24: No Such Thing As A Malicious Robot

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We ran it on QI a few years ago.

Yeah.

Which was there's no such thing as a fish.

No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life.

It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish.

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 three other elves, James Harkin, Alex Bell, and Anna Czezinski.

And once again, we've gathered around the microphone with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And here we go, in no particular order, here they are.

Okay, fact number one, Alex.

Okay, when he was bored, Calvin Coolidge used to ring a bell to summon his bodyguards and then hide from them under the Oval Office desk.

Really?

Yep.

Just as a joke.

But I mean, presumably after the first time you've done that.

Or did they have to be like parents to a four-year-old four-year-old child?

Yeah, oh, where can it be?

Oh, no.

Probably.

Yeah, I wouldn't have much trust in them if they were continually fooled by it, like every time.

That would be the worst.

You would fire your Secret Service straight away.

You'd be like, seriously, this is the second time.

You're done.

Well, actually, speaking of firing people and hiding, I found a completely, sort of slightly related fact as well, a secondary fact.

Herbert Hoover had a really strict privacy policy to the point where whenever he or his wife were on the approach, the White House staff would signal to each other using the bell system in the White House and then hide in a cupboard or behind bushes or something like that because

he hated seeing his staff and really liked his privacy.

And they risked being fired if they were seen.

So anytime he came into a room, they'd sort of have to scramble around and try and hide somewhere.

They got so used to doing this that when Harry Truman took over the presidency, moved into the White House, he was like, where are all my staff?

Herbert Hoover invented Hoover Ball, didn't he?

Which was

it as soon as he gets the ball, all the other players hide in cupboards and he just gets to walk right to the goal line.

He then hides under a desk until someone finds him.

That's Cooleridge ball.

No, it was actually invented by his doctor to keep him fit.

And it's a cross between, according to the government website, tennis, volleyball, and medicine ball.

Which do you guys know what that is?

Medicine ball, yeah.

It's a big bowl that you use for exercise.

Yeah.

That big heavy thing.

So it's basically like volleyball with an unbelievably heavy ball, about the weight of a newborn baby, and you throw it over the net.

Calvin Coolidge liked to eat breakfast in bed while having his head rubbed with Vaseline.

Was he bald?

Because that is a recipe for greasy hair.

You know the guy who invented Vaseline?

He was, oh, I've forgotten his name, Cheeseburger or something like that.

He thought that Vaseline was like a big sort of cure-all and he used to eat it every single day.

And he used to rub it on his body all the time because he thought it would cure him of all

illness.

And did it?

Well, he's dead.

Okay.

So it didn't make him live forever.

Yeah, okay, so it wasn't an elixir.

I can understand why he does that.

I once went on a date and

I couldn't find any hair gel and my hair was really all over the shop.

If this is something about Mary story, can I stop you there?

I put tiger balm in my hair and my god, that was the most intense sensation I've ever had.

It was like putting chilies all over my head.

It was just like on fire

and my head stunk like hell.

I got on the train and everyone was like, what is that smell?

Was that a successful date?

It was, because in the end, I had to admit it, I was like, by the way, the reason my head smells like this is because I did tiger balm all the way.

And she said, I really like the smell.

It is quite a nice smell.

And if you have a cold, it's quite, so maybe if she was a bit blocked, it would have really helped her out.

Exactly, my sinuses were fucking incredible.

My point is, though, is that maybe the Vaseline on his head while he's eating kind of gives a slight kind of, like putting Tabasco on your face.

Maybe that's how he managed to get Mrs.

Coolidge.

She was like, oh, I really like the smell of Vaseline.

Yeah.

Have you thought of tiger balm?

There is a thing called the Coolidge effect.

Do you know that?

No.

The idea is that male animals prefer to have sex with females they've never seen before than females that they have seen before.

And it's called the Coolidge Effect, and it's named after Calvin Coolidge.

Why?

It's a story about him and his wife who were being shown around the farm and they got to a chicken yard and Mrs.

Coolidge noticed that the male chicken was having sex a lot and she said to the guy, you know, does he do that a lot?

And he said, oh, yeah, he has sex about 12 times a day.

And she goes, well, you should tell that to my husband.

So then the guy went to Calvin Coolidge and he said, said, This chicken has sex 12 times a day, and your wife told me to tell you about it.

And he said, Oh, is it the same chicken every time that you have sex with?

And this guy said, No, it's a different chicken every time.

And he said, Well, tell that to my wife then.

Which chicken farmer named it then?

It was named after that anecdote, which I guess probably didn't even happen.

Yeah.

But just to make this clear, that is a really cruel thing he said.

So he did basically say the only reason he wants to keep having sex is because it's not with my wife every time.

He's saying, If I was to have sex 12 times a day, it wouldn't be with you.

Yeah.

To be fair, it was a pretty snacky move on her part.

That was quite a good movie.

No one comes across well in that anecdote at all, apart from the chicken.

Do you know?

I only found this out the other day.

A weird number of presidents have won Grammy Awards for spoken word albums.

Really?

So I stumbled upon this because Hillary Clinton did a spoken word album, which was some kind of, you know, telling us how we should live better album in the 90s.

Obama's won two Grammys.

Spoken Words.

For his autobiographies.

Oh, they are well spoken.

Yeah.

It's true.

Clinton's got one.

Both of Clintons have got one.

Jimmy Carter.

Kennedy.

You have to be well-spoken, though, don't you?

You have to be good at doing speeches.

So not that surprising.

It makes total sense.

Yeah.

I wonder who didn't get one.

Well, George Bush certainly didn't.

Did he not?

Yet.

Maybe.

Is the cherry night just full of presidents just waiting?

And the best spoken word?

We got Clinton, Obama.

The presidents are the only ones who were asked to make audio tapes.

It would be like, and the winner is Calvin Coolidge.

Has anyone seen Calvin Coolidge?

I want to talk about hide and seek because we were talking about

Coolidge playing hide and seek.

So, you know how refrigerators have got this magnetic seal that keeps them closed?

Yeah.

That's because of hide and seek.

In 1958, the decade up to 1958, a load of kids have been killed playing hide and seek and hidden inside refrigerators.

And so the new law was brought in saying that they had to be capable of being opened with a 15-pound pound push from inside.

And as soon as that law came in, they had to come up with a way of making sure they stayed closed but were able to be open from the inside.

And that should have been a lot of fun.

Because previous to that, would it lock and then it's like

latches.

Did it have latch, so the kid would be stuck inside.

Okay.

That's interesting

because I only found out recently that in Back to the Future, the time machine was originally supposed to be a fridge and the reason it was changed was because of a fear that kids would start trying to imitate them and locking themselves in fridges.

Yeah.

Should we wrap up on this one?

It feels like no, go ahead.

I was just looking at things, well, hobbies of presidents, which are quite good, and related to hide and seek.

So, Woodrow Wilson made his Secret Service staff paint his golf balls black in winter, didn't he?

So that he could still see them in the snow.

But in more humorous news, one of Einstein's favourite hobbies was sailing, and he loved to sail even though he couldn't swim and refused to wear a life jacket.

And at one point in his life, he had to be pulled from the water by a teenager who heard him crying out for help and pulled Einstein out of the water.

And the teenager just disappeared, so no one knows who that teenager was.

But Einstein's life was saved by a teenager.

But bizarrely, this year, there's a fish called Einstein in Blackpool, and it got a bladder infection, which meant that it stopped being able to swim and just sank to the bottom.

And so the guy in Blackpool has designed a tiny fish life jacket, which the fish now uses to swim in.

So, unlike Einstein, this poor Einstein fish has been forced into a life jacket and given the chance to swim again.

I just think that's a really weird mirroring of the real Einstein's life.

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Okay, time for fact number two.

And that's my facts.

My fact this week is that until 2011, the sun was only in theory a sphere, but it's now confirmed to be a sphere.

Oh, yeah, how have you confirmed that?

NASA confirmed it.

Oh, did they?

Yes.

How did they do that?

So NASA, basically, and this was a headline that appeared on NASA's official website on February the 6th, 2011.

It said, it's official, the sun is a sphere.

And the idea was that NASA had two twin stereo probes, they were called stereo, and they went to either side of the Sun and took the first 3D photo.

Basically, they got to the dark side of the Sun, as it were.

They got to the side that we never see.

Yeah, it's not dark as such, though.

But just in terms of

badly chosen words,

it's the dark side.

That would have been amazing if they got to the other side and it turned out to be dark.

Yeah.

It would be amazing.

Or flat or hologram, something awesome.

But anyway, I just find that amazing.

I find that we've gone all this time and just assuming that scientists agree that it's a sphere.

And it's probably a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I just like that that is how far scientists do actually go.

Might not be, might not be.

That's what they say.

It might not be.

It is amazingly spherical, the sun.

Yeah, they don't understand why this is the case.

It was discovered only in 2012.

It's the most perfect sphere in nature by quite a long way.

And I think it's the second most perfect sphere in the universe that we know of.

What's the first?

The first are the silicon balls that have been used as a replacement for the kilogram.

So one incredible thing is that if you scaled the sun to the size of a beach ball, its bulge, the biggest dip in it, would be less than the width of a human hair.

But even so, the biggest dip on the sun, so it's the biggest difference between its smallest diameter and its biggest, is 10 kilometres.

And if my math is right, if you blew up this perfect sphere that we've created to the size of the sun, then the biggest dip in it would be about 120 centimetres.

I know you always wanted to have a Guinness Book of Record record, Dan.

Yes.

One that you can't have is the

record for longest time spent staring at the sun because the Guinness Book of Records specifically refuses to accept entries for that one.

Why?

Because it's too dangerous.

Because it's too dangerous.

Isaac Newton used to do experiments where he would look at the sun for as long as possible

and he did it one time for so long that he had to shut himself up in a darkened room and wait for his sight to return and it took three days for his sight to return.

Not so smart, these scientists.

Not so smart.

In 1999, when there was an eclipse, a lot of people were looking at the sun then.

And when people obviously damaged their eyesight and they went to hospital afterwards, the doctors could tell exactly when they looked at the sun by looking at the impression on their retinas.

So if it was like a halfway through the eclipse, it would have the half sickle of the

although I don't know how anyone's eyes got damaged then because I remember it and it was so cloudy.

So the original fact that we had here was how we didn't know know for sure that the sun was a sphere,

but people were pretty certain about it.

So Galileo, for instance, he could see the sunspots going around the back and coming back again.

And so he postulated that it must be a sphere.

And there are lots of other reasons why we were pretty certain it was a sphere.

But not 100%.

Yes, exactly.

I read a headline which you guys are going to hate.

So the people listening to this podcast, they must hear Dan about to say something and then us all groaning and wonder why we do it.

And it's, you know what?

It's the look on his face.

As soon as he's about to say something ridiculous, he has this look as if to say, I'm a naughty boy, you guys are all going to shout at me.

Anyway, go on.

Okay, so the world almost ended in 2012, but

we survived by a week.

This is what happened.

The Sun had a ginormous solar flare in 2012, around July.

And it shot out into one particular bit of space.

We were a week away from the end of the path of where it went out to.

And scientists have said that if we were in the path, if we were a week ahead in time, or if it happened a week later and we were in that path,

the size of the solar flare would have knocked us basically back to the dark ages.

It was literally we were that close to destruction.

Well, and if we'd just been a bit further ahead in our rotation around the sun, yes, we would have been in its path.

So it's just we just happen to not be in its path.

Wow.

I am slightly terrified of the sun because there is this massive risk of coronal mass ejections just wiping out all technology on the planet, which is just horrible, I did.

There was a massive solar storm in 1859, which is the storm that has had the biggest effect on Earth

since records began on this.

And the biggest piece of technological infrastructure that existed at that point was the telegraph network.

And

it basically, all across Europe and US, it basically shut down.

Everyone unplugged their machines, but there were sparks flying off all the pylons.

And even if you turned off the transmitters, they were still sending and receiving messages.

And aurori were seen all over the world.

And in places like the Rocky Mountains, it was so bright that the gold miners actually got up and started making breakfast because they thought it was daytime.

Wow, middle of the night.

Wow, really?

Yeah.

Lloyds of London, the insurance people, in 2013, they did a study using the data from

1859 to work out how much it would cost if that kind of thing happened today.

And they estimated that in the US, it could cost up to $3 trillion worth of damage, even if it was just that strong.

So it could go so much worse than that.

Very scary.

Yeah.

You know, you were just saying about these guys who woke up in the middle of the night because they saw the corona.

Earlier this week there was an earthquake in California.

It was in the Napa Valley where they make wine.

And enough people around there have these you know these exercise bands that are attached to the internet and it can tell how much how many steps you've done every day and how your heart rate's doing and such like that.

And they could work out who had woken up at the same time as this earthquake went off.

And they found out that more than half of the people who woke up during the earthquake stayed up for the rest of the night, even though it went off at 3 a.m.

Oh, really?

Isn't that cool?

Yeah, that's

just a way that you can take information that was for another thing and then work out how humans react to something.

Yeah.

You mentioned California and the sun.

So, relatedly, there's a big solar plant in California, and when birds fly over the top of it, often they catch fire because the sun's rays are being so concentrated.

So, then they've called them streamers, the guys who work there, and these birds fly through and ignite a spontaneously combust mid-flight.

Wow.

And set on fire.

It's really sad.

Yeah, it's very sad.

They just freak out mid-flight.

That never happened before.

You're on fire.

Oh, right, thank you.

No, no, you're not.

You're on fire.

Literally.

Wow.

Okay, time for factor number three, and that is Jasinski.

Yeah, my fact is that there are some birds' nests that contain over a hundred rooms and are so heavy that they cause trees to fall down.

What?

Yeah, so these are really cool.

This is my new favorite creature, I think, the sociable weaver bird, which you find in southern Africa, in South Africa, Botswana, places like that.

And they are really sociable.

So they build these gigantic nests where up to 400 birds will live in one nest.

And they have loads and loads of different chambers.

And they're incredibly efficient for a bunch of different reasons.

But they do weigh an enormous amount.

Trees will collapse?

Yeah, a tree recently collapsed under their weight, so they can weigh almost a thousand kilograms, which I think is about as much as 12 adult men.

So if you stick 12 adult men in a tree, it's likely sometimes a branch is going to break.

And it did.

The desert where most of these birds live is obviously very hot in the daytime and gets very cold at night.

And it's insulated so that if you go right into the middle of this nest where they all roost together, then it's much warmer at night, like more than 10 degrees warmer than it is in the daytime.

And then in the daytime, if you hang out in the outside chambers, it's more than 10 degrees cooler than it is in the daytime because it's so well shaded.

Wow.

Do they have different rooms for different things?

Or do they all have their own rooms and stuff?

The pairs have their own rooms, so each room will be a pair and sometimes their offspring, and then in the center will be where they all sleep together.

It's like a hotel.

It really is.

It's incredible.

It is like

a huge.

Is it that other birds live in there as well?

Yes.

I saw a list of some of the other birds who live there.

They include the familiar chat,

the ashy tit, and the rosy-faced lovebird.

But yeah, they do.

They let other birds live in them, which I think is also great of these guys.

When they've got a spare room going, they say to their mates, hey, you couldn't be asked to build a nest.

Don't worry.

So they're like a hostel.

Yeah.

It's like Airbnb.

Yeah, exactly.

Badgers do that as well, don't they?

Do they?

Yeah, because badgers have sort of like very similar to a rabbit hole, but in because rabbits only let rabbits in.

But badgers are like, if they see a rabbit, they'll be like, come on in, mate.

Sure.

Yeah, and they let them live with them.

Yeah.

Are you sure this isn't

Watership Down?

It might be Wind and the Willows if they were.

They all wear tweed, right?

Prairie dogs we've done on QI as well, quite extensively, and they're quite similar to these birds.

And I also like them for it, aren't they?

Because they have enormous burrows, prairie towns, I think they're called.

So they're smaller than they used to be because they're now more in danger.

But in 1900, a prairie town was found that took up 25,000 square miles and housed 400 million prairie dogs.

What?

How many?

400 million.

400 million.

Are you hearing the number?

That's like the population of America, isn't it?

Yeah.

So you've got prairie dogs in America That's amazing.

In one house?

It's in a book called Prairie Conservation: Preserving North America's Mosthood.

Why do they need to conserve these things?

There's 400 million in every single house.

They're doing good.

But they let other animals live in their homes as well, so you get burrowing owls.

How is there any room?

Come on in, squeeze in.

Let's go back to nests.

Yeah,

tell us about nests.

You were talking about the temperature of the nest, how it fluctuates.

I found something great thing about temperature and nests.

The sex of an alligator and some other reptiles, like lizards and turtles, is determined by how warm the nest is that they're laid in.

So for alligators, if the egg is kept in a nest at 30 degrees, it turns out female, and if it's 34 degrees, it turns out male.

Really?

Yeah.

So in 2009, some researchers found a geofalcon nest in the Arctic and they did some radiocarbon dating on it and they found that it had been in use for 2,500 years.

So people had been living there since the Roman era.

Or birds had been living there, I should say.

Birds just outside, going, get out of my house.

Wow, that's incredible.

Yeah, Dan, you've been away at the Edinburgh Festival.

Yes.

While you're away, Greg Jenner came in, who was in one of our earlier podcasts.

He's the historian from Horrible Histories.

And we were talking about a human nest.

It was like a mattress inside a cave somewhere in Africa.

So this mattress was in use for 77,000 years.

Wow.

77,000 years.

Imagine how long that is.

Like 2,000 years was like when Jesus was

around.

77,000 years.

Is it still in use?

No.

Okay.

I mean, we should keep the tradition going.

That's true, actually.

Yeah, why do we stop?

They used moss, and they would put it in this corner of a cave, and then they'd use it for a while, for a while, for a while, and then they would burn it and put more moss on top, and then they would burn it and put more moss on top.

And this moss was particularly good because it would stop insects from being able to live there, so it was a really good place to sleep.

But also, so you're saying it's the exact same bed, effectively?

Yeah, because they just kept adding different bits of the mattress on top.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow.

And they almost never changed the bedding.

We did ask about it.

It was only about every 2,000 years or something that they bothered even changing the moss.

Just

on the subject of mattresses, I was reminded there's a trapdoor at the bottom of the blue whale in the Natural History Museum in London.

When they opened it up, they discovered a mattress in there.

And it was basically a time capsule inside the blue whale because it was when they were building it, it's where all the workmen would sneak in.

So they found a bunch of magazines and newspapers and empty wrappers, but also a mattress because apparently, horny curators, that used to be a top location.

I can't believe they went to that sort of trouble.

Think about it.

If you're someone who works at the Natural History Museum, you're already quite a big dork.

And so the idea of sex inside a blue whale, yes, please.

I mean, even I think that that's the best

possible location.

I don't know why they need the trapdoor because a blue whale's vagina is large enough to walk through.

Such a good point.

Maybe it's a male blue whale.

Yeah.

Oh, that's probably it.

I was just going to talk really quickly about the weaver birds, just because they often now build their nests on telegraph poles and pylons, so you'd recognize their nests.

And anyway, this often causes power outages.

So I was looking at animals that cause power outages, and squirrels are always cutting off electricity.

So there are some electricity companies that say that two-thirds of their electricity outages just come from squirrels chewing through wire or like linking up circuits by jumping from one bit to another.

And they've shut down the NASDAQ twice.

I think an estimated $20 million worth of shares were not traded in that time.

$20 million.

Millions.

Okay, guys, numbers can be big.

Let's get over it.

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Okay, time for the final fact of the show, James.

Okay, my fact is: the worst baseball team in South Korea has replaced its supporters with robots.

So these guys are called the Hanwha Eagles.

They've lost more than 400 games in the last five years.

They came bottom of the league in the last two years, and the opposition have started calling them the Hanwha Chickens because they don't put up any kind of fight.

What they do is they have these screens around the pitch, and you can, using your computer or your phone, you can put your photo on the screens and you can make the screens do Mexican waves or do cheers or chants or whatever.

I just think that's quite a

god that's so sad isn't it though?

I mean so the players and is the idea that the players are supposed to feel rejuvenated at the sight of automated things which are being forced mechanically to cheer them on.

Yeah.

I think it's solving like that.

Yeah.

I think it's a bit demoralizing.

It's solving the wrong problem.

Like it's the problem is the bad team, not that the fans are booing because they suck so much.

It's like, do you know what we've got to solve about this?

Our fans.

They're the problem.

Let's invest all our money in futuristic robots.

Futuristic robots.

Okay, so here's another way of using your fans, maybe a slightly better way.

You guys don't like the robot thing.

I like the robot thing.

I just think it's not solving an issue.

Okay, well, the Washington Bullets had this super fan called Robin Ficker.

And what they would do with him is they'd let him sit behind the opposing coach's bench.

And they would give him a megaphone, and he would make fun of the opposing team by shouting at them.

So he would make fun of the coaches' outfits or when the Chicago Bulls came to play, he read the sex passages of the Bulls coach's autobiography at him showing the game.

Wow.

That was distracting.

I was looking up Robots and Death and I found out that Jeremy Clarkson was nearly killed by a robot or robot wars.

Apparently one of the robots was fighting another robot and a circular blade came loose and zoomed across the studio and they had it on film and they played it back in slow motion and it went across his head two inches above his scalp.

Whoa!

We actually know who the first person to be killed by a robot was and his name was Robbie Williams.

Robbie Williams.

How was he killed by a robot?

He was in a car factory or something like that and he was in a fog factory and he was hit by a protruding arm and he was killed by that.

So it was like because it was an arm kind of was a robot.

Yeah.

Well it was it was a big mechanical device.

It was for moving car parts parts from one end of the factory to the other and it just he got hit on the head really hard for it the second guy who got killed by a robot definitely got killed by a robot his name was uh kenji rada and that was two years later and he got pushed into a grinding machine by a robot arm oh yeah like was it a malicious with malicious intent so there's never been a malicious there is an innate human fear of robots the first use of the word robot was uh in a plague by czech playwright carol capec called rossom's universal robots and it was about robots trying to take over and kill people nine percent of americans when surveyed admit that they will have sex with a robot or would have sex with a robot.

There was that book called Sex and Robots, which it's a guy who's a huge computer scientist and chess champion saying that he thinks we'll have sex with robots within 50 years.

He's one of the 9%.

Yeah, definitely.

They did have the first kissing robots in 2008.

They were made in Taiwan, and they performed as the stars in Phantom of the Opera.

They did an all-robots cast of Phantom of the Opera, and these two robots kiss, and it's the worst kiss you've ever seen.

Their heads come together, and then they pause for 10 seconds and their heads pull apart.

It's like a 12 year old's disco.

Empathetic robots are a thing that are just being experimented with and they've sort of are claiming they've invented where robot they're robots that respond to your own facial expressions with matching facial expressions and they're preparing why are you smiling

really creepily

okay I'm gonna stop looking at you so they've come up with empathetic robots now whose faces stop it everybody they've come up with empathetic robots whose faces mirror the facial expressions that humans have in the hope that they can care for lonely humans in future.

But again, a bit like the fake cheering crowds in Korea, it seems like a sad thing if you need a robot to fake empathetic facial expressions in order to feel okay.

Our buddy Levin Skyra,

who was on this podcast a few episodes ago, just actually took part in the opposite version of what we're talking about, which was the World Robot Football Cup.

Oh, yeah.

And he went out to Brazil, I think.

It was in Brazil.

It was in Brazil.

Yeah.

And so it was robots playing against each other at football.

And Levin was saying that they've projected that within 50 years, a robot football team will be able to beat a human football team.

And within two months, they'll be able to beat Man United.

Did you see?

So have you seen this, Dan?

You've been away.

So we're recording this on Wednesday, but on Tuesday, Man United played against MK Duns, who are lower in the third tier of English football, and they lost 4-0.

Whoa.

And there was a great thing on Twitter.

There was a girl who'd got a free bet from an online betting site, and she put £2.50 on Man United to win 4-0 but had accidentally put £2.50 on MK Duns to win 4-0 at 500 to 1.

Wow.

Wow.

I know.

And she was like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, I've won over £1,000.

That's right.

Anyway, let's talk about...

Oh, would you like to talk about that?

I was going to talk about sports fans since we're on sports now.

So I was looking at generally sports fans.

One of the amusing things I like that's happened in the past is that during baseball matches until about a hundred years ago, because the stadia was smaller if you hit the ball out of the stadium it would fall into the long grass and the game had to stop for five minutes and everyone the fans and the players had to spend five minutes searching for the ball because they wouldn't have lots of spare balls I think now in baseball balls just get lost and that's it they have they've bring spares people take them don't they get so if it comes out and you catch it it's your ball yeah that's how it works another thing about old baseball games where they didn't have as many umpires in those days and some of the umpires were allowed to if they weren't quite sure about a decision, they were allowed to consult the audience, consult the crowd.

Like he wants to be a millionaire.

Yeah, exactly.

And see what the crowd thought and then use their ideas if they couldn't really work it out.

72% of the audience thinks that that was a home run.

God, it must have sucked when you were playing away games.

Yeah.

If you blamely made it and you just missed it.

Did he make it?

No!

Definitely not.

So I think the angriest any sports fans have ever been, and James will know about this, must be during the Heidi game.

Is that the Calvin Coleridge game?

Heidi goes seeky.

Yeah.

I don't think I know about the Heidi game.

It's so good.

And it is frequently voted the most exciting game of American football of all time.

It was Oakland Raiders versus New York Jets.

And it was really close.

The New York Jets were just ahead of the Oakland Raiders, but it was obviously a really thrilling match.

It had about three minutes left.

And suddenly, at the very last minute, the Oakland Raiders overtook the New York Jets and they won.

And it was a massive title and it was a massive deal.

And NBC, the network that was broadcasting it, as it had overrun by a couple of minutes past its three hours, switched over automatically to show Heidi for all the kids on the other channel.

Now, they didn't want to do this.

The NBC executives saw that it was a really thrilling match and were like, we've got to obviously keep this on the airwaves.

So they tried to call the studio to say, obviously, keep the match on, guys.

Look at this.

This is the biggest match ever.

But so many people, so many angry fans were trying to call the studio to say, I can't believe you're going to switch over to Heidi.

It's outrageous.

I want to watch the rest of the match, that their phone lines broke down and the executives couldn't get through to the studio to say, keep it on.

So, in in the great irony of fan complaints, they caused Heidi to overtake the match by calling, breaking the phone lines.

And Heidi came on.

And then NBC managed to irritate people further, I think, by during this episode of Heidi.

There was a really touching scene where Heidi's disabled sister, I think, learns to walk.

And they thought, What can we do to remedy this?

So they flashed up the score suddenly for all the fans in the middle of Heidi.

So just

all these little kids suddenly

tearing up at this scene.

NBC, it sounds like an episode of 30 Rock.

My favourite baseball player, just before we finish,

is Joe Sprints.

And

one of his rivals, another baseball catcher, had caught a ball that had been dropped from the top of a building.

And he got a world record for the highest catch from a high point.

So he decided that he wanted to beat this record.

And so he got a friend to go up into a blimp.

And someone was going to drop the ball from the top of this hot air balloon and he was going to catch it.

Oh my god.

Okay.

He caught it in the way that baseball players do with his mitt directly above his face.

The ball hit his mitt, the mitt hit his face and he fractured his jaw and lost five teeth.

And apparently he dropped the ball.

Oh!

And someone alongside him just went, stop hitting yourself.

Why hit yourself?

Okay, that's it for this episode.

That's all our facts.

Thanks so much for listening.

If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said during the course of this episode, you can get us on our Twitter handles.

James, you're on

Alex.

At Alex Bell underscore.

I'm on at Triberland and Chasinski.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Still not on since I've been away.

Still hasn't happened.

Okay, and you can head over to no such thingasaffish.com, which houses all of our previous episodes.

And we're going to be back again next week with another episode, four more facts.

So stay tuned, and we'll see you then.

Goodbye.