72: No Such Thing As A Bacon Telescope

Transcript

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Speaker 13 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 Shriver.

Speaker 13 I'm sitting here with Anna Czaczynski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

Speaker 13 And in no particular order, here we go.

Speaker 13 Starting with you, Czazinski. My fact is that the first item to be sent via New York's pneumatic tube postal system was an artificial peach, and the second was a live black cat.

Speaker 13 An artificial peach, that's the interesting thing.

Speaker 13 It was a huge, oversized one as well.

Speaker 13 It's quite a leap, really, because you would think you'd go from artificial peach to real peach to artificial cat to real cat, but they just missed out a few steps. Yeah, they got overconfident.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 But the cat did survive. Did it? Bizarrely.
This story comes from the reminiscences of a postal worker called Howard Wallace Connolly.

Speaker 13 He self-published an autobiography in 1931, and he worked for the Postal Service where New York was building its pneumatic postal delivery system, which is a system of pneumatic tubes, underneath New York.

Speaker 13 And so he recounted the big launch of this pneumatic tube, which was an exciting event. So there's a guy demonstrating the pneumatic tube, going, look how great this is.

Speaker 13 This is coming from the other side of town, and there's this opening of the pneumatic tube, and something shoots out from it.

Speaker 13 He opens it up, it's an artificial peach, and then a second thing shoots out of it, he opens it up, and a cat jumped out and looked really scared and tried to get away, and then they grabbed it.

Speaker 13 I read, though, that they had a basket waiting for the cat, so someone knew. This was pre-planned, it wasn't like a cat.
The cat hadn't leapt in of its own accord.

Speaker 13 Cats get into places that they shouldn't get into. I read just this morning, you know the famous scene in The Godfather, Marlon Brando stroking a cat that comes up onto the table?

Speaker 13 That was a stray cat that just jumped on and Brando improvised with it. Yeah, it's one of the most famous scenes in cinematic history.
What about that one in James Bond where he's stroking a cat?

Speaker 13 The villain was meant to be the cat, and then Blofeld just walked on. The cat started improvising.
It was a stray villain.

Speaker 13 101 Dalmatians was just called One Dalmatian. 100 Strays just walked in.

Speaker 13 By the way, though, London, 40 years before

Speaker 13 New York had this pneumatic tubing, London had pneumatic tubing. Do you know what the first thing they sent on their trip was

Speaker 13 a novelty foam strawberry

Speaker 13 followed by a live bear.

Speaker 13 No, it was the Duke of Buckingham.

Speaker 13 Was he just a stray Duke of Buckingham who just won the day?

Speaker 13 Pneumatic tube sounds amazing. They sound unbelievable.
It's the best thing ever.

Speaker 13 So basically the way they work, just to quickly explain, although I'm sure people mostly know, is that it's a big pipe and you have to put a cylindrical tube in it and this and you put whatever you want to send inside the cylindrical tube, and the cylindrical tube is propelled down the big pipe by the force of compressed air or by a vacuum so that it's sucked into the vacuum.

Speaker 13 And people thought this was how they were going to deliver posts. So there was a time in the late 19th century in New York where I think a third of all posts was delivered by a pneumatic tube.

Speaker 13 It kind of still feels like the future, doesn't it? It's so futuristic.

Speaker 13 I think, well, it sounds like it is going to be a part of the future now because Elon Musk, the billionaire of PayPal and who's been doing SpaceX and so on, he's now building a pneumatic ride to get people from San Francisco to LA.

Speaker 13 Whoa, and it's going to take half an hour. I think he suggested it.
Is he actually building it? So, this was from an article two years ago. So, actually, yes, I don't know fully if he's stuck with it.

Speaker 13 His idea is that it'll take 35 minutes to go from San Francisco to LA, right?

Speaker 13 But the current designs, there's no bathrooms in there. So, you just kind of strap yourself in, and if you want to go, it's tough.
And let's face it, I've read that you travel at 800 miles an hour.

Speaker 13 That's really good.

Speaker 13 So, you would be wetting yourself wouldn't you that's true have you heard of william murdoch he was the guy who invented this in the uk and he is unbelievably cool so um he invented pneumatic tubes uh he invented gas lighting basically when he was 23 years old he walked 300 miles to birmingham to ask for a job with james watt the steam engine pioneer he got the job partly because he had an interview with uh what's business partner matthew builton the reason he got the job was because builton was fascinated by murdoch's wooden hat

Speaker 13 he had a hat he'd made himself out of wood. And he wore it 300 miles as he walked to Birmingham.
And then he said, Can I have a job? Because it's a talking point in an interview, clearly.

Speaker 13 He also invented a steam gun, which fired lead bullets, and he invented a steam cannon. And this is on his Wikipedia.

Speaker 13 It just says a steam cannon, which he attempted to use in 1803 to knock down a wall in Soho.

Speaker 13 That's all it says.

Speaker 13 It seems to me, and I don't want to put this guy down, but he's just adding steam to lots of other inventions.

Speaker 13 You're a Luddite. I think this guy's amazing.
I want to add steam to everything. There are some modern-day applications of pneumatic tubes, right, which are also quite fun.
Go on.

Speaker 13 They're really common in hospitals. That's one of the few places I think where they're still used regularly for quickly transporting medications up and down floors and around hospitals.

Speaker 13 So that's quite interesting. Also, a salmon cannon, so that's quite handy.

Speaker 13 Pneumatic tubes are used to propel salmon in America now over waterfalls because sometimes there's a problem with salmon because we've built a lot of dams and so they can no longer get up the river to lay their eggs at the top of the river.

Speaker 13 So we shoot salmon

Speaker 13 through the air. Do you know how birds kind of sit by the river and they wait for a salmon to jump out and then kind of grab it? They must be going, what the fuck was that?

Speaker 13 But if you work out

Speaker 13 whether it's going to land at the other end, you're just sitting there with your mouth open waiting for the salmon to land at it.

Speaker 13 There is a restaurant in New Zealand called C1 which has food delivery pipes and they fire out burgers to tables in pipes.

Speaker 13 I went to in Abu Dhabi Dhabi there's a restaurant which is a roller coaster restaurant and you sit and your food gets roller coaster to you. So the food gets to do a really fun roller coaster ride.

Speaker 13 Yeah. Well no it's a time because it's attached to Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi which has the fastest roller coaster in the world.

Speaker 13 So it's just a little bit of a Does Only Food get to enjoy that as well?

Speaker 13 Only vegetables allowed?

Speaker 13 That restaurant in New Zealand, the owner said that the tubes would be locked until it had delivered the actual canister to the table.

Speaker 13 And he said, and I quote, a canister of that speed could take someone's hand off. We certainly don't want to be known for that.

Speaker 13 There is also a restaurant in Bangkok called Cartron, and they send their food by catapult to the table.

Speaker 13 So the chickens are cooked in the kitchen, loaded into a catapult, fired across the restaurant, and caught on a spike by a waiter riding a unicycle. No, no, no.

Speaker 13 The health and safety required to have a man on a unicycle holding a spike riding around a restaurant with chickens being fired at him.

Speaker 13 What if he doesn't catch it?

Speaker 13 He always does. He always does.
James is the PR man for this movie.

Speaker 13 Someone got decapitated by a chicken. We don't want to be known for that.

Speaker 13 I looked into cats this slide, but

Speaker 13 just off the back of it being a black cat. It was the first.
Read something crazy this morning.

Speaker 13 Cats are lactose intolerant.

Speaker 13 No. Yeah.

Speaker 13 I had no idea.

Speaker 13 They drink milk. Yeah.
Well, no, we give them milk and they drink it. They don't know not to drink it, but they technically, majority, are lactose intolerant.
So but they do keep lapping it up.

Speaker 13 Yeah, yeah. But they're so they're quite stupid then.
Because most animals, if something makes them sick, they avoid it. Yeah, weird, hey.
That's why funny how dogs are allergic to dog food.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I know.

Speaker 13 Cats can be allergic to humans as well. Can they? Yeah, in the same way that humans can, like, cat fur can make you sneeze and

Speaker 13 make your eyes water, cats can get allergic to their owners. My god, I have definitely been feeding our cats the wrong things then.
Chopped up human.

Speaker 13 With a side of milk. No, I really feel terrible.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 I read as well that so whiskers are obviously very important to cats. I didn't realize they had whiskers on other bits of their body that were just important.

Speaker 13 So they have whiskers on the back of their legs. Really? Yeah, so they use it for if their sight is bad at night.
That's the thing.

Speaker 13 So for their hunting prey that might be below them, they have it on the back of their legs.

Speaker 13 That's really cool.

Speaker 13 I found that out on Pussington Post,

Speaker 13 which is like a

Speaker 13 cat news

Speaker 13 website. I thought Pussington Post was a magazine that was banned in the 90s.

Speaker 13 I've just clicked on the Pussington Post, and the headlines are unbelievably good. Cat interrupts cross-stitching.

Speaker 13 Irish police take care of exceptionally cute kitten found by roadside. Marmalade's epic birthday party.

Speaker 13 This is amazing. There was an inventor called Joseph Sturtzel in 1908,

Speaker 13 and he proposed a system of larger pneumatic tubes to transport freight. I know Andy's still laughing at the Pussington Post, but I think we're just going to ride on past that.

Speaker 13 Catman from Japan walks nine cats in a stroller.

Speaker 13 Sorry. Sorry.
Go on. We've got to stop letting Andy have a laptop during these.
Yes.

Speaker 13 It's becoming a child here. This is why I feed my cats milk.

Speaker 13 So they stop ruining the podcasts.

Speaker 13 Yeah, so this guy decided that people could be transported in pneumatic tubes

Speaker 13 in Chicago. So in 1908, he erected these pneumatic tubes and then to prove it to people, like shooting that you could shoot people underground,

Speaker 13 he said, I will demonstrate for you

Speaker 13 and here's my young son Robert to do that. And he laid his little son down and there's a really good picture of it.

Speaker 13 If you look up Chicago Daily News pneumatic carrier, there is a terrified looking ten year old boy lying down in a cylinder about to be shot. Extremely fast through a tube.
And it was okay?

Speaker 13 Not sure, actually. Let's look into it.

Speaker 6 We demand to be host. Winner, best score.

Speaker 5 We demand to be seen.

Speaker 6 Winner, best book. We demand to be quality.

Speaker 11 Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

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Speaker 13 Okay, time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that scientists have made algae that tastes like bacon.
I'd eat that. Did you? Yep.

Speaker 13 Have they made it for fish to make their lives a bit more enjoyable?

Speaker 13 That'd be good. That would be so nice.
Yeah, why did they make it? They've made it because it's a possible new kind of superfood. It's a kind of algae called dulse.

Speaker 13 It's a bit like seaweed and it tastes like bacon, but it's high in protein and it has twice the nutritional value of kale.

Speaker 13 So it means that if you're a vegetarian, or maybe we'll all be vegetarians in the future, we'll be able to eat this stuff and still have the delicious, delicious taste of bacon.

Speaker 13 But the texture of algae?

Speaker 13 What is the texture of algae? Slimy, I reckon. Yeah, slimy, squishy.
Well, seaweed is a kind of algae,

Speaker 13 and that you know, that tastes good sometimes.

Speaker 13 Yeah. I mean, it tastes like crunchy salt.

Speaker 13 Yeah, it's delicious. Oh, yeah, it's delicious.
Yeah, I love seaweed. Bacon flavoured seaweed.
Yeah. Yeah, that's really nice.

Speaker 13 Yeah, but I just like this kind of idea of like food science and creating weird flavours.

Speaker 13 And I think probably it's the future, isn't it? Definitely.

Speaker 13 I mean, we definitely are going to need to spend a lot of attention on turning vegetables into things that taste like meat in the next couple of years, I think.

Speaker 13 Because I think we will all be vegetarian quite soon. Fortunately, I won't be alive then.

Speaker 13 You all have died of cholesterol overdose.

Speaker 13 I was looking at what algae actually is. Oh, yeah, what is it?

Speaker 13 Well, there's no generally accepted definition of algae because it comes from lots of different phyla, and there is just biologically it's loads of different things, I think.

Speaker 13 But I had no idea how cool it is. So, 70 or 80% of the oxygen in the atmosphere comes from marine plants, and those are almost all algae.
Wow.

Speaker 13 So, people think that a lot of the oxygen comes from plants photosynthesizing, but it's actually blue-green algae that photosynthesising. Yeah, it's amazing.

Speaker 13 You can even make algae into oil. They found a way of doing that.
Yeah. A new kind of technology, and they think that might be the future of biofuels.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I think they found that it's twice as efficient as

Speaker 13 biofuels that they make on land. I think it's about twice as efficient as that,

Speaker 13 or you can use half as much as you can. And also means you're not using up the land, which you can then use for making delicious bacon.

Speaker 13 Another cool thing that you can do with algae is they've recently discovered that it absorbs light in a really unusual way, and blind people can have their sight restored by introducing an algae gene into them.

Speaker 13 Basically, you introduce to these people a gene that encodes this light-sensitive protein, which is one that only algae has,

Speaker 13 and then you introduce that gene into the retinal cells of a blind person, and their sight can be restored. That's amazing.
Yeah, it's cool.

Speaker 13 Also, do you know the animal whose eyes are the best to transplant into a human face?

Speaker 13 Cats?

Speaker 13 That would be awesome.

Speaker 13 Or like goats, which have rectangular pupils.

Speaker 13 That would be really fun. It's sharks because they have surprisingly similar eyes to ours.
No way. Does that happen now? Yeah, it does.
Isn't that incredible?

Speaker 13 People are going around with sharks' eyes in their face. I would like to have shark nose transplants so I could smell blood from 500 miles.
And you would look so great as well.

Speaker 13 Here's another thing that they're using algae for. They've worked out that algae might be perfect for making batteries.
So I just can't see how you would squish algae into the back of a T V remote.

Speaker 13 No, there's probably more science behind it than just taking the seaweed. Yeah, yeah.
I'm just the same way that you can't can't just shove algae in someone's face to stop them from being blind.

Speaker 13 There is a sea slug that eats algae and then it can steal the genes from the algae and it can then photosynthesize and it can run on solar power rather than eating stuff. Is clever.

Speaker 13 So if we ate that sea slug, would we be able to photosynthesize? Shoved it in your face.

Speaker 13 Is there any way that we could steal that technology from the sea slug so that we could photosynthesize?

Speaker 13 You couldn't do it just by eating the sea slug, but theoretically I suppose you could kind of splice some genes. Do you want to have you always wanted to be able to photosynthesize, Andy?

Speaker 13 Imagine if everyone photosynthesized so that we were all producing oxygen. Yeah, no, it would be used to just producing couple of things.
You'd only need half of us, wouldn't you?

Speaker 13 I could photosynthesize and my wife could just respire in the normal way, and then we'd have a net no gain or no loss. Yeah.
Wow.

Speaker 13 I was looking into food science. Shall we talk about that as well?

Speaker 13 So food science-wise, one thing I really liked is dog food is tested on humans. Really? Yeah.

Speaker 13 Had no idea. So you can have, this is a job.
Anyone who makes dog food, that is a job. And I found the salary ranges between 34,000 American and 117,000 American per year.

Speaker 13 It's not just the money, though, it's the shiny, shiny coat that you get.

Speaker 13 What you'll be doing is not only testing it, you're developing it as well. So here's the thing that they say.
More salt, more salt, like that kind of thing.

Speaker 13 Their thing is that they say dogs will eat anything. What dogs will like though is what humans will quite like.
So when humans eat dog food they'll go mmm would I feed that to myself?

Speaker 13 No, so I won't feed it to the dog. So that's kind of the mentality.
That's a very strange bit of reasoning to assume that humans and dogs have the same sense of taste.

Speaker 13 Their point is you can't reliably ask a dog to go, no, that's no use because dogs will just eat it. Yeah, so who cares what their food tastes like?

Speaker 13 All those adverts where they say nine out of ten dogs prefer pedigree chump, they should actually say nine out of ten humans prefer pedigree chump.

Speaker 13 Do they have them on all fours on the floor in the lab?

Speaker 13 They don't wear name tags. They've got dog collars around them.
Why don't you check the Waffington Post and see what they say?

Speaker 13 I bet that's what they're doing. That must be real.
Check it out. That has to be real.

Speaker 13 I have a serious quibble with this fact.

Speaker 13 Dog food is not manufactured to be something that humans want to eat. Otherwise, we'd just give them human food.
Have you ever tasted dog food?

Speaker 13 I have smelt it, and I do think you can tell a lot from a smell.

Speaker 13 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 13 But people ate dog food during the Second World War when human food was in very short supply. Right.

Speaker 13 Yeah. So you're using that as evidence that humans do enjoy it? Well, no.

Speaker 13 Maybe it's evidence that these guys actually know of an imminent war that's coming and that we're going to have to be returning to dog food.

Speaker 13 Okay, time for fact number three, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact is that telescopes have a new telescope smell that can break them.

Speaker 13 So you know new car smell? Yeah. Where you have the lovely smell of a new car.
You get the same with a telescope in space. You even smell things in space.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 So there's not many molecules, aren't they? Not many molecules, but I imagine that they they give off the molecules. If I was in space with my massive shark nose, I might be able to smell it.

Speaker 13 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So this is something called outgassing, which is where if you've built something using particular chemicals, they give off volatile chemicals.

Speaker 13 They're called VOCs, volatile organic compounds. Unfortunately, telescopes telescopes are so sensitive these days that if they give off the chemicals it can literally break them and all the

Speaker 13 VOCs get stuck on the optical surfaces of the telescope and that ruins what you're seeing through it. So yeah.

Speaker 13 What you're saying they're called VOCs. What's that stand for? Volatile organic compounds.
Oh right, bacon has them as well. Really?

Speaker 13 Yeah, he has 150 volatile organic compounds that contribute to bacon's meaty aroma. And these compounds are given off by bacon, but but they're not really given off by ham or gamma or whatever.

Speaker 13 And that's kind of why bacon is so much tastier. I'm not sure why, but yeah.
It's also why you don't give any space telescopes made of bacon

Speaker 13 yet.

Speaker 13 So, about smell, okay. You can smell danger,

Speaker 13 okay?

Speaker 13 Everyone has this ability, or most people do.

Speaker 13 Volunteers who couldn't tell the difference between two similar smells, so it's like bacon and bacon-y smell,

Speaker 13 bacon and facing,

Speaker 13 then, if they were given an electric shock from one of them and then not the other one, then later they could distinguish the two different smells.

Speaker 13 Because they remembered the electric shock that they had. That is really cool.

Speaker 13 Right. But wait, what does that have to do with smelling danger? I thought you meant if I'm walking on the street and there was a mugging going on behind the alley,

Speaker 13 I couldn't see it, I could smell danger. Yeah, it's not quite smelling.
So it's not quite. Oh, what a shame.

Speaker 13 Whereas if you had been approached by two people who smelled very, very similar and one of them had mugged you,

Speaker 13 later on, you'd be able to tell which of the muggers there was. Actually, don't they say that when they do line-ups with police,

Speaker 13 you know, when they do a police line-up and they bring someone who is at the scene of the crime, something new that they've started trying out is to get them to close their eyes and go purely by the smell, because smell's actually a really big thing.

Speaker 13 Wow, I was going to ask if there have been any police line-ups which only used smell and completely dispensed with the visual element of it.

Speaker 13 If you were blind and you were mugged, maybe that would be a thing. Maybe.
They smelled of oak, you know, something like that.

Speaker 13 Were you being mugged by a tree here?

Speaker 13 That'd be a great line-up. Five men, one tree.
I know who it was immediately. No, I don't need to do the smell test, honestly.
Smells of oak, like a wine as well.

Speaker 13 The man who mugged me, I'd say he was five foot nine with notes of citrus.

Speaker 13 He was fruity, full-bodied.

Speaker 13 Go on. No, after you.

Speaker 13 I was just going to say that the only scent to win an EU trademark is the smell of freshly cut grass, and that was registered by a Dutch perfume company, and it uses it to give tennis balls their aroma.

Speaker 13 When we did this fact, I was like, I'm desperate to know what that amazing smell is when you click open on YouTube of tennis balls and it smells so delicious. It's the best part of a game of tennis.

Speaker 13 And I couldn't.

Speaker 13 How good are you at tennis?

Speaker 13 Anyway, the company that sprays these balls for the smell of freshly cut grass has trademarked that smell with the EU. That's very cool.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 Smells in space, we were talking about because of this telescope. There's an artist called Carrie Patterson who wants to send messages to aliens but include smells in them as well.

Speaker 13 So the idea is, you know, we would send like these messages with pictures of humans or which planet we're from and stuff like this.

Speaker 13 She thinks that we should send smells as well in case the aliens are particularly good with smells, like a dog or

Speaker 13 a shark or whatever.

Speaker 13 She wants to send smells of animal blood and feces.

Speaker 13 That's a good welcoming message.

Speaker 13 Anytime.

Speaker 13 I see you've moved into the neighbourhood.

Speaker 13 But even if we send nice smells, how do we know that their excrement doesn't smell like freshly opened tennis balls? And therefore, this would be a huge insult. Yeah.

Speaker 13 Also benzene to show our global dependence on the car. And the blood and feces is to show that we have like carbon-based life forms.
This explains why that got left on my doorstep the other other day.

Speaker 13 Someone was trying to explain to me that we're carbon-based life forms. Oh, that's great.

Speaker 13 Telescopes? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 13 There is a telescope called the Ice Cube Telescope.

Speaker 13 I don't know if you guys know about this, which is buried a mile under the ice in Antarctica. And yeah, that's cool.

Speaker 13 It's the only one that's looking for gravity waves. It's looking for neutrinos.

Speaker 13 It actually has.

Speaker 13 So I think the only place that we had detected neutrinos was from the sun until a couple of years ago, and then they used this telescope to find, detect 28 neutrinos under the ice in Antarctica. 28.

Speaker 13 They built a telescope and buried it a mile deep for 28 neutrinos. That's right, yeah.
What are neutrinos?

Speaker 13 They're totally neutral particles that were theoretical for ages. Yeah, and that fired out from the sun, and there's billions of them passing through your body every second.
Wow.

Speaker 13 And also, they don't really react with anything. Yes.
Wow, wow. Just very quickly, we should say how they fix the new telescope smell breaking it problem.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 13 They use a spray paint made of this chemical called zeolite, which I'd never heard of before.

Speaker 13 It doesn't absorb the chemicals that are given off, it adsorbs them, which means it reacts chemically and binds to them. So, yeah.

Speaker 13 They clean telescopes, or they clean telescope mirrors using snow spray, don't they?

Speaker 13 Firing a spray of very fine snow particles. Oh, right.
So not that stuff that you spray on your window to make it look festive. No, not the stuff you spray on the Christmas tree.

Speaker 13 That would ruin the telescope. It's got a ghastly mix-up, and that has been another $500 million.

Speaker 13 Because the intern in the office heard a QI factoid on the podcast.

Speaker 13 Just do these guys a favour and polish this.

Speaker 13 No, they spray special snow, which is made of carbon dioxide at the mirror, and then it freezes and creates little snowflakes.

Speaker 13 And then, when the snowflakes slide down it, it takes any little tiny particles of dust and dirt with it.

Speaker 13 That is amazing. That's very cool.
That is very cool.

Speaker 13 You know, the

Speaker 13 you know Gene Shoemaker, the very famous, spotted a lot of comets, I think famously the one that impacted on Jupiter.

Speaker 13 I saw there was one called Schumachalevi, which went past the Earth a few years ago. Yes, exactly.
Yeah. So

Speaker 13 he worked a lot with his wife, Carolyn Shoemaker,

Speaker 13 to find all of these comets out in space. Do you know how they found all these comets? Using what?

Speaker 13 A telescope? No. Microscope.
Really? So they would take all the images from the telescope, but they were so grainy and so small that they would use a microscope.

Speaker 13 And using the microscope, that's how they would eventually spot all of the comets. Wow, that's really cool.
Yeah. Mirrors are obviously a really vital part of telescopes now.
And I read

Speaker 13 that. If you put a mirror half a light-year away from Earth, and then you looked at it through a telescope, you can see a year into the Earth's past.
How cool is that?

Speaker 13 We should plant a mirror half a light-year away. The great thing about that is, whenever I look in the mirror in the morning I always look so old.
There you go. So you would look a year younger.

Speaker 13 Maybe put it even further away, James. For you I would say maybe a few light years away.

Speaker 4 Sucks.

Speaker 5 The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

Speaker 6 We the man to be home. Winner, best score.

Speaker 5 We the man to be seen.

Speaker 6 Winner, best book.

Speaker 8 It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Speaker 6 Suffs!

Speaker 11 Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

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Speaker 13 Okay, time for our final fact of the show, and that's my fact. My fact this week is that there is a museum in North Korea that has a scaled-down replica of the world's largest table.

Speaker 13 From what I'm told, it's been scaled down to the size of a normal table.

Speaker 13 So, this fact actually got sent in to us via our email, podcast at QI.com, and it was sent to us by a guy called Ian Kimball.

Speaker 13 And he said in episode 50, we'd started talking about my favorite table, which was going to be a side podcast, Anna Chaczinski's favorite tables.

Speaker 13 And he was in North Korea, and he went to a thing called the National Friendship Exhibition.

Speaker 13 And that's basically an exhibition where they show all the presents that have been given to North Korea by countries around the world to show to the North Koreans how loved they are by the rest of the world.

Speaker 13 And he wrote a blog about it, and in this blog, he included, amongst the other things in his list, the table.

Speaker 13 And it's one of these things where I've been googling it, and I can't actually find verification that the table exists. So I'm taking his word for it here,

Speaker 13 which is a bit dangerous, but I don't know. I think first-hand research sounds about right.
Yeah, exactly. I tried to find out what the largest table in the world is.

Speaker 13 And there are a few different records.

Speaker 13 So there's the longest table in the world, which was broken this month. It was broken in July 2015.

Speaker 13 Sorry, the table was broken. No, sorry.

Speaker 13 The record was broken.

Speaker 13 It was 1500 meters long. There's an iftar table, which is the meal for when Muslims break Ramadan, they're fast.
It's a very, very, very, very long table. Excuse me, can you pass the salt?

Speaker 13 And there's also the largest desk in the world, which is in a New York marketing firm's office, and which can seat 125 employees. Wow.

Speaker 13 Yeah, and it goes through the entire office and it ramps up, and it's sort of made from a single piece of resin that was poured into the cast or however. Wow.

Speaker 13 So, you know, there's a bit here where a certain department sits, but then it banks up to the floor above and then swoops around. And it's very, very cool.
It's so cool. Yeah, it's really cool.

Speaker 13 So you can get an app now, which is a tourist guide to North Korea. So it's a North Korea travel app.
It's not condoned by North Korea, it's built in Britain.

Speaker 13 And it contains genuinely quite useful advice about traveling there.

Speaker 13 So they, for instance, talk about the Rajin Zoo, saying, best known as World's Worst Zoo, where the attractions are three ducks, a turkey, some elusive foxes, and a drawing of a monkey.

Speaker 13 They've also actually. A drawing of a monkey.

Speaker 13 That's a great, great zoo.

Speaker 13 It saves on feed, doesn't it? It definitely does. If you've got a drawing of a monkey, you just need to give it a, you know.
A drawing of a banana.

Speaker 13 Just on this North Korea app, it just has some other good travel advice you can get.

Speaker 13 It suggests that you bribe your guide by bringing him really good quality alcohol, and then he'll be more likely to give you a better tour.

Speaker 13 But it does say don't ask your guide any difficult questions because guides will be blamed for tourists who cause trouble.

Speaker 13 So if you've been guided around North Korea, yeah, don't start a fight or anything.

Speaker 13 And it acknowledges, it says, most of the guides will be aware of the inaccuracies of their government's line on things, but try not to embarrass them by challenging them. I think that's fair.

Speaker 13 It's not polite, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
Nod and smile. It describes the People's Army Circus as a circus that you can visit.
They've got a drawing of a clown.

Speaker 13 It says, this circus very rarely features any animals, but does almost always feature an anti-American clown show.

Speaker 13 An anti-American clown show. What, if that's your bag? Yeah.
Well, I mean, I would be interested to see what that involves. Yeah.
Something about weird museums. Yeah.
You were saying.

Speaker 13 In Kansas, you can find a place called the World's Largest Collection of the World's Smallest Versions of the World's Largest Things,

Speaker 13 which is a traveling museum. Wow.
What happens is they find out about a world's largest thing and then they document it, usually by going to visit it, and then they make a tiny version of it.

Speaker 13 Damn it, I thought you were going to say then they make the machine from Honey Ice Front the Kids and fire it at the thing

Speaker 13 and take it away with them. God, those were great films.
They were fantastic. Rick Moranis.
Yes.

Speaker 13 So to make these smaller versions, they say that they have to find find materials that are most appropriate, but that they can find.

Speaker 13 So the world's smallest version of the world's largest ball of rubber bands is made of miniature rubber bands.

Speaker 13 And weirdly, the world's smallest version of the world's largest otter is made from a dashened figurine cut in two, filled in with modelling clay. Wow.

Speaker 13 Sounds great. Very creative.

Speaker 13 Another museum, and I've mentioned this previously on the podcast, that in Georgia that there was a museum dedicated to Elvis, in which one of the displays was maybe Elvis' toenail.

Speaker 13 This lady

Speaker 13 found it in a carpet when she was at Graceland in the jungle room, and she got to the ground because she wanted to feel where Elvis would have walked.

Speaker 13 And she came across this toenail and thought it must be his, but she can't verify it. But she put it into her own Elvis museum that she's opened, which is called the Louder Milk Boarding House Museum.

Speaker 13 It contains 30,000 Elvis Presley artifacts. Possibly 29,900.

Speaker 13 I mean, how many of the others? Well, maybe this belonged to Elvis. It appeared slightly near him on one occasion.
Well, she has a vial of sweat.

Speaker 13 She has a wart. And actually, a lot of people, she says, come to her and say, Could you donate the wart to science so that they could clone Elvis? And she says, It wouldn't be right.

Speaker 13 He wouldn't be happy.

Speaker 13 Which is rich coming from someone who's collecting body parts. I believe actually Elvis himself is in that museum.
Well, a drawing of him.

Speaker 13 Potato potato. But if you cloned him from a wart, wouldn't he just be an enormous wart?

Speaker 13 With funny hair. I don't think that's quite how cloning works.
When they cloned Dolly the sheep, which came from a bit of a mammary gland, it wasn't just an enormous sheep mammary gland.

Speaker 13 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 13 Big woolly breast.

Speaker 13 She also has Elvis hair button, which has the hair of Elvis in it, donated to her by Elvis' barber. Next to it, she also has a cease and desist letter from selling Elvis Presley hair buttons.

Speaker 13 She started manufacturing and selling them, and legal action was threatened against her. Or did she put sort of one hair in each button or something? Exactly.
Oh, come on. Yeah.

Speaker 13 The old Boat Store Cafe in Cornwall has the Museum of Celebrity Leftovers. Oh.

Speaker 13 And their exhibits include an actress called Mia Vasikovska, who I've never heard of, a clogette from her soup is on display there, and there is a piece of Prince Charles's bread pudding, which he chose to leave unfinished one time, and a few other exhibits.

Speaker 13 Wow. Oh, God.
I think I really like these little museums. I think they all serve an interesting, unneeded purpose, but yet I'm happy they exist.

Speaker 13 I'm not sure they're all museums.

Speaker 13 Well, one day, because like, you know, for example, they have bits of hair from in the Smithsonian, I think it is, from 14 presidents. And, you know, at the time that wasn't.

Speaker 13 Are they bits of hair or are they just hair that was found in a carpet vaguely near somewhere where they gave a speech once? All belong to Elvis.

Speaker 13 Yeah, well, it's interesting what is a museum and what isn't, because a museum is just a collection of interesting artefacts or culturally significant artefacts or historical artifacts.

Speaker 13 So yeah, these are definitely museums. There's a museum in

Speaker 13 Tasmania, and I can't remember what it's called, but it's a museum that's made up entirely of stolen tiny little bits from other famous bits of museum exhibits. So it's really

Speaker 13 okay. That's it.
That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 13 If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on Twitter. I'm on at Schreiberland.
James. At Egg Shaped.
Andy.

Speaker 13 At Andrew Hunter M. Anna.
You can email podcast at qi.com. And you can also get us on at qi podcast.
That's our group Twitter account.

Speaker 13 Or go to no such thingasofish.com where you can see all of our previous episodes and have a listen. We will be back again next week with another episode.
We'll see you then. Goodbye.

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