143: No Such Thing As Chariots in Space

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Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score, we demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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 Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, James Harkin, and Alex Bell.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, James.

My fact this week is that scientists at MIT have invented an artificial intelligence that can see into the future, but it can only tell two seconds into the future.

Totally.

What's it reported?

I knew you were going to say that.

So

this is really cool.

So, what they did was they got this algorithm to watch TV shows like The Office and the Big Bang Theory.

Okay.

And it watched what people did when they met each other.

So, did you go in for a hug or a kiss or a handshake or a high five?

And then, when you showed them a picture of two people coming near each other, it could work out what they were going to do, whether they were going to high five, whether they were going to hug, whether they were going to kiss, or whatever.

So, that's basically as far as this has gone so far.

Still pretty good for an AI.

Yeah, and I'm surprised it was able to do this based on the Office and the Big Bang theory, both of which are about totally socially inept people who I wouldn't have thought give those correct questions.

It would be the best source material to use for an AI.

Maybe it made the AI feel more comfortable watching something closer to their kind of robotic way.

So it's like, oh, okay, we're not so different, you and us humans.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And also, I think that is quite a useful thing because how many times have you gone in for a hug to someone and they tried to high-five you and slap you in the face or you know or the kiss slash handshake thing is pretty awkward at times well in the article it said that the ai could only get it right 43 percent of the time which i was reading wasn't very high but then i realized i get it right about maybe two percent of the time

so apparently normal humans get it right 71 percent of the time but obviously that doesn't apply to you the thing is alex goes in for the kiss every single time

and it will get better won't it because it'll keep on watching it'll get better and 43 percent of the time versus 71 percent of the time is not that bad considering all they've done is got it to watch these two things.

Yeah.

Whereas most humans have had a lot of social interaction to get to where we are, which is still not that good.

The thing it might do in hospitals if it gets really good is anticipate a couple of seconds in advance whether someone, for instance, is about to fall over, like an old person on the way to the loo, and then swoop in and catch them.

Maybe they should show him lots of episodes of Miranda

where she falls down all the time.

Intermediate level, you can see it kind of a mile off.

If I watched Miranda, it would try to save you every step you took.

Yeah.

Yeah, if you saw a Mr.

Bean episode, it would probably either explode or not let you out the house if it was a robot.

Check this out.

There's another AI robotic thing which plays scissors, paper, rock and beats humans 100% of the time.

No,

it has 100%.

It breaks the rules, though.

This makes me so angry at this machine.

It doesn't break the rules.

Yeah, it does.

It waits to see what you're doing and then very quickly...

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

No, that's not quite right because

it technically is doing that.

But if you're a good game player as well, you would be looking at someone's hand to monitor where you think they're going to go.

So it has a camera on it, which is able to work out hand movements of people and what most likely hand shape they're about to take.

But it can make a split-second decision so that it's at the same time.

It's a microsecond afterwards because it's seen the way your hand is moving, so it's decided a microsecond afternoon.

Is it not indistinguishable to humans?

We would be.

Of course, but it is cheating after that.

That's cheating.

That's not cheating.

It is because rock, paper, scissors is fundamentally a game of chance.

It's like a coin sauce.

You're supposed to try and use it to decide things where there's a game.

No, but it's a game of chance.

No, because all it's doing is it's calling your tell.

It's seeing the hand shape that you're bringing.

That is not cheating.

It is.

100% of the time becomes cheating because you can work out what's more or less likely.

100% mean it's cracked it, it knows how to win a game.

It's done the impossible.

This is war.

Wait, what is James Sink?

What do you think?

Do you know how we should decide it?

It does look like you're about to high-five Dan, but I'm not sure that that's what's going to happen.

So a robot was was arrested recently

in September for taking part in a political rally.

Seems a bit dodgy.

This was in Russia, and this is actually a robot that I think might have come up before.

You guys might have heard about.

It's Promobot, and it's the one that escaped from its enclosure twice in, I think, about July this year.

Oh, yeah, but didn't we work out that that was actually

the clues in the name, Promo.

Yeah, it's not the same.

Yeah, the clues in the name.

But then it did it again, and then the mechanics at Promobot said that they were trying to reprogram it to stop it escaping.

So they're just really sticking to their story.

But now it's taken part in a political rally because this robot supported parliamentary candidate Valery Kalachev.

So it went to Moscow and started collecting people's views on politics, asking them what they thought.

Again, it escaped by itself.

I was just going around interviewing people.

I believe it might have been programmed to do this part.

I dreamed to be a political correspondent.

After it was arrested, did it escape from prison?

It probably has done now, yeah.

They did put handcuffs on it, apparently.

They must have been like idiots, those policemen handcuffing a a robot.

Ah, that would have been a fun moment of an otherwise probably depressing arresting situation.

It's one of the highest points.

I had to handcuff 25 people at a political protest, but I did handcuff a robot, and that actually really made me smile.

This is just one bit of delight.

You're right.

Also, in Robot News, they have set this year, in July, a new dancing robot, Guinness World Record.

A thousand thousand and seven robots danced together for a minute and that was what was needed.

And so that it was synchronized.

You can see a video online.

It's really cool.

It was in China and

it was at a Qing Dao beer festival.

So it was, I guess they were trying to just get headlines for it.

But you can see all these tiny little robots, the kinds that you would buy in a shop that make sort of small movements.

They're all doing a dance and some fall over so they're discounted, but they're still dancing while they're talking about it.

I wonder if it'd count, you know, those like a flower, and when you play music, they just kind of dance to the music.

Do you remember them from the MTS?

Yes, yes.

If you put 1,050 of those down, would that be able to technically beat the record?

I think they're effectively, that's the robots effectively that they used anyway.

Yes.

They were built to dance, they can't do anything else.

Yeah, so they put down 1,040, but they lost 33.

I have danced with a robot.

You have, haven't you?

Yeah, you have Asimov, right?

Asimov.

Sorry, Asimov.

No, yeah, we had Asimo, who was built by Honda, I think it was was he?

And he came on QI and we, during the warm-up, I did a little dance with him.

And he kind of just follows your dance patterns, I think.

I think that's how it worked.

I know a thing about Asimo, which a guest on our show from quite a few episodes ago, Levin Skyra, Belgian comedian and scientist, he was telling me that Asimo, they've programmed him to speak something like, I don't know, let's say 30 languages, it might be less, so that whenever they bring him over to different countries for conferences, he's able to do a lecture in their language.

But he has one special setting for when he's in Italy, which is that they've programmed his arms to gesticulate so that when he's talking, it feels more because that's how in Italy they feel more humanized than the robot standing still.

That's quite cool, isn't it?

That's really good.

Yeah, I love it.

And he's also watched episodes of The Office so he can do the David Brent dance.

Okay, here's something amazing about telling the future.

Okay.

There was a study done by a US intelligence group called the Good Judgment Project.

And what they did is they got a load of people, about more than 2,000 people, and they started asking them things about world events, like will Robert Mugabe still be the head of Zimbabwe in two years' time or whatever, like a load of different things.

And a load of people made guesses, and eventually they siphoned off the top 2% who were doing the best.

And then they put them in a separate group and compared them to everyone else, and found that that group was four times more accurate than anyone else.

And they're saying that this proves that in humans there are a thing called super forecasters.

And these are people who are better than normal humans at foreseeing the future.

Wow.

Wow.

And are they all on Brighton Pier with a crystal ball, charging people £10 to make their fortune?

It's weird.

They all had different jobs.

Like, one of the best ones was a pharmacist.

They come from different walks of life and everything.

So we need to round these people up and take them all to the Met Office.

They should all be the weather forecasters.

If they're definitely better.

Well, God, is that how you would use people who have this incredible?

In my new world order.

red note?

Is it going to be cloudy?

And apparently what these guys are particularly good at is being open-minded, which you can kind of imagine.

It means that

they don't let their worldviews judge their predictions.

And also they change their mind fast and often.

So whenever...

What does the net To like correct their wrong prediction.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it is kind of like so they get something wrong one time, and a normal human might kind of stubbornly stick with the same similar kind of predictions.

But then these people go, well, actually, you know, I've seen that that happens in the past now, so I'm going to change my mind this time.

Oh, okay.

I was thinking more like football matches where they're like, okay, Manchester United is going to win this one.

Liverpool school.

And they're like, do you know what?

I'm actually thinking that maybe.

Or I'm going to go for rock.

No scissors.

We need to put one of those people against the machine.

Start your journey toward the perfect engagement ring with Yadav, family-owned and operated since 1983.

We'll pair you with a dedicated expert for a personalized one-on-one experience.

You'll explore our curated selection of diamonds and gemstones while learning key characteristics to help you make a confident, informed decision.

Choose from our signature styles or opt for a fully custom design crafted around you.

Visit yadavjewelry.com and book your appointment today at our new Union Square showroom and mention podcast for an exclusive discount.

What if Juliet got a second chance at life after Romeo?

And Juliet, the new hit Broadway musical and the most fun you'll have in a theater.

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Created by the Emmy-winning writer from Schitt's Creek and pop music's number one hit maker.

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

My fact this week is that Big Ben is falling over.

We should get out of here.

We're not that close.

No, we're out of reach.

What do you mean?

Okay.

Well, technically, the Elizabeth Tower, not Big Ben, obviously.

Don't write in.

But when they built it, when they built the House of Parliament, they built it straight, obviously.

And then I think as soon as the building settled, it was a little bit leany.

And it's got leanier and leanier as in it's been leaning over more and more away from House of Parliament.

And they've worked out that if it keeps falling over at the rate it is falling over, in about 4,000 years' time, it'll be leaning as much as the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Really?

How many years?

4,000.

So it's not like super urgent.

So they are going to restore it now, aren't they?

There's this big Houses of Parliament restoration going on, which is costing billions.

And they're about to start working on that as well, The Elizabeth Tower.

So, anyone overseas who wants to see it in its pure unscaffolded form, you better get over quick because beginning of January 2017, they're going to start scaffolding it.

Yeah, and it's going to be scaffolded for three years, but it's going to take six months to just put the scaffolding up.

Isn't that nuts?

Yeah, six months.

What, and they're going to push it back the right way?

No, I think they're doing basic restoration.

I don't think they can do anything about that.

I don't think so, no.

But it's causing cracks in the offices next to it because it's basically pulling the wall away.

So, they're going to fill those up

The Big Ben Tower has a prison in it that they keep naughty MPs in.

Does it?

What are you talking about?

They have a prison room.

If an MP breaches codes of conduct, they'll get put in there.

And the last time it was used in 1880 was when Charles Bradlaugh, an atheist, refused to swear allegiance to Queen Victoria on the Bible.

Wow.

And who's kept in the prison room overnight?

And no MPs.

Every hour, every quarter of an hour, it rings.

You're right.

You're right.

You're not going to get much sleep, are you?

That'd be torture.

That's like torture.

It's like how they play Barney.

Guantanamo, yes.

That'll be why MPs behave so well these days is because they're terrified of the noise.

It used to make a different sound, didn't it?

When it was originally built, it chimed differently.

So it was built in May 1859.

No, so it was made, and the thing that crashes into the bell to make the bonging sounds worked for a few weeks and then immediately broke the bell.

And the crack in the bell is still there from where it broke it.

And so they had to realign it, didn't they?

Which for some reason took them three or four years.

and then they made it bang the bell on a different point of it so we'll never hear the tone that a big ben originally made did you know that the big ben chimes have words they have lyrics though

yeah they do it's uh it's half past two it's quarter to nine

it's all through this hour lord be my guide and by thy power no foot shall slide Hang on, but it doesn't say though.

I've never heard those words broadcasting from the haven't performed.

No, yeah, that's true.

Here's another one, play up Pompy.

The Portsmouth fans sing, Play Up Pompey, Pompey, Play Up, like that.

Same tune.

Just play up as in Play Better.

Play Pompy.

Oh, Pompy is a nickname for Portsmouth FC.

Got it.

Did you know that you can hear Big Ben chime before it chimes?

Is that those future predicting people?

No, it's not.

No, absolutely not.

Because that's an easy prediction.

I feel like it's going to chime in about five seconds.

It's not.

No.

So the BBC, for anyone who doesn't know, the BBC broadcasts the bongs live at

six six o'clock every day Yeah, so they have they have a speaker installed inside the tower and that has directly linked to the BBC broadcasting center

so if you have a F an FM radio and you go and stand even really close to Big Ben so like on Westminster Bridge for example and you listen to the FM radio the FM radio signals are so much faster than the sound waves in the air that the sound of the bong will go into the microphone all the way to the BBC and be broadcast all the way to your radio faster than it just coming through the air at you.

So if you were standing on Westminster Bridge and you listened to an FM radio and Big Ben chimed, you would hear it on the radio a split second before you would actually hear it in your other ear.

That's really cool.

It's really cool.

Yeah.

Well done the radio.

It doesn't get enough appreciation of the day of the internet.

That's so impressive.

Do you know on Wikipedia there's a big long list of leaning towers?

So you can just see every leaning tower in the world.

That's good.

There's a nice one in Australia.

This is called the Leaning Tower of Jinjin.

It's purposefully built to be leaning and it's built at the Gravity Discovery Centre and they wanted to make it so that when you went to the Gravity Discovery Center that you could replicate by climbing the top Galileo's experiments on the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Yeah, so you could actually go up and

you drop stuff down a chute.

The idea with Galileo is that he supposedly, although we don't think this happens, dropped two balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa and they were different weights but they landed at the same time and that was proof that things will fall at the same rate, not dependent on the mass.

You know buildings in Amsterdam tilt deliberately as well.

Do they?

And do you know where that is?

No.

So these are buildings in Amsterdam that face the canal.

They're many hundreds of years old.

And the reason they're built at a slight tilt is that they're tilting towards the canal, and that's so that they could winch goods up from the canal to the upper windows.

And it's also so that if it if houses flooded, which they often did, then the first couple of floors might get full of water and you'd need to evacuate your goods really quickly.

And faster than carrying them all upstairs was if you just got them onto a platform outside the window and winched those goods up to a higher level.

And the only way you can do that without breaking the windows on the way up and having it crash into the wall is to have the building lean so that you can pull the goods up directly.

Yeah, because if you go to Amsterdam you see that they a lot of the houses have got winches on the front of them haven't they?

At the very top they got a little winch and the reason was I think this is right, I might be wrong, but I think they came up with a law that the amount of tax you paid was dependent on the front of your house, how wide that was.

And so people wanted really, really thin houses so they paid less tax.

And so they would be thin and long and they would be tall as well.

So that was fine but then they needed to get, if you need to get a sofa up to the top floor, that's going to be really tough because you're going to have a really thin staircase going up there.

And so the way they did it was to winch it all up.

And if you look now in Amsterdam, they have all these winches at the top of the houses.

This is so cool.

I feel like our facts have just married each other, met and married.

They also actually, in Amsterdam, they had to have a law preventing houses from being too tilted in the end because everyone was going, you know, 45 degree angles.

Actually, it's a really thin house, but it's tilted tilted 90 degrees

there's a tilted structure in Ekaterinburg in Russia it's a massive TV tower and it is the tallest abandoned structure in the world oh really they started building it they got it really really high and then the Soviet Union fell and then they were like okay we're not going to do this anymore and it's still there unintentionally leaning uh yeah unintentional it's very slightly leaning and did the soviet union fall because it itself was on

it was leaning too far to the left yeah

uh a friend my friend uh who you all know marina is from uh you katerinburg and this is right near her house and she says that everyone from there absolutely hates it and really wants it to get pulled down as soon as possible right just give it a nudge sounds like yeah

one of the buildings that is on the list of the uh list of leaning towers on wikipedia is this one that is a current story it's a news story the san francisco millennium tower so they're still trying to deal with it it keeps leaning further and further because it's sinking into the ground and it was found out it was about six years ago they started noticing.

It was a lady called Pamela Buttery who was up in her room and she was, it's she was on the 57th floor and she was trying to play golf in her room.

And every time she put the ball down, it just dribbled away from her towards the end of the room.

And she had to go and collect it.

And she's like, what's wrong with my floor?

It is a bit annoying for Pamela Buttery because presumably if she's got tilting floors, she's going to be slipping all over them all the time.

That's true.

But yeah, so then she falls over, she'll fall face down as well.

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

My fact this week is that when aspirin tablets were first introduced, people were unsure how to take them, so one patient ended up strapping them to his head to cure a headache.

Did it work?

We actually have no reports on that.

So, I read this in an article in the Independent from 2005 by a journalist called David Randall, who, and I'd love to know more on it.

So, David, if you're listening, please get in touch.

But this was a drug called Aspro, and this was devised in 1915, and it was called Aspro because the aspirin name was taken by Bayer, but it was the same as aspirin.

So, aspirin is it's like saying jacuzzi or Hoover, they are technically, yeah.

But didn't Bayer lose the copyright to lose the trademark to it because they literally let anyone use it and they had they never sued anyone.

I think they lost it in the Treaty of Versailles.

Yeah, really weird.

Yes, Well, actually, the interesting thing about Germans and aspirin is that its invention is put down to a guy called Felix Hoffmann.

And if you look at Bayer's official history of aspirin, it still says that he invented it.

And actually, it's pretty much widely accepted now since about 1999 that it was, in fact, created and tested by a guy called Arthur Aikengrunn.

And I'm probably pronouncing that wrong.

And he tested it in 1899, and he wrote a paper in 1949 saying that he just told Hoffmann what to do.

Hoffman didn't even know what he was doing.

But Aikengron was Jewish, and so he wasn't ever included in the official narrative.

And Hoffman was this Aryan kind of guy, and it didn't come out until just over 10 years ago.

And still, if you look it up, Hoffman is the person who's mainly credited as inventing it.

I thought it was Hoffman.

Yeah.

I was just thinking by strapping your aspirin to your head, it might work still as a placebo.

Yeah,

that's what I was thinking.

I bet the person did feel better.

Yeah.

Individual tablets or just the whole box.

It doesn't matter.

If you believed it was going to work, you could strap an empty box to your head and it would still work a little bit.

Yeah.

For me to believe it, I'd need the aspirin to be touching my skin.

I think I'd have to take it out of the packaging, yeah.

Okay.

Otherwise, yeah, as a placebo pharmacy, is you just stare at the products behind the counter and just visualise them going into you.

That'd be great.

I've got a magic pharmacy.

All these things work from a distance.

You don't even have to take any of them.

You get the placebo effect, and my business goes immediately out of business because I don't sell anything.

You can charge them to look, and you can charge them more to look at branded aspirin than you charge them to look at unbranded aspirin.

And that's true because branded aspirin is does better, doesn't it, than non-branded aspirin.

Because people believe that it's more somehow more potent because it's got a brand attached to it.

It is insane that literally the same thing in Tesco costs 30p, that also costs £3 or whatever, and people so often buy the £3.

And Tesco even colours it so it looks like the Neurofen packet.

It's a break.

And then it makes its aspirin red so it looks like um branded aspirin packet.

It actually does work.

So you paying extra actually makes it work better.

There was a study by Braithwaite and Cooper in 1981 that showed that that was true.

And I was thinking it's good that they don't make the tablets themselves silver, because imagine you're being attacked by a werewolf.

You accidentally mistaken your aspirin tablets with your silver bullets that you're using to kill it, and then you end up just curing.

That's the problem, isn't it?

But instead, they've made them look like children's sweets.

I can't see the risk with that.

It's not nearly as dangerous as the werewolf situation.

I think we can all agree.

Hey, I was reading in the new QI book, The Factbook, there's a fact in there that I've been thinking about for weeks, weeks which I just think it's so odd and I can't believe that it's true 95% of people on earth have at least one thing wrong with them so that's quite amazing but flip that round that means there are five percent of people on this planet with absolutely nothing wrong with them how is that possible yeah I don't think it can be that is impossible right 5% of people are like, how are you?

Absolutely fine.

It's impossible.

Yeah.

But maybe they're just people who are extremely stoic.

And so when they asked them in the survey, they said, you know, what's wrong with with you?

They're like, fine, I'm fine.

Just their organs hanging out.

Collapse, can't move.

Fine, I'm fine.

But yeah, anyway, so sorry, just to round up, apparently it was the first thing that was, it was the first medicine that was sold en masse in tablet form, and so it wasn't widely accepted, even though I think people have been swallowing things for hundreds of years.

It wasn't widely accepted this would be the way to swallow it.

And like I say, I couldn't find any more information on this poor man who strapped one to his head.

So if anyone knows him, it's descended from him.

He died of a headache immediately afterwards, and so was never heard of again.

Aspirin is called a wonder drug by a lot of people because it's been very recently discovered that it does all these other incredible things.

So, a lot of people over a certain age or with blood clotting issues are told to take an aspirin a day because it stops platelets from clotting.

And a third of all- That sounds like a really crap version of an apple a day keeps the doctor away.

An aspirin a day keeps the platelets from clotting.

Yay.

Does the trick.

But a third of all people who are at risk from cardiac arrest or cardiac incident will not have that cardiac incident if they take an aspirin every day.

Isn't that amazing?

Apparently, if your car is broken down.

It can't fix a car down.

You just strap it to the top of the car.

Apparently,

if you haven't got any jump leads on you and no one is passing by to help you and you happen to have some aspirin on you, if you put the aspirin, two tablets, into the battery itself,

basically the sulfuric acid within the battery will mix with the aspirin and it will kick-start it back into life.

I read this in the Reader's Digest article.

I haven't tested it.

I can't give first editing.

The fact that the dosage is the same for cars and humans.

Take two switches.

Two every four hours will keep your car running.

Drop two aspirin tablets.

Another thing it helps to get running is a collider, like...

Not the Large Hadron Collider, but there is another collider in Illinois.

There were little switches, they put aspirins on.

And the idea is if there was a leak, the water would drop down, it would dissolve the aspirin, and then the switches would be able to switch back and it would turn off automatically.

Oh, so it's kind of like those old resistors or trip switches or something when the metal is supposed to basically destroys the connection if the current's too much.

Yeah, it's like a fuse box kind of thing.

Wow.

We're getting near the end of the year, and obviously, New Year's Eve in America, there's huge traditions of dropping things

in Manhattan, sorry, in New York, Times Square.

It's the what they drop the ball.

There's a place in America called Myerstown in Pennsylvania where you can see a giant aspirin tablet dropped.

Yeah, and that brings us into the new year.

And the reason is because the Bayer healthcare plant is there.

And so it's such a big part of the town and probably employs so many people who live there.

So yeah, they just drop a giant.

Into a giant glass of water?

No, into a giant mouth.

Is it real aspirin?

Like if I went and chipped some off, would that so?

No, no, that would be so cool, though, but no, it's uh it's it's fake.

They do it it's really weird.

There's a list you can go on of things that are dropped at New Year in America and Pennsylvania has so many.

So in certain places you can see a a beaver dropped, a canal boat dropped, indie car dropped.

It's like a theme that each town has on their own.

Wow.

Yeah, but one is the aspirin.

Raw beaver.

It's a stuffed beaver.

It's not a real beaver.

Well, yeah, but still, poor old beaver who got killed and stuffed.

Oh, yeah, yeah, that's true.

And that's in Beavertown in Pennsylvania.

I don't think that's a coincidence.

What if Juliet got a second chance at life after Romeo?

And Juliet, created by the Emmy winning writer from Schitt's Creek, and Pop Music's number one hit maker, playing October 7th through 12th at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts.

What if Juliet got a second chance at life after Romeo?

And Juliet, the new hit Broadway musical and the most fun you'll have in a theater.

I got the INTO!

Created by the Emmy-winning writer from Schitt's Creek and pop music's number one hit maker.

Anne Juliet is exactly what we need right now.

Playing October 7th through 12th at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts.

Tickets now on sale at BroadwaySanjose.com.

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

My fact this week is that the first British plans to put a human on the moon was made by Oliver Cromwell's brother-in-law.

This is so cool.

So this is back in the 1600s.

Yeah, he wouldn't have really had the means to do so, I don't think.

No, he didn't at all.

I mean,

I think you're right.

Yeah.

This is Dr.

John Wilkins.

This is not in any way a nutcase of who just, we happen to have found documents of some crazy machine that was built.

This is a really respected clergyman, philosopher, author, helped found the Royal Society.

He was a really big deal back in the day.

He's quite a famous polymath, I think.

Yeah, he was, yeah.

And he was a big champion of sort of the latest ideas about space.

And

one of the ideas.

What were the latest ideas about space in the 17th century?

Well, so, I mean, I guess Galileo had telescopes trained at the moon, and he was very much...

He wrote two books about the moon and his thoughts about what actually was going on.

He thought it was a solid object.

And he got a lot wrong, but you always do in those, you know, when there's limited science and you're trying to break ground.

Although, to be clear, the moon is a solid object.

That was one of the things he did not get wrong, right?

What?

So how did he try and get to the moon?

Okay, so his idea was that you could build a space chariot, and he was using obviously the technology of his time.

And his theory was that as soon as you got 20 miles up into the air, magnetism of Earth and gravity loses itself.

So that's why you can stay up there.

The reason he thought that is because why do clouds stay in the air?

And he thought as high as they were, that's where you no longer suffered to the pull of Earth's magnetism.

I mean, that's pretty good logic considering the information you had available at the time.

Yeah, yeah.

So he thought if you could just get up to that point, then you'd be able to float off into space and go to the moon and you would adjust to the air and you'd breathe the air of angels.

This is where the kind of religious side comes in.

But it made sense that that's how angels breathed.

They just got used to it.

And then you go to the moon and you would trade for spices and so on with the people who lived on the moon.

We thought there were people that might live on the moon and we could trade with them.

And sorry, this very easy problem of getting the initial 20 miles up into the air, how was he surmounting that?

Well, okay, so

yeah, so the flying chariot.

So it was

meant to use clockwork gears.

It was gunpowder.

The idea was that it was going to be propelled using gunpowder and springs and springs, yeah.

The Acme space chariot.

But he was a very rational, sensible person.

And in this age, that was actually kind of a perfectly reasonable thing to think.

And his greatest interest was making a unifying language for the world, wasn't it?

So he did lots of work on creating what we have now, Esperanto, which obviously we all speak.

He also designed the system of a decimal system, which the metric system was then based on and built off.

His language was quite interesting.

Every time you added a new letter to a word, it would change the meaning, but your meaning would be related to the previous word.

So, the word DE, D, would be an element, but then when you put a B on the end, deb, that would mean fire, and then deba would mean a flame.

So, each one was related to the previous.

And the whole idea of it was you would be able to see a word and knowing the basic building blocks of how his language works, you could work out pretty much what it kind of meant.

So if it began with D, you would know it was in this part of, you know, semantics.

And if it began with X, you would know this.

Or with J, you would know that.

That's clever.

So to a much smaller extent, you can do that with English, and that you know if something is, you know, it's got a diminutive on the front or a kind of like something.

It has both suffixes.

But the core word is usually completely random or comes from a really random source, so you can't deduce it right from the beginning.

Sure, so I suppose if you hear a word that has hydro at the start of it, you know it's going to be something to do with water.

Didn't he also say that eating wouldn't be necessary when we got to space because there's no gravity and the reason we have to eat on earth is that the gravity pulls your food through your body and makes it fall out.

So you have to keep eating more.

So wonderful.

But he was genuinely, I mean, I have to say, when I saw this fact, I thought, wait a minute.

So there are some animals whose mouth and anus are on about the same level, like a dog, for instance, or a cat.

Yeah.

Maybe he tried to train animals not to sit down because as soon as they sit down, that suddenly gravity slides out.

Right, dogs don't poo when they're standing up, do they?

They kind of move their bum down.

Of course, they do.

It all makes sense.

Maybe he was right.

But he didn't like all of this theoretical stuff.

He did, he worked out the distance to the moon to a degree of accuracy of 99.9% using just trigonometry.

That is incredible.

He's so impressive.

And I'm quite surprised that of the you know the British space program that this guy, there's not a big statue of this guy outside.

I mean, we don't really have that much of a space program.

We have one that goes all the way back to the 17th century.

And it kind of ended there.

Yeah, that's true.

We've done pretty much everything.

We have one, we have the

Prospero satellite.

We've got one British-made satellite that was launched with a British-made rocket.

Everything else is basically being we've given something somewhere.

Everything else is basically chariots.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at Egg Shaped, Alex, at Alex Bell underscore, and Shazinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, you can go to our group podcast account, which is at qi podcast, or you can go to our website, no such thingasoffish.com.

We've got all of our previous episodes up there.

And you can also go to our other website, which is no such thingasthenews.com, that has all of our previous TV show episodes, which has just finished.

It's not out anymore.

And if you're missing it, that's where all the episodes are.

Okay, we will be back again next week with another show.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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