101: No Such Thing As A Giant Robot Michael Jackson

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Speaker 3 Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast. This week coming to you from the Birmingham Mac.
My name is Dan Shriver, and please welcome to the stage.

Speaker 3 It's the three regular elves, Andy Murray, Anna Chaczynski, and James Harkin.

Speaker 3 Woo!

Speaker 3 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 Harkin.

Speaker 4 Okay, my fact this week is that in 2005, there were plans to make a 50-foot-tall robot Michael Jackson that would roam around the Nevada desert.

Speaker 3 How advanced were these plans?

Speaker 4 They were pretty advanced.

Speaker 4 Michael Jackson was going to do a residency in Vegas, and they wanted to advertise it, and this was their big idea. They were going to do a massive robot.
He was going to wander around the desert.

Speaker 4 He was going to fire lasers out of his eyes.

Speaker 4 And the idea is, as you were flying into Vegas airport, the first thing you see when you came into Vegas was a massive Michael Jackson.

Speaker 3 Well, this was a couple of months after he had been acquitted on charges of child molestation. And for some reason, raising money was a problem for this project.

Speaker 5 I think then they scaled down a bit, didn't they? And they decided to make a Michael Jackson-themed hotel and casino in Vegas, which had a smaller robot at the door.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 5 And that would also fire lasers from a huge Michael Jackson face that was going to be painted on the huge hotel. Yeah.
So

Speaker 3 the hotel didn't happen either?

Speaker 4 No, no, none of this happened. But I mean, they always have these big plans in Vegas, don't they, of what they're going to do? And this one didn't quite work out.

Speaker 4 I read one thing that they were going to do, which was make a life-size Starship Enterprise that was going to be in Vegas and that got quite far down the line that they were going to do this but they never did in the end.

Speaker 3 Is that Star Trek? Yes, yes.

Speaker 3 Cool. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 I really like the idea of turning certain celebrities into robots. I think it's quite nice.

Speaker 3 No, sorry, not like the existing living ones,

Speaker 3 into a cyborg. Like for example, Philip K.
Dick, they actually made a robot of Philip K. Dick, and they left his head on a plane accidentally, and it became a huge story of where's Philip K.

Speaker 3 Dick's head?

Speaker 3 So the robot head. Yeah, it was a robot head.

Speaker 3 But so, yeah, so they did it with Philip K. Dick.

Speaker 3 I wish they did it with Michael Jackson.

Speaker 3 Sorry, what was the purpose of the Philip K. Dick one?

Speaker 4 I'm thinking it was just so that they could have the headline, Dick head missing.

Speaker 3 I think you're right.

Speaker 3 It was obviously the connection that he has with

Speaker 3 electronic sheep.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Do robots dream of electron sheep.

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly. So it was he was just such a founder of the idea.
So they were trying to do AI and they created a Philip K. Dick robot but lost his head.

Speaker 3 I was reading about robots and walking robots and why it's so hard to make walking robots. So the distance record for a walking robot is 54 miles, which is amazing.
It's longer than I can walk. Wow.

Speaker 3 But it was a very... set path.
So it was around a flat course in an indoor arena.

Speaker 3 And it then ran out of battery power and it stopped.

Speaker 3 And the article I read about it said: unconscious and immobile, Xing Ji earned a Guinness World Record, and it has a little moustache painted on the front.

Speaker 3 But the thing is, it's not very useful because to walk on rough terrain is much, much harder. I mean, almost impossible.

Speaker 4 And it just walked around in circles.

Speaker 3 Exactly. And as the article says, the robot is not really designed for real-world applications, as there are few jobs that require a robot to walk a smooth circular path until it collapses.

Speaker 3 I read an exciting bit of robot news yesterday as well, which is that there is a robot currently writing new episodes of the sitcom Friends.

Speaker 3 How can they tell?

Speaker 3 So it's interesting.

Speaker 3 It's a guy called Andy Heard, and he's been feeding all the scripts of Friends into a machine, and it's been generating what effectively is just really weird fan fiction of Friends, but doing full scripts.

Speaker 3 And, you know, it doesn't make total sense. They've put a few extracts online.
One is, this is from Chandler. So brackets, first off, Chandler, Bracketts, in a muffin.

Speaker 3 Bracketts runs to the girls to cry, and then the dialogue: Can I get some presents?

Speaker 3 So, that's where that's at at the moment.

Speaker 3 That sounds absolutely fantastic. They're doing a reunion of friends.
If they should take one of these scriptures,

Speaker 5 that sounds better than actual friends, and I'm a huge fan of actual friends.

Speaker 3 That sounds incredible, doesn't it?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I read quite a cool headline about robots, and that is USA challenges Japan to a giant robot battle.

Speaker 3 Wow, that sounds cool, doesn't it? Where can we get tickets?

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 I don't really know, but there's a company called Megabot USA that raised $1.8 million through Kickstarter to make a massive robot.

Speaker 4 And apparently, there's one other company in the world that makes massive robots, and they're from Japan. And they've challenged each other to a big fight, and it's going to happen sometime this year.

Speaker 4 Each robot suit will be piloted by a team, and both are laden with guns that can shoot paint-filled cannonballs.

Speaker 5 I imagine Japan are going to absolutely smash that. Every impressive robot advance you hear about comes from Japan, doesn't it?

Speaker 3 Yeah, probably.

Speaker 5 There's one which comes from Harvard University, which is robo-bees,

Speaker 5 which are quite cool. So these robot bees, they can swim and fly.
Swim like a puffin, apparently.

Speaker 3 I don't know why you wouldn't make them swim like a fish.

Speaker 3 What do they fly like?

Speaker 3 That was Muhammad Ali's rejected slogan, wasn't it?

Speaker 3 Swim like a puffin, fly like a cow.

Speaker 5 They fly like a bee. But they can be used to pollinate crops in future, they think, and for various reasons.

Speaker 5 But, yeah, autonomously pollinate crops that are struggling to be pollinated naturally for search and rescue operations, military surveillance, traffic monitoring.

Speaker 5 We'll have little robo-bees buzzing above our cars.

Speaker 3 It's quite cool. Yeah, that's very amazing.

Speaker 3 Can I bring up a couple of Michael Jackson facts? Yeah. So when Michael Jackson died, I read this massive biography of him.
And

Speaker 3 they're such an interesting family.

Speaker 3 Like when the Jackson 5 got big and then the subsequent solo careers, Joe Jackson, the dad, started releasing his own products, thinking I can ride this wave of celebrity.

Speaker 3 He released a competitor to Coca-Cola. He want to take these guys on, releasing Joe Cola.
But this is a thing that I didn't know about him, which is the family are Jehovah's Witnesses.

Speaker 3 At least they were back in the day. And the mum didn't want Michael Jackson and the family to lose their connection with the Jehovah's Witnesses, despite being famous.

Speaker 3 So even at the height of his fame, when they were doing Blame It on the Boogie and stuff, Michael Jackson still had to go door-to-door undercover as a Jehovah's Witness to tell people.

Speaker 3 And everyone who they've interviewed about it said, Well, it was blatantly Michael Jackson at the door. He had just like a fake mustache.
And he was like, Oh, can I talk to you about it?

Speaker 3 And they were like, It's Michael Jackson. Yeah, of course he can.

Speaker 3 Wait, wasn't he five when they were doing Blame It on the Boogie stuff? No, he was an astache. No, he was like a teenager.

Speaker 3 Who is it? Well, I think it's Michael Jackson, but he's got a mustache on.

Speaker 3 So he used to go for hours, and they would just be like, of course you can talk to us about it.

Speaker 3 And he would sit in their house and he'd be stuck there and he would be probably the only Jehovah's Witness in history going, how am I going to get out of this house?

Speaker 3 I like the message, but maybe could you sing a few bars of it?

Speaker 5 Okay, so he recycled that disguise, I think. Because so his two security guards, who are security guards for the last few years of his life, have written a book.

Speaker 5 And they say that whenever they had to go shopping, he would sneak out the back in disguise. So we all might have seen Michael Jackson, but we wouldn't know.

Speaker 5 And once once in 1989, he went shopping in disguise. He was wearing a false moustache, but also a red baseball cap and an Afro wig.
And he was arrested because he looked like a shoplifter.

Speaker 5 One of the phrases in the news article at the time I liked from this, just because I had never heard it before, was one of the security guards who arrested him, and then he started saying, This guy who looked like a crazy man said, I'm Michael Jackson.

Speaker 5 And so the security guard said, my first thought was this guy had gotten off the elevator between floors.

Speaker 5 And I googled that phrase and it's not a phrase.

Speaker 3 But I love it.

Speaker 3 That's amazing.

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Speaker 3 We're going to have to move on to our second fact, so it's time for fact number two, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

Speaker 3 My fact is that in the 16th century, people disliked hedgehogs because it was believed that they sucked cows' udders.

Speaker 3 This is a genuine myth, if you like, about hedgehogs. So I looked into it.
I found loads of books, 19th century, 18th century, all saying, and so the later ones are debunking it.

Speaker 3 So there's one from 1862 which says that the hedgehog sucks the milk from cows is a vulgar error. It is structurally impossible for the hedgehog to drain the udder of the cow.

Speaker 3 Are hedgehogs famous for standing on their back legs? No.

Speaker 3 But cows lie down at night. You're thinking of people like that.

Speaker 3 You are thinking of people. Hedgehogs are lactose intolerant, aren't they? Are they? So

Speaker 3 they're lactose intolerant.

Speaker 5 Yes, stop giving them milk, everyone. Yeah.
Well, like a lot of cats are lactose intolerant, but I think almost all the hedgehogs are lactose intolerant, so they get really sick when they're...

Speaker 3 Oh, I read it gives them diarrhea. And then they come back and have more milk because they've had diarrhea.

Speaker 5 Because they like that so much.

Speaker 3 No,

Speaker 3 they're dehydrated, is why they come back for more of it. So people think they like it.
So hedgehogs were originally called urchins.

Speaker 3 And that's where sea urchin comes from. Because it looks like a hedgehog of the ocean.

Speaker 5 Yep, urchins are still called sea hedgehogs in Dutch.

Speaker 3 Urchins as in Victorian Cockney youths. Yes.

Speaker 3 Just a pack of sea hedgehogs out there.

Speaker 4 I can tell you something else that people used to think about hedgehogs. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4 So Pliny, who's one of our favourite guys, Pliny the Elder, he wrote that hedgehogs could climb trees, knock down apples, and then roll on the apples, put them on their spikes, and then run away stealing the apples.

Speaker 4 It's good though, isn't it?

Speaker 3 They can't do that.

Speaker 3 Why have they not worked that out? That's fantastic. They roll into balls.
They roll into balls, yeah.

Speaker 4 I mean, I think the spikes just aren't spiky enough.

Speaker 3 No, but that was believed into the 19th century. There were debunkings of it.
But they can climb. They can climb up walls.
Walls?

Speaker 4 You're thinking of spiders.

Speaker 3 I'm not.

Speaker 3 I have read people saying they can climb

Speaker 3 into a first,

Speaker 3 into

Speaker 3 a first floor flat.

Speaker 3 Into a first floor flat, was that right?

Speaker 3 How come Dan gets away with aliens?

Speaker 5 All right, get it together. Yeah,

Speaker 3 shall we talk about hedgehogs, Anna? Let's talk more about hedgehogs.

Speaker 4 So, you know how they can go into a bowl, Dan was saying. Yeah.

Speaker 4 The muscle which allows them to go into the bowl is the same muscle that you use when you're frowning.

Speaker 4 So, you know, when your face kind of crunches up like that, their muscle, their version of that muscle in your face, goes all the way down their body, and it's that that turns them into a ball.

Speaker 5 And they do an ass frown, don't they?

Speaker 3 Because they do it

Speaker 5 on the front. The first thing they do is frown with their front, and then their spines come over their face.

Speaker 5 And then they do an ass frown with the end of their spine, and then that makes their spines cover their bum.

Speaker 5 And then they have a third muscle which latches those two bits of ball together so that they can't, and they can sit like that for hours and hours, can't they?

Speaker 3 Oh, wow. It's amazing.

Speaker 5 It must be so cozy.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 I read another few quotes from 17th, 16th century sources about hedgehogs, and one of them is from 1607.

Speaker 5 It's a book called The History of Four-Footed Beasts, and it's about what foxes do when they find a hedgehog.

Speaker 5 And apparently, it was thought that when a fox finds a hedgehog, it licketh gently the face and snout of the hedgehog, by that means bringing himself to unfold himself and to stand upon his legs, which being done, he poisoneth the beast with the urine that he rendereth upon the hedgehog's face.

Speaker 3 So it pees on its face.

Speaker 5 So they thought foxes weed hedgehogs to death.

Speaker 3 Yeah, which they don't. I don't think.

Speaker 4 I heard another thing about foxes and urine and hedgehogs, which is that.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, I've got four or five of these.

Speaker 4 Just that foxes, I read that when you had a hedgehog in a bowl, then a fox would urinate on it to make it open itself up and then go for the fleshy bit inside.

Speaker 3 And that's like a.

Speaker 4 I think still, some people in the countryside believe that.

Speaker 3 I don't know if it's true or or not, but a lot of people think it.

Speaker 5 They also are immune to snake venom, mostly. Or not completely immune, but almost completely resistant to snake venom.
So

Speaker 5 hedgehogs have been known to kill snakes, poisonous snakes.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 3 They can bite back.

Speaker 5 And they do this other. Sorry.
Just doing a run of hedgehog facts now. But they cover themselves in really gross substances, and we don't know why.

Speaker 3 So they roll around. They self-anoint, don't they?

Speaker 4 Like they spit on themselves a little bit. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 5 So when they find weird stuff like turpentine, which is obviously very potent, or tobacco, they'll chew it and then they like get a little lather worked up in their mouth and they spit all over their spines.

Speaker 5 Uh so they cover themselves in terps or tobacco or something like that. And we don't know why it is.

Speaker 5 It might be to make their spines a little bit toxic or it might be to kill parasites, but it might just be for fun.

Speaker 3 I read one thi one idea was that it's that they were trying to camouflage themselves. The s the smell would create a sort of camouflaged effect.

Speaker 3 And I just love the idea that it there's no truth to that and the hedgehogs don't know it. And I'm just walking around going, he has no idea

Speaker 3 that I'm here.

Speaker 5 He thinks I'm a cigarette.

Speaker 3 Hope no one smokes me.

Speaker 3 You know, when you're playing Sonic the Hedgehog, if you go underwater, Sonic drowns and you lose a life. Okay.

Speaker 3 They forgot to fact-check that because hedgehogs actually can swim. So there's a lot of unnecessary death, is what I'm saying.

Speaker 4 I got thinking about humans again.

Speaker 3 Hedgehogs can swim. Hello? Yeah, yeah.
For a bit.

Speaker 3 They were actually quite regretful of the fact that they didn't fact-check the fact that they could swim, because that could have led to

Speaker 3 some great underwater levels.

Speaker 3 They should have had Sonic die by a fox urinating on the surface.

Speaker 3 Should we move on to the next fact? Yeah, let's move on. Okay, it's time for fact number three, and that is Chaczynski.

Speaker 5 My fact this week is that the English philosopher Herbert Spencer had an angry suit specially made, which he wore only when he was feeling irritable.

Speaker 5 So, this Herbert Spencer, just to go through who he is, he's basically Charles Darwin.

Speaker 3 But he's also not Charles Darwin.

Speaker 5 So, he's the guy, first of all, he popularized the term evolution. He said that in 1852, I think, in a book he wrote, which was seven years before Darwin wrote The Origin of Species.

Speaker 5 And even in The Origin of Species, Darwin used it very sparingly. He only used evolution for the first time in the sixth edition, I think.
Whereas Herbert Spencer was using it all over the shop.

Speaker 5 And he also came up with the term survival of the fittest. And then Darwin liked that.

Speaker 5 And so he used the term survival of the fittest to replace the term natural selection, which he'd come up with, which wasn't nearly as catchy. And Darwin called him 20 times my superior.

Speaker 3 Totally loved him. Wow.

Speaker 4 And he had some kind of suit. What's this suit?

Speaker 5 Oh, yeah, right, the suit. So

Speaker 5 it was a woolly garment, apparently, and it was designed so that there would be minimal exertion in getting dressed, because I guess when he's in a bad mood, he doesn't want to have to to go to the trouble of putting proper clothes on.

Speaker 5 And so it was basically an elaborate onesie, but it has shoes fitted and a coat fitted. And you just stepped in with your legs first, and then you got your shoulders in and you zipped it up.

Speaker 5 And you just went

Speaker 3 and went and beat some people up.

Speaker 5 And then, yeah, you had boots, trousers, and coat on.

Speaker 5 And sometimes he wore it for weeks at a time, apparently. That's how angry a man he always was.

Speaker 3 I read that he got angrier when he was wearing it because people kept laughing at him saying, What's he wearing?

Speaker 3 And yeah, people would stare at him in the streets. But I had no idea that the onesie

Speaker 3 went back that far because we've talked before on the podcast about maybe Churchill invented the onesie because he had a special

Speaker 3 boiler suit which he would wear in the cabinet war rooms. So I thought that was the very first onesie.
But this is definitely earlier.

Speaker 4 So Herbert Spencer was quite a weird guy, wasn't he?

Speaker 3 Yeah, he was bloody weird.

Speaker 4 He decided he should avoid all over stimulation for the sake of his health. And so if he thought conversation was getting a bit too excited, he would move to another room.

Speaker 4 It's quite good. And if he ever sat next to an ugly person at dinner, he would move so he wouldn't risk his digestion.

Speaker 5 He would also, if he didn't have the liberty to move to another room, he always carried earplugs with him so that if conversation was boring to him or getting him overexcited, he would just put earplugs in to block out irritating people.

Speaker 3 I read that he put them in if he was losing in an argument. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So it's basically la la la.

Speaker 3 He invented the la la la. It's amazing.

Speaker 3 That's the thing, you know, he also is said to have invented the prototype of the paperclip. Yes.
Really?

Speaker 3 So it sounds like he's invented a lot of things, but this whole survival of the fittest thing is really getting the headline on quite an extraordinary life.

Speaker 4 One of his paperclips is in the British Library, I think. You can still see it.
But it was quite successful in his time. It made him £70 in profits in its first year.
Wow.

Speaker 4 Which in those days was a lot of money.

Speaker 4 But then it kind of stopped being that popular after that.

Speaker 3 I was looking into other interesting suits that have been invented. Okay.
And there's a really exciting one, which is Bat Sensors suit.

Speaker 3 And so the idea, and it's actually for blind people, it's a really great idea. It helps to sense when objects are near it.

Speaker 3 It's a really advanced bit of technology that they're working on so that you have the ability to, I guess, an advanced version of the walking stick

Speaker 3 that can help you. it's that kind of thing.
So they've been inventing that. That's in a prototype stage at the moment.

Speaker 5 It's like having whiskers, basically. Yeah.
Sensing stuff around you. That's so cool.
Yeah, it's amazing.

Speaker 3 And then this is not a suit, but a lady called Eleanor Bodnar, who's a scientist, invented a bra that doubles as a gas mask, which is really cool.

Speaker 3 The idea is that in the event of a very chaotic moment of gas going off everywhere, you can just take the bra off and you can put it over your face. But it actually works.

Speaker 4 Really cool. Do you you know there's some cows in Russia that are wearing bras?

Speaker 3 Oh, really? Yeah.

Speaker 4 In Siberia.

Speaker 3 Because it's so cold that their nipples will freeze if they don't wear these bras. Well, so hedgehogs can't quite get through the bra.

Speaker 3 They're fumbling around with the straps as a bit.

Speaker 3 When they've scaled the side of the cow, that's not. They can do it, okay? They can climb.

Speaker 3 I will go to the wall over this one.

Speaker 3 Have they been moved there? Because presumably they didn't evolve to be in Siberia where their nipples were taken.

Speaker 4 No, but of course there are farmers in Siberia and people need food and milk and whatever.

Speaker 4 They do in this place in Oymiakon,

Speaker 4 which is in Siberia. And the local civic leader said that the cows seem to like it because it can't be nice to have such cold teats.

Speaker 5 Actually, just on cows, because I found out the most amazing thing about cows the other day that maybe everyone knows, but a lot of cows have windows in their stomachs.

Speaker 5 So this is so we can study cows' digestion and work out how to feed them better, work out what they should be eating.

Speaker 5 We've got these portholes, these transparent portholes, which we've done in a paint created in a painless operation, apparently, according to the people who've done it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it could be according to the cows or according to the people who could cutting into the side of them.

Speaker 5 It's so creepy, though. You should look it up.
And it works exactly like a petrol cap on a car. So, you can unscrew it really easily.

Speaker 5 If you're a vet, let's say, you unscrew it and you can dip your arm into a cow's stomach and you pull out the contents of its stomach.

Speaker 5 So, one of the applications, for example, is if you've got a really sick cow that's not digesting stuff very well, then you go to the healthy cow that's got the window in its stomach, and then you unscrew it and you put your hand in and you pick out the grass from in the stomach and you squeeze out its digestive juices because that cow has good digestive juices.

Speaker 5 And then you insert the digestive juices into the sick cow and then you put the grass back in the cow's stomach and it's like nothing ever happened.

Speaker 3 Isn't that bizarre?

Speaker 3 It's fine.

Speaker 4 I gotta say, if Dad had said all that, I wouldn't have believed a word of it.

Speaker 3 Hey, can I talk very quickly about how other people have dealt with their anger? Yeah, please. So anger management.
Mel Gibson,

Speaker 3 in all the trouble he got into, he did an anger management course.

Speaker 3 His first meeting, immediately he had a verbal argument with the guy leading the meeting over a name tag that he was wearing, saying, I don't need to wear a name tag.

Speaker 3 Everyone knows who I fucking am already, don't they? And then the guy was like, okay, Okay, so I think you actually do need to do this course

Speaker 4 in Dallas. There's a place you can go to called an anger room.
Oh, yeah, you can just basically smash it up. They put a load of stuff there, which is smashable.

Speaker 4 They give you a baseball bat, and they say, Do your worst. And it's the, you know, you pay, I don't know, $50 for 15 minutes, and you can smash up as much as you like.

Speaker 4 And it's supposed to be a way to let it all out.

Speaker 3 15 minutes is a long time to be that angry.

Speaker 4 Actually, I've just found that.

Speaker 4 So for five minutes you get something which is called I need a break and you get five minutes in the anger room and that's $25.

Speaker 3 Okay that sounds quite good.

Speaker 4 15 minutes is $45 and that's called the lash out session and for 25 minutes of total demolition

Speaker 4 you have to pay $75.

Speaker 3 Presumably you need to pre-book to get your anger room. So it must be when you're in the moment of absolute fury.
So imagine how bad the job is for the receptionist taking those phone calls.

Speaker 3 I need an anger room right now. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
We don't have a room for another week.

Speaker 3 That would be the worst job you could ever have.

Speaker 5 So just quickly back to Herbert Spencer, because he was a hilarious character. Just one more funny thing about him.
He was obsessed with taking his pulse, so he was a hypochondriac.

Speaker 5 And he used to, when he went out in a carriage, I think he was a bit afraid of travel. When he went out in a carriage, then he'd suddenly shout out, stop.

Speaker 5 And in the middle of traffic in Piccadilly or Regent Street or whatever, the carriage would have to stop dead, all traffic's disrupted, silence reigns, and he has to consult the diktats of his pulse, this horse says.

Speaker 5 And if his pulse is too fast, the carriage immediately had to turn around and go home, and if not, he could go on.

Speaker 5 And similarly, at train stations, he would bring, first of all, he'd bring a woman to train stations when he was going to get on a train, specifically to read to him.

Speaker 5 and then to wave him off as he departed. And before getting on the train, he'd make his secretary take his temperature in a waiting room.

Speaker 5 If his temperature was fine, they had to string up a hammock in first class, and he was good to go. If his temperature was too high, then he sent the train away and stayed behind.

Speaker 3 Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Speaker 3 I'm sure you've got the Bill Currency to do that.

Speaker 3 Get out of here. We're going to part for another 10 minutes.
I said, get.

Speaker 3 He was just a powerful man.

Speaker 5 He sent the train away while he stayed behind having his head wrapped in vinegar and brown paper.

Speaker 3 Oh, really? That's the thing. Yeah, it was a thing.
It was a thing. It's in the first ever version of Jack and Gart.
Jack and Jill, yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the second, Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pet of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown and came tumbling after.

Speaker 4 And then there's a second verse of Jack Garten horned the trash as fast as he could caper.

Speaker 4 He went to bed and mended his head with vinegar and brown paper.

Speaker 3 It's a Victorian version that it says, and patched his knob with vinegar and brown paper, but they mean his head. But that was an old word for your head.
Your knob. Your knob.

Speaker 3 Imagine the confusion.

Speaker 3 Should we move on to our next fact? Yeah, let's move on.

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Speaker 3 Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is my fact. My fact this week is in order for Spider-Man to climb buildings, he would need size 89 feet.

Speaker 3 So they've just worked this out. You may have seen it in the news.
They've just worked out that Spider-Man could not literally climb buildings with the size feet and hands that he has.

Speaker 4 On the other hand, if he was called Hedgehog Man, he would have no problem with it.

Speaker 3 Well, he could certainly get into a first floor flat.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so I mean, it's...

Speaker 5 Can we clarify what? Because I don't know Spider-Man as well as some. So why wouldn't he just have to have super strong super blue on his hands? And then they could be any size.

Speaker 5 Is it something to do with the surface area of his hands that causes them to stick to buildings?

Speaker 4 I think what this is, is it's done by zoologists, isn't it? Yes.

Speaker 4 And these are people who are studying geckos that climb up and they use Van der Waals forces on their hands and their paws to climb up things, but it depends on how big the surface is, that how easy it is for them to hold on.

Speaker 4 Now, if Spider-Man used this kind of tactic for climbing up walls, then he'd need massive feet.

Speaker 5 But do we know that he does? He could just be using super glue. The Van der Waals forces.

Speaker 4 I don't know that Superglue works that well because you just get stuck.

Speaker 3 Imagine seeing him right at the ground floor.

Speaker 3 No, but the idea is

Speaker 3 because the weight increases so much

Speaker 3 wi with uh with your volume.

Speaker 3 So, um geckos use about four percent of their body surface area to climb and even smaller animals like mites they use naught point naught two percent because they're so light in comparison with the surface area that uses this force.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 So h uh for a human uh of the average weight to do it, you'd have to have adhesive pairs covering uh forty percent of your body to climb and that's of your total body, so it would be eighty percent of your front.

Speaker 3 So it would be you would you would need basically all of you to be sticking to the wall before you could climb up it. Wow.

Speaker 5 You'd have to shuffle up, really, way too much.

Speaker 5 Geckos actually, when they're sticking to walls and ceilings, they kind of walk on air, don't they? Because they trap,

Speaker 5 so they've got tiny hairs on their feet, and that

Speaker 5 when they're on a wet surface, so usually on a wet surface, I think the van der Waals force would mean that you would slip off, it would be too slippery.

Speaker 5 But they trap air bubbles between these little hairs.

Speaker 5 And so essentially, when they're walking on a wet surface, up a wall or on a ceiling, they're walking on a thin layer of air, which is quite a bit of a colour.

Speaker 3 Wow, that's really cool. Yeah, so they're hovering.

Speaker 5 Yep, exactly. They're hoppercrafts.

Speaker 3 That's incredible. Do you know that half the geckos in the world, half the species of gecko, can't climb up walls?

Speaker 3 I didn't know that. That's quite cool.

Speaker 4 The world's stickiest salamander is a northern slimy salamander.

Speaker 4 And it's so sticky, it gives off this substance that's so sticky that if any predator tries to bite it, its mucus immediately seals the predator's mouth shut.

Speaker 3 Whoa!

Speaker 3 that's a good kind of thing to have, isn't it?

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 Just because we were saying about my idiot mistake, the fact that Super Glue would actually just stick you to a wall,

Speaker 5 flies have this problem, I think.

Speaker 5 So, flies have sticky feet, so they can walk up walls and across ceilings, but then they also have to have little claws on their legs so they can scrape their feet off

Speaker 5 when they need to move them. So, they stick to a surface and then they have to claw their leg off in order to move it again.

Speaker 3 That's great it's weird when you when you get to that kind of level of um life uh where things become much more sticky because water is a big problem for flies and and other insects because it's actually really sticky and apparently uh surprisingly sticky for humans as well water so if you get out of the shower for example if you get out of the shower a lot of water sticks to you if you haven't wiped down properly when you get out of shower you're a pound heavier that's how much the water weighs that is sticking to you as you get out of the shower that's very cool yeah some stuff on Spider-Man?

Speaker 4 Yeah, go for it. So the first Spider-Man comic is from 1962, but the word Spider-Man dates back to 1955.

Speaker 4 And the word Spider-Man originally meant someone who works on very high structures, like a steeplejack.

Speaker 3 Really? Yeah. That's very cool.
It's good, though, isn't it? They call them Spider-Man. So why were they called, I guess they were just...

Speaker 4 Yeah, like a spider climbing up a wall or a hedgehog or whatever. They're like, you know, working somewhere really high.

Speaker 3 And a lot of those guys were itsy-bitsy as well.

Speaker 3 Spiders, just quick on climbing things,

Speaker 3 they have 600,000 micro-hairs on their legs

Speaker 3 that can contact the walls. 600,000.
And they can support,

Speaker 3 this has been studied by Germany's Institute of Technical Zoology, 170 times their own weight.

Speaker 3 And the guys who studied this said, that's like Spider-Man clinging to the flat surface of a window by his fingertips and toes only while rescuing 170 adults who are clinging onto his back. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 That's amazing. Isn't that fantastic? Yeah.

Speaker 5 They are better than he is. And this is why there's a mystery about spiders.
The great spider mystery is why don't they stick to their own webs?

Speaker 5 Because they can support that and they've got all these tiny hairs, but we don't quite know.

Speaker 5 But I think we think that they lick sort of lubricant onto their hairs, which means that they slide over their webs quite easily. And someone in, I think in 1905, a French naturalist tested this.

Speaker 5 So he put solvents on spiders' legs and he found out that once you did that, then it would dissolve the lubricant that they'd licked on, and so they would stick to their webs.

Speaker 5 And then we decided to repeat the experiment recently and just pluck the legs off spiders and tested it again. And it's true.

Speaker 5 So they lick, they salivate onto their legs to make sure they slide over their webs.

Speaker 3 Okay. Wow.

Speaker 4 I did some calculations about shoe sizes

Speaker 4 over this weekend. So I worked out that if I was a foot, I would need a size 195 shoe.
If it was a size 195 shoe and I was a foot, I would perfectly, my height would fit.

Speaker 4 So I'd be able to lie perfectly inside the shoe.

Speaker 5 Is that UK sizes?

Speaker 4 UK size, yeah.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 Do you wish have a fun weekend with you?

Speaker 3 Honey, honey, quick, quick, puppy in here, slowly and gently.

Speaker 5 Would you go face up or face down?

Speaker 3 If you were a foot.

Speaker 4 No, I don't think this working out is getting the respect it deserves.

Speaker 3 Honey,

Speaker 3 you said something

Speaker 3 yeah

Speaker 4 if the uk was a foot

Speaker 3 sweetie no no this time it's really important come back in come back in yeah

Speaker 4 if the uk was a foot it would need a size 175 million eight hundred and seventy four thousand nine hundred and seventy four shoe according to my calculations

Speaker 4 Big shoe. Which is approximately 200 million European size.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 5 You just should have done if Italy was a foot.

Speaker 5 Oh, of course.

Speaker 3 Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts.
Thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 3 If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on Twitter.

Speaker 3 I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at egg shaped, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

Speaker 5 And Chacinsky. You can email podcast at QI.com.

Speaker 3 Yep, or you can go to no such thingasafish.com, our website, and we've got all the previous episodes up there. Thank you so much for listening, guys.
Thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 3 I hope that was fun. And we'll see you again next week.
Goodbye.

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