No Such Thing As An Emotional Support Wig

8:33Anna Ptaszynski:So every time it saw a little fleck of paint go past bright and white, it thought, oh great, and just started changing direction. No. Nightmare. And they had to just correct it all the time and it was constantly having to be redirected. It's like, do you remember when they had AI that was doing the camera work for a football game and they would just follow the football but then it accidentally saw the bald head of the linesman I just followed him for the entire game.

8:58James Harkin:That really happened.

8:59Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah.

8:59James Harkin:Beautiful.

9:00Dan Schreiber:So funny.

9:01James Harkin:It's really hot there. That's the other thing, right? It is so unbelievably hot.

9:05Dan Schreiber:Sometimes.

9:06James Harkin:Yeah.

9:07Dan Schreiber:As discussed, when it's not unbelievably cold.

9:09James Harkin:Yeah. Yeah. When you're on the other side, and at one point, they thought that Mercury didn't spin around, so they thought the far side of Mercury was probably the coldest bit of the solar system because it was just purely, it gets so, so cold. But the front side facing the sun, that's really hot. And so getting these satellites there is proving to be, we've had to use amazing technology. So they have a solar array, right, which is how they're powering it. It's so hot when they get that close, they can't even point the solar panels towards the sun. They have to gently kind of suggest the sun is over there because it's still going to heat it up.

9:44Anna Ptaszynski:Is that wild?

9:45James Harkin:Flirting with the sun. Yeah, exactly. It just needs to stay on such an angle. Otherwise, it would just burn out.

9:49Anna Ptaszynski:It would just get too much energy. You know what it does with the solar power? It turns xenon gas into a charged stream of plasma, which is then fired out as the solar propulsion thruster. I didn't know we had solar propulsion thrusters.

10:05Dan Schreiber:And in fact, if we had just done that, rather than going with this slingshot system, it would have taken seven years to get there, will it, by this point? Whereas if we'd just been doing the thruster mechanism, it would have taken a couple of months. So could have done with some more plasma streams.

10:22Anna Ptaszynski:But then it would have just speared into the sun or speared into the sun?

10:25Dan Schreiber:No, no, it just uses so much fuel. Oh, yeah, we should say that the slingshot mechanism is so useful because it uses hardly any fuel because what you're doing is you're using the gravity of Venus and Earth and Mercury to get yourself there. So you just need to have a huge fuel. And it's very hard to get fuel outside of Earth. It's like a bloody electric charger. Something you have to be really careful about on Mercury is making plans. Because if you tell someone, I'll see you in three days, what kind of day are you talking about? So in fact, quiz question, what's the definition of a day?

10:57Anna Ptaszynski:One spin, the planet spins around once on its axis.

11:00Dan Schreiber:Is that what everybody thinks?

11:04Anna Ptaszynski:You idiot.

11:06James Harkin:Idiot. God, I'm an ass.

11:08Dan Schreiber:The definition of a day is the time it takes for the sun to return to the same place in the sky.

11:13James Harkin:In the sky, yeah. So 24... It's always in the same place in the sky.

11:21Anna Ptaszynski:No, it's not. It's always in the same place. No, it's not. The sun? It's not in the same place. What about night? It's not.

11:29Anna Ptaszynski:It's always in the same place. We go round it. Don't go anti-Copernican on me, right? Okay, it's not in the same place in the sky. To your eyes. That's the definition of a day.

11:39Dan Schreiber:Yes, well, the day that you would talk about. So that's what takes 24 hours. The time it takes for Earth to do a full axis, is 23 hours and 56 minutes. And that's because at the same time as spinning on its own axis, the Earth is rotating round the Sun. So if you imagine it going round, it spins on its own axis. And by the time it's done a 360 degree spin, it's moved a bit round the Sun. So to point still directly towards the Sun, it needs to spin one degree more. Not a big deal on Earth. On Mercury, because it orbits the Sun at quite a similar speed to the speed it orbits on its axis. So it spins on its axis very, very slowly.

12:15Dan Schreiber:The two different kinds of day are very different. So a sidereal day, which I'm sure you all know, is the time it takes to spin on your own axis. On your own axis. Sorry, Dan, I should let you take over from here.

12:27James Harkin:Give me a chance to at least jump in, yeah.

12:30Dan Schreiber:23 hours, 56 minutes on Earth, 59 days on Mercury. A solar day, 24 hours on Earth, 176 days on Mercury. So if you say, I'll see you in three days, you could be out by like, I don't know, what's the maths a year and a half so I'm just saying that's something to worry about yeah yeah yeah

12:48Anna Ptaszynski:yeah yeah I think maybe we shouldn't go after all

12:57Anna Ptaszynski:stop the podcast

12:58Dan Schreiber:stop the podcast

12:59Anna Ptaszynski:hi everybody just wanted to let you know we are sponsored this week by Shopify

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13:54Dan Schreiber:Yes. But wait, Anna, I've got questions.

13:57Anna Ptaszynski:I've got questions about my cold water bottles.

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14:37Dan Schreiber:OK, on with the show. On with the podcast.

14:43James Harkin:Why don't we get to fact number two, and that is Andy.

14:47Anna Ptaszynski:My fact is, a female boffin is technically known as a boffin. Okay. Technically. Technically. According to the book, The Rise of the Boffin. Okay. By Ron W. Clark. This is a book about the history of boffins and boffinology and Boffin had a very specific meaning for a long time boffins were kind of they were they were a cadre of Mostly men sort of male research scientists during the second world war who were working on weird and wonderful experiments And that's that's where the word came into kind of modern use But this book I just picked it up it there's a copy in the in the basement because we were lucky to get a kind of backstage tour of the Royal Institution.

15:35Anna Ptaszynski:And there it is, page one, it says a female boffin, of course, is a boffin. One thing, because I think we'll probably talk about a few more kind of brilliant women from the RIS history, but the boffins from the Second World War, they were sent down to a place on the English Channel, right? And they were doing the first work on radar. So it was massively important for the war effort. You know, it was massively important for the Battle of Britain, for all sorts of areas, you know, having functioning radar was a huge advantage. The thing is, it was directly under a bombing route that the Luftwaffe frequently flew over during the Battle of Britain.

16:06Anna Ptaszynski:But it didn't look like very much. It just looked like an army camp, right? It was bombed once, and this could have been absolutely catastrophic to the British war effort. But fortunately, later, after all the dust had settled on the war, they asked the Luftwaffe, why didn't you bomb it more? And they said, oh yeah, well, we assumed you wouldn't put anything important under a major flight route for the Luftwaffe. Like, you'd have to be unbelievably stupid to do that. So we assumed it was just a kind of piddling little army camp.

16:33Dan Schreiber:The double bluff that won the war. The word boffin, we should just say, comes from our mutual friend by Charles Dickens and this character called Nicodemius Boffin, who is like an uneducated dustman. He wins a load of money and decides to educate himself by reading lots of books and doing that kind of thing. We think that's where it comes from, although there had been a meaning of like an officer, like an old doddering officer in the war was a boffin, and that doesn't quite work with this but I think certainly that seems to be most.

17:02Anna Ptaszynski:It's in loads of books. There's a family in The Hobbit called the boffins. Yeah, it seems to be a really, I guess it's quite, it's a fun word, isn't it really?

17:09James Harkin:It's a fun word. But boffin is not caught on, presumably. No, just this book. Just this one book.

17:15Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah, like page one. Yeah.

17:17Dan Schreiber:Are we gonna make it happen?

17:19Anna Ptaszynski:Let's make boffins happen.

17:20Dan Schreiber:This is sort of a home of boffins, the RI. Would it have done so well if it weren't for the boffins of the very start of the 1800s? maybe not because i was very surprised to know that the audiences in this lecture theater which is where all the greatest scientific discoveries were basically distributed to the public were more than half female and it's because the ri employed socialites to make it cool to go to science lectures guys i got a question for you so look at the audience here what kind of what word do you think was one of the most common to describe the audience at the royal institution this is something noted by Sir William Henry Bragg who was a Nobel Prize winner

18:02Anna Ptaszynski:someone shouted nerd from the audience not nerd odd no we're talking about the old audience is it positive or negative? it's positive cool dude is close enough fashion, fashionable and like Hannah said it was a very fashionable place for people to come and also as well as like sending the socialites out you would be able to get discount lecture rates if you gave your daughters or your best friends tickets they would get cheaper tickets to get

18:34Dan Schreiber:more women in oh nice oh what like one of those sign someone else up and you'll get half price off and they'll get half price off things and i keep meaning to forward that email to you guys about airbnb oh it's more like use the offer code fish can I tell you one of my favorite boffins yeah yeah so this is Caroline Haslett I think she was

18:57Anna Ptaszynski:a member of the RI um she was also director of the Electrical Association for Women and she was born in 1895 started off as a boiler engineer in Suffolk uh was expelled from her boiler engineering school because of a a dangerous love affair and then she had but she had a crusade her whole life which was to liberate women from drudgery in the home through the medium of electricity. And she had this thing called the House of Marvels in Bristol, which was a house which was all electric. And in 1935, this was insane. You know, people couldn't believe it.

19:31Dan Schreiber:What do you mean, like lots of things plugged into the mains? Not like you step into the house. What do you think? I don't know, an electric house sounds like I step on the floor and I go...

19:38Anna Ptaszynski:It killed everyone on impact. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it had things like a drying cupboard and an electric clock. And these were very advanced in 1935. And her memorial, which I just think is so nice, there is a Caroline Hazlitt Memorial Pylon down in Sussex. Really? Yeah.

19:58Dan Schreiber:That's nice.

19:58Anna Ptaszynski:I didn't know you got those. No. I know.

20:01Dan Schreiber:Sounds like the kind of place you're going to take your wife on holiday, Andy. If you could have any piece of infrastructure named after you, what would it be? Oh, my God.

20:09Anna Ptaszynski:I know it's difficult for you. It's got to be a solar farm. A solar farm? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But a pylon's a nice one, you know. Oh, no, a big, one of those big new sand batteries they're building in Finland. They're very cool. Okay.

20:19Dan Schreiber:Oh, well, hmm. I kind of wish I had... Can't have it at all. You've opened a can of worms here. The Royal Society, though, and it does feel like sacrilege to mention it in the Royal Institution, but it obviously has been held in very high esteem for a long time. Such high esteem that another boffin, I can't believe this is how we're calling, referring to them now, Dorothy Hodgkin, very famous, won the 1964 Nobel Prize in chemistry, for her work in crystallography. when she'd made the discovery that led to her Nobel Prize, which was solving the structure of penicillin. Her tutor said, you'll get the Nobel Prize for this.

20:51Dan Schreiber:And she said, I'd much rather be elected a fellow of the Royal Society. And he said, that's much harder. Wow. But she was anyway, so that's all right. And also she had a colleague, John Cornforth, cool name, who when she said, I think the structure of penicillin might be this, He said, if it turns out to be this, I will give up chemistry and grow mushrooms instead. And did he? He didn't. He went on to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1975. So, bit of a dickhead. Really? Didn't stick to his word. Can I give you another boffin? Yeah. Seeing as we're doing that. So, Raisa Nitterbuch. She is the only woman for whom a body part is named.

21:32Say her name again. Raisa Nitterbuch. The knee. No, it's a layer between the placenta and the uterus wall. But there are 432 people after whom parts of the body are named. And 424 are male physicians. Eight of them are gods and kings. And the only one that's named after a woman is this part of the placenta.

22:01James Harkin:Wow. Really? And I think there are at least three times more human body parts named after worms than there are after women. Oh, boy. Wow. So the vermilion border, for instance, around your map. I don't know that. It's like the bit between your lip and the rest of your skin. Oh, yeah. That's named after a worm.

22:16Dan Schreiber:That's very small. I can see why you're named after a worm. Well, here's the thing. The wormian bones, they are wriggly bits of bone that attach your skull plates together, named after Olé Vorm. Yes. Of course. Yeah, yeah. people want this book yeah they know they know where it's going that into the book half the audience so confused by that and one other is so these are things which sound like they should be named after a trait but are actually named after a person with an opposite name and the other one i found when i went through all the body parts is the allcock canal which is where the nerves that serve your penis pass through and that's named after benjamin alcock wow

23:10James Harkin:that's great that's wonderful the problem we're talking about uh in a fact like this where we're talking about general female scientists is there's just so many extraordinary people out there and how do you narrow it down so i i decided i was going to look specifically at people called margaret just to see what they've done for the world and there are so many amazing margaret's in the audience. Yes, exactly. But there are amazing ones. Margaret Gatti, she wrote a book about seaweed, and there was a whole seaweed craze that happened in the UK in the 1800s. And it was a way of liberating women who wanted to have a scientific passion, but weren't allowed into these institutions.

23:48James Harkin:They could go down to the sea and they could identify all these different seaweeds. Margaret Gatti's book had 200 different seaweeds in there, right? And it was getting so popular that men were writing that their wives were traveling with larger muffs so that they could hide all their seaweed equipment in because this was seen as uncouth to have that so the muff obviously the thing you put your hand obviously yeah

24:12Anna Ptaszynski:well it wasn't to me so i thought it's worth mentioning have you cleaned that muff recently

24:18James Harkin:it absolutely reeks why is there a test tube in there yeah um another amazing woman margaret Alice Murray. She was the first woman in Britain to hold a full-time appointment in Egyptology. So this is an academic world, not strict science. But she was the first person to unwrap mummies in public as a woman. Not meant to do that. Sorry?

24:41Dan Schreiber:Not meant to do that. Meant to keep them wrapped. It's the whole idea. Well, see, this is why they didn't use to let women in. They just come in and they unwrap all the mummies. Oh, take these bandages off. Come on.

24:53James Harkin:Get some air on it. Get some air on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No woman was allowed to do it again until 1945. She also wrote a book about witchcraft, which led it up to Wicca being quite a legit field. But it was very controversial because she bent a lot of the stuff. But she lived to 100, and she released her autobiography, Aged 100, and it was called My First Hundred Years. Love that. Such a good title. Love that. Last one I'll mention quickly, Margaret Roberts. Very interesting lady. She was a chemist and she's notable because she became the only Prime Minister of the UK to have a science degree.

25:32James Harkin:That was Margaret Thatcher. She started as Margaret Roberts. And it was very interesting. She's still the only one. Yeah. Wow. I believe so, yeah. I mean, the article was from 1998. But she... Well, it's not like we've been going through them quite a lot recently. What's really cool though is that for all the faults that you have with Margaret Thatcher, she was one of the people that led to the Montreal Protocol, which is when there was discussions about CFCs on an international level, she was a chemist who came to the table with knowledge that it was ruining our planet and convinced all the other leaders of the world that this was something that we needed to ban.

26:07James Harkin:So having a scientist in a prime minister role is probably a good thing.

26:12Dan Schreiber:Do you know who her supervisor was at university? previously mentioned in the last 10 minutes Dorothy Hodgkin, Nobel Prize winner Not Benjamin Alcock

26:24Dan Schreiber:Yeah, isn't that amazing? I did not know this Dorothy Hodgkin was Margaret Thatcher's tutor at uni and Thatcher, so she worked in Hodgkin's lab so she was a big crystallographer person hence the Nobel Prize and she kept a photo of her up in 10 Downing Street when she worked there and Dorothy Hodgkin was incredibly virulently anti-nuclear development and anti-lots of other stuff that Margaret Thatcher stood for and used to keep on coming to nag Margaret Thatcher about, you know, please stop investing in nuclear technology and Margaret, I think, would just always say no. But I have your picture up in my room, so...

26:57Great.

26:58Anna Ptaszynski:I've got a couple of very quick boffin quizzes for you. Oh, great. Great. These are all headlines from the sun about what those boffins have been up to. I've removed one word from each one. Okay. Oh! This is nothing like, have I got news for you. Just for legal reasons. What's that show? I don't know it.

27:14Dan Schreiber:Okay, good.

27:17Anna Ptaszynski:Boffins create super what that can survive being run over by a car? Super rat, someone yelled out in the crowd. Super rat that can survive being run over by a car? No?

27:25Dan Schreiber:Super human.

27:26Anna Ptaszynski:No. Super color fragilistic, expialidocious. There we go. Jelly. Super jelly. Super jelly. Okay. 50 most beautiful what's confirmed by boffins. Is yours on the list? Olcott canals. Is that a body part? No. It's baby names. Dave the 16-inch Watt killed by boffins. I'm not going there. Earthworm. Dave the Earthworm. It was basically Britain's Harambe.

28:02Anna Ptaszynski:It was tragically a 16-inch long earthworm. Can you imagine? It's a lot. Huge! Is he now two 8-inch earthworms? He's now one 16-inch earthworm in a jar at the Natural History Museum. Sadly, they studied him and then they killed him and put him in a jar.

28:18Dan Schreiber:Oh, right, okay, that's...

28:20Anna Ptaszynski:Well, I've got one more, but I'm too cross about a day for the earthworm now.

28:29James Harkin:It is time for fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that according to Ethiopian tradition, during the 14th century it was illegal to be a short, bold, old man.

28:44So... Someone just said, damn it. What was that? This is a legendary Ethiopian queen called Fara and we don't know very much about her because it's all oral retelling of her story. She may not have even existed but all the stories say that she reversed traditional gender roles and she forced the men to do all the housework and all the child care, and she really took against all the short, bold, old ones. And as someone who's kind of on the borderline of some of those categories, it's kind of interesting. But she, basically, it was that the older, bolder, shorter men were kind of talking to people and giving them ideas and telling them what to do, and she's like, well, I'm the queen, and I should tell you what to do.

29:28That's kind of the same.

29:29Anna Ptaszynski:And they were, like, traditionally figures of respect in the community. Yeah. And then in all the stories, there is one short, old, bold man who manages to escape. And she asks people to do something ridiculous. And they go to him for advice. And then he tells them how to do things. It's like a lot of different stories like that.

29:49James Harkin:Yeah, because it was a lot. She didn't say she was the queen of the people. She was the queen of the women. She was really saying, men, you have no place here. And so it was the men who were escaping to the cave going, please, short, bold man, tell us what we can do. And he kept feeding advice back to them of what they could do. And eventually it was his advice that saw to her end. Yeah, just to give an example of the kind of thing. So she would ask them to do ridiculous things like to build a house that was not on the ground and not in the sky, but somewhere in between. And then they would go to the old man saying, what the fuck is she on about?

30:24And then he'd say, OK, we'll say that you'll do it if she puts down the first foundation. And then they went to her and said, we'll do it if you put down the first foundation. and then she'd get really annoyed and she'd be like, you're talking to that old man again, haven't you?

30:37Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah, like you said. Now, go and build me an elevator for grain. But no nails. But you were saying about how they got rid of her at the end.

30:49James Harkin:Yeah. So finally, she said, I want to go see all of my land and I want to ride around it and I want people to meet me and say how great I am. So they ran to the old man in the cave and they said, hey, she wants to go around, what do we do? And he said, here's our chance. It's finally arrived. Put her on a giraffe, and it will run so fast it will rip her limb to limb. And according to the facts, that's what happened. According to the facts? This is all very misty stuff, isn't it? According to the stories. According to the stories.

31:19Anna Ptaszynski:But why does riding on a giraffe take your limb from limb?

31:21James Harkin:Well, she was tied to the giraffe. Does that help? I don't think so. I don't think it makes sense at all, Andy. But her arm flew off, and then her waist flew off. Her waist flew off. Her genitals flew off. Oh, dear. And the remains fell off. And where all these pieces fell is a long ride, apparently, because all the towns are named after each bit of her body.

31:42Dan Schreiber:Really? So can you still visit towns called, you know, Fura's Buttock? Yeah. So there's a place called Sala, which means genitals. A place called Kura, which means, like, the remains, after you've got rid of all the other bits. And her waist, there's a place called Halo, which means waist. I can't find any of them on Google Maps, but I do believe that they all exist. And isn't there a tradition, I don't know if it's still upheld, but the place where her last bit of body fell, her last big toe fell or whatever, people go to it and women pour milk on it as a sign of respect and love and men beat it with sticks.

32:20Dan Schreiber:So if you're going as a couple to this tourist site, you've got very different aims when you get there.

32:25James Harkin:The milk is an interesting thing. Why is there milk? What's the milk connection?

32:28Dan Schreiber:I don't know. it's always like a kind of a votive offering milk isn't it but I guess because it's such a precious resource um I think especially in certain certain parts of Africa yeah well I I wonder if it's to

32:38James Harkin:do with the fact that we have some items from the old what are they called again it's the um Salima Salima people Sadama sorry Sadama people um we have old items so there's an item in the Met Museum which is a pillow for keeping the people of uh that area in Ethiopia their head off their pillows because they used to use butter as their... Keeping your head off the pillow? Yeah, so basically your hair had been done up in butter, which was a hair gel, basically, back in the day. The idea is that you would do your hair up, you would keep it on this wooden thing, and it would retain this amazing look that you'd done purely...

33:15Dan Schreiber:You would keep your head on the wooden thing, you mean? Yeah. So it's like a wooden frame and you lie your neck on it?

33:18James Harkin:Yes, exactly, yeah.

33:19Dan Schreiber:Feels like you don't need the pillow at that point, doesn't it? Feels like if it's to keep your head off the pillow, at that point you can just take the pillow away.

33:26James Harkin:Yeah, okay.

33:27Dan Schreiber:Can I borrow your pillow? It just doesn't look like you're using it. They have four types of marriage, the Sadama people, or four types of sort of getting married. Three types are your kind of standard, traditional woman forced into a relationship she didn't want to be in against her will at the end. But number four, if you're lucky enough, is if a woman fancies a man, she stands on his doorstep, waits for the door to be opened, and throws a stick into his house. and if a woman does that to you as a man, you have to marry her. Oh. And a cool save is a lot of small talk, doesn't it?

34:01James Harkin:How often would number four happen over number one?

34:04Dan Schreiber:I think it depends on like family culture, on, you know, just what your parents let you do.

34:11Anna Ptaszynski:It's a bit humiliating for someone to basically play fetch with you as their way of...

34:17Dan Schreiber:Come on, Andy, you've been treated worse by various... I'm in marriage number four, yeah, yeah. There are some marriage taboos in the Stama area. So men are not allowed to mention the names of their in-laws. And women are not allowed to not only not say the names of their in-laws, but also any word that has the first syllable as the name of their in-laws. So for instance, my surname is Harkin. And my wife wouldn't be allowed to say Harkin, but she wouldn't also be allowed to say harmonica or hard-boiled egg.

34:48James Harkin:Which would be very difficult in our life. Oh my God. That comes up a lot in our house. Every morning at breakfast, you get the harmonica out where you're cooking. Yeah, that sucks. Short, bald, old men?

34:58Anna Ptaszynski:Who's the shortest, oldest, baldest man you can name? Living? Because I've got one, and I don't think you're going to get shorter or bald or older. Living? Not living.

35:09James Harkin:So in history, in all of history?

35:10Anna Ptaszynski:Well, yeah, yeah. Gandhi. Short and bald and old, yes. But not him. Older and shorter and maybe bald. Methuselah. Older. Older than Methuselah? Yep. But Methuselah was like 600 years old or something, wasn't he? What kind of bald are we talking about? Is it like older and longer ago? Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. No, nice. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so from someone from... He's a friend of the podcast. Oh, oh, Ootsy. Ootsy the Iceman. No way! Ootsy the Iceman. Ootsy the Iceman. Friend of the podcast. Was balding. He had the male pattern baldness gene. He was 53, which I think at the time was old.

35:44Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah. He was getting on. Yeah. And he was 5 '3". Was he? Short, bald, old. He could have been tall for that era. You don't know. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, I guess so. It's pretty good, though. That's good. Yeah, that's good. The other thing, I haven't told you this, this is fresh information that's just come into the inbox today. Ertz the Iceman had a tramp stamp.

36:09Anna Ptaszynski:I'm afraid I didn't write down the name of the person who sent it in, but he had on his back one of those. What is that? What's a tramp stamp? Yeah. You know. It's a... You don't know because, you know, you have so many. But it's the tattoo that goes on the lower back. Oh, that one. That one. OK.

36:28Dan Schreiber:Male pattern baldness. It's quite weird, isn't it? That you go bald in a pattern. And that we have no idea why it happens like that. And so, obviously, you lose it from the top, and then you lose it from the front sides. And there have been various theories, but the latest scientific papers are concluding that the reason that you lose the hair from the top of your head first and then from the sides of your temples is basically gravity is pulling your hair off. No. Really? The theory is that basically you've got a layer of fat under your scalp and men lose this layer of fat as they get older, whereas women don't.

37:06Dan Schreiber:And that's where your hair follicles are, sort of under this layer of fat. And so the idea is that this layer of fat is cushioning the force of gravity. So as men lose it, then gravity is pushing down hardest on the top of your head, because that's where it's directly hitting it, as opposed to when it starts to slope on the sides, the gravity is a bit less. So it pulls the hairs off. So that's why the hairs fall off the top. And then the reason they apparently, in scientific papers, fall off the front and starts to recede is from the weight of your face, pulling the chemicals. Stop.

37:35Anna Ptaszynski:Heavy face? Stop.

37:36Dan Schreiber:How heavy is your face? Well, if you look at bald men, they've all got huge noses.

37:42James Harkin:Well, that's interesting. That's interesting because I have a very big nose, but also, in theory, I should be bald. But luckily, as a child, I basically had no forehead. I had like a two-point forehead. I had hair that grew all over here. My parents used to shave a forehead onto me. No, seriously. And it's receded now that I'm in my 40s to where it's like basically a normal forehead. But that tracks with your theory. Big nose and heavy face. Absolute cobblers. Guys, this is the home of science.

38:20Anna Ptaszynski:I'm reporting data. Dan sits down. What today, sir? Just another forehead, please. Same again.

38:29James Harkin:As a child, if you see photos of me as a child, I had a bowl haircut, and I asked my parents why, and they said, because you didn't have a forehead, and it was weird. So I just had a fringe the whole way around, looking like I was Blackadder from series one. Yeah, I was reading about, there's a lot of baddies in literature and let's say in movies that are bold. Lex Luthor. Lex Luthor. Darth Vader when the mask comes off. Yeah, but... Is he?

39:00Anna Ptaszynski:Describe Darth Vader in one word. If you get it right, we'll give you a billion... Describe the man who robbed you with a lightsaber.

39:10James Harkin:I'm just pointing out He was bald Just pointing out that when the mask came off they would have gone yeah of course he's bald

39:17Anna Ptaszynski:Of course he is because if you pull the mask off and there's this luxurious beautiful hair That's weirder

39:25James Harkin:When he was younger he did have luxurious hair I think then acid took it away didn't it Yeah Anyway the point is is that you do have you do have villains who are seen with that, but that almost led to Patrick Stewart not getting the job of Picard in Star Trek. And he wrote about this in his autobiography recently. When he was on his way to the audition, he was in the UK and he was going to America. Just before he got on the plane, they said, can you bring a wig? We need you to wear a wig. And so his wife went home and he got on the plane and his wig got on the plane behind him. So it followed him to LA to where he did the audition.

40:02Anna Ptaszynski:Because... Can I tune out for a second? Did Dan say the wig got on the plane behind him? Yeah, like an emotional support dog.

40:08James Harkin:Well, they weren't going to hold the plane for it, so it got on its own.

40:13Anna Ptaszynski:I'm sorry, it got on the following plane. Yeah, you said it got on the plane behind him, like he gets on the plane.

40:21Dan Schreiber:Stop kicking my seat. Whoa!

40:27James Harkin:The theory is that because in the future, that far in the future, we would have cured boldness, so there would be no people who were bold. So they thought that's what Gene Roddenberry wanted. He does the audition, he goes home, and then a few days later he gets a phone call, and they say, we'd like to see you again, this time without the wig. And it turns out Gene Roddenberry said, I don't think in the 24th century we're going to care about bald heads anyway. And then the wig got back on the plane.

40:53Dan Schreiber:I actually have a fact that marries Ethiopian female rulers and baldness. Okay. So did I at the start. because it's actually... Shit, it's the same one. How embarrassing. No, this is about the most famous maybe Ethiopian female ruler, the Queen of Sheba. Some people claim that she's Yemeni, but are any of those people here? No. Most people agree that she was an Ethiopian queen. King Solomon was told about her by his pet bird, actually, who flew around Africa and came back to Solomon and said, there's this really fit woman, you should marry her. and so he found the queen of Sheba and he thought yes I will marry her but there are all these rumors that she's got really hairy legs and so there are various versions of this story some in the Torah some in the Quran I think but this is one of them he was like we're gonna have to trick her because I need to know if she's got really gross hairy legs and so in the palace he made for her he built a floor made of glass with water underneath it but that made it look like the whole floor was a pool so when the queen of sheba's walking across it she's going to have to hitch up her skirts and she did indeed hitch up her skirts and he did indeed say ha you've got a disgusting hairy leg what's going on there and she said my mom fancied a goat when she was pregnant with me genuinely this was the explanation um and so that made her be born with a hairy leg and he didn't marry her until he designed a special hair removal cream that could remove all the hair from her legs and that is...

42:26Anna Ptaszynski:Is that feminism?

42:30James Harkin:Go on, it's...

42:31Anna Ptaszynski:Feel like it.

42:37James Harkin:Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is my fact. My fact this week is that Gollum actor Andy Serkis' MTV Awards acceptance speech was so good, it won an award. The acceptance speech won an award. Crazy. Isn't that astonishing? It's not when you see it, though. Has anyone here seen the acceptance speech? Yeah, big 2003 MTV Award fans in the house. It basically was Andy Serkis sort of accepting it on behalf of Gollum because the category was best virtual performance. So it was a year in which Gollum was up against Scooby-Doo, Kangaroo Jack, Dobby, and Yoda.

43:19Anna Ptaszynski:I wonder if they had speeches prepared. I love that four shot of them all in the audience. Yogi's looking absolutely livid. He's short and bold and old. Anyway, sorry. Oh, yes.

43:31James Harkin:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it was a speech, and we've got a picture of it up here where Gollum is holding the award. He basically attacks Andy Serkis for trying to accept the award. It should be his. But instead of it just being quite a fun sort of, oh, you took it from me, he goes into total profanity, the worst swearing you would ever hear. and it was so good, it won a Hugo Award, which is a science fiction ceremony that happens.

43:54Anna Ptaszynski:Do you want to know one of the strangest award speech knock-on effects ever? Yeah, go on. So 1994, Tom Hanks won Best Actor at the Oscars for Philadelphia, right? Yeah. And he was a very young man at the time, but he'd done a few films and this was his first, you know, really big serious role. Obviously all about, you know, the AIDS crisis and in the speech, he paid tribute to his old high school teacher, Raleigh Farnsworth, right? And he said he paid tribute to him as one of the, you know, sort of one of the great but unsung body of gay Americans, right? And the story at the time was that he had outed him accidentally on stage.

44:32Anna Ptaszynski:Oh. Which thankfully is not true. He had phoned up three days before and asked for permission to mention him. He was saying, I was one of your pupils. I don't know if you remember me, but I'm Tom Hanks. I'm actually pretty famous now. but this speech and the kind of version of events of the speech led to another film by Kevin Kline called In and Out about someone inadvertently outed during an awards acceptance speech so the acceptance speech prompted another film a whole film was based on the speech

45:02Dan Schreiber:poor Tom Hanks then really having to double down and go I definitely didn't do that

45:07Anna Ptaszynski:no he definitely didn't

45:09Dan Schreiber:it's actually kind of cool the way that Andy Serkis became Gollum, I suppose. If you're a Gollum fan, I mean, it was quite groundbreaking at the time, right? When we saw Gollum and it's like, he is Andy Serkis, but he's not. And Andy Serkis was meant to be just the voice. And he didn't really want to be just the voice of Gollum because he thought, I'm a full body actor here. So he rocked up anyway, because his wife persuaded him to. And he was so good while he was auditioning for the voice, his whole body and his whole face morphed in the way that Gollum's does and acted out the bits so well that Peter Jackson thought, okay, we've got to use the body and face of this guy as well for Gollum, which is a bit shit because they'd already designed the whole of Gollum for The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film.

45:51Can I just say, sorry, I don't really, I don't know these films very well and I don't know what Andy Serkis looks like. Does he look like this?

45:58James Harkin:It's uncanny, it's uncanny. That's actually just a shot of Andy Serkis. Oh, is it? Yeah.

46:03Dan Schreiber:But yeah, they had to redesign the whole part around him and one of the earliest uses of that kind of CGI where they put points all over Andy Serkis' body. Motion capture. Motion capture, indeed.

46:14James Harkin:But that's an interesting difference, which I didn't properly appreciate. CGI is different to motion capture. Motion capture is we are seeing Andy Serkis. He's in the scene. He's doing all these things. CGI is really a computer-generated reconstruction, maybe using a guide, but built from scratch.

46:30Dan Schreiber:Totally, yeah. One feels like a subcategory almost, but yeah. But what motion capture can't do is the face. or it can and it sometimes does but in Lord of the Rings it didn't but if you look at Andy Serkis' face and to answer your question James yes it does look quite a lot like Gollum's but in the most flattering possible way it kind of mimics Andy Serkis' face and that's because the animators when they were turning Andy Serkis' movements into Gollum they used to call Andy Serkis over to their desks and say okay we're creating this scene now can you act it out in front of us and we will follow your facial expressions precisely and make sure that we match them exactly to Gollum.

47:09Dan Schreiber:Yeah, which sounds quite so fun being Andy Serkis just trotting along to the desk again. Yes, I'll do it. I read that he based the voice on Gollum on the sounds his cats made while coughing up fur bowls. Does that sound right? Exactly. I think his name, Gollum, according to J.R. Tolkien, the name comes from the horrible swelling and gurgling sound that Gollum made. Yeah, but what does Tolkien know? Well, I thought it was named after because it's like a Jewish monster or something called the Golem. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, Golem. That's right. I thought it was that. But he said that it came from this.

47:44Other people think that maybe it comes from like the word gold, basically an old word for gold.

47:49Anna Ptaszynski:I don't know. But I looked at Andy Serkis' filmography because, like I said, I'm not really massively familiar with him. And apparently he voiced an animated talking anus in 2019. I don't remember that. You don't remember? No. It won Best Picture. It was for an environmental charity, and it was to discourage people from flushing web wipes down the toilets. And it opens with a line, Hello, I'm an arsehole. Gollum, or Andy Serkis rather, wasn't the absolute first example of motion capture, which I find very interesting. So there was an early pioneer in the field, was Jar Jar Binks. Does anyone remember the character of Jar Jar Binks?

48:36Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah. Now beloved, of course, we all celebrate Jar Jar Binks Day every year.

48:41James Harkin:Ahmed Best was the actor.

48:43Anna Ptaszynski:Ahmed Best, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he didn't win Best Actor. No. Jar Jar was hated, but a lot of people...

48:52Dan Schreiber:It's hated, I think, as we know, from the groan in the audience when you mention his name.

48:56Anna Ptaszynski:As in, it was very sad, because he was a young actor who was very excited to get this role as Jar Jar Binks, and George Lucas told him, look, they hate it now, but 20 years from now, the kids who love Jar Jar are going to be adults, and they're going to change the narrative, and that has not happened. But the absolutely mad thing about Jar Jar Binks, because, I mean, it was, you know, pioneering stuff, and you can see production shots where Ahmed Best is wearing the suit, he's wearing the head, but he's got the sort of, like, the body suit on that's helping to map his movements. Other people going for Jar Jar Binks included Robin Williams and Michael Jackson.

49:31Dan Schreiber:would have been even less popular maybe yeah he Michael Jackson eventually refused to do it because he wanted to do it as himself he didn't want it to be himself to be CGI'd he was like I have the Jar Jar Binks look just let me act it and Lucas said no one wants to see that on screen wow but the actor who played him

49:51James Harkin:Ahmed Bess interesting fact his twin brother went to prom with Lauren Hill Jesus Christ

49:59Dan Schreiber:we've slipped into the pages of heat magazine and i think we should slip out sorry who's lauren hill

50:06James Harkin:the miseducation of lauren hill she was in the fugees she was one of the pioneering uh sounds of the 90s i would say thank you yeah yeah um the first cgi in movies was in vertigo 1958 alfred hitchcock oh and it's the swirly bit at the start so it's not any real film oh yeah credits and he used something called a kerosene predictor and this was something they used in the war where you could put a load of inputs in about how fast an airplane was going and what direction it was going and it would be able to predict where the airplane would go and then you'd be able to fire in that spot so that when the plane got there, the bullet would get there at the same time.

50:46And he basically put a load of inputs into this and then hung it over his camera or whatever and made it make lots of different twists and turns and that's what makes those spirals at the start of that film. Wow. That's so cool.

50:58Dan Schreiber:Yeah. One of the first films to really lean in, I suppose, to CGI was Tron, which I haven't seen but it looks brilliant, 1982. Yeah. So this really was the first pioneering use of computer-generated imagery without any real world in it. But I always find with early CGI, the weird stuff is the stuff that's kind of lo-fi and done by hand. So all the characters in it are just a face and then the rest of them is CGI'd and they've got all these sort of glowing lines, like lines of circuitry all over their bodies. And every single frame of those lines was hand-painted on. So there was about half a million separate pieces of art done for that film with little bits of paint that hand-painted on the glowing lines of the circuitry.

51:41Dan Schreiber:It was the opposite. And then it couldn't be nominated for an Oscar for Best Special Effects because it was cheating.

51:49James Harkin:Yeah, I remember that. Really? You remember? It was 1982.

51:54Dan Schreiber:You were one.

51:55James Harkin:I hadn't been born for two years, but I remember the first thing I said when I came out of the womb, going, that's bullshit, man. You came out of the womb, picked up your fringe, and went, this is bullshit.

52:07James Harkin:Someone CGI this bullshit on my head? A lot of films now, they want to say we don't make it with CGI. That's a big thing. It's like, this was not made with CGI. And so I was looking at a YouTube miniseries by someone called the movie Rabbit Hole. And they found out that basically films are using CGI to delete evidence of CGI in their behind-the-scenes footage.

52:34Anna Ptaszynski:Love it. Isn't that amazing? But, like, for instance, one thing about not using CGI, Christopher Nolan, for Interstellar, there's this big bit where there's a big cornfield. Yeah. And he planted 500 acres of real cornfield in Alberta, Canada, in order that he didn't have to CGI this field. Wow. What a faff. Well, the cornfields exist. You need one willing farmer.

53:01James Harkin:What, to lose all his corn? Because he burns it down, Andy, in the movie. He burns it down. You don't see Nolan in shot, but it's as part of the...

53:09Anna Ptaszynski:Sorry, I thought it was just walking through the corn, swishing it like in Gladiator, which actually would make it worth more, probably. Well, he didn't actually burn it all down. It cost him$100 ,000 to make this entire cornfield, and he managed to make a profit of$162 ,000 by selling a lot of the corn afterwards. That's amazing. It's pretty good.

53:29Dan Schreiber:Because I was just wondering if Gladiator bread went for more at the time. And if not, they should have.

53:34Anna Ptaszynski:What, the bread where Russell Crowe swished along it? Yeah, of course.

53:37Dan Schreiber:You'd pay more for one that's been fingered by Russell Crowe, wouldn't you? I don't think I would. Do you know what I mean? No. You'd ask for a discount. I feel like I would erect a scarecrow just to scare Russell Crowe. Nice.

53:51James Harkin:We're going to have to wrap up, guys. Does anyone want to say anything before we go? I was reading an article in The Economist about actors losing their jobs due to artificial intelligence. It is happening, but mostly in the animal world. And that's because people don't really want to use animals in movies because it might be cruel. And you can do it with AI and CGI instead. and there's a guy called Steve Martin, interestingly, who was, he's like one of the main guys who used to give all the animals for Hollywood to use. And he said, there's not been a single chimp in any big American movie since The Wolf of Wall Street in 2013, and he has a bear called Tag the Bear who can't get any work at all, and has had to start wrestling with Logan Paul and taking on humans in hot dog eating contests.

54:42What?

54:43Dan Schreiber:Oh, God. Really? Has had to. Well, has had to. I feel like Steve Martin slightly... It's the only work you can get.

54:50James Harkin:But that's where we're getting with actors, right? Where CGI is now taking over a lot of actors. I think we're going to get to a point where they'll replace old movies with problematic actors with a new actor so that you can watch the movie again.

55:02Anna Ptaszynski:Really?

55:03James Harkin:I think. That feels like we're headed. I can see a world where Michael Jackson's taken out all his video clips and Jar Jar Binks is put in his place. and that's just our reality going forward.

55:12Dan Schreiber:It's always going to be George Hart. Everybody Allen builds George Hart. George Hart.

55:20James Harkin:It would be a much happier oil, that's big.

55:26James Harkin:That is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for being here in this amazing room, the Royal Institution with us. We've loved being here and if you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this show, We're all on Instagram. We're on Twitter. We're on various different places. You can find us there. Or email podcast at qi.com because Andy goes through it all and he picks out your best facts for our new show, Little Fish. Anyone heard Little Fish? It's a cool show, eh? And then there's Drop Us a Line. Any Drop Us a Line listeners and viewers?

55:56James Harkin:Please send them all there. We love getting them. But otherwise, we'll be back again next week with another episode. Thank you so much, everyone, for being here. We'll see you again. Goodbye.

56:08Thank you.