97: No Such Thing As Andrew Diplodocus Carnegie

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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 Andy Murray, James Harkin, and our friend Helen Arney of Festival of the Spoken Nerd.

And once again, we've 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, Helen.

My fact is: tomorrow will be the longest day of your life.

What do you know about my life that means the tour is going to be so terrible?

It's because I won't be with you, Andy.

That's why it's going to be so long.

The days on Earth are getting longer all the time.

On average, right?

This is an on-average thing.

So, potentially, tomorrow could be your longest ever day, but then the day after that could be even longer.

Oh, wow.

We're talking like tiny, tiny amounts, but the Earth is gradually being.

So it's not like 20 minutes.

Yeah, you don't you don't suddenly wake up tomorrow and you're like, wow, I've got an extra spare 20 minutes.

It's like you've got a microsecond.

You've got a microsecond spare.

Oh, so okay.

What will I do with it?

Take the dog for a walk.

Thinking about what you will do with it, you have wasted a microsecond.

Like in contact, in the next 800 years, if we didn't adjust our clocks to account for this, we would be an hour out.

So, midday wouldn't be when the sun is at its highest point.

It would be 1 p.m.

So, in 800 years' time, we'll be an hour out, unless we adjust our clocks and we add these things called leap seconds, all kinds of stuff.

Do you know that the word noon used to mean 3 p.m.?

So, you would go 12 p.m.

1 to noon for

noon was the ninth hour of the day, and you can work back however many hours that was.

It was 6 a.m., wasn't it?

So, the first hour of the day for in Was it Roman times?

Actually, in medieval times, and I think it was for

people who were praying, they would have to pray on the ninth hour.

And so they would do their noontime prayers.

And it would be at three.

So in the year 5000, approximately,

midday will be

back there at the end.

We'll be back at noon.

This is perfect.

What were you saying about leap seconds?

Well, this is the weird bit about all of this slowing down, because the Earth is slowing down.

There's nothing you can do about it.

It's things like tidal forces are kind of slowing down the earth by moving in and out changing the angular momentum if you want to get physicsy about it but things like earthquakes they can speed up the movement of the earth so this is a really on average thing so over the last few decades we've noticed that the earth has slowed down but sometimes it's speeding up and sometimes it's slowing down so on average it's slowing down but they can't predict it exactly so you can never say right next year we need to add a leap second we'll get back to normal.

Because some years you're going a bit slower, some years going a bit faster.

So these organizations decide, they're kind of like the real time lords.

They decide when we're going to add a leap second.

There's a guy at the National Physical Laboratory, which is down in South London, and he's kind of in charge a little bit of this kind of measurement of the time.

He's known as the Time Lord, like you were saying.

They call him the Time Lord.

His real name is Peter Wibbly.

But that's really interesting because Doctor Who calls his sonic screwdriver the wibbly wobbly.

So he's got a

wibbly wobbly timey-wimy.

Anyway, Peter Wibbly, or we're going to call him the Time Lord.

He said there are consequences with tinkering with time.

All the consequences, Daleks.

Robo-men.

Robo men.

I don't watch it.

Cyber men.

Yeah, sure.

But it is a trade-off, though, because computer time is clocking along in its own happy way, being exactly 60 seconds, exactly 60 minutes, exactly 24 hours.

But the Earth is doing something a little bit different.

The Earth is doing 20

one second every couple of years.

And the thing is, if we do change it, then we need to tell the computers as well.

Yeah, right.

And that's where it goes horribly wrong.

Because they can only tell you six months in advance they're going to add a leap second.

All of the stock exchanges are now computerized.

And one second, adding one second to one computer and not adding it to another

means that all of the financial transactions happening in microseconds can be exploited.

Suddenly, the stock exchanges can go.

What is the thing, Andy, about the number or the average time that people hold onto a share is like 0.01 seconds or something?

Something crazy.

Because they all happen so quickly and so microtransactions happening all the time.

Like you or I might own 10 shares in Tesco's or whatever.

I certainly have.

I was very worried when the quarterly figures came out.

But companies will have, you know, 100 or 1,000 shares in Tesco's remicrose.

There are 1,000 shares in Tesco, James.

I'm pretty sure I own more than a tenth of Tesco.

There is actually a big international argument about whether we keep the leap second, though.

Because the US and France want to abolish leap seconds because they're incredibly annoying.

But Britain, Russia, and China say that the technical challenges should be manageable, right?

We should be able to handle this.

But this last leap second, quite a few GPS receivers knocked out.

Apparently, in the 2012 one, Reddit was down for 40 minutes, which was incredibly upsetting.

2015, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and Amazon were down for about an hour or something.

Did I not read that they had to ground all Qantas' flights for about an hour or something?

Yeah, it was 2012.

Their booking system went AWOL because the systems couldn't cope with this added second in the middle of the night.

There's a thing, I don't know too much about this, but you guys might.

Anna was telling me this: that the because

someone I used to know,

so basically, obviously, every planet has a different amount of day to Earth, but they're not all 24 hours.

So, all the NASA scientists who are working on the rovers on Mars have to adjust their clocks to be doing a work schedule on Mars time.

So, they work on a Mars day.

That's cool.

It's like

26 hours or something.

It's not that different.

Yeah, it's not that different.

But it starts to really mess you up.

I found a really cool measurement.

So I was looking into different measurements of time

and found a few surprising ones that I didn't know were real things.

Like, for example, I would always hear an American say, I'll be there in a Jiffy.

I didn't know Jiffy was an actual unit of time.

What?

Yeah, Jiffy's an actual unit of time.

It's 0.1 seconds.

Really?

Yeah.

Another unit.

Do you guys know how long a moment is?

So I got this from a guy called Haggard Hawks at Haggard Hawks.

He's on Twitter.

In medieval Europe, 90 seconds is what a moment was defined as.

Be there in a moment.

Cool.

I'll see you in 90 seconds.

Is that right?

That's according to this guy.

He runs a really amazing blog about words that are no longer used.

It's a really nice kind of Twitter guy.

I read once that a moment now is like three seconds or something.

Is that how long you have to be hugging someone for it to be uncomfortable?

Yeah, it is.

It was a similar study.

It was some kind of study about hugging, and it was like how long the average hug is until it gets a bit awkward.

And they said it was a moment, which is three seconds.

And then they said a lot of other things in your body also last for three seconds.

I can't remember what it was.

Yeah.

So I don't think it's universal because I think if James and I hugged, it'll be awkward after about 0.2 seconds

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Okay, time for fact number two, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1457, men with mustaches were banned from Dublin.

This is such a cool fact.

What?

Why?

They didn't like Irish people.

Yes, it was Irish people.

Weirdly, with it being Dublin.

But because Dublin was owned by the English at the time, just the area around Dublin, the rest of Ireland was run by the Irish.

But the area around Dublin was run by the English.

It was called the Pale, which is where we get the phrase beyond the pale for something that's crazy, something that was outside of this pale area.

And what they didn't want was Irish people in the town.

But if an Irishman did kind of get in there, how would you know it was him?

Well, they all had these moustaches.

So if there was an English person in the pale who had a moustache, you didn't want him there because everyone would think he was Irish.

Right.

That was a problem.

The um ordinance said men with bardies above the mouth were not allowed and bardies meant beards.

So any beard above the mouth.

So you have a beard above the mouth, Dan.

No, I don't.

But he's also got a beard below the mouth.

He's got a beard.

I've got a bit of growth.

I wouldn't say it's a fully formed.

That counts as a bardie to me.

Really?

I'm afraid so.

Well,

they even had a rule about this.

It was so that this same rule was so that the said lip be at least shaven within two weeks.

So if you haven't shaved for two weeks, that's what counts.

Because amazingly at the time, they did not have a word for moustache.

So, they had to say if you have any beard above the mouth or hair on your upper lip.

They had no way of, more concise way of saying moustache.

One thing I love about this is: this is: I'm quite obsessed with facial hair and beards in the sense that I'm really fascinated by it because I can't have it myself.

And I'm also fascinated by it, and I don't really want it near me.

It's like nuclear power stations.

I know that they're really great and lots of people like them, but I just don't want one pressed up against my face.

Like a nuclear power station.

Yeah, exactly.

But I'm absolutely obsessed with beards.

And I've got some adverts that I dug up about quack beard growing solutions that were sold by Victorian quacks in order for people to grow a beard.

Because beards were supposed to be for health.

So

they would filter out the bad air.

And they would apparently...

It was when people still thought that diseases were carried by bad smells instead of by contact.

So you would stop the bad smells getting into your mouth, blah, blah, blah.

So, people would get a beard on prescription, and if they weren't able to grow a beard, they would get like a beard-generating liquid that they could smother over themselves.

That's so funny.

That's amazing.

So, yeah, beards were like for health.

That's very cool.

But then they went really out of fashion at the end of Victorian times.

Yeah, yeah.

And there was a study in 1909 about how moustaches harbour germs.

And this was the New York Times.

This was a French study they were quoting.

It said, a Parisienne, as in a female Parisian, allowed herself to be kissed by a clean-shaven man and then by a bearded man.

And the clean-shaven man had left a small quantity of harmless particles.

His rival's kiss had colonized the lady's lips with the bacilli of tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, and numerous other unpleasant microbes.

Where did they get this bearded man?

They just dredged him up from the seine.

Because, you know, this is brilliant because in the Journal of Hospital Infection,

they went and swabbed some men with beards and some men without beards, and the men without beards had MRSA on their faces, and the people with beards did not have MRSA.

Yeah, but they have tuberculosis cholera.

Arguably, it's because

all the other bacteria, they had tons of bacteria, but it was producing toxins that was then killing off the nastier bacteria.

It was good bacteria.

Yeah, so it's like penicillin.

Penicillin kills off other bacteria because it produces toxins.

I found a survey result from 2010 of what people in Britain recognise as the most famous mustaches in the world.

I think there's one.

Interestingly, Hitler is not on the list.

You're kidding.

Hitler's not on the list.

Total fix.

Yeah.

Total.

Total fix.

Total fix.

So in at number one with 24%.

Chaplin.

No.

Chaplin is in at five.

Give us a clue.

Clue, artist.

Darling.

Darling.

Darling.

Dali, the Picasso mustache.

Famed.

You panicked.

I did.

I could see Andy was going for it.

I was like, I need to get in here fast.

And then I just.

Oh my god.

And just quickly at number two in 18%.

Carsel?

Nope.

Clue.

We need a clue.

Clue, sportsman.

No.

Big daddy in the haystacks with the white moustache, whatever.

The one with the wrestler with the white moustache.

Yes, you got it.

Hulk Hogan.

Hulk Hogan.

Yes.

Hulk Hogan.

Hitler's moustache is way more famous than Hulk Hogan's moustache.

Definitely.

Someone else missed out on the list of most famous moustaches, which is the South Korean striker Kang Soo-il,

who very recently was suspended for fifteen matches because he was found to have steroids in his system, which he blamed on a moustache growing cream that he had been applying to his face.

Yeah.

Did you say Korean football player?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, because I've got the same thing as a Japanese football player.

Well, a few years later, a Japanese rugby player missed the World Cup.

Yeah.

Exactly for the same reason.

He said he was trying to grow a mustache and he was using this kind of thing that had, yeah.

It seems that I've never heard of modern-day moustache cream.

Yet in Korea and Japan, apparently, this is a thing.

Clearly, if they're using it as an excuse,

then it has at least some traction there.

Yeah.

There are a group of people in Japan called the Anus.

Grow up.

Grow up, kids.

What's wrong with you?

Grow up.

And they're heavily moustached.

So the hairy anus.

Honestly.

So the anus,

they have these really long moustaches and they are often said to carry a moustache stick around to lift the moustache when they're eating so they don't get Guinness or whatever inside their moustaches.

That's very cool.

Now it was first described by a guy called Edward S.

Moss when he uh went around Japan in the nineteenth century, but it turns out that it isn't a moustache stick, it's a prayer stick, but they do use it to lift their moustaches, so it kind of is a mustache.

So what's a prayer stick?

It's a stick you use for praying.

Is it like an antenna to God?

I don't know.

I imagined it would be like, you know, like prayer bowls in Buddhist countries where you kind of

would take the bowl and you would make it make a ringing noise and it would help you meditate or something.

I imagined it was like that, but I really don't know.

They did used to have, I think it was back in the Victorian times, a set of

mugs and so on where they had mustache catchers.

So you'd place your mustache into it as as part of the porcelain.

And there would be a.

I think the Anus had those as well.

I think so.

Mustache cuts.

So maybe that's where.

Those are big.

Yeah, we had some of those on QIA TV shows.

Oh, really?

And some of the spoons as well, which have a little hole in.

So it's like a normal spoon, except it's got a cap over it with a hole cut out of it.

So you can pour soup onto one half of the spoon and then strain it through the hole so you get none of the other stuff.

Wow.

That sounds incredibly practical, just from a kind of sippy cup kind of perspective.

Yeah.

That to have that would mean you can't.

I know.

I'd like one myself.

Yeah, I'd love one.

I've got another stick beard

facial hair stick fact.

Which is,

we've mentioned the popularity of beards in Victorian times.

In the early Victorian times, they're incredibly unpopular.

And then they kind of reached peak beard in kind of the 1890s.

But to give you an example,

in the 1840s, only one member of parliament had a beard.

And it was George Frederick Muntz.

And this was really extraordinary, not just because it looked like a toilet brush attached to Fort Muntz's face, but at the time, beards were the mark of a tramp, revolutionary, or charlatan.

So he used to carry a stick with him.

And I've got this: he was, although he was a large man, he would carry a stiff cane with him at all times to answer any insults he encountered on the streets from people who accused him of being either a crank or an artist.

Even more.

I thought I'd look at some other things that happened in 1457.

Oh, cool.

Just a few things.

Pope Paul II died in a melon-induced apoplexy.

We've all been there, huh?

Incredible.

So, this is

Anna, who I should introduce you guys to one day.

She didn't, she did a big thing where she found melon overdose was a massive thing back around this time.

She loves it.

Yeah, she found like 10 people, kings and popes, and yeah, all died from melon overdose.

but how?

Is it like it goes?

I think it was surely something else.

Obviously, it was something else.

Yeah.

Some other things.

Vlad the Impaler made his first raid into Transylvania in that year.

Golf was banned by James II of Scotland.

And in 1457, a sow, a pig, was convicted of murder and sentenced to be hanged by the hind feet from a gallows.

Her six piglets were found to be accomplices, but as no evidence was offered against them, on on account of their tender age, they were acquitted.

Wait, but being hanged by your hind feet, wouldn't that be just like a bungee jump?

Okay, it's time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that Diplodocuses could break the sound barrier.

The dinosaur.

It was so fast.

Yeah.

Was this like a the days were shorter, sound traveled a lot slower?

I know.

So the actual answer is that they had a little whipping system at the end of their tail, and they would whip it so fast that it would break the sound barrier, a little sonic boom created.

And we know this, apparently, according to scientists, because they've been doing these computer simulations where they've been recreating the dinosaurs.

And one of the consequences of putting this thing together, the simulation, is that when the dinosaur's tail did this movement, it moved at such a speed that it breaks the sound barrier.

So obviously it's hypothetical.

We don't have diplodocases to check it out on, but supposedly they broke the sound barrier.

I just find something crazy that something that large because I think I think, unless I've made it up, there are a few sort of smaller animals that can break the sound barrier.

But outside of that, I've never heard of something natural, a living thing breaking the sound barrier.

Isn't the there's a is the shrimp?

Does that?

Yeah, mantis shrimp.

Yes, that's what I'm talking about.

But it doesn't, it itself doesn't move faster than the sound barrier.

It clicks with its claws and it creates a bubble which breaks the sound barrier.

Is that correct?

Yeah.

That sounds a bit rainy.

Okay, so then that shouldn't count.

So I don't, yeah, in terms of the animal moving itself,

it's fantastic.

And it's a diplodocus.

I mean, that's.

Well, I think it's a diplodocus, isn't it?

Well,

I say diplodocus.

A lot of people say diplodocus, and that's the American pronunciation.

Two scientists around here say

Dan's seen Jurassic Park a lot.

I would trust

his judgment.

Well, because the word Diplodocus was invented by an American and he pronounced it Diplodocus, I think we were supposed to pronounce it Diplodocus.

But actually, I do concede that Diplodocus is a nicer word.

Well, there's a BBC news correspondent called Susan Ray, and she went round surveying what people thought it was amongst academics to get the best understanding of it.

And what she actually came out with, I think there was a definitive answer, but I got more interested in this sideline thing she found out, which is that there's actually four pronunciations of it.

So it's not just the two that we know.

Okay.

There's diplodoke us.

Yeah, that's the one you.

That's how I say it.

Yeah.

That's speed as well.

Is there a diplodocus?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Diplodocus.

Yeah.

So that one as well.

That's the fourth.

Yeah, I meant diplod acus.

But that would imply there's a single animal called a plodocus, which is twice as big.

But yeah, so there's four pronunciations, apparently.

What was the fourth one?

I think the one I just said, Diplodoke us.

Dubba D-Dook.

Diplo.

Doke us.

So this was by a BBC journalist.

Yeah.

Due to the unique way that BBC is funded, we now know that.

We now know there are four.

But Dan hasn't told us which is the right one.

Well, as I said, I got so interested in the four pronunciations, I didn't look into

the one that actually won.

And it was named after Andrew Carnegie.

One of the first dinosaur specimens was named after.

Andrew Diplodocus Carnegie.

Yeah, no, one of the most wealthy men ever.

Can you explain how it was named after him, though?

Well, it was called Diplodocus Carnegie.

The first specimen, the scientific name it was given.

Yeah, yeah.

And he invested a lot of money.

I think he gave Dippy the Diplodocus to the Natural History Museum, the Plastercast.

It was him who presented it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he was very instrumental in spreading the amazing news about this dinosaur around the world.

He was fascinated by them.

That's it.

Just speaking of Dippy,

so Dippy obviously originally had a different tail.

I think it was on the ground, and then they realized that Diplodocus has probably had them raised up, so they had to redo it.

So they had to do remolding of it.

So the person who did the molding of it was the same guy who did Jabber the Hut for

Return of the Jedi.

Really?

His name is John Coppinger.

That's a great authority.

That's really cool.

Yeah.

I know this because someone we work with, Steve, helped to work on it.

So this guy not only did Dippy, but he did Jabber the Huts and he did a lot of the aliens in Fifth Element and Harry Potter and so on.

I love the aliens in Harry Potter.

They were so good.

It was a curveball, but it was the right moment.

I've got a dinosaur naming story, which is that it was a couple of years ago, a new species, completely new species of pterosaur has been named after a nine-year-old girl who found the fossilized bones on a beach in the Isle of Wight.

And the species is called Vectidraco, which means pterosaur, means dragon from the Isle of Wight.

And the second word is Daisy Morrissee, because her name is Daisy Morris.

And so she's a nine-year-old girl who has a dinosaur named after her because she found the bones, she collected them up, she handed them in.

That's very cool.

Best bit about this, when she actually found them, she was only four years old.

Wow.

Wow.

And she started fossil hunting at the age of three.

I've been looking for fossils in the Isle of Wight as well, and I've never found any pterosaurs.

That's because bloody Daisy Morrison got there first.

She's had years head start.

She's been going for like 10 years.

Yeah, but I'm a lot older than her.

My eyesight might not be as good as it used to be.

Another thing, she's closer to the ground.

You can't move as fast on the uncertain terrain, James.

Yep.

I was reading about the sound barrier and breaking the sound barrier.

The first man to break the sound barrier is still alive, which I did not know.

Chuck Jaeger, great name.

That's an amazing name.

And he was 24 when he became the first man to break the sound barrier.

It's really...

He's what, 89 now?

He's 92.

92?

Yeah.

And because he used to be a fighter pilot, he

flew in the Second World War.

And he had amazing adventures, as you would expect.

Because he was a fighter pilot.

And I was just reading, this is all very publicly.

This is on the Wikipedia about him.

He, on the 12th of October 1944, he downed five enemy aircraft in a single mission, which is good, I believe.

Like you saying, you would expect it with him being a fighter pilot, you would be the worst audience for his stories, wouldn't you?

He's like, I was in the war and I shot down all these enemies.

And you're like, well, I would expect that.

You're a fighter pilot.

Hang on, hang on.

I want to tell you what happened on the 12th of October 1944.

So this is the exact sentence.

Two of these kills, out of five in a day, two of these kills were scored without firing a single shot.

When he flew into firing position against a Mesherschmitt 109, the pilot of the aircraft panicked, breaking to starboard and colliding with his wingman.

Whoa,

how cool is that?

You just have to turn and face.

Yeah, yeah.

They both parachuted out.

So they survived.

He's

so 92.

I follow him on Facebook.

He's a very active Facebook user, yeah.

Yeah, Chuck Jaeger loves Facebook.

That's amazing.

Breaking the social media barrier.

Wasn't there supposedly a story about, was it Kittinger or someone who maybe broke the sound barrier before him, doing a free fall from extremely, extremely extremely high.

And the idea being that he went so fast, and with the air being so thin up there, the sound barrier is a bit less, that maybe he did break the sound barrier.

Wow.

There are loads of earlier claims,

and they sort of didn't have very accurate instruments and things like that.

Also, the last time that Chuck Jaeger broke the sound barrier was on the 50th anniversary of the first time.

He flew a plane at the age of 74 past Mach 1.

There's a picture of him sitting in it on his Facebook page.

You can see that.

So cool.

I'm going to go and poke him after this podcast.

We were talking on last week's podcast about the Concorde, and so that obviously breaks the sound barrier.

And you pointed at Andy, that they're not allowed to do it over cities.

And I had no idea.

It's because the boom is so great that it would actually just be incredibly noisy.

But actually, it goes beyond noise.

There was an accidental sonic boom, a sound barrier breaking that happened.

And how do you pronounce this place?

I know it's.

Aberystwyth.

Aberystwyth.

There are actually four ways of pronouncing it.

It was a boom.

So a jet was flying over and it broke the sound barrier.

And it was so loud that everyone thought that a bomb had gone off.

Windows in shops shattered.

Wow.

Like, just blew out completely.

People were terrified and they genuinely thought something had exploded.

That's incredible.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

Night shift worker Greg Babalicki said, I was just falling asleep and the the somic boom happened.

Keep it down, please.

Isn't that what happened with the meteorite in Chelyabinsk as well?

It broke the sound barrier and it caused a massive kind of smashing of windows and stuff.

Wow.

So when the dinosaurs were wiped out, allegedly, by this giant meteor, were they all just like, wow, those Diplodocus

whipping up their tails to stop?

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Okay, time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that more and more scientists are describing their findings as astounding.

So this is a study of scientific papers from the last 40 odd odd years and it's by uh the researchers at the University Medical Centre of Utrecht.

Utrecht in the Netherlands.

There are actually four different ways of pronouncing that.

Um and so they found that uh in scientific papers that are published, more and more uh re researchers and scientists are putting positive words, uh like novel or amazing or spectacular into descriptions of their works.

And they're also using other descriptive words more, a bit more.

So amazing, assuring, astonishing, bright, creative, encouraging, enormous, excellent, groundbreaking, innovative, phenomenal, reassuring, shall I?

And robust and spectacular and unique and unprecedented.

A novel, the word novel now appears in 7% of papers in PubMed, which is this huge online database of papers.

And the researchers have jokingly said that at this rate, every paper will be described as that by the year 2123.

There was a guy who wrote a book about weird newspaper articles from the 19th century, and he, I think, searched for a singular coincidence

or a singular example of something, which obviously should mean it only ever happened once, but they used it all the time in Victorian times.

That's great.

Who was saying, was it one of you who was saying about Sherlock Holmes stories the other day?

I was talking to someone about this and they pointed out that every single Sherlock Holmes story starts with Watson saying, in all the cases we ever dealt with, this was the most singular, the most extraordinary.

So there are a couple of flaws in this study because it's just picked, it's based on certain words, so it doesn't take into account all language.

But they do think that it genuinely highlights an actual problem with scientific language.

Is it a problem?

Is it a problem that scientific papers are using the language of discovery for their discoveries?

Yes.

I am on your side, actually.

Like, I read a headline that was scientists left, and then this is the quote, gobsmacked by astounding Pluto images.

So, yeah, you would be gobsmacked and astounded by Pluto images.

Yeah, but I don't think you would be if you had sent a camera to look at Pluto.

It's still.

You'd be gobsmacked if you'd never sent a camera to Pluto and the images are right.

Where did that camera go?

This is typical of you, Andy.

Well, you would expect that.

You work with Pluto.

So the word astounding comes from thunder, tonnere, and it means like to leave something thunderstruck.

Where does the word gobsmacked come from?

I think it's just been smacked in the gob.

gob.

There's another cool thing about scientific language.

So they've analysing scientific language, looking at word frequencies and things.

There was a scientist called Diederik Stapel, who got the nickname the lying Dutchman

because

in 2011 he admitted that he made up a lot of data.

He's a psychology researcher.

And researchers at Cornell University in New York looked at his papers and they knew which ones were fake and which ones the data was fake and which it was real.

And they worked out that he used more science-related terms to describe his methods when he was writing up fraudulent findings than when he was writing up real ones.

So they can identify to 70% accuracy, which is so there's a long way to go, but they can identify when he's lying, which is interesting.

So if that could be rolled out to other forms of language, that would be amazing.

Forensic linguistics.

Yeah.

That is fascinating, because there are certain tricks, I don't know them all, like in interrogation where you can study not the content of the responses, but the word count of responses.

It's a certain police technique where you're not really listening to the answers, but you're listening to the number of repeated words that they're using.

And it's actually.

They say, I did it, I did it, I did it, I did it, I did it, I did it, I did it.

No, it's because if you were at a scene and you were actually there, then you don't have to draw on your imagination as much, so you use a different

control the kind of repetition of language.

There was a scientific paper with no words in it that I found.

It was by a guy, a clinical psychologist called Dennis Upper, which he wrote or didn't write in 1974.

And it was called The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of Writer's Block.

Oh, wow.

That's delightful.

That's a scientific equivalent of John Cage's Four Minutes 30.

Yeah, that's what I do.

Nice.

That's great.

You can, instead of like in for 433 you talked about this the other day you talked about 433 and and how it's about the audience noise and the the orchestra noise or the pianist noise is that just reading that paper you just as a scientist have the internal thoughts of disappointment yeah you project onto it you project

yeah yeah wow wow that's really cool I went on to Google News and looked for the word astounding to see what people are describing as astounding at the moment.

It's astounding that ten households in Western Supermare still watch black and white telly, according to one, the most recent headline I found.

See, there we are.

I'm not astounded.

Are you not?

I'm in I'm intrigued.

Yeah.

I thought that word was going to be indifferent as it came out, but no, intrigued was much more interesting.

Yeah, I mean, those must be a rarity now, and I'm sure the sets have a certain value to a collector or a connoisseur.

And you pay a cheaper license fee?

I understand.

Yes, you do.

The next astounding news story I found was Officer hands out an astounding 19,000 parking tickets in a year.

Now that is astounding.

I'm surprised that you wouldn't say, well, you would expect that.

He's a parking guy.

And then the third one that I found was, It's astounding.

Seven black and white TV licenses are currently in force in Pontypridd.

Wow.

So

the word astounding outside science papers is mostly used to describe TV licenses.

Now that is astounding.

It is.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At Egg Shaped.

And Helen.

At Helen Oni.

Yeah, and Helen's got a bunch of gigs coming up as well.

First one is this coming Sunday, which is the 24th of January.

And that is in London, and that's Festival of the Spoken Nerd.

So you can go to that.

And also, you're doing a new show, aren't you, on the last Tuesday of every month?

We are.

It's called An Evening of Unnecessary Detail, and it does exactly what it says on the tin.

Even your own Andrew Hunter Murray is doing our Casio Night special.

It will be astounding.

It will be.

Okay, if you want to listen to all our previous episodes, they're on our website, no such thingasafish.com.

You can also email podcast at qi.com.

Anna, who used to be on the show,

she will be back next week.

She will answer those emails, and we'll see you again next week for another episode.

Goodbye.

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