127: No Such Thing As 'Carry On Colliding'

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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 Dan Schreiber.

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

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Alex.

My fact this week is that this episode of No Such Things as a Fish is going to the moon.

That's a bold claim, Mr.

Bell.

It's absolutely true.

Yeah, how are we doing that?

Basically, a couple of years ago, I contributed to a Kickstarter campaign for a probe, a UK lander to go and land on the moon around 2024, they hope.

It's called Lunar Mission 1.

And the idea is that they're going to send it to the south pole of the moon, drill down 100 meters and take some rock samples and do some science.

But also it's going to leave a time capsule there.

And in that time capsule, people who've donated to the Kickstarters campaign get a little bit of digital space.

And so I'm going to put this episode in.

So are you doing that because you just want to get this as far away from all things in existence as possible?

Yep.

Also, we got drunk last night and Dan had the idea and I didn't read how to say no.

We got really drunk and I was like, we're definitely doing this.

Alex had all these plans of his family portraits to go up to the moon.

My legacy gone.

It's interesting though, because it's not going up for the other eight years.

Yeah, so minimum, yeah.

About.

I don't like the word about twenty twenty four either.

I've heard that before in big projects.

But it's it's an interesting Kickstarter because if they can pull this off, it actually just completely alters how we can fund universal travel, basically.

I mean, we could, who knows, maybe we'll be able to kickstart something to Mars as well.

Yeah, let's just try and get this podcast further and further away from planet Earth.

Rescue human society.

Can I ask, because they're drilling down and it's 150 degrees Celsius, I think, down there.

Is it going to be protected in some capsule?

I don't know, I guess so.

They haven't yet told us how much space they have or anything like that, so it's still pretty vague, all the plans.

God, so we might have to just record a five-minute podcast or something.

We don't know how many megabytes we're going to have.

Just send the Squarespace out.

Do you know the first thing off the internet that was sent to space?

Something off eBay.

So close, but even lamer,

it was a bunch of Craigslist adverts.

Really?

Yeah, so it was in 2005 and Craigslist, the website, which I'm not sure is any longer in action.

Oh, it is, yeah.

James is a frequent user.

It sent up about 138,000 ads, I think, Craigslist ads.

And you could just tick a little box that said, please beam this into space, and they beam them into space.

This was sort of digital stuff encoded onto light.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was sending the data out there.

So I was looking this up and I found the reference on the Craigslist page to it after it happened saying that they really wanted to remind people that you could not cancel Craigslist ads that were beamed into space or retrieve them.

So sorry guys.

So actually there are just going to be loads of pissed off aliens eventually coming going, you said you had a sofa.

And I was saying, no, sorry, I sold that.

That's actually what Independence Day was, the fury of when they realized the sofa had now been sold.

They just demolished Earth.

I don't suppose light's the best thing to get your message into space, though, is it?

They think radio waves is the best.

I think it was said by radio waves, was it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So 2024, obviously quite a while away for stuff for us to make it to the moon.

And I thought, is that the closest that we're sending probes now?

But actually, there's a lot of probes that seem to be set to go.

The Google Lunar XPRIZE has been set up.

And the idea is that they want someone to not only land on the moon, but travel 500 meters on the moon.

Because anyone could crash a thing into the moon.

The idea is can you land something on the moon and make it functional and still move?

So they've set up this idea of a prize and the prize is $30 million.

What's interesting though is that teams have now realized that it's going to cost them way too much to get there on their own.

So a lot of them are pairing up now and sending all of the vehicles in one trip, which means they're going to land at the same time and there's going to be a moon race to see which is the first one to travel 500 meters.

It's going to be like a hunger game, and as soon as they land, it's just going to be absolutely all the robots are going to turn on each other.

Yeah, so it's going to be more like robot wars.

It will be like robot was on the moon.

I was reading of things that are already on the moon.

I think we might have discussed a few of them before, but we as human beings have left 187,400 kilograms of material on the moon, and that's almost exactly the same weight as a blue whale.

Really?

That is actually much less than I would have thought.

Yeah, the largest blue whale that we've ever found was 176,000, but scientists think we'll find some that are over 180,000.

So basically, what we could have done is just taken one blue whale off the earth, put it on the moon, and it would have had the same effect.

We've achieved exactly the same.

The moon is officially metric and not imperial.

Just because you say kilograms, it reminded me.

Who decided that?

NASA decided, I think, and then everyone else had to agree to it.

But then, given that there's only like two countries in the world that are still Imperial, and I think it's America or something like Liberia or something,

it would have been pretty weird to go with theirs.

Although maybe not, because it's NASA.

You never know.

Yeah, the aliens might land again and go, Why are these guys using this metric system?

The Imperial makes much more sense.

Well, the thing is, like, there's no reason why the aliens would use anything like metric.

In fact, they wouldn't, because that's metric is based on the size of the Earth, or the meter is.

Yeah.

So really, you want to do it on, like, the width of a hydrogen atom or something like that.

Something that will be universal, yeah.

They might be measuring it, like, according to the diameter of their hands, which are the size of elephants or something.

That's the interesting species of alien.

You know, I didn't know about the fallen astronaut sculpture on the moon, and that it's kind of a sad story.

So, this is one of the things that we've left behind on the moon: this sculpture called the fallen astronaut.

And it was agreed that that would be put on the moon by this artist called Paul van Huydonk.

So, he agreed with David Scott, who was on the 1971 Apollo mission, that he would design a sculpture that David Scott says was supposed to represent all astronauts who had fallen up until that point.

So, any astronauts who had died trying to get to space or being in space.

And Scott smuggled it into his pocket of his spacesuit.

So NASA didn't know, nobody knew it was there.

And Scott went up to the moon and he got off the spacecraft and one of his colleague astronauts distracted the people down at mission control apparently with banal talk while he performed some kind of little funeral ceremony.

That's the worst kind of talk to distract someone.

You're right.

Maybe he just didn't have scintillating talk in him.

But anyway, he put this thing on the moon, gave a little funeral ceremony for it,

and he lay it down and then came back down, and it was announced that this is an hour on the moon.

And this argument's ensued ever since between the artist and NASA, because the artist says, A, it was meant to be standing upright and it's not.

B, it doesn't represent fallen astronauts, it represents just humanity.

And C, he says he never agreed that he wouldn't make it a commercial thing, so he tried to sell a whole bunch of them on Earth, and NASA were like, no, because I think you're not allowed to commercialize stuff that you've taken to the moon.

So, yeah, it's kind of sad.

This little sculpture on the moon is supposed to represent humanity and how great we are, is now kind of a testament to how we can't really agree on anything.

I think it's weird how they always seem to smuggle stuff into space when you can't even get toothpaste onto an aeroplane.

Do I not have that bit where you have to empty your keys into the X-ray moon boots off?

I also thought the weirdest thing that was left on the moon was nail clippers because they only went out there for a couple of weeks and they were trying to keep the weight down to a minimum, and yet they took nail clippers with them.

Such a great point.

Maybe it's like how you know your nails go a bit faster in summer.

Maybe in space your nails just grow at 12 miles an hour.

Actually, it's kilometers per hour.

Sorry.

I was looking into what Neil Armstrong took back from the moon, and this is really interesting.

This wasn't discovered until 2012, until after Neil Armstrong died.

His wife was going through his cupboard, just like in their house, and there was a white bag in there.

She opened it up, and it had all this stuff from the moon landing, including the camera that filmed the famous

camera.

lighting rig.

Yeah, the camera that filmed him saying the famous words that we all saw, that was in the bag and all these other instruments.

And so no one knew that he had this bag.

Usually you would leave that bag or any of the equipment that was in it on the moon as part of the rubbish, but he brought it back.

He just didn't tell anyone.

They went through quarantine, so you think they'd have to show everything.

Yeah, well.

It sounds like everyone was sneaking, so it sounds like the security is not that tight.

And then he's such a filth pig that he didn't clean his house for 50 years.

Didn't even go through his covers.

I was reading a list of all the languages, all the greetings that we sent out into space on the Voyager Golden Record.

So, you know, that thing that was Carl Sagan's brainchild.

We sent this thing up into space, which has 55 different greetings in 55 different languages on it.

And most people said hello or hi, guys, hello to space.

But the Turkish one began with dear Turkish-speaking friends.

Especially since Turkish is a language that was created within the last hundred years as well.

So they're only assuming space is caught on.

There's a greeting in Amoy, which is a Chinese dialect, which says, friends of space, how are you all?

Have you eaten yet?

Come visit us if you have time.

That is fantastic.

They're offering themselves up as dishes.

Huge error.

And then the last one is just, I think this person got confused because one person would receive the recording device to record it on.

So the Swedish greeting is, greetings from a computer programmer in the little university town of Ithaca on the planet Earth, who I clearly didn't quite understand he was supposed to be speaking for his piece.

Is there some whale song on there or something?

There is, yeah.

One thing that's recently gone into space is the new football kit of Reading FC.

Okay.

Wow.

Who did a kit launch

a few weeks ago and they sent their home and away strips up to 128,000 feet, four times the cruising altitude of a passenger jet and then they returned to Earth at a speed of 211 miles per hour.

And the news article I read said, Reading will be hoping the team can rise as high in the table as their shirts can in altitude before presumably plummeting down the table at 200 miles an hour.

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

My fact this week is that geologists have made an earthquake by dropping something heavy from somewhere high.

Is it a Redding football kit?

Are they made of iron?

No wonder they're so bad.

No, so what I like about this is I think if you were five years old and you wondered, how am I going to make an earthquake, you just pick up a heavy object and drop it.

And this seems to be what they've done.

And this is these geologists, Sebastian Gueno and Stéphane Broulet, who are trying to simulate earthquakes to work out the best ways to minimise damage from them.

And there was just one reference I read in a PBS article to the fact that in one test they dropped a mass of 21 tons from a height of 164 feet to simulate an earthquake.

And the shaking registered between two and three on the Richter scale.

And they did it another way, which sounded like a more sensible way, maybe, by putting a vibrating probe thing into the ground and then vibrating it underground.

And that sent seismic waves out, which is also a way to measure it.

But what they're looking into is really interesting, which is that if you drill holes in the ground, not particularly deep holes, that dissipates the waves that come from earthquakes.

So, what they did was they, this was in 2012, they drilled these boreholes into the ground just a few feet, and then they generated this earthquake nearby.

And the waves that they measured in the second row of boreholes, so just 11 feet away from where they'd created the earthquake, the earthquake had been stopped, and usually it would travel 160 feet.

So, these holes just deflect the waves and cause them to go elsewhere.

The problem is that they deflect them in a different direction.

So, behind the boreholes, suddenly, was twice as much vibrations as in front of it.

So, it's not a good idea for in a city, if you were doing it to protect one building, you'd do it at the expense of another one.

It sounds a bit like, do you remember we talked about the volcanoes where they dug ditches to move the volcanic lava away from a city into another city?

Oh, yes, yeah.

It's exactly like that.

It's like screwing over your neighbor by diverting the earthquake towards them.

Yeah.

So, Alex's fact was about Kickstarter doing this project to get us to the moon, and I saw this amazing crowdfunding thing for someone's invention, which is an earthquake-proof bed.

Have you guys seen this?

Oh, yes, it's almost unbelievable.

It's this huge metallic contraption, and the idea is that as soon as your building or your house is in the middle of an earthquake, the bed recognizes it's an earthquake and it literally slams down in the middle, so you disappear into the middle of the bed.

A huge lid comes on top of you, and you're just stuck in this bunker of your own bed.

How do they make sure that the bed can tell the difference between an earthquake and an extremely rigorous set?

Did the earth move for you?

Well it didn't, but the bed thought it did.

Inside it has bottles of water, it's got oxygen tanks, it's got anything that you would need to survive.

But how does it protect you?

Because surely if you're in a house that's crumbling down around you and you want to escape it and now you're locked in a bed.

So it's the idea being that this is so strong,

that house would just crumble around it, but not affect the box itself.

So it would give you time to be rescued, I guess.

Yeah, and it sends pulses out that firefighters and anyone who's digging up the rubble can sense where you are because there's like a message, an SOS message going out.

Yeah, it looks nuts.

There's an app you can get that I read about which is called MyShake where you have it in your pocket and it can detect earthquakes and seismic activity and then do real-time updates so people can see when there's been earthquakes.

Does it like vibrate?

You never notice it.

Did you know you can get negative earthquakes technically?

Because when the Richter scale was invented, it's a logarithmic scale.

So the smallest detectable amount of earthquaking was one when they made the Richter scale.

And then it kind of goes up from there.

But since then, our technology has got better, so we're able to detect even smaller earthquakes than that.

So an earthquake that registers minus one on the Richter scale is a hundredth the strength of an earthquake that they originally measured.

Yeah, it's something like a feather landing on a table or something.

I remember I read an XKCD comic about it.

Oh, yeah.

Minus 1,000 on the Richter scale would be something like an atom hitting another atom or something.

You'd be really annoyed if your earthquake sensing device went off every time it sensed a minus one earthquake.

How do I change the settings on this thing?

Pliny described how in ancient Greece they used to mitigate earthquake damage by putting sheepskin in the foundations of their buildings.

So they'd bury them, put a layer of sheepskin, and the idea was that it would stop bits of earth sliding over each other.

And we sort of employ vaguely similar technologies today if we put springs and stuff in the foundations of buildings.

Aren't they trying to put coconuts now?

What?

They're trying to harness coconut technology.

Because coconuts are so far advanced than we are.

It's about time we use some of their technology.

Oh, yeah, coconuts, apparently, they're very good at absorbing certain things, and they're trying to work out the makeup of the coconut that allows for it to absorb so well that they can then apply to technology.

Should we move on soon?

One quite interesting thing about making earthquakes.

The father of seismology is a guy called Robert Mallet, and he was from Ireland.

But But there aren't any earthquakes in Ireland.

The highest one ever recorded was two on the Richter scale.

But what he did was he set explosions up on the beach and measured the explosions.

So using dynamites and stuff like that.

That's annoying for those on beach holidays.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that until 1970, you could still buy men-only flights in America.

This is extraordinary.

It makes no sense.

Well, it's sort of so explain the logic and then we'll pick it up.

So this was United Airlines, and for about two decades until 1970,

you could buy these flights between New York and Chicago or between LA and San Francisco that were for men only.

And the idea was, I think, they were for businessmen, and you were going to have no women and no children on board.

And according to the advert which I saw online, it said you will enjoy the informal club-like atmosphere, smoke your pipe or cigar if you wish, and make yourself comfortable using the pair of slippers provided.

Wow.

I mean, obviously, it's ridiculous, but I think they wanted to replicate the idea of a gentleman's only club, for instance, which still existed then and still exists now.

Partner flight attendants were female.

Yes.

They were, yeah.

Yeah, so famously, stewardesses have had very strict appearance rules that they have to abide abide by in the past.

So I think the very first stewardesses had to weigh less than eight stone two, which is microscopic.

And they had to be under 25 and less than 5'4, which is extremely short.

Wow.

So I was reading about the first air stewardess ever, Ellen Church, so this was for Boeing Air Transport.

She saw an advert for cabin boys.

They were trying to get people more confident about air flight.

And she persuaded Boeing Air Transport to give her the job on the basis that why don't you put women on and then people will see that if women can do it then men can definitely do it.

And she was just to say she she was actually a pilot.

She went and said I'm a pilot, I can fly this plane.

They were like, no, we don't believe you're going to fly a plane.

She's like, okay, there's only 4,000 female pilots around the world out of 130,000 for airlines.

Wow.

That's nuts.

But I was looking at some of the things he had to do, and they had to carry a spanner and a screwdriver in their pockets so that they could fix the wicker chairs that the passengers sat in to the floor of the aircraft, because apparently that was not the thing that was already done for them.

And one of the other jobs was that if a plane ever had to make an emergency landing in like a field due to bad weather, they were responsible for knocking down the fences so that it could take back off again

because these are sort of in the early days of commercial flights, so it was mainly male planes.

I mean, postage, oh, yeah, because that was another justification for the small size they asked women to be.

It said we need to fit as much male on board as possible.

As so, if you weigh nine stone, then you can't fit that extra part.

As much male as possible, and then as little female as possible.

The first female commercial airline captain in Britain was called Yvonne Sintes.

She was a pilot for the UK-based airline Dan Air

from 1975 until her retirement in 1980.

Well, good for you, Dan.

This is great.

Unfortunately, things went downhill for Danair, and they were sold to British Airways in 1992 for £1.

Oh.

There's an airline that I found that I really like.

I hope it's still going, but it was launched in 2008, and it was the world's first nude airline.

So it was for nudists.

Bonus, very quick to go through security.

Yes.

I I thought you were saying bonus.

Very quick to go through security.

So it was a very specific route that they were taking them on, which was from a German city, Erfurt, and they were going to a Baltic Sea resort.

The thing was, though, is that you can't arrive at the airport naked.

So what they would do is they would come with their clothes and they would get on the plane and then all take their clothes off when they were on the plane.

And then when they landed, all had to put their clothes back on to get off the plane.

Imagine if you're the one person who's accidentally put stickers on that, and you get on that plane, it takes off, and you look around like, What's happening?

Oh my god.

My favourite airline I found is North Korea's airline, Air Koya.

Have you seen these guys?

They're the world's only airline that Skytracks has rated one star, so they're their worst airline.

I was looking at some of the complaints that people have posted on,

including that the in-flight entertainment for the two-hour flight was basically North Korean propaganda, that the seats tilted forwards rather than backwards, the

and then during the flight, both pilots came around to say hello, presumably leaving the aircraft on autopilot

just on in-flight entertainment in the 1950s when it was a rare and exciting thing to be flying.

Well, first of all, it was so exotic that people would wear evening dress onto a flight.

So

you'd go in.

And that's just getting onto the flight and then you'd take it off.

And second of all, you'd automatically be given a postcard when you boarded by the stewardesses.

And that was so the idea was that during the flight, you'd write a postcard to your friends back home talking about the flight, because

that's what they want to hear about.

There's new services that are happening now.

KLM, the Royal Dutch Airlines, they now do a thing.

Do you know when you're checking in and you can select the seats that you want?

They're now attaching Facebook profiles to the seats.

So you can actually decide who you'd like to sit next to.

So there's the creepy element that you might sit yourself next to me.

Yeah, and I can't think of any other element here.

So the other

weirdly, the other element for they say, the other element for a lot of people is they don't want to be near kids.

And so, you look to where families are sitting and you can sit yourself as far away.

Wait, and is that

first come, first serve kind of thing?

So, because surely everyone would say, I want to be near that one really attractive person, and no one wants to sit next to the really smelly-looking guy.

The smelly-looking guy from his Facebook profile.

He's got little wavy lines above his Facebook profile.

There's green smoke coming up out of his

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

My fact is that the discovery of the Higgs boson was announced in Comic Sans.

This is the big

multi-billion dollar machine that is looking for something to unify science with a missing god particle that was found, and they chose Comic Sans,

the font, to announce it in.

Why not?

And why not?

It's yeah, really good point.

What was amazing was if you were online at the time when the Higgs boson was announced, you probably remember this story because it caused such a huge commotion.

And everyone was on Twitter and all social media making all these angry points about it, including a guy called Vincent Connar, who was saying this is ridiculous that they use Comic Sans.

Vincent Connar invented Comic Sans.

His argument that he designed it only for children and well it was designed for comic books, wasn't it?

Well it was inspired by comic books.

It was inspired by The Watchman, weirdly.

And

Dark Knight Returns, two seminal comic books that couldn't be further away from the kind of integrity that Comic Sangs brings to the table.

But I'm totally on his side because he did, he invented it.

Microsoft commissioned him to design a very friendly, approachable font for a very specific program for kids and people who aren't really good at computers.

It's actually not a bad font to use for that, but it's just very misused all around the world.

And so this guy gets a lot of hate for inventing a font that's actually, people use it in the wrong places.

I think it's fine.

Yeah.

I don't really get the big deal about it.

Neither do I.

I think it's great.

But so it's sort of for children.

It's just supposed to be a friendly, non-aggressive, non-intimidating font.

So you can...

Oh, and then all of the aggression and aggro that this guy's got from it.

Ironically, ironic.

Yeah.

I mean, there's even, there's a site called bancomicsans.com.

It's run by a couple who met.

over their hatred of Comic Sans.

They got married, literally, they say that's what brought them together, and they started this thing.

And I've seen a documentary between Vincent Kunner talking about hearing about these people, and these people just discussing how much they hate it.

And it's really funny because he makes this point where he says, I'm so glad that my font brought them together because now they're together for the rest of their lives.

They're kind of there going, Don't change the subject.

Maybe they did it to make the discovery try to appear simpler to understand than it was.

If this is the purpose of Comic Sans, perhaps it was to convince us that it was actually easier to understand the Higgs boson particle.

I think literally that is why they picked it, in all honesty.

Yeah, I think they wanted to match the complexity of what they were doing with a friendly font that said, This is is not meant to be scaring you

that's what it's proper math I see

bombs have personalities James

do not have personalities you are forcing a personality onto these things they're just bits of code

do you know that the Higgs post on on the subject of how complex it is to comprehend the UK science minister in 1993 ran a competition to see who could provide the best explanation to the British government of what the hell it was the guy who won or one of the people who won was a physicist called David Miller he described it by saying an anonymous person could move through a crowd unhindered, but if the Prime Minister moved through a crowd, he or she would attract a lot of attention.

So party workers would clump around that person and slow them down and give them this metaphorical mass.

And that's the equivalent of the Higgs boson.

Ah, that's a very good explanation.

I remember ages ago going out for a drink with a couple of scientists here, and they were saying that basically the reason that scientists were so wanting to say, yes, let's find the Higgs boson, is then we'd be able to build the LHC.

And what that meant was, effectively, was they didn't know what they were looking for, but they said it would be the equivalent of just going out fishing and throwing your rod out into the lake or the ocean.

So the Higgs boson was the excuse, but actually, they just wanted to go fishing.

Right, yeah.

Well, the Higgs boson, I think I'm right in saying that it's been a bit of a disappointment because it kind of just does what everyone expected it to do.

This is confusing.

This is what Stephen Hawking said, wasn't it?

He said it was disappointing because of that.

And I was like, surely you're happy, guys.

Yeah, you are happy, but if it had done something really weird, then suddenly it opens up whole new bits of science and science becomes really exciting.

But if it just fits perfectly, you know, it's like doing a jigsaw and you've got one more piece in and it goes in and you're finished.

Or if the last one doesn't go in right, then maybe you've got some other stuff wrong and never.

You've got to tear it apart and you try it again.

Maybe if they'd announced it in a more exciting font like Wingdings or something.

Just on fonts having personalities.

They do not have personalities.

There was a study that suggested that you're more likely to believe that a statement is true if it's written in a sensible, weighty font and like Basqueville, for example.

That's a very trustworthy font.

Whereas Comic Sans, you're not likely to believe it's true.

The people who did bancomicsans.com, they showed examples of there's a lawyer firm in America that has their name written in Comic Sans outside, and then they're going, you're not going to trust that lawyer, the lawyer who writes in Comic Sans.

And they said, if you see something that says wet paint and it's written in Comic Sans, you're going to touch that wall.

And then I thought, okay, you're losing your argument.

This is getting a bit desperate.

There was a Dutch war memorial that had something engraved on it in Comic Sans, which is really inappropriate as well.

I was looking a bit more into CERN, just the history of CERN, and there's a few famous things that I think a lot of people know.

For example, the first image that was ever put on the internet was of a band that worked at CERN.

The Cernets.

Yeah, the Cernets.

So I just looked into them a tiny bit, and they're actually, I think more people should listen to them and check it out, because it's genuinely, like, it's really good lyrics and really

stuff.

There's a song called Collider, and this song is about the frustration that Michelle de Gennaro had with the fact that her boyfriend was always going away and working on the LHC and not spending enough time with her because they were all so busy doing what they're doing.

So she wrote Collider and the lyrics are: I gave you a golden ring to show you my love.

You went to stick it in a printed circuit to fix a voltage leak in your collector.

You plug my feelings into your detector.

You never spend your nights with me.

You don't go out with other girls either.

You only love your collider.

Your collider.

Those are really good lyrics.

Well, are they, though?

Yeah.

The thing is, I'm not sure many people can really relate to those lyrics.

My boyfriend's obsessed with his Kaleido.

It's just being a workaholic.

A lot of people complain about their partners being workaholics.

So, what you're saying is this is basically Rihanna's work, work, work.

Exactly, and I think they should sue because there's a lot of plagiarism going on here.

You know, Sun, do you know what it stands for?

I can't believe I didn't know this.

I'm guessing you guys all do.

It's French, but I can't remember.

So it's French.

It stands for nothing now.

So it was the Conseil Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire.

So the Council for European Nuclear Research.

But the name of that was changed to the Organisation of Nuclear Research, so it should have been OERN.

And this was many, many years ago.

And they just thought OUERN sounds a bit rubbish, so let's just call it SUN.

OOEN sounds like it could be like a carry-on

carry-on colliding or something.

I think it should be called UN.

We got anything before we move on, guys?

Yeah, I just got more thing on fonts.

I was just looking up kind of weird fonts, and if you go to dotsies.org, it's a font, but they're trying to reinvent what the alphabet is.

So every letter of the alphabet, this person who designed it argues, is very inefficient because it takes up so much space.

So what he's done is basically like a couple of pixels for each letter.

And it's basically like braille, but for the eyes.

If you go to the website, you can read a whole paragraph and it starts off in normal text.

And then the letters get more and more distorted until you're reading something that is actually completely legible if you look at it.

And it's just a weird, it's just it looks a bit like sort of very condensed square braille, and then you can kind of read it.

It takes a while to start.

That's amazing.

What sort of thing is the slight shape of words?

Yeah, the words they start are completely normal words and then they're sort of very distorted.

And you sort of train your brain over.

That's very clever.

What are we going to do with all that amazing extra space that we're going to have at the end of each book?

It's just going to be 30 pages.

Actually, just say that.

The other thing I found about space in books is that all of the Harry Potter books were printed with a a size 12 font, but the Order of the Phoenix was printed 0.5 smaller.

Everyone complains that The Order of the Phoenix is so much longer as a book.

That's an amazing

bit of information.

That's going to the moon now, Alex.

That's what we're telling the universe.

They really are.

They're turning back.

They're turning back, going back where they came from.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening to this special Made for the Moon episode.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said, you can't.

We all died in 2023 in a tragic explosion at the QI office.

We're still in the bed somewhere.

So please locate James or tweet him on James.

At eggshapes.

Or you could tweet me on at Schreiberland, Alex at AlexBo underscore.

And Shazinski.

You can email podcast podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to at qi podcast, which is our group account, or go to our website, no such thingasafish.com, where all of our previous episodes are waiting to be listened to.

We'll see you again next week.

Goodbye.

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