, but not forever, just a bit further down the line for a bit more time.

Yeah, but that's assuming immortality has been cracked.

I think that's two things that have been shoved together that are quite

right.

That's the 0.5% chance.

We've got the elixir of life and we're able to reanimate.

What if they can do it?

They can just do it again, can't they?

You know, if they can reanimate the dead.

I'm with Punster Leon over there.

The big problem which neurologists say is basically your brain can't survive this kind of thing.

Yeah.

And even if you could somehow bring your body back to life, you would be very likely to be severely brain damaged.

Yeah.

The brain is designed to keep out other liquids and stuff.

There's the blood-brain barrier, which is meant to keep your brain separate.

And so you would have to pump the antifreeze basically so vigorously into the brain that

it might really damage the

yeah um there is a British outfit devoted to cryonics so there are only a few cryonics chambers in the world there are there are a couple in America one in Russia but there there is in the UK a cryonics ambulance

and the Financial Times interviewed a guy called Tim Gibson who is a member of the British cryonics society basically and they do all the medical procedures to cool you down and stabilize you and then they'll send you to the USA

and

there are forty people on the list who might ring up at any time and say, I'm dying, can you come and get me?

And they give you, you know, they give you all the drugs and then they replace the blood with antifreeze.

We should probably say why they replace it with antifreeze.

Because when you because when you're crying frozen, you're not you don't actually have any ice in your body because that would be really bad.

Your body is a huge proportion of it is water.

And if you actually frozen it turned to ice, then it would expand and all your cells would explode.

So you have to replace all the blood.

You have to pump the body full of antifreeze antifreeze to stop the water actually turning to ice.

So I think people think that you're becoming kind of ice, but yes,

we have Austin Powers images in our head, I think, for cryogenics, right?

It's, yeah, demolition mat.

So, this thing about having this ambulance come, they try to get there quite quick because obviously, once you pass away, well, no, no, it's all to do with preserving the body straight away, right?

So, part of this Russian company, the cryo-R Us company,

they offer VIP package deals.

Do they?

Yeah, and so at the base level, what they do is they give you a Fitbit style wristband, and

that will alert a nearby team.

So when they see it sort of flatline, they'll go, quick, let's go to them, ASAP.

Well, if your battery's just run out,

I have an Apple Watch, right?

And the battery runs out all the time.

It's true.

If every time that happens, suddenly a crack squad of ambulance men turn up.

Turn up.

I'm trying to cut your head off.

It is.

It's the only ambulance which turns up hoping that you'll be dead.

Yes.

If you're fine, then they have to go away again.

Yeah, that's brilliant.

They would have to wait outside with the other ambulance crew who are trying to keep you alive and then have an argument.

So the father of Cronix is a guy called Robert Ettinger, and he is...

preserved at the moment in one of these places as are his late mother and also his first and second wives.

God, that's going to cause problems.

I just read that as well.

What a brilliant sitcom that is in the making, mate.

Do you think they're all in the same tube?

Because that's four people.

That's a four-person tube.

Yeah, I wonder who's head some stranger's head.

So you can be like, oh, God, how did I end up with this guy?

No, once you learn that that's the dynamic, you're like, I'll pay to go in that one.

I want to see that when I wake up.

First wife going, oh, and who's this lovely lady?

So

this all is quite far-fetched, obviously, this kind of cryonic freezing.

And actually, Dan, you said cryogenic earlier, but just to be clear, cryogenics is actually the science of getting stuff to really, really, really low temperatures.

It's not to do with cryonics.

And this is made very clear on the official cryogenics website of the United States, which is basically the website which serves anyone who's interested in that, scientists who are interested in that.

Basically on their front page, they're like, we are not about freezing bodies and hoping to reanimate them after death.

We do not believe this is a real thing.

If you want to do that, look up cryonics.

please leave our website.

So that's people always confuse those things.

But it's quite far-fetched.

But what we can do is reanimate people very temporarily now.

And this is really exciting.

So it's just happened.

So it's basically about if you're in a traumatic accident and it's extremely unlikely that you're going to be able to be saved in the time that you've got, then they can sort of put you on hold for a few hours.

And this is really early days.

There hasn't been the study published, but at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in November last year, they've placed at least one patient in suspended animation.

And so what they do is they come in, they've had a trauma, they've been shot or stabbed, they have a big cardiac arrest, they've lost loads of blood, they're not going to survive if you only have, you know, five minutes to operate on them.

So you cool their body to 10 to 15 degrees Celsius, which is obviously much colder than the human body is supposed to go, but by replacing all of their blood with ice-cold saline solution.

And so their brain almost completely stops.

They've done this for a few hours.

And then you have two hours to actually operate on them and save their lives.

Wow.

And then you replace their blood and they come back to life.

And they are clinically dead for that period of time.

For two hours clinically dead.

Wow.

Isn't that amazing?

It is amazing.

It's not much of an episode of Austin Powers, is it?

When you come back after two hours,

the fashions are kind of similar than when you left.

So many dated references.

But that's so we've learned how to press pause on life, basically.

It looks like it, yeah.

Again, it hasn't been published yet.

They're sort of like drip-dropping all these hints that it's very exciting, but they should be known by the end of the year.

That's extraordinary.

I have another freezing thing.

Okay.

Yeah.

So Reader's Digest magazine just suggested various methods to deal with hemorrhoids.

They suggested top ten methods to deal with hemorrhoids.

One of them was putting a warm tea bag against your bottom, and one of them was grating a raw potato and making a kind of potato poultice.

Okay.

And then, off the back of this, there are lots of other websites which recommended putting a frozen wedge of potato into your bottom for

30 seconds and then for a minute and then for one minute, 30, and so on.

Like a chip, a frozen chip.

No, like a potato wedge.

But that's

like a thick chip.

A wedge is.

Sorry, I can't believe that this is the debate we're having.

A wedge is different to a chip.

Yeah, it's different.

A chip would be a cuboid, whereas a wedge would have a curved end and a sharp end.

Yeah, it's shaped like a wedge.

Shaped like a door wedge.

Do you think the shape is important?

Probably is, isn't it?

Because you not put a sharp end in first.

I think if you're going to put anything up your bum, the shape is impossible.

Really, you will want to put the thin end of the wedge.

That's where we get the phrase from.

You don't start with the big end of the wedge.

No, you're right.

It's a nightmare waiting to happen.

Anyway, doctors recommend not to do this because it doesn't work.

And you just end up ruining a perfectly good potato wedge.

That's the second factor you've had today where there's been a very long explanation of an amazing fact with the cafe at the end that's but this isn't true.

What was the first one?

The Madagascar trees.

Have you not read Andy's autobiography?

I shove frozen potatoes at my bum.

Page one.

I don't actually do that.

Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy.

Okay, my fact is that if Hamlet had wanted to buy buy a lemon, it would have cost him 700 euros.

Okay, this sounds like another one of your facts from this podcast.

Heck, I've got Dan's notes here.

Now, the Hamlet I'm referring to is contemporary with Shakespeare.

So it's if Hamlet had been alive when Shakespeare wrote the play, because Hamlet's based on an older story.

It's several hundred years before that.

So I'm talking about the late 16th century.

Yep.

If Hamlet had been alive in the late 16th century,

and real,

and

he'd been at home in Elsinore Castle, which is real.

That's the good news.

That's the one part of wonder,

isn't it?

It would have cost him 700 euros.

Well, did they have Euros?

They would have cost him the local equivalent of 700 Euros.

So you've decided when there was a very famous real man available for this fact.

Shakespeare.

Yep, yep.

You decided to go for a fake man.

Okay, if Shakespeare had wanted to buy a lemon when he was on his research trip to Elsinore, it would have cost him the local equivalent at the time of 700 euros.

Except he he never went to Elsinore, so that's another.

The fact is that lemons used to be expensive.

That's why you said the word if at the start.

Yes.

Oh, okay.

So, in fact, all of these things are completely sorted by that one word if.

Let's do that with more of our facts and feed our time.

It's actually a lot easier.

Yeah, so the fact is, lemons are cheap now, is basically the fact.

Well, they were expensive then.

They were expensive then, and both are true.

The price of lemons has changed, I think, is the one thing we can all agree on.

Sorry, should have made that my fact, shouldn't I?

That's one thing that is definitely true.

What, have you got any sort of further explanation?

You know, why were they so expensive?

Were they gold-plated back then?

So, obviously, lemons are more of a tropical fruit.

And the other thing I didn't know when researching this is that lemons

didn't get to Europe for a really long time.

Yeah.

And in fact,

part of the reason was that they are man-made.

Humans invented lemons.

Wow.

They're cross-bred

between a citron, which is a Himalayan fruit, which is large and not very juicy, and then another kind of sour orange.

And we're not, I think, sure exactly what the other ingredient is, but we know that it is a hybrid.

Was it definitely not a natural hybrid?

It was definitely man-made.

So I thought they were very good at hybridizing, aren't they?

A citrus plant.

They are.

I don't think we've got the records of whether it was man-made or natural.

Because I think some of them naturally met each other.

Yeah.

All the hybrids weren't man-made.

But But all citrus goes back to these three super citrus fruits, isn't it?

So weird.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So anyway, they started in northern China or India or Pakistan, northeast India or Pakistan.

I'm not sure where.

And then by the 4th century BC, they were in Rome, but they were still, obviously, very expensive.

And especially in northern Europe, i.e.

Denmark, which is where Elsinor Castle is.

I found out how much they cost

in Britain around a similar time-ish.

So Henry VIII has his privy purse, so you can see everything that he spent his money on.

And at one stage, to James Hobart for bringing oranges and lemons to the king at Hartford, he paid 20 shillings.

Now, I don't know how many oranges and/or lemons there were, but he went to Hartford Castle as

almost a bit like a holiday home kind of thing.

So, he wouldn't have been there for the whole time, so it would have been for a shortish amount of time.

He would have been eating these oranges and lemons, so maybe not so many of them.

And other things that were worth 20 shillings around the same time, so I could work out what 20 shillings was.

To Arthur the Looter for a loot for the Duke of Richmond.

So if you wanted to buy a loot, the musical instruments,

not the magazine for buying used cars,

then that was 20 shillings.

What a very useful point of comparison for all of us because my loots, I know how much they cost me.

So that's very helpful.

If you wanted to buy a Citroen in loot, this could be a...

Oh,

very good.

That's the joke I think that Charles Babbage would have hated most of all in this whole show.

He paid Anthony Ansley 20 shillings for playing him three days at tennis.

Wow.

And 20 shillings would also buy him a brace of greyhounds and a wig for his fool.

So these are all the equivalent of getting a certain amount of oranges and lemons is about the same.

That's a disclosed quantity.

It sounds like they were cheaper.

We can broadly say they were cheaper.

It feels like they were cheaper here than they were 700 euros.

And that was earlier.

So I should say where this fact is from, which is from the guide to Kronborg Castle.

And Kronborg is the castle that was fictionalised as Elsinore in Hamlet.

So we went to Copenhagen last year and I bought the guidebook and then I waited seven months to read it.

And then I read this faction there.

In the middle of the 17th century, 51% of Dutch paintings contained a lemon.

Really?

Yeah, that's really good.

Sorry, in the middle of which century?

17th.

Wow, that was a big one for Dutch painting as well, wasn't it?

It was the biggest, yeah.

Which is weird because lemons I would have thought are very easy to draw.

And if I were a Renaissance great, I would challenge myself with something more like a pineapple.

Well, they weren't of lemons, they just contained lemons somewhere in them.

It wasn't like a paint the fruit contest.

I don't know how familiar you are with Dutch masters, but they tend not to just be of one lemon.

You've got the big lemon and the big apple one next to it, and the bananas, the crowning glory.

Yeah, but I think they're a state, they're a big status symbol.

And they were, in fact, they were ornamental mostly.

You wouldn't eat them because they were so hard to get.

And if you did eat them, you initially would eat them with the skin on, apparently.

No, I don't know.

And same with oranges, yeah.

But then, actually, I was reading a little cooking blog in The Guardian by the chef Tom Hunt, and he actually said that if you eat, like he said, good lemons are knobbly, juice-filled, and should be eaten whole like apples.

Rind, flesh, the lot.

So I'm going to try that next time.

Cool.

Yeah.

But I mean, most lemons are waxed, aren't they?

Yeah.

So you wouldn't want to eat the waxed ones.

That's why you've got to go organic.

Yeah, you don't want that wax.

But you could boil off the wax, I suppose.

Yeah.

You could do that.

Yeah.

Culinary tips from fish.

Have a potato wedge, anybody?

All right.

Our restaurant is not waxed.

But citrus fruits have gone mad in the last few hundred years, then, haven't they?

They've really multiplied.

Oh, okay.

Given that they did start with these three types of citrus, so so citrons, permelos, and mandarins were the official grandfathers of all the citrus fruits we have today.

And now, I think I was reading that the, I don't know why this is the authority, but the University of California's California Riverside Selected List of Citrus Varieties lists 1,200.

And that's the edited list.

And they are, they're all hybrids.

So a grapefruit is part lemon.

It's a hybrid of lemon and a bitter orange.

And yeah, as you said, lime is a citron and a mandarin orange.

But grapefruits are quite relatively new, I think.

And they were accidentally made from this hybrid.

Mandarins, which I think of was quite ubiquitous now, didn't reach us until the 19th century.

Didn't have any mandarins.

What about Sainsbury's Easy Peelers?

They were the original.

They're almost the fourth grandparents.

They're in the Garden of Eden, aren't they?

In the early 20th century, there was a phrase in America that you would be handed a lemon.

Do you know what that is?

What it might be?

Is that

if someone handed you a lemon?

That's not like a bad car, you know, where you say a bad car is a lemon.

No, I see what you mean, but no, not that.

And that's not a

make lemonade, the first, just the setup, okay.

Okay.

Is it testicular?

No, and actually, I don't think you could guess this.

It was.

It meant that you were splitting up with your partner.

Okay, so you would say, I'm handing you a lemon, and that means that we're going to go our separate ways.

And you would used to get like

cards or, you know, where it said, I'm handing you a lemon.

And it would be like a dear John letter that you would give them.

And it comes from, basically, it's because they're the opposite of sweet.

So like you would have a sweet fruit and this is a sour fruit.

And there was a song called A Lemon in the Garden of Love by the Broadway composer Richard Carl, which had this idea and then it became really popular.

And then in 1907, there was a letter in the Boston Herald from a fruit dealer who was complaining about this and saying, I'm trying to sell my lemons, and yet it just means that you're splitting up with someone.

That's not really fair, is it?

Just all his customers going, we're not even in a relationship.

I don't know why you think you've got the authority to dump me.

He said, why not an overripe cucumber or a frozen tomato

instead of being a lemon?

Isn't someone an over-ripe cucumber?

Could be a good way of...

Is that where we get the phrase, I'm standing around like a lemon?

Because I say that sometimes.

No.

You do it a lot.

Because

that is a phrase, isn't it?

I haven't made that up.

I've been left around here like a lemon for half an hour.

I think it just probably comes from the fact that lemons are the longest lasting thing, right?

No.

You don't say I'm standing around like a lemon because lemons don't go off quickly.

No, but it might be the last thing in the fruit bowl.

It's the last thing in the fruit ball, so it's sitting there alone.

Oh, yeah.

That's what I would have thought.

I agree.

I'm sorry.

I guess.

I think what Andy's saying is if you've been split up with, then you're alone.

If you're standing like a lemon, then you're lonely.

Exactly.

So they're kind of similar.

Yeah, I can see how one might have.

I really do think the other is right.

Okay, well look, whatever, whatever, guys.

Oh, there is a related fact about lemons and personality, which is that the amount of saliva that you produce after tasting a lemon

can tell you whether someone is an introvert or an extrovert.

Come on.

Really?

This is something called the reticular activating system and it's a bit of the brain that responds to some sti stimuli in food and also to some social stimuli and it controls the amount of saliva you produce.

We haven't judged the cause and effect here, have we?

Because maybe they're introverted and antisocial, because every time they meet anyone, they start dribbling.

That's possible.

Isn't that why they say, you know, when you're stood on your own in the middle of the room, they say it's like you're 11, and that's because you're dribbling all over yourself and no one will stand near you.

Because that is a phrase, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Basically, this system reacts to social contact.

So introverts react very strongly to meeting people.

It gives them, you know, kind of more of a reaction, and so does lemon.

So, if you think someone might be an introvert, just give them a bit of lemon, slip them a lemon, and then ask how much that's salivating.

Do you know that lemon juice kills sperm?

So, it's actually an effective contraceptive.

Okay.

You know that phrase that's where you're like standing like a lemon in a room?

Do you think that comes from the fact that you get like a load of sperm in a bowl and you put

a lemon in it, and only one of them survives?

Yeah.

Because that is a phrase, isn't it?

It's definitely a phrase, yeah.

God, there's only one flaw with that, and I think it's that I think all the sperm would be killed.

So I think maybe you've got one sperm out of the bowl, and the lemon's missed it, and he's on his own.

But it definitely could be used.

Casanova used it, apparently.

And the idea is that you put it inside the female of our species

as a

woman, as we call them.

I always forget what they're called.

It was half a lemon, he supposedly used as a Dutch cap.

Which makes more sense.

Because if you put the full lemon in, then the juice is not going to get out of there.

I actually think even half a lemon is quite an ask.

Me too.

I couldn't quite work out because then, if you're putting the whole thing in, isn't that just effectively a condom rather than just using the lemon juice?

Well, it depends which way up it goes.

Yeah, no, it's a cup, I guess.

Yeah, over the bell end.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know, but so that's a condom.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

It was inside the vagina.

It's a cup inside

the female of the species.

I see.

Yeah, yeah, so it's sort of a catching, it's a catcher's mitt.

Right.

I guess is the.

Yeah.

By the way, sperm in a bowl, definitely the worst dish on our restaurant's menu.

I think Michelin styles are coming our way.

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 have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter account.

I'm on at Triberland.

Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

James, at James Harkin, and Chaczynski, you can email our podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or go to our group Twitter account at no such thing or our website, no such thingasoffish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Have a listen, and we'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.