290: No Such Thing As A Winter Fax Machine

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Hello, welcome to another episode of No Such Things a Fish.

My name is Alex Bell.

No, a weekly episode.

No, what is it?

A weekly podcast coming to you from the QI episode.

Shut up.

Shut up.

I'm hosting a weekly podcast from

the QA offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Alex Bell and I'm joined by James Hawkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Anna Chaczynski.

And I've forgotten what happens next.

This is amazing.

Once again, we are gathered around the microphone to share our favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, James.

That was the flawless.

That was really good.

Well, I would say flawless.

It's so nice.

You've given us outtakes for a year.

See, we all think Dan's a complete idiot, but now I see how difficult that job is.

It's not easy.

You found respect for the man.

Okay, well, my fact this week is that in Japan, you can buy left-handed chopsticks.

Amazing.

Isn't that cool?

It's not amazing because chopsticks are just a stick.

How can they be left-handed?

You would think they're just a stick, but I went to a shop in Nashiki Market, which is in Kyoto, and they had a whole shop full of chopsticks.

And if they were just sticks, I don't think they'd be able to do that.

I think you've been had.

Really?

Yeah, did you spend a a lot of extra money?

No, because I'm not left-handed.

So they weren't really for me.

But they also had right-handed ones, which I also didn't buy.

So what do they look like?

So

they look like chopsticks, but they're in a box that says left-handed.

Oh, I think.

I think you were had.

No, I wasn't.

There is a very, very important difference, and that is that they're not just sticks, they're slightly molded.

And I put them on my social media to see if people could explain what was going on.

And our good friend, Carrie Adeld, asked her friend, who who I don't know called at gumi underscore the future is me

and at gumi underscore the future is me on instagram um said that they are learning chopsticks for children and the way they're molded is where you put your fingers so you always put your fingers in the right place and obviously with left-handed people that would be slightly different than right-handed people and so these are training chopsticks wow

can you get you can get training chopsticks that are attached to each other as well

like a hinge and a spring absolutely don't fall apart which i'm so they're more like tweezers You can get those as well.

But these are ones to not just show you how to pick things up, but show you how to hold them correctly.

So it's a bit like, you know, when you're at primary school, and if you're not very good at handwriting, they put a big plastic thing on your pencil so that you can hold it better.

I don't know that.

Anyone else had that?

Oh, I have one of those.

Like, it was like a little rubber thing.

But I was left-handed, so I was at a disadvantage anyway.

Okay.

I am left-handed.

I'm left-handed too, but didn't get one of those.

So actually, half of this podcast are left-handed because Anna's right-handed, I know.

I am, yes.

We are not representative of the general population, and that's a good example of where a small sample size can be very misleading.

So, the left-handed chopsticks are not for adults, they're just for kids, left-handed kids when they're learning and they've got a little groove in them, presenting themselves.

That's as I understand it.

If you know any different, then do message me on Twitter at James Harkin or on Instagram, no such thing as James Harkin.

And the pictures are on there, so you can just comment on it.

Because

chopsticks are brought to Japan from China, of course, weren't they?

And have existed in China for thousands of years, but weren't really used, we don't think, for um, the actual process of eating, like we use a knife and fork for the first couple of thousand years.

They were just basically for reaching into boiling pots of water and oil and retrieving the food that's in them.

So they were used in the cooking process, like a like a tong or something.

And they just really have a spoon to eat off or eat with their hands.

It must have been an amazing moment where someone was just eating, cooking with their spatula equivalent and then just started eating with it.

It saves on the washing up, doesn't it?

Yeah, it does.

What really happened is that around

kind of 500 AD, there was a massive population boom in China and food became really scarce.

And the way they cooked it was by cutting it in really small pieces.

And that kind of makes the kind of eating with chopsticks a good way of doing it.

I thought it was to do with people chopping up their food small so that it takes less cooking fuel to prepare.

Oh, yeah.

Because of the population boom, there was much less fuel to go around, you know, the fewer trees to chop up as firewood and stuff like that.

It's partly that.

So it was partly that.

There's a really good book, though, called Chopsticks by a guy called Edward Wang.

So he looks into this, and actually, they started eating with chopsticks, using them as we use knives and forks in about 400 BC,

but it became very commonplace in 400 AD.

And it's partly because of the population boom, but also because oil became readily available.

And so that's when they started stir-frying stuff.

And so that's when, I guess, Chinese stir-frying came in as we would know it.

And obviously, to stir-fry, you need those little bits of meat.

And so then you don't need a knife anymore.

But the other thing as well is, like you say, you would eat with a knife.

Before that, you would kind of stab things and eat it, right?

And that was in Europe in the Middle Ages as well.

But the other thing is Confucius thought that you shouldn't eat with a knife because a knife is something you would use in war or in aggression.

So he thinks it shouldn't be something you should have around the table.

So anyone who followed Confucianism also thought that you shouldn't eat with knives.

But did you know you can get Japanese left-handed knives as well?

So yeah, because European knives are traditionally symmetrical because they're obviously just sharp.

But some Japanese like kitchen knives, they're cut asymmetrically, so the cutting edge is supposed to be closer to the body.

So it's like at an angle.

So you need the left-handed knife.

Wow.

That's interesting.

So it points towards you, you mean?

The cutting edge.

Yes, yeah, exactly.

You lean the knife slightly in towards you when you cook.

I imagine.

Oh, when you cut.

And if you're left-handed, you can't really do that.

It's a total mess, you lose all your fingers.

So many left-handed things are just, you know, not really necessary.

And I say this as a left-handed person, like left-handed scissors and all of this.

I think a great

crock of hooey, yeah.

Really?

Yeah, I do.

Because I can't cut with scissors with my left hand.

I agree, I can't do that either.

I've tried and I can't.

Well, you can use a right-handed, you're not supposed to.

Yeah, no, no, but how do you cut with scissors with your right hand if we can't cut with right-handed scissors with your left hand?

I just

jam my fingers into the holes that they're not supposed to fit into, and it's fine.

Yeah, we're used to overcoming adversity, like it is.

You just learn to do the hard way.

It hurts, it bleeds every time I cut.

I do it.

They do make a big old fuss, lefties.

Obviously, not you, Andy.

Thank you for representing the other side, but you know, about how difficult life is.

And it basically all boils down to a can opener, doesn't it?

That's the thing.

Can I just say, I don't think we should be annoying the left-handed community because science has shown that they are better at fighting than right-handers.

Oh, what?

Because that's surprising.

Yeah, well, that's basically it.

Yeah.

Also, we've got the left-handed scissors.

Yeah, but we've got way more right-handed scissors.

We've got way more weapons than you have.

If it's a battle of can openers and scissors, our armoury is way better.

It would be like fighting your own clone.

Like, it's all expertly matched, but in opposite.

As soon as we invent a left-handed gun, you guys will be in the middle of the game.

There is a left-handed gun.

You can get left-handed guns.

They're just guns in opposite.

So, because you also have a dominant eye as well, often.

And so, for people who are in the army and stuff, if you have precision shooters, precision weapon, I don't know what the verb is for when you shoot a gun, gun people.

You need to think we're going to be winning this war anytime soon.

Said in the gun people.

The general one?

No, the precision gun people.

Yeah, but it's all a reverse, so that you can put your left eye on the sights.

You want to be careful saying things like the left-handed gun is just a gun in reverse.

I don't think we want to encourage lefties to use it that way.

And I should just finish off the fighting thing.

The reason that we think, no one's really sure, but basically 90% of people are right-handed.

And so in throughout history people who have been fighting have been more likely to come across a right-handed person so we basically trained ourselves to fight right-handed people so when a left-handed person comes along it's much more difficult

and there was a study of the careers of 10,000 boxers and martial arts competitors found that those who are left-handed do much better wow

but then around this table you guys are much more lovers than fighters aren't you

yeah I'd say that you're just reading my t-shirt

you haven't been to my left-handed fight club after work

We never talk about that.

It's true.

We're always very, very hungry afterwards because no one can open the cans.

So I thought I had invented something in the researching of this fact, and it turns out I haven't.

But I do think it's a very good invention.

So you know how you get a bowl of noodles and there'll be some soup with the noodles?

So, you know, normally you eat the noodles and then you have the soup left over and you have to lift the bowl up often if you don't have a spoon, for example.

I thought, what about a chopstick straw?

Okay, so it's a hollow chopstick, and once you've finished eating the noodles, you just drink the soup to the straw.

Isn't that just a straw?

It's two straws.

I mean, yeah, okay, I'll take you out to a Chinese restaurant, and you can eat with two straws, and we'll see how well you do because I think you're going to go hungry.

So, this a guy called Julian Lechner has invented it, and he shamefully has not followed it up.

Well, so he's invented one pair.

I think I don't know whether he's built a pair or whether it's just at the concept stage, but it wasn't the runaway massive success that you would anticipate it would be.

I just think it's a way of making chopsticks lighter they use less material

because they use millions of trees don't they every year there's some terrifying stat that China uses 3.8 million trees making 57 billion pairs of chopsticks that's huge in China they used to eat with silver chopsticks and it was because they thought that silver would turn black if it touched poisoned food so you could tell if your food was poisoned but um actually silver often turns black when it comes into contact with hydrogen sulphide and that's something that you get a lot in foods like garlic and onions and eggs.

So pretty much every time they cook with garlic and onions it's poison.

It's good for vampires though.

Well unless they stab themselves with it.

Actually no it's not good for vampires.

What?

No it is because you'd know if there's any garlic.

Yeah but also silver bullets kill them and a silver chopstick will probably do some damage.

You'd have to be a clumsy clumsy vampire to stab yourself in the heart with a chopstick while eating.

I'm a clumsy eater but I've never done that.

Yeah but they're always eating in the dark so they're at a disadvantage.

Actually chopsticks can be used as weapons.

And I learned how to do this at ninja training a few weeks ago.

Is it aimed for the eye?

Well, yeah.

I guess you would aim for whatever.

Anything's a weapon if you stick it in the eye.

Well, yeah, I guess so.

But so ninjas would have like these throwing stars, but they would more likely have a throwing stick.

And it would be kind of a small metal stick.

But if you didn't have a small metal stick, you could do it with a chopstick.

And they taught us how to throw it so that it kind of goes into a target like a dagger.

This was apparently,

as we've spoken about a while ago, not all ninja things are possibly true, but there's apparently ways that ninjas threw chopsticks.

And did you succeed in embedding it in...

Well done.

I can tell you the trick is to keep your wrist cocked the whole time.

Put the chopstick in between your first and second fingers, so it's kind of in the gap between them.

Have your wrist cocked, put it up in the air, your hand, and then go in an arc downwards and then let go at about kind of, I guess, 40 degrees.

And it just goes, but you have to.

Actually, what you're doing there, Anna, is you're kind of flicking at the end, but you don't flick.

You have to keep your wrist cocked the whole time.

I'm so sorry, wrist cocked the whole time.

Got it.

Yeah.

Absolutely amazing.

I feel like I hit the ground with that one.

It looks like you've just been taught how to do air quotes, but you're really struggling to

execute.

It looks like we're all out for dinner and we're desperate for the bill.

Well, that's really useful to know.

Thanks, James.

Although then you don't have anything to eat with afterwards.

Quite right.

Shame.

I thought this was really interesting.

Disney princesses are a good target group for working out the correct ratio of left to right-handed people in the real world because there are 12 official Disney princesses and one of them is left-handed.

So that mirrors real life.

Wow.

Right.

So

what?

Sorry, how is this useful ever?

It's not useful.

I just thought that was interesting.

Like, Muppets, on the other hand, nearly all left-handed because their operators are right-handed.

So their right-hand is up the Muppet in the head, operating the head, and then the left-hand is operating the left hand of the moppet.

Just as a point of order, which Disney princess is left-handed?

It's Tiana.

Who's that?

The one from the Princess and the Frog.

She's not one of the main ones, is she?

They really made a bit of a runner-up princess, the lefty, which I think is the right choice.

In China, less than 1% of people are left-handed.

Really?

What?

According to Chinese people.

Why?

It's because they're suppressed.

It must be.

Yeah, so it's not biologically speaking.

But China claims that less than 1% of its students are left-handed.

The global average, as you say, is 10 to 12 percent, as you can tell by watching 12 Disney films in a row.

And it's actually because people tend to have to switch their dominant hand in China.

A lot of people say because the characters can't be written left-handed, but I was reading a blog by a woman who's lived in China for decades who was saying that she'll go around and say I'm left-handed, and people will say, There are no left-handed people in China, you know.

And she'll say, What are you talking about?

Of course, there are.

And she'll demonstrate that you can write Chinese characters characters with your left hand.

But people will look at her and say, Nope, it's wrong.

It's done with the left hand.

Can't be done.

Wow.

Right.

That's amazing.

So they pretend they can't read what she's written.

I don't think they go quite that far.

They just say, it looks gross.

Wow.

Wow.

You know the musical composition Chopsticks?

That was written in 1877 by a girl, a 60-year-old girl, called Euphemia Allen.

And her brother was called Mozart Allen.

No way.

So weird.

Once again, the brother got the musical talent, James.

Well, I think she got the musical talent, but they hoped that the brother had, because he was called, the parents called him Mozart, obviously hoping he would be some great musician.

But actually, the daughter managed to write this composition, which is now probably one of the most played by the artist.

It's ubiquitous.

It's not necessarily great art.

It's the baby shark of piano, really, isn't it?

Now, don't you bring baby shark into the shit.

Is it called chopsticks?

Because it's kind of like you could play it with chopsticks.

No,

well, kind of.

It's the reason is that when you play it, it's like two notes that are next to each other and you move outwards, don't you?

So it's like

that.

But you're not supposed to play it with your fingers.

You're supposed to turn your hands sideways and then play it as if you're chopping something.

And that's how you're supposed to play chopsticks.

And that's why it's called chopsticks.

So we've all been playing it wrong.

Yeah.

So you turn your hands 90 degrees so that your thumbs are facing the air and you play it with your little fingers.

You karate your piano exactly.

Cool.

Isn't that cool?

Do you want to hear some stupid chopstick records?

Yes, please.

Okay.

So the most marbles moved with chopsticks in one minute is 43.

And that was broken not by someone from China or Japan, but by an Italian man called Silvio Saba.

And then a few years after that record was made,

a Japanese man called Mr.

Cherry tried to break the record for most marbles moved in one minute with chopsticks.

And he didn't.

He exactly equaled it.

Wow.

But he did get the record for the most baked beans eaten with chopsticks in one minute.

Sorry, actually,

what was that record?

That was 71.

That's more than one per second for a minute.

That's more than I can do.

Yeah, but I think, I guess, only if I'm sure there would be a way of building up some kind of sluice where you just turn the chopsticks into a chute and you pour the baked beans down it.

I'm sure you can get them all.

Maybe like some sort of like propeller where it scoops them up and you sort of spin it around.

Exactly.

I think you probably, the rules say that you have to pick them up in traditional chopstick fashion.

Although, there is, they would enjoy those baked beans more because there's been a study that finds that you would, you enjoy food more if you eat it with chopsticks.

This is specifically with popcorn and specifically in one study of 68 participants, but hear me out.

Basically, the idea is because you can only eat one at a time or one thing at a time, it's almost like...

Let's say you're eating something else like alphabetti spaghetti or something.

When you have the first spoonful, or forkful, it's really tasty, right?

It's like that's so good.

But then by the time you're halfway through it, you've kind of even forgotten that you're eating alphabetti spaghetti, aren't you?

You're just eating it then.

But if it's really hard to get that food to your mouth every time, then each time you're kind of building up to the mouthful.

Yeah, I see that.

I have that when I eat with chopsticks.

Basically, if you're so cack-handed that you're just enormously relieved that you've managed to get that one bean into your mouth, it is more enjoyable.

How did the world record attempt go at the end?

Wow, so it's kind of novel as well.

It's just an unusual that's exactly true because whenever anything seems new, people pay more attention to it.

And when you're eating it more slowly, each mouthful appears more new than if you're shoveling it in.

You look astonished every time that next big bean goes in.

Oh my god, what is this?

So I think I read about this experiment because there was another way they tried it of, and this was asking people to drink water, but to come up with their own fun ways of drinking water.

So

some people drank it normally, and then afterwards, they were all rated on their enjoyment of the experience.

So, some people drank it normally, and I guess just gave it five hours.

What were the other ways that they did it?

Well, I only have written a couple down.

One was drinking it from a martini glass, which is fun, I think.

You know, anything from martini glass is fun.

Another person drank it out of a shipping envelope, and they have a way of touching it, and they loved it.

I can imagine you coming up to this study with a pair of chopsticks, and everyone's like,

You can't drink water with chopsticks, and you're like, Aha,

you went counting on my sluice

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

My fact this week is that sorry, can I just Dan often does the okay with a little bit more vim.

Just give it one more try.

Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is my fact

You can't please all the people all the time.

Sorry, what was your fact?

My fact this week is that the fax machine is older than the telephone.

Okay, the fax machine.

It's a fax about facts.

It's a fax about facts.

So the telephone was, what, early 20th century?

Was it not late 19th century?

It was, yeah, like late 19th century.

So you're saying that the fax machine was from the 19th century?

Well, the first patent was in 1843 for an electric printing telegraph, and it was by actually another Scottish inventor called Alexander Bain, so quite similar to Alexander Bell, one of the inventors of the telephone.

And he was actually a clock maker, and he invented this device.

It was also called a facsimile machine.

There were various different versions.

And it involved a synchronized pendulum, so you can see where the clocks kind of come in, that would scan a message line by line, convert it to electrical signals, sent them down some wires, and then reproduced it at the other end using electromagnetically sensitive paper that had this kind of chemical imbued in it.

The first version wasn't very good because there were all sorts of like synchronization problems.

And then he improved it between 1843 and 1846, but then he was beaten to it when he tried to repatent the improved version because a rival had got in the way and demonstrated a much more accurate version.

And it was just the synchronization of the pendulums that he could never get right because it was really difficult to get it to swing because it's swinging left to right across the page at the exact time.

So it's getting, it's almost like an inkjet printer, kind of doing dots along a line.

Wow.

It's very tricky.

It's very clever though.

All the paper that you need to be receiving the electrical current, it needs to turn black whenever it receives a current.

So it needs to be soaked in potassium ferrocyanide.

Was that kind of toxic?

Sounds like it was cyanide in it.

Like every time you get a fax, you basically die.

I mean,

that was probably why it didn't work.

Yeah, no,

I don't think it was lethally.

I think you should not eat too much of it.

But then, so he was the, you know, the pioneer.

But then, I think the first really usable one was in 1860, which is still so long ago.

And it was an Italian called Caselli.

And you would write your message on a piece of tin and you would write in non-conductive ink.

And then the sheet was scanned by a stylus, and that was attached to telegraph wires going to the other place.

And then, whenever the stylus at the other end got to a bit of ink, the conduction would stop.

And then at the receiving end, whenever the conduction stops, the stylus there would stop.

And so you'd make a kind of perfect mirror image of it.

Okay.

It's actually the same, but in reverse, because it's the

drawing that's non-conductive instead of the drawing that is conductive.

I think I've explained that right, but it was demonstrated for Napoleon III.

I think that's amazing.

That Napoleon III had a fax machine.

It's unbelievable.

It's unbelievable.

And he said, this is incredible.

He got sent the signature of the composer Rossini from 100 miles away by fax.

Wow.

That is amazing.

And it didn't catch on, did it?

The idea with the fax machine, I think, is that they weren't in the information age yet, so business just worked too slowly.

So I think, was that one between Paris and Lyon and Paris and Marseille?

They set those ones up, and there just wasn't really any interest in it.

It was a gimmick.

Yeah, it was a gimmick.

This is not going to catch up.

They did lots of public demonstrations of it and stuff, and everyone was like, wow, but no practical applications.

The Russian Tsar had one, Nicholas I.

Wow.

Between his palaces in Moscow and Petersburg, there was a fax connection.

It's so weird.

So I'm sure you guys came across this in your research.

Do you know who's the biggest buyer of fax machines in the world?

Is it Korea?

It's

not Korea, it's the NHS.

And they have at least 8,000 machines across the NHS, just in Britain.

And I asked a friend of mine who's a doctor, just out of interest.

He works down on the south coast.

And I said, Do you use factors?

And he said he sends at least one or two every day.

Oh, yeah, they use them all the time.

They're banned from doing it now, so they're no longer the biggest buyer.

They're banned from buying anymore.

They haven't been banned from using them.

No, but as in they're not the biggest buyer anymore'cause the government's finally said you are not allowed to buy any bloody factors.

This is ridiculous.

I don't know, because like when I used to work as an accountant, we used to use faxes like, like you say, not two times a day, maybe ten times a day.

And they're a really good way of getting kind of invoices across.

It's useful for sending secure information, I believe.

Yeah, yeah.

And there is secure email, but it's a bit of a pain.

And yeah.

I feel like you can ring faxes for no reason at all, and you just get a weird noise.

I just think that's a totally unnecessary.

Is that how you spend your evenings?

I know.

I just never use actually fax with a fax machine, but I do routinely accidentally ring people's fax numbers.

You've never sent a fax?

No.

I don't think I've ever sent a fax.

What?

But to be fair, I'm not a doctor.

That is insane.

Well, sorry, let me just say, I had to do it for my work?

Why are you just doing it like asking your friends if you're going to the shops or whatever?

I feel at work a lot when I was younger.

And also, me and my friend used to send faxes to each other

after school.

That's what I mean.

Like, not under social.

I don't think anyone's ever, apart from you, sent faxes for a social reason.

Wow.

What did you say in your faxes?

So I remember she once sent me a fax of the newspaper article in her local area, which on the headline was her dog getting married to another dog.

This is an incredible insight into your early life.

This is like an analogue version of BuzzFeed that you invented there.

Yeah, it was a pretty huge moment in our childhoods, actually.

Wow.

Are the dogs still together?

Are they happy?

They had a lovely long life together, but I'm afraid, sadly, they have expired because it's quite 25 years ago.

Which in dog years?

This is our 175th wedding anniversary.

Oh, I heard a fact about wedding anniversaries, which is through this fax research, which is you can, this is not really fax related, but you can request anniversary greetings from the White House.

What?

If you are a U.S.

citizen, and if you contact them several months ahead.

But Trump's not sending them, is he?

I can imagine his faxes in massive capital missile letters.

He just faxes you saying no collusion.

It's kind of weird.

I think you can request presidential greetings.

And they send some, you know, poor drone in the White House has to send you presidential greetings but they they made it clear you can only request a limited number of greetings per day which I think is a very funny idea.

So the idea is that obviously somebody at some point received about 100 different greetings on the same wedding anniversary.

I just love the idea of keeping Trump busy by setting him on the tape fax machine.

Just saying, sorry, Mr.

President, Barack Obama used to get through 20 a day.

Work with the Queen.

She's got almost no political power because she has to write cards for every 100-year-old in the country.

Something really cool you can do with fax paper, if you've got any left over, from the nineties.

From your friend's dog wetting.

Yeah.

So this is if you use a thermal fax machine, and fax paper would be thermal paper.

You use those in the winter, don't you?

No, fax, so if you're using a thermal fax machine, then the paper turns black when it's exposed to heat.

So there's especially chemically treated.

And basically, what a fax machine would do, how it would work, is it would only heat up the parts that were meant to be written on.

So those bits would turn black.

But what you can do is you can just get some fax paper, or this also works on receipt paper because they still use that for that, and heat it up, and it'll turn black.

I was expecting another part to that, like some useful light pack.

Like, what?

Yeah, what's that for?

Or if you've only got a white crayon and you need to write someone a message immediately, you need black paper to write on.

That's true.

So, why don't you heat your thermal fax machine's roll of paper?

Or if you're going to a fancy dress as a zebra, you can heat up one roll of receipt paper, don't heat up the other one, and just wrap them around you like a mummy.

Perfect.

Instant zebra costume.

It's a multi-purpose life hack.

Sorry, hang on.

Is that how the receipts work in old till machines?

Is that they've selectively heated up the paper?

Not in the really old ones, I don't think.

Okay.

I think quite a lot of that are still in use.

They're slightly waxier, the paper, I think.

And they're a bit more transparent.

And if you do heat them up, yeah, they go.

So it's quite a good way of redacting things as well, because Because if you heat it up, then obviously it eats all of the work.

Does it when you cool down, does it not go back to normal?

I don't think so, because otherwise, as soon as the receipt came out of the thing, you'd actually be given a blank receipt.

It was momentarily written on there, the record of what you bought.

I'm talking to my tax man.

I'm really sorry.

All these receipts said stuff when I got them.

I don't know what's happened to them all.

You'll have to trust me.

Can I tell you my favourite ever fax machine fact, which I actually went to George Will Bank to find this out?

So, in 1966, the Russians landed the Lunar 9 craft on the moon, which was the first craft to successfully achieve a soft landing and land without crashing.

And it was designed to take the first photographs on the moon.

And it was basically a contraption that had like a camera with a film in it.

So it would take the photos and then the machine would take the film out of the camera and develop the photographs and then put the photographs into a little fax machine basically.

and then transmit the photos back to Earth.

This is all on the moon.

All on the moon in a little craft, yeah.

So, and the Russians were broadcasting it back to Earth.

And the British were monitoring all of the landing and everything and all of the signals from Jodral Bank.

And then they noticed that when it landed and all of this stuff had happened, we didn't know what was going on because the Russians didn't tell anyone anything, that the signal had changed and they recognized it as being a standard signal from something called RadioFax, which was a standard way of transmitting photos by a kind of fax machine kind of system around the world that was used in journalism.

And so they very quickly realized that they could interpret the signal.

So they rang up the officers of the Daily Express in Manchester and said, Look, do you have a RadioFax receiver machine that we can borrow?

And they said, yes.

So they stuck it in a car and raced over to George Roll Bank and managed to get these transmitted photos and print it out.

And they got the first photos of the moon from the surface of the moon.

And they then published them on the front cover of the Daily Express before the Russians had even released them to the media.

So we actually hacked the first facts from the moon.

That is amazing.

But what was great is that Bernard Lovell, after whom the Lovell telescope is now named, was annoyed because the Russian photographs were calibrated for a slightly different size of paper from what we had, so it slightly distorted the photographs, and he was really annoyed because he thought that everyone would think his telescope was a bit shit.

Well, there are disadvantages to theft of property, aren't there?

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

My fact this week is that a boatload of researchers are about to deliberately get themselves stuck in the Arctic ice for a year.

And for fun.

And for science.

For fun, I think it's for work.

It's fun and science, guys.

Science is fun, isn't it?

Yeah, the two are not mutually exclusive.

I reckon in this case they are.

Like, if you're spending a whole winter in the Arctic,

you're talking to someone who faxed her friends for fun in their childhood.

Her set of friends walked.

No, man, these guys are going to have the best time.

They're going to need one of those thermal fax machines.

So, this is a project called the Multidisciplinary Drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate, shortened to Mosaic.

And hundreds of researchers from 19 countries are involved.

It's the largest Arctic expedition in history.

And it's all about data collection in the Arctic.

So just gathering as much as they can from the ocean, from the ice, from the atmosphere, about the climate, the algae, all the chemistry of it, to basically work out how climate change is affecting the Arctic.

And they're doing it by going on this big well, they've just arrived actually.

So there's this 400-foot-long icebreaker ship called Polar Stern, which left Norway a few weeks ago and it is now about to freeze itself into this little

bit less than two mile square bit of ice and then it's just gonna let that bit of ice carry it through the North Pole.

It's so amazing.

It is amazing.

I read that on Monday the sun set

where the boat is and so it's set and it's not gonna return for 153 days.

That's a long night.

Yeah.

Okay, fine, so that bit's not that fun.

But it's and they can't because obviously they're going to be locked in the ice, so they can't really control where they go, can they?

No.

So I read that they have to be a bit careful because there's a risk that the ice will drift them into the Russian economic zone.

And if they go in there, against their will, they don't have permission to do carry out research there.

So they've had to select the bit they've locked themselves into quite carefully where they think they'll stay in sort of international territory.

I bet they'll end up there and they'll be like, oh, no, we can't do any research.

We'll just have to sit and drink all the time.

It must have been fun selecting the flow where they're going to embed themselves because they had 15 candidates and they just had to narrow it down.

And you have to work out, as you say, you have to predict where you think it's going to go.

So they've picked this one that's the perfect depth.

So it needs to be deep enough that it can really lock you in place.

And it needs to be deep enough that planes can land on it, hopefully, in winter, which is what they're intending, how they're going to resupply themselves.

At the moment, it's 350 miles from the North Pole, and they need to work out the direction it's sort of travelling in and they want to drift right past the pole because obviously that's the big money.

Wow.

And they will be resupplied.

I was reading an article on Mashable that said they will be resupplied with provisions and rotating scientists.

I've seen one of those in a kebab shop.

But actually they are scientists from all around the world and they're going to come and stay for a little bit of time and then go away again.

I think that's the idea.

yeah i think most have signed up for two months and i think a couple of people are going to do the whole thing although that's pretty hardy yeah they'll need some vitamin d pills you could say that these guys are going to go with the flow yeah because i bet they're not saying that though oh but it's painted on the side of the body chip of course it is the best job i bet there's an embargo on saying that right two days in

it's really cool they're divided into these different sections into what they call cities so if you go to their website it's kind of like at a theme park and you know you've got the different zones.

So, essentially, the ship will be stuck in the flow, but then they're going to spread out onto the ice all around it to set up their various cities.

Like Ice City, which sounds like it's going to be a lot of it, but ice city is basically the patch of ice on which the ice researchers will work, and that's they'll pick up bits of ice and study it.

They've got ocean city, and that's where the oceanic researchers drill a hole in the ocean and then they pick up water.

This drill isn't working.

Every time I make a hole, it fills back in.

This is why I was fired from the project.

They drill a hole in the ice and then they retrieve the ocean water.

And what they have to do in Ocean City is set up a tent over the hole.

And that's because they need to keep that a bit warm.

Because otherwise, if you pull the ocean water up to where you are, it immediately freezes.

And then you've just got ice again.

That's how you do winter fishing in Russia.

Isn't it?

Yeah, every winter, if you go to the Moscow River, you'll just see loads of little tents.

And basically, it's just like men in their little tent doing fishing with a bottle of vodka, and that's what they do.

These guys on the Arctic, as well, there are loads of problems that they have, obviously, because it's a very, very challenging environment.

So, they're going to have guards who are wearing night vision goggles who are constantly looking out for polar bears.

And every research station on the ice has to have a two-mile radius around it with a perimeter fence, which is monitored for polar bear activity.

And they've got guns, but before that, they obviously don't want to shoot polar bears.

It's not what they're about.

So, before opening fire, they will honk the horn of the ship to try and scare it off, and then they will use a flare gun just up in the air to alarm it, you know.

And then, finally, they've got a pepper spray to try and deter it.

I think you would have to have considerable presence of mind in order to open fire, to use the pepper spray.

You have to wait until it gets really close to you.

The next thing is you poke it in its nose, and if that doesn't work, you bring out a throwing chopstick.

Have you tried reasoning with it?

Yeah, it is cool.

They're also setting up tripwires for the polar bears themselves around.

So when a polar bear crosses one of the tripwires, it sends up a big loud flare.

It sounds like home alone with polar bears, really.

Yeah.

I found out about another experiment that's being done on the Arctic at the moment.

So scientists need to study how organic matter decays in the soil.

And,

you know, that varies by the soil's temperature and moisture and acidity and all of this stuff.

So they have to sow bags of material, organic matter, to decay.

That's the test subject.

So lots of leaves and things like this go into the matter and then they bury that.

And then a couple of scientists, they had spent weeks laboriously sewing litter bags full of leaves and then sealing them up to be buried.

And then one of the scientists was having a cup of tea and she realized, oh my god, we have bags full of leaves that can be buried under the ground that are made to an almost exact uniformity standard.

So

at least one twelve hundred groups across the world are doing citizen science using tea bags now, and there are 5,000 tea bags just buried under the Arctic.

Really?

Wow, that's an advantage of global warming, isn't it?

When it melts, you've got a nice cup of tea.

It's going to be very weak.

That's really cool.

Can we talk about making a knife out of your own poo?

Yes.

Oh, yeah, we better.

So, Wade Davis, the famous traveler and writer, he wrote about an Inuit man who once sculpted his own frozen poo into a knife and used it to kill a dog.

And people have kind of taken this as truth, that it might have happened.

But this year, for the first time, scientists have properly tried it out by making knives out of their own excrement, and they found that it wouldn't have worked, it wouldn't have been able to cut into a piece of pig hide.

They said, like a crayon, it just left brown streaks on the meat, no slices at all.

If I was working in that lab, that was the point at which I put in a complaint to you.

I found a poo in the freezer.

And this is a proper experiment.

So, first of all, before they even had the poos, they adopted an Arctic diet, which was high in protein to ensure that their poo would have the same consistency as the Inuit people.

That's cool.

That's so clever.

That was interesting because I read somewhere that people escape from prison by making shivs out of frozen poo, so it can't be true.

It's not true.

It's a urban myth, it turns out.

Yeah, most prisoners don't have access to freezers, though, do they?

I don't know.

I think they're like in not lower-security prisons, maybe.

I don't know.

You have to ask the chef, and they do ask questions.

So when you approach someone with a bag of your own feet, you can say, Would you mind putting this in the freezer?

If it was very cold outside, you might be able to dangle the poo out of a window and wait for it to freeze overnight.

Yeah.

Like the way you keep the milk fresh if your fridge is over glittering.

I just think there are easier ways to make ships.

There must be, right?

Yeah, you're in a place full of metal.

There are mine bars everywhere.

Yeah, you're right.

So,

I've got, I thought of a question about the

poo knife experiment.

Oh, how did they manufacture it into a knife?

How did they mold it?

Oh,

was that in the ejection you have to sort of clench and release at the right moments in order to get the shape exactly right?

What a skill that would be.

What an Edinburgh show.

I will now be pooing this sculpture of Michelangelo's David.

Is that the next balloon sculpture magician trick?

I imagine that they just cut it into shape.

Did they make a standard symmetrical European knife or a left-handed Japanese knife?

Wow, and it doesn't work.

It doesn't work.

It just leaves the brown streaks on the meat.

Another really cool Arctic experiment that's happening is to deal with climate change.

And so that's a problem with the Arctic, which is heating up faster than the rest of the world.

So it's really bad.

Ice is all melting.

And there have been sort of three main proposals people are thinking about for us to geo-engineer it so that this problem is solved.

One of them is just refreeze it, they're thinking.

Try and refreeze the ice.

Just refreeze it like a big poo.

Just

refreeze it.

So the plan is to put 10 million windmills there and they will power these water pumps.

And what the water pumps do is they suck up the seawater from underneath the ice and then they spray it out on top of the ice during the winter and then it freezes.

And so that restocks it from the ice.

It sounds like a Doctor Evil plan.

10 million windmills.

Why the donkers?

I mean, presumably the windmills have to use less energy than they pump out.

Well, they're getting free energy from the wind, I guess.

Yeah.

Okay, sorry, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

Yeah, no, that's how they work.

That's how windmills work.

So you don't plug them in.

That's why my windmill has been so expensive to run.

Another idea that they had is you basically get a submarine,

and this is an idea, sorry, by a 29-year-old architect called Faris Kotahatohaha.

And he says that you

launched it.

You're laughing at his name.

I was not laughing at his name.

That is his name.

Anyway, his name isn't important in the story.

He is going to get this submersible vessel.

And what you would do is you would get a load of water from the sea in it, and then you would somehow suck all of the salt out of the sea water, which then makes it freeze.

So you suck out the salt, it freezes because it's cold down there, and then it floats to the surface, and you're making icebergs.

That's really good.

Isn't that clever?

How are you sucking the salt out?

Sorry?

I said, I don't know if you heard.

By some method.

By some method.

I don't think I could be more clear than that.

It's an almost foolproof plan.

How are you going to fix the Irish border?

By some method.

I'm so sorry.

I clearly wasn't listening.

This ship that's getting frozen in is an icebreaker, isn't it?

Yeah.

And we should just say how amazing icebreakers are.

It's so clever.

And they're very, very powerful things.

And then, what shape would you guess they would be at the front?

Triangular.

Yeah, pointy.

Pointy.

Yeah, that's what I meant.

Like a poo knife.

Right, like a poo knife.

They're not pointy.

They're shaped like the backs of spoons at the front.

Really weird.

So when they hit the ice, they ride up onto it, and then the massive weight of the vessel just crushes it down.

Wow.

Yeah.

So Russia's biggest icebreaker is called 50 Years of Victory.

And it's powered by

great name.

Always humble our name.

We would call us 40 years of hurt.

And it's powered by not one, but two nuclear reactors.

So it's extremely impressive.

And the reason it's nuclear is because otherwise it would expend more than 100 tons of diesel every day.

So, I mean, it would just have no range.

It wouldn't be able to get anywhere, you know.

Doesn't it need to be in cold waters then?

Because I was reading about how the nuclear engines, the cooling system, depends upon the icy water.

So you couldn't sail it into warm water because it would overheat.

Right, right.

So it is literally built.

It needs the ice as much as the.

Well, the ice doesn't need it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I like that.

And it's hopeless in open water as well.

They roll from side to side all the time.

Because of this spoon-shaped bow in the front.

So some are being built now, which are reverse e-Percy's.

They can go forwards and backwards.

That's so clever.

So they've got a pointy back end and then a spoon-shaped front end.

And if they're ever sailing in open water, they just sail backwards using their pointy bow because that gets through the water very nicely.

Great.

But if you're, do they have two steering wheels?

Or does that make it?

It's got a nuclear powered.

I imagine they could be stretched out.

The guy just turns it around and went, beep, beep, beep, all the way back to.

Terrible quick neck,

okay.

It is time for our final fact, and that is Annie.

My fact is that Leo Tolstoy, one of the greatest writers of history, frequently wore two hats in case his head got cold.

Oh, what a guy.

This is from someone called Marianna Hunt, who sent me this fact.

So thank you to you mariana and it's just that tolstoy was very sensitive to head colds so he wore multiple hats

he literally wore multiple hats cold in russia we've already established that it's cold in russia and the hats were nuclear powered it's like

so amazing did he have like a reversey percy hat he was put on when he was walking backwards

were they two of the same type of hat or was it like a top hat and then a tiny polar hat on top of that or i am not sure the history relates tragically i don't know if it was like a fez followed by a fedora or, yeah, so I don't know.

Because he could have just bought a thicker hat.

In Russia, you know, you often get these big bearskin things that go after the meeting.

With the flaps.

With the flaps, of course.

Yeah.

But he didn't, not that smart, turns out.

No.

No.

Thicky Tolstoy, we call it.

We call him Leo Tolstoy, but his name was Lev or Liev.

And the reason that we do that is because Liev means lion in Russian.

And when he brought out his book in France, they translated his name as Leon Tolstoy.

Oh, really?

Because that means lion.

And he kind of gave his blessing to that.

And when he gave his blessing, it meant that everyone else could kind of go in that direction.

And so when it came into England, it was anglicized to Leo, which also means lion.

Right.

Do we know if everyone does that?

Like in Kenya, are they calling him Simba Tolstoy?

That would be amazing,

I can't remember if that's Willie Valion.

There's one of the words in the world.

That's so funny.

On translation, I was looking at the

so apparently the Russian word for peace is

yeah, so but that can also mean like world or society.

It can mean like like a place where people like a community kind of thing.

Right, yeah.

But but um there was there's an argument about how you could translate the title of War and Peace to War and the World, which I prefer as a kind of sex in the city vibe.

Well, one of its provisional titles, it went through a couple of titles before he settled on War and the World.

War of the World himself.

It was a provisional title at first, The Year 1805.

Okay.

And then, briefly, All's Well That Ends Well.

Well, I think it must have been the Russian for that, but...

He hated Shakespeare as well.

He didn't think he was a very good writer.

Is that so?

Yeah.

He and Shaw talked about Shakespeare, didn't they?

About how they hated him.

Wow.

He thought that Shakespeare was unfair to servants and poor people, and they were frequently made the object of ridicule in his plays.

Yeah.

Yeah, he was big on the rights of servants and serfs.

He was kind of obsessed with that, especially in his later life, wasn't he?

And he sort of shifted his whole family to this different kind of barren land to try and make his own farming using his own farming ideas and principles, which, if you've ever read Anna Karenina, are basically all written out in the character of Levin, who is essentially, I think, Levin is who Tolstoy wishes wishes he was in Anna Krenina.

He's a kind of wheat obsessive, isn't he?

He is, yes.

He's the opposite of someone who's gluten intolerant.

Yes,

he's a gluten enthusiast.

He doesn't just love sandwiches, guys.

There was a whole socialist philosophy behind this.

Sandwiches for everybody.

He loved eggs as well.

There's an app you can download, which is

his wife's cookbook.

It's now available as an iOS app.

And so we know all about the different things because his wife was amazing.

She's kind of the great woman behind the great man kind of thing.

He had terrible handwriting, so she copied out seven drafts of War and Peace, the 1400 pages by hand.

Often, like, after he'd gone to bed and finished, she would stay up and do it by candlelight.

And he had terrible handwriting, and sometimes she needed to use a magnifying glass.

But look, we have to stay on the eggs for a minute because

this is really relevant.

So he had this, he was born in 1828, and he had this huge mental crisis around his 50th birthday, which I think was after War and Peace and Ada Corona.

And he gave up smoking, gave up drinking, gave up meat, and became a massive vegetarian.

So he had because there was no tofu or corn, obviously, so eggs it was.

And he had a rotating menu of 12 egg dishes, which he ordered to be cooked for him.

It can't have been fun to have been around around that time, can't he?

I think after his big life change, he was a major bore.

So like eggs with Brussels sprouts and beans.

You'd want to be sitting next to him, for one thing.

That is an amazing meal.

Don't order that on the first date, is all I'm saying.

One of them was just omelette in soup.

Gross.

And he became a serious buzzkill.

He would cobble his own shoes.

And it got so bad that his wife...

After 25 years of this kind of shit from Tolstoy, his wife was given a gift of a joke recipe book of all the mad dishes he'd received.

I think that's the thing that is the app.

Yeah.

She had a terrible time.

Notwithstanding the constant farting based on the disgusting egg-based vegetarian diet.

I've got really mixed feelings about Tolstoy because he's such a brilliant writer, but my God, he was awful to his wife.

So, Sonia, even they met, she was one of the daughters of a family that he was friends with, and she was 18 when they met, and he sort of fell in love with her or fell in lust with her.

It was quite a lusty man.

And he proposed very soon afterward afterwards.

And amazingly, he proposed.

And the scene of his proposal is repeated in Anna Karenina.

And it's always a scene I've thought that's so unrealistic.

So there's this scene where, spoilers, Levin proposes to Kitty, but he proposes by just proposing with the first letter of every word that he means to say.

But it's not just like, will you marry me?

It's incredibly long sentences.

And I remember reading this scene and thinking, that is absolutely ridiculous.

She can work it out, can she?

She can work it out.

This is exactly how Tolstoy proposed to Sonia.

So it was in, it was more complicated, but it would be like W-Y-M-M for will you marry me?

Exactly.

But in his instance, they had a whole conversation.

This was Tolstoy and Sonia, and he spelled out the letters with pieces of chalk, and it was sentences like, In your family, there is a false view of me and your sister Liza.

You and your sister Tanya must defend me.

Spelt out in initials.

I think that could work in some cases.

Like, if I was to go, OMG, and you went BS, then that works, doesn't it?

Is that how you proposed?

That was the response I got.

But yeah, sorry, after he proposed and before they got married, he said there shouldn't be any secrets between us at all.

I'm a massive diary writer, he was a huge diary writer.

You must read all my diaries.

I must read all of yours.

She said, okay.

And he forced her to read all of his diaries, which involved just his constant recounting of his affairs with surf ladies.

Yeah.

Just lots of shagging around.

And there was one, he had fathered a child by a woman who still lived on his estate.

Yeah.

And she was still there, you know, and so Sonia read this and obviously was really felt very threatened by it because, you know, he'd had a child with her and she was constantly worried that they were going to take up again where he'd left off.

Yeah.

And he made her read this.

It's very weird.

I know.

In fact, he then made her transcribe.

One of the first things he made her transcribe was a short story based on his relationship with this surf woman, which is one of the few stories he didn't finish, which we suspect is because she drew the line at some point.

He's just saying, and then my wife turned up.

What a boy.

He sounds like a river dick.

Yeah, I think what happened, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think his early life where he was doing all these naughty things,

then he had this kind of midlife crisis, didn't he?

And then that's when he started giving everything away.

And obviously, neither of those parts of his life were particularly happy times for his wife.

He did go from one extreme to the other.

But it was when he, in the 1890s, he re-translated the New Testament.

So he got a copy of the Bible in presumably in Greek or something like that.

And then they had the Russian Orthodox version, which everyone else read, and he translated his own version.

And then he realised that actually the way I should be living is vegetarianism, giving everything away, living as a serf, all that kind of thing.

But he was tortured his whole life.

Like if you do read bits of his diaries, which I kind of have over the years, it was like an adolescent constantly.

So everyone thinks Tolstoy had this phase where he was shaggy around and writing all these great novels and then this phase of ascetic religiousness.

And actually, he was up and down all the time.

His diary is full of him messing up, letting himself down, scolding himself, saying, all right, tomorrow I will do this, this, and that.

And it's like real kind of self-loathing, but self-involved.

And it would be stupid stuff.

He'd get annoyed with himself about, like, one entry in his diary said, receive my gymnastics teacher over-familiarly.

You know, hate myself for that.

Or made a bad exit from the collision's drawing room.

And that's very interesting.

This does sound like a lot of stuff that I think I angst over all the time.

He was so angsty.

He's greeting people is a classic, though, isn't it?

So someone else who did that, someone else who noted their moral failures, or what they thought were their moral failures, obsessively, was Isaac Newton, which we've discussed.

He said, you know, I got this wrong, or I was peevish, or I think threatened to kill my

parents and burn their house down, was one thing.

Up to that point, I was going to be like, it sounds like social anxiety, but I think that's probably a bit further.

Also, the fact that he translated his own version of the Bible, which is like Thomas Jefferson, which we talked about a few weeks ago.

So, these sort of great people of history tend to think they can have another crack at the Bible.

One of his things that he tried in his early teenage diaries was he kept a note of his attempts to only go to the brothel twice a month.

I know, so he really was trying.

Yeah, he was.

Like the gym.

He's got his membership, he never uses it.

Wasting money.

Got it on Christmas Day.

I want to quit the brothel.

After a while, you haven't been to the brothel, you can't really go back because they've noticed that you haven't been.

When he was 16, he recorded that he sort of scourged himself and whipped himself because he wanted to toughen up to physical pain.

And then immediately the next day, he remembered that life is short, and so he lay in bed for three days enjoying reading and eating honey cakes.

Honey cakes are nice.

Oh, it's all

Tolstoy in some way.

He wrote the Shaw Shank Redemption, or he wrote the original.

Sorry, I am feeling a fadam here.

So The Short Shank Redemption, the film, is based on Stephen King's novella, Rita Hayworth and the Short Shank Redemption.

But that, in turn, was based on a short story by Tolstoy called God Sees the Truth But Waits, about a man who's sent to prison for a murder that he didn't commit.

Really?

Yeah, and it's all about redemption and forgiveness.

But he wanted Tom Hanks for the part, didn't he?

He did, yeah.

As a young man, Tolstoy lost so much money gambling that he had to sell off his family home, right?

And

this was a huge, you know, shame and all of this.

But the buyer dismantled the family home and removed it from the site it was.

So there were just two huge wings of the house on either side, which he had not sold off.

And there's a sort of gaping hole in between them.

Yeah.

No way.

Oh, my God.

That's amazing.

Well, all the useful rooms in the middle bit.

20 ensuite bathrooms and no bedrooms.

Okay, that is all of our facts.

What comes next?

Thank you so much for watching.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to listen to, subscribe to our podcast.

If you'd like to get in touch with us, Alex, this is so concerning.

You're supposed to listen to our podcast every week to check it all sounds okay and then upload it and it sounds like you've never heard it.

I'm sorry.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us, we can be found on our social media account.

I am at Alex Bell.

James.

James.

James Harkin.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

And Anna.

You can email our podcast at qi.com.

Okay, thank you so much for listening.

No, no, no, okay, or you can get in contact with us all at no such thing.

Okay,

or you can get in contact with all of us at no such thing on Twitter at no such thing.

Sorry, what was the other thing?

Just so to say,

okay, thanks so much for listening.

And if you want to listen to any of our old episodes, you can go to no suchthingasafish.com, and you can also go to the website if you want tour dates and the book release.

Yeah, you can go to our website, no suchthingasafish.com, for tour dates of the book tour and also, no, it's just a book tour, isn't it?

For the

American tour?

Book of the Year.

Isn't that all sold out?

No, there's still some tickets for New York.

If you're from New York, come along.

Yeah.

Alex doesn't care about any of this because he's not going to be here.

But please go to no suchringsofish.com.

You can get tickets for our US tour.

If you're in the US, still some tickets left.

You can go to our Book of the Year 2019 tour or pre-order the book as well if you go there.

Yeah, Alex, you designed that website.

You should have a real dog at this game.

Thank you, Sori.

Goodbye.