157: No Such Thing As High-Fiving The Beatles

For the final trivia question, what is the largest mammal in the world?

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

My name is Dad, my name is Dad Schreiber, and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunt and Murray, and Anna Chaczynski.

And Anna Chasinski, and once again, we have gathered around the microphones.

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, my fact this week is that the man who popularized the high five only has four fingers.

And this was a basketball player called Wiley Brown.

back in 1978 slash 79 season of basketball he and his mate started high fiving and they talk about it really really interestingly like I read an interview where he said

you know no one was doing it they all did it low there's all these low fives going on no one did it high and he said then the first time we did it both of us looked at each other and said Did that just happen?

Really into it.

It was a magical moment.

Can I I just ask, when you say four fingers, you mean on one of his hands?

Exactly.

So nine fingers.

Yes, exactly.

So he had nine fingers in total.

He was missing a thumb.

He lost his thumb when he was four years old.

And a prosthetic thumb was made, which meant that he could still become an amazing sports star because he played basketball and football.

He was a bit sort of carefree about his thumb at times.

He actually went to the finals of a basketball match, having left his thumb back at the hotel that he stayed at, and they had to rescue him.

It would be awful if you had to hitchhike home.

Well, you could only do it on one side of the road.

He actually hated his thumb, his his prosthetic thumb, didn't he?

Yeah, he tried not to wear it.

So he played basketball without the thumb for ages.

And then one of his coaches said, You're really good without that.

I bet you'd be even better with it.

And they made him wear one.

And it kept on flying off at matches.

And he said it made him look like a freak, because you know, it was someone would bash into his thumb and it would fly into the crowd.

And so he tried not to wear it.

And the coach was adamant, and so much so that he said if he wasn't wearing his thumb, he wouldn't let the other teammates pass to his right hand, which really damaged the game.

So they could only pass to his left hand.

But yeah, he wasn't a fan.

I should say that I got this fact.

It was sent in to us by a guy called Michael Buccino.

He's a listener.

And again, just quickly have to say this.

If you want to see the finest interview ever, ever recorded, go to YouTube and put in Wiley Brown talking about the high five.

It is nine minutes of interview where they ask a question, which is, so you invented the high five, how was it?

He says, yeah, it's great.

And then they've got nine minutes more of interview.

It's too long.

It's not too long.

It is.

I mean,

no, because they run out of questions, but he does not run out of answers.

He is so enthusiastic, and he has a new tale for each time the high five started.

So he did it with Derek Smith, who Wiley Brown says is the actual creator of the high five, because in all the stories, Smith is the one who instigates it.

So for example, another story is that he said he was going up during practice to Derek Smith to give him a low five, classic low five, as they always did.

And then he said, out of nowhere, Smith looked Brown in the eye and said, no.

Up high.

I mean, that's fucking awesome.

There is another theory about who invented the high five.

Yeah, it's actually very controversial, isn't it?

Yeah, so

there's a baseball player called Dusty Baker and another called Glenn Burke.

And it's claimed that when Baker was getting back towards the dugout, Burke offered a raised hand and Baker, not knowing what to do, smacked it.

Again, very much the same sort of like amazing foundation moment.

And then Burke went out and he got a home run, and then on the way back, he gave another high five.

And that was in 1977 that that supposedly happened.

So that's earlier.

It's earlier, so that predates

maybe an origin.

Do you know Glenn Burke, who you were talking about?

Yeah.

He's famous because he was pretty much the first major league baseball player to come out as gay.

And there was a documentary in 2010 called Out the Glenn Burke Story.

And they said that the Dodgers executives executives offered him $75,000 to get married because it would cause such a problem if people found out he was gay while they were while he was still playing.

No way.

And apparently when they said, you know, would you take $75,000 to get married?

He said, I guess you mean to a woman?

Which is quite a good reply.

That's a great title for a movie.

Out.

I guess you mean to a woman?

Oh, right.

No, no.

Out.

Oh, the actual movie itself.

Do you think there was any confusion at the start when people would say, Hey, how's Glenn?

And then you go, Oh, he's out.

And they go, No, he's not.

He's still out.

Just years of playing.

Yeah.

That's good.

And then Dusty Baker, just one fact about him.

He was famous for liking to chew toothpicks.

He said toothpicks are an excellent source of protein, which he was wrong about.

No.

So on high fives,

there is a basketball team called the Phoenix Suns.

Yes.

Have you heard of them?

Yeah.

Is that like saying there is a football team called Manchester United?

It is.

It is, Your Honour.

Anyway, these Phoenix Suns,

in 2016, they announced that they were keeping track of all the high fives that their team

passed to each other, hoping that they would create more camaraderie.

Like throughout the season, they did this.

And supposedly,

teams which embrace the most in terms of high fives or other celebrations are more successful.

I think it's surely more likely that if you're more successful, you score more points than you high five each other more.

Yeah, that's true.

There is a cause and effect thing there.

But I've read articles saying that sports players who touch each other more are supposedly better at the sports.

And I'm pretty sure that England cricket team always touch each other on the bum whenever they do something good.

And I think that kind of comes from that idea.

Sports psychologists.

Most sports do, yeah, there's bum slaps all the time.

If we want to improve our performance on the podcast, should we start slapping each other's bums?

No, I don't think we should.

I think we should.

That was a high-five, by by the way, not a thumb slap.

There is a machine that an artist has invented where you can, it does self-high fives.

Have you seen it?

It's unbelievably disgusting looking.

This sounds like the saddest, loneliest machine in the world.

She's a Turkish-born artist.

I think she lives in America called Denise Ozuiger.

Sorry, how does she pronounce her surname?

I don't know, but I don't think it's like that.

I'm so sorry if I've mispronounced it, which I definitely have.

So she cast her own arm, right?

She made two casts of her arms, and then one of them is just sticking out of this machine, and the other one is rotating very slowly, like a kebab thing.

And every minute they come into contact because it's going around in a circle, the moving arm, and it just slowly brushes the fingers of the other arm.

So that's not really a high five.

That's how you would imagine Michael Gov would high five.

Yeah, it's really

high.

It only does one high five per minute.

I'm not sure what the point is.

One high five per minute.

But it's hard.

It's hard.

That's the point.

Okay.

The thumbs up that Donald Trump's gradually destroying for everyone else in the world.

Do you know what the origin of that is?

Apparently, there are lots of theories.

In basketball, when someone got hit in the face by a stray thumb and they held it up and said, who's this?

It's a strong theory, but no.

So apparently there's a...

Gladiator thing.

Well, there's quite a strong myth that says that gladiators, you give the thumbs up for gladiators if you thought they should live and then the thumbs down they should die, but I think that's not true.

I think you just put your thumb out, and that meant.

I think we've got no evidence that the thumbs up meant live, and thumbs down meant die.

But Desmond Morris says that it's from medieval times where if you were a businessman doing a deal, then the way you'd do it is you'd lick your thumb and then you press it up against someone else's licked thumb, and that was

like, hey, deal is done.

Wow, that's like Blood Brothers, but slightly

weirdly more disgusting.

What it reminds me of is: do you remember in the last QI meeting, Anna, when you were trying to show us some pick-up lines

and you tried one on Andy?

You missed this, Dan.

She licked her thumb, wiped it on Andy's clothes, and said, Let's get you out of these wet clothes.

Oh, that's a good one.

He was smitten.

Single most erotic moment of my life.

Strong couple of years ago.

You know,

marrying couples used to shake hands at the altar.

Oh, really?

So, this is an

BBC History magazine claims this.

But, yeah, in the 17th century, you got married and then you shake hands with the bride.

Because it's like a contract maybe.

Exactly.

The kissing thing, when I got married in January, the priest told us that, you know, it's not a thing.

You don't need to do it.

It's like, it's just people just started doing it.

It just caught on, like the high five, and just people decided to do it.

But it's never been officially a part of the ceremony.

Yeah, I know.

You may kiss the bride is not a line, a part of the ceremony.

It's not popularised at death.

I think it was a half-lipped man.

Yeah, I don't know.

It's quite American.

I always think of it as not a...

What, you may not kiss the bride?

Yes, in fact, that's what he said to me.

He said it's something that was seen in American movies and then everyone thought, oh, there's meant to be that line.

And then we started doing it.

So when I was looking at stuff about high-fives, I came across an article about a lollipop man.

He's quit because he was high-fiving the children as they walked across the road.

And he was told not to do it.

And he was like, right, fine, I'm going to quit.

Okay.

So just very quickly, a lollipop man, because I didn't know this until I got to this country, is someone who stands by a zebra crossing and allows school children to walk across.

I had no idea.

He's holding a large lollipop-shaped object to stop the cars.

But he doesn't sell lollipops.

For a zebra crossing is a road crossing with black and white stripes on it.

That the Beatles walked over on Abbey Road.

Yes, but there are thousands and thousands of zebra crossings.

It's not like Britain has one zebra crossing, and all school children have to cross that before they go to their school.

I was surprised they got the space to take that photo with all the

lollipop man.

So, this guy, he was from Plymouth City Council, and then I just carried on reading the rest of the Google searches on pages two and three that people don't normally go to.

And there was also a lollipop man in Edinburgh who was told not to high-five children.

What?

There was a lollipop lady in the Vale of Glamorgan who had the same.

There was two lollipop men in Essex that I found.

There was a guy in West Dunbartonshire who's left his job because he wasn't allowed to high five kids.

What?

And there was a guy in Australia, in Bayside, Australia, who has also left his job because,

well, he got told off because he was high-fiving children.

So this seems to be a real problem.

Amazing that it's like a deal-breaker for keeping your job.

No high-fives?

I'm out of here.

That is so weird.

It's so weird.

It's just a thing that seems to be happening all over the world.

That's amazing.

I bet no one else has made that connection in the world.

I bet even they have not made that connection in former lonely people.

They meet.

The high-five club.

They meet and high-five each other, and that's all sad.

Is it because it's dangerous?

So the idea is you're supposed to be concentrating on the road

and not high-fiving kids as they go across.

And presumably, what's happened, I might be completely wrong about this, but it seems to me like a memo's gone out to all the different councils and they've all gone around checking that no one's high-fiving people.

I don't know if that's right, but it's a real coincidence.

It doesn't take that much concentration to high-five, does it?

I would have thought you could focus on the road as well as also

distributing high-five.

If someone was repeatedly high-fiving while driving, I would not be so comfortable as a passenger.

How would you do that?

Stick your hand out the window.

I guess so, yeah.

But then you're driving too close to the pavement.

No, you would high-five other drivers coming in the opposite direction,

of course.

What you can't see on the Abbey Road cover is a crestfallen lollipop man on the other side taking his P45 slip with it.

Don't ever high-five the Beatles again.

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

Yeah, my fact this week is that when the first American woman went into space, NASA designed a makeup kit for her.

And this is an interview I was reading this week with Sally Ride, who is in the first group of female Americans who went into space.

And yeah, she said that NASA called her in for a meeting and said, Look, we're really worried about this, but we're sending women out there now.

And we obviously need to design you a make-up kit.

So what kind of stuff should we be putting in there?

Because we're a bit stuck with that.

What did she say?

And she said it was the last thing she wanted to be thinking about at that time.

Effectively, this fact is about the sort of slightly backward, massively backward sexism that happens to a lot of women.

I don't want people to look like a minger for the aliens, do you?

So there was this interview with Sally Ride, who it was quite sweet, saying that when NASA came to her, they were a bit confused about various things, like they didn't know how many tampons they would want out in space, so they suggested 100 tampons per person for a week, and she was like,

What if you need to build a fort?

Tampon Fort.

What if that?

It's like a pillow fort, but for a mouse.

But some of them, I read an interview with another of the women who went up who said that when they came in and asked them, Do they want makeup and what kind of makeup do they want?

There were loud guffors by some of the women.

But one of them said, Look, these pictures taken in space will follow us around for the rest of our lives, and I don't want to disappear into the background.

So, a couple of them did take these makeup kits out.

Yeah.

Well, they sort of specially tested makeup that would adhere to the skin even in a microgravity.

What doesn't happen with makeup, Andy, is women don't put makeup on at the start of the day, and by the end of the day, it's the gravity's just pulling down to the bottom of their faces.

It's on your feet.

That's a good point.

A face-up crotch look at about 3 p.m.

No, it's extraordinary though.

It is weird.

And what's also weird is how long NASA took to send women into space, given how long the Soviet Union did not take.

So it was 20 years after.

It was an odd way of phrasing that squeeze.

They took a long time.

So the Soviet Union sent Valentina Tereshkova up in 1963.

And one NASA official was actually asked what he thought about this at the time, and he said it made him sick to his stomach to think of women in space.

But this is the weird thing about Tureshkiva's trip.

She was only allowed to go because she wasn't menstruating.

Oh, because they were worried about what would happen with periods.

Don't they just didn't have enough payroll to take 5,000 tampons like that?

No, there were all these reports sort of worrying about it.

So basically, all your blood sort of pools in your torso and in your head because there's no gravity.

So that does, yeah, that is something that on Earth is affected by gravity.

And there was a report in America in 1964 which said it would be hard to match.

I'm quoting here, a temperamental psychophysiologic human and the complicated machine, i.e.

the spacecraft, both need to be ready at the same time, i.e., we think women will be too mad if they're menstruating to operate a spacecraft.

And they also worried that the blood from that system would also float up and cause, it could cause theoretically a dangerous condition called peritonitis, which can be fatal.

And so they thought, well, maybe, well, what if that happens?

But the reality is that that normal blood circulation is completely different to menstrual blood, so it was never a risk.

And actually, women going up in space is very sensible and a good idea because they can do everything that the men can do, but they're smaller, generally speaking.

Yeah.

You just need less power to get women up there.

Oh, I think that's it.

Every bit counts.

You don't have to send them as far because they're smaller, so they'll look the same size even when they're a bit closer.

That's the whole point.

That's why we send people into space, so they look smaller.

To see what humans would look like if they were one centimetre tall.

That's one small step.

No, it's a normal step, it's just a long way away.

There's another astronaut called Svetlana Savitskaya, and she went up in 1984.

She did a mission, first woman to fly in space twice.

In 1995, she gave an interview and she was talking about the sort of sexism that was going on with being a female astronaut.

When she arrived at the Salyut 7, as she came in, there was another astronaut there who handed her an apron and told her to get to work.

That was her arrival

in space.

Was that a tongue-in-cheek thing?

No, no.

It was very much a...

It seems like, well, women shouldn't be up here, so I'm going to say something extremely offensive.

It was a deliberate, like,

you shouldn't be here.

You shouldn't be here.

Put the apron on if you're going to be here and clean up our shuttle.

Wow.

Yeah, they've been deliberately letting dirt build up on the shuttle and jeopardising the entire mission to make this incredibly petty point.

Where Where do you get the apron from?

Who has an apron in space?

You would have had to smuggle an apron.

Yeah.

He would have had to craft an apron, probably from vital bits of the spaceship.

Maybe.

On the ISS, do you know they have to vacuum every day?

Really?

Yeah.

Because they need to keep it clean and they need to keep it clear of, you know, germs and bacteria.

And yeah, so they have to vacuum every day.

It's quite ironic the fact that they're bringing a vacuum into space.

Do they?

Because the stuff isn't adhering to the ground because of the absence of gravity or the land ground.

So do they just wave a vacuum in the air?

I think they must do.

They must do, right?

Those are so easy.

I guess what happens is it kind of floats around and then it'll just stick to things.

Yeah, I don't know.

I think it does.

We've mentioned before, you know, you get calluses on your feet because you're not walking around on the ground, so your underside of your feet gets soft.

And then the top of your feet, because you're hooking your feet around railings and things, it gets very hard.

Those calluses break off and then they're just floating around the space station.

Bits of your own foot skin.

so you have to vacuum those up don't they wear socks most times you should be wearing space socks i guess yeah i guess so but it is cool they have reverse feet in space yeah

i do love that is that what we're saying here that's what we're saying

if you live in space you have reverse feet do you know what happened on the

the maiden space shuttle columbia mission in 1981?

the toilet got clogged when they were up in space and they had to use these tube-shaped bags which attached to your bottom bottom with a sticky seal to go to the loo.

It was very unpleasant.

And then, as they were re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, the toilet was broken, and the vacuum-dried excrement got into the ventilation system and then started floating around in the main cabin.

No,

bad times.

That's see, you really need the vacuum cleaner then,

suck that up.

You can't suck up poo in a vacuum cleaner.

I wouldn't use it again after I'd done it.

If it's vacuum-dried, okay.

If it's vacuum-dried, you can, which is why I always vacuum-dried whenever I get

just one more thing on the extreme sexism in space theme.

Yeah.

Great theme.

It's not just a wrong theme.

It's just a real laugh a minute.

So in 1971, there's a NASA memo which is about psychological issues with long space flights.

And so this is in 71, and this is about how men can suffer in various ways.

And one of the ways that they'll suffer is that they don't have a direct sexual release because they're up in space, all a bunch of men on their own.

And this NASA memo says: the question of direct sexual release on a long-duration space mission must be considered.

Practical considerations preclude men taking their wives, so it is possible that a woman, qualified from a scientific viewpoint, might be persuaded to donate her time and energies for the sake of improving crew morale.

No,

no.

Space prostitutes.

That sounds like a movie, doesn't it?

No.

suggesting

that.

They were suggesting that providing a woman puts they talk about sublimation, which is the idea that men will be sexually relieved by just being around a woman.

It will improve their morale rather than being on their own, because it pointed out that masturbation is messy and that homosexual behaviour shouldn't be encouraged.

Masturbation is messy.

I would say, as long as it's freeze-dry.

If you ever go to Andy's house, you'll notice.

Oh, dear me.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the Indian justice system has a backlog of 31 million cases.

31 million?

Yeah, that's nuts.

Oh, my goodness.

That's terrifying.

And if all of the judges managed to deal with a hundred cases an hour and didn't take any breaks it would take them 35 years to get rid of the backlog because there's hardly any judges it's like it's between 13 and 15 judges per million people

in india and in america it's more than a hundred is it wow yeah um so i saw this in a review of a book called when crime pays money and muscle in indian politics in the economists magazine a few weeks ago And what it was really, it was an article about how corrupt politicians are in India.

And they said in this article that if you are a politician with serious charges hanging over you, you have an 18% chance of winning your race, and that's compared with 6% for someone who doesn't have any charges against them.

So you're three times more likely to get into parliament if you have a serious crime against you than if you have no crime, which is insane.

Where's the causation correlation link there?

Do they speculate?

Yeah, because I can't believe people are voting people in just on the grounds of their criminal history.

Well, the speculation is that getting the Indian state to do things is very difficult because it's just there's so much bureaucracy, and sometimes you just have to bang a few heads together to get things done.

And so people think, well, this criminal knows how to get things done, specifically crimes.

But if he can do crimes, he can probably sort out the roads and the railways and stuff like that as well.

So is it only the people who've done crimes well that are getting elected?

If you do crimes that well, you tend not to go to prison.

Well indeed, they've been caught, so I would have thought.

Well a lot of these people haven't been found guilty or anything because there's still 31 million

cases.

Two-thirds of all people in prison in India have not been convicted of anything.

They're waiting.

So they still put them in jail though.

There are 400,000 people in India in prison.

Which is actually, I think, a bit lower than the British proportion.

Because Britain's got about 80,000 people in prison.

So they've got five times as many, but their population is way higher.

But yeah.

So you might have to wait ten years for your case to be brought to court, and you might be innocent that whole time.

And some people can't afford bail, or some people don't know that bail is available to them.

So they're just sort of left mouldering in jails for years and years and years.

Wow.

And in the lower house in India, the Lok Sabha, 34% of the MPs have got criminal charges filed against them.

So that's more than a third.

And according to this article, you can pretty much walk from Mumbai to Kolkata without stepping foot outside a constituency whose MP isn't facing a charge.

Oh my god.

And that's about 2,000 kilometers.

You can walk.

Wasn't there a thing in the American election this year that you told me about, Anna, where there was one of the people running had a warrant out for their arrest.

Oh, yeah, the Green candidate.

That's why they were running.

Oh, vote for me.

I've got to go.

Chill Anna, bye.

Vote Green.

Yeah, Jill Stein.

Just

a little bit of a job.

And it was for protesting.

Yeah, it was for vandalism because she graffited something in a little bit of mental protest.

It was in a particular state, wasn't it?

Yes.

So she just didn't campaign very much there.

Yeah.

People saw it.

Or really anywhere else.

Wow.

So obviously there are people who have to wait a very long time to get their cases heard.

One example is a guy, an 85-year-old man, who in 2014 was granted a divorce that he'd filed for 32 years earlier.

Wow.

You've probably made up by then, haven't you?

Yeah.

Well, you'd hope so.

Otherwise, that's a lot of resentment that's festering for 34 years.

True.

In 2008, in India, government whips sprung six MPs out of prison so that they could vote.

Yeah.

Oh, if only our whips were that cool.

The most rebellious thing they do is not obey Jeremy Corbyn.

Imagine if they were springing people out of jail.

So it was going to be a really tight vote, and they decided, oh, we're going to need these six people, so they got them out of prison.

That is amazing.

Like on a day trip or just altogether out of prison?

I think they put them back in.

Yeah.

But that's like during John Major's government in the UK, because he had this wafer-thin majority, didn't he?

And they kept on having to bring in, you know, if there were MPs who were really seriously ill to get legislation through, they were practically bringing in stretchers, you know, sort of pushing them through the division.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do we know how they sprung them out of prison?

Was it a great escape-style tunnel-digging sort of endeavour?

The tunnel digging, you need to know that the vote's coming coming up a long time in advance.

Ordered 12 bulldozers on taxpayers' expense.

There's one court case in India that's been going on since 1878.

I think this was the oldest I could find.

It's a long divorce, isn't it?

Great-grandchildren are getting divorced.

It's over a plot of land that's less than two acres,

and it's a fight between a Shia Muslim family and a Sunni Muslim family.

And one side argues that their graves are on it, and so they need to keep it.

The other side argues it belongs to them.

It's been going on since 1878.

The Election Commission of India says that no person should have to travel more than two kilometers to cast a vote.

So in the state of Gujarat, there's a temple caretaker who lives in a temple in the middle of a forest, who is the only person who votes in his special voting booth.

Okay, so the police come in whenever there's an election, they have to go through this massive forest with snakes and lions and stuff like that.

And then they put the voting booth in the middle of the forest and they sit there and they wait for him to come.

And he says in the morning he has his breakfast and he has a cup of tea and he works out who he's going to vote for.

And then about 11 o'clock, he wanders down and puts his vote in and they can go home.

That is amazing.

Isn't that cool?

That's really cool.

That's hilarious that they haven't specified a time.

They've just got to sit.

Turnout's very low this year.

Just one thing we've we've never talked about, actually, that's another weird thing about the Indian justice system, is the case of Lal Bihari, who set up the Uttar Pradesh group of dead people who aren't really dead.

I've never mentioned this, but this is totally bizarre.

He's this guy who in 1975 wanted to apply for a bank loan, and so he went to try and get proof of identity from the revenue office, and he found out that he was dead because his uncle had declared him dead so he could claim the land that he'd inherited.

And it turned out this is a massive problem.

And he set up this organisation, which is to represent people who have been declared dead in India even though they're alive and he eventually in 2004 he he eventually in 1994

I told you he was dead I told you and I'm right

in 1994 sorry he finally managed to get himself declared alive but his organization which is the Uttar Pradesh Dead People Association has over 20,000 members and by 2004 they'd only managed to declare four of them alive.

I I remember reading about him where

all the times he tried to prove that he was alive.

So he started doing things like illegal stuff, like robbing a bank.

They'd be like, We can't arrest you.

You're not alive.

We can't arrest a dead man.

So do you think he was robbing the bank of the leg?

Oh, it's a ghost.

He would just move mugs around.

Just walk into seances.

There was a, sorry, sorry, on seances, there was a legal case in the UK that had to be redone because it turned out the jury, this was in 1994, it turned out the jury had made their decision based on a seance.

What?

Yeah, it was a double murder case, and they had to spend the night in a hotel because the case was going on a while.

And they all got really drunk.

And then one of them emptied their wine glass, turned it over, and went, all right, let's ask a ghost whether he's guilty or not.

And they did, and then they had to redo the case because that isn't allowed.

Why would the ghost know?

Like, what was the.

I'm not sure the ghost did know.

Like, the ghost.

Who was the ghost that

was the ghost of the murdered man?

Who killed you?

Did he do it?

Oh, so it was specifically, it wasn't just a ghost.

Well, it might be, because ghosts can talk to each other, right?

So the ghost, whoever it was, could have gone and asked the murdered person.

That's not the ghost.

I'll get back to you.

I'm seeing him next week for a ghost lunch.

I will.

Ooh, I don't know who did that one.

This is not fun.

Oh,

ooh, I'll ask.

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

My fact is that scientists are building a special bunker in Antarctica to store bits of glacier from the Alps.

So

exciting.

That's amazing.

Why?

Because glaciers are melting all over the world and I didn't know this that this is a job.

There's a job of being a paleoclimatologist.

So like a paleontologist does dinosaurs, a paleoclimatologist does ancient weather, basically.

And all these glaciers, they're really old ice, and it contains lots of data about what was in the atmosphere, how much of which kind of gas, what the weather would have been like, what the climate was.

So, if they melt, you suddenly are losing tens of thousands of years of data.

So, what kind of weather do they learn?

It's like, oh, it was snowing.

It was snowing before that, and snowing before that.

Cold, cold, still, cold, still cold.

They learn about the gases in the atmosphere.

But they're now collecting cross-sections of ice.

They have these circular drills.

They're like cookie cutters, and they just bore right down into the ice, and then they bring it up, slice it into one-meter sections, label them, and they are currently building this massive bunker, which is going to be in Antarctica.

Is this their research group?

Are they the ones called Protecting Ice Memory Project?

Yes.

Okay, so this is this big international project.

Oh, yeah.

Do they call themselves PIMPs?

I think it's it's PIM.

Project, I think, is just a.

I could see why they didn't bother with the project.

They make a big deal of that space with a PIM project.

PIM pause project.

Yeah, it's unbelievably cool, though, actually.

So these ice cores that they pull out, just the idea that all of this stuff that's happened for hundreds of thousands of years is literally frozen in time and we can look at it.

So find volcanic ash or find when carbon dioxide was in in the atmosphere and how much of it.

And that's how they get a lot of climate data, which I hadn't realised.

So when we say, you know, when you have those graphs which show how much CO2 is in the atmosphere X number of years ago, very often that's because they've studied an ice core and they found a little bubble of it somewhere beneath that's been preserved

for hundreds of thousands of years.

It's all the bubbles.

It's always the bubbles, isn't it?

Why don't they just keep the bubbles?

That's true, because it'd be easier to store, wouldn't it?

And the reason it's an Antarctica is that even if the power fails, it's still minus 50 degrees outside.

Yeah.

Whereas if you have it somewhere warmer

and the power fails, obviously all your precious data melts.

Do you guys know about Project Ice Worm?

Project Ice Worm.

I know what ice worms are.

No, I don't know.

They're ice worms.

They're worms that live in ice.

Alright, yeah, that's amazing, James.

Wait, is that true?

That can't be true.

They have worms that live on glaciers.

But Anna can tell us about her thing and then I'll tell you about ice worms.

Okay, let's compare ice worms.

So this isn't actually in Antarctica, this is in Greenland.

But Project Ice Worm was this American plan in the Cold War to build this massive underground network of tunnels below the ice in Greenland.

And then that would be, they would be missile launch sites.

So that way, if they went via Greenland, then they could get easy access to the Soviet Union.

And we actually did this.

So if you go to Greenland, way, way under the ice, there's this network of tunnels that they started building that's full of stuff like sewage and loads of diesel fuel apparently.

some pollutants, some radiological waste.

And I think 21 tunnels were dug under the the ground in Greenland.

And then they decided it wasn't actually going to work because it wasn't viable for people to live under the ice for long periods of time.

They had hospitals, they had a cinema, they had shops.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What's all this sewage there for?

Yeah, I don't know why all the sewage is there.

Maybe it made you have a funny tummy if you're living in on Greenland.

It makes it easy to freeze dry.

Yeah, that's true.

But it's a problem because the ice sheet might melt on Greenland, and then you've got all the radioactive sludge, which is going to...

No, but bad news, the ice sheet melts,

the seas kind of rise and stuff like that.

Good news, we find a new cinema.

Oh, yeah.

Imagine that day when the ice melts and there's a like a, you know, an Odeon

covered in radioactive waste and sewage.

I can imagine it being a hipster destination cinema, actually.

People are going to go, it's going to be radio.

You have to dig through 12 meters of ice to get there.

Okay, okay, I can't wait anymore.

What's an ice worm?

Oh, yeah, sorry.

That's why you've been quiet all this time.

It took so long.

Oh, God.

Well, an ice worm, like I say, it is just a worm that lives on ice.

They live in glaciers

and they eat little bits of pollen that have been trapped in the glacier.

They're little black things, so you can see them really easily.

And do they burrow through the ice and live under ice?

Sometimes they do.

So if it's warm on the outside, if it's above, like, say, two degrees, they'll go into the ice because if they get above five degrees, they melt.

And they literally melt, they turn to liquid, these worms.

It's like an enzyme in their body which starts to liquefy their whole body.

So if they go above, like, say, two or three degrees, they will melt.

And you see them on glaciers, the little black things.

Wow.

That is so terrifying, being them.

For some reason, I feel it's like speed where you can't go over a certain amount, and they're obsessively watching the thermometer all the time.

Yeah.

Sometimes glaciers enter this sort of super fast state.

And

Not fast.

Not very fast.

So not super fast.

It's...

Well, they call them glacier surges.

Right.

And they move at 100 times their normal speed.

When I read that the fastest that they've ever gone is 11 miles per year.

That's pretty fast.

Is it though?

Is it?

Well, it's about 45 meters per day.

Sure.

It's like Southern Rail.

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

But they are moving four times faster than they were in the 90s,

or the summer speed of glaciers, Which is that's big.

Where are they going?

Well, they're melting and moving

downhill and towards the sea.

Okay, right.

So that's what a glacier is, basically.

It's loads and loads of snow that's fallen over loads and loads of years, and it's just slowly with gravity moving down towards the sea, like a river, but it's made of ice.

So it's on land?

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

Otherwise, it'd be an iceberg.

Yes, okay, so that's the difference.

That's what I didn't understand.

Yeah, and actually, a Fox's Glacier Mint shows a polar bear standing on an iceberg.

You're right.

So it's a a completely inaccurate mint.

It should be an iceberg mint.

Yes.

Or they need to change the design.

Either way.

Until they do one of those two things, I'm gone by a couple of those mints.

I mean, to be honest, if we're being really pedantic, they should show a fox standing on a glacier.

So they've got it wrong in a couple of ways.

What are you guys doing?

Polar bear iceberg mints.

It should be.

There are towns in the Alps who are still burying soldiers from the First World War, thanks to glacier melt.

What do you mean by that?

Well, loads of soldiers were posted in the Alps during the First World War, and it was incredibly, obviously, very cold, extremely harsh conditions to live in, and they were fighting very fiercely over almost no territory, basically.

But lots of soldiers froze to death, got caught in the glaciers.

Didn't get caught by the glaciers, but they incredibly slow, like that Austin Powers scene, edging away from the slow-moving glaciers.

Well, no, we've established that they're super fast, so maybe they weren't ready for the speed of a

glacier.

11 miles

per year.

How did these guys get into the army?

Anyway, they were caught.

And

they're now being discovered as the glaciers retreat as they melt.

Bodies are being discovered and they're being buried.

So there was a funeral for two of them in 2013, and 500 people turned up to sort of pay their respects.

And were their bodies preserved properly?

Because I remember when they found Mallory on Everest.

Yeah.

You know, a lot of his skin was there.

His body was there because you're properly preserved, aren't you?

In the cold.

I don't know how well preserved they were, but there is a particular town called Peo where they do a lot of these burials because they're near a lot of the battlefield sites and that's where the bodies are being discovered.

Wow.

Amazing.

It is kind of a, if you're looking on the bright side of global warming, it is good for glacial archaeology, isn't it?

Because, like you say, it's suddenly revealing all this amazing stuff.

So melting glaciers have suddenly revealed lots of Roman coins, some Iron Age horses.

There's a glacier called the Medenhall Glacier.

I'm not sure, Anna.

A couple of coins and a horse makes up for losing the entire Netherlands.

What if you want your children to go into the same line of work as you when there's no more ice?

It's only good in the very short term.

Well, I think we've established that this view is a very short-term view, isn't it?

So if I was worried about the long term, I would be concerned about climate change.

As it is, I'm very excited about these Roman coins.

And a forest.

So there's a thousand-year-old

ice that we can always do with more forests.

And there's a thousand-year-old forest that's been revealed by a melting glacier in Alaska.

I've got it a rubbish forest after all the time under a glacier.

It's a bit stumpy.

A bit depressing.

Some dead squirrels everywhere.

Yeah, that's strange, isn't it?

Because you do want more trees as well.

You want more forests, but you also want more ice.

So which do you choose?

Oh, it's Sophie's joyous, isn't it?

Yeah.

But the ice, I think, will keep the ice.

Okay.

Yeah.

Great.

Because you can go forests elsewhere where there's no ice, but you can't put ice.

You can make ice.

You can't keep it in the Amazon.

If you have a refrigerator, you can.

You can't turn the Amazon into a fridge, Dan.

But you could put a lot of refrigerators into the Amazon.

It's not a refrigerator, it's a freezer.

Why?

A refrigerator is just going to slow down the melting.

Isn't that why my ice tray is always full of water?

I'm delivered.

That's why my parties are never any good.

Do you want some ice when when you drink?

Dribble, dribble, dribble.

Never mind.

We'll have an ice cream instead.

Oh, no.

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.

So I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at Egg Shakes, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

And Anna.

you can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, it's at qi podcast, or you can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

We have all of our previous episodes up there.

We'll be back again next week.

See you then, guys.

Goodbye.

Let's be real.

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