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Chapter 1: Who is Greg Foote and what is his expertise?
Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, where we were joined by the absolutely brilliant science communicator Greg Futt. Now, I have known Greg for many, many years. He is really, I would say, one of the UK's premier fact-checkers.
If you listen to BBC Radio 4, you might know him from the show Sliced Bread, where he looks at different products and claims and sees whether the science backs them up or not. But he has a brand new podcast. It's very exciting. It's called The Baby Fact Check. And it is something that I really wish I had about three years ago when I had a very young baby because Greg is a new father himself.
Congratulations to him and his partner. And they have realized that there is so much information out there. So many claims from companies, from the internet, and Greg has decided to use his many, many skills to work out which of these claims are true and which of them are false. It's such a great idea, and he has done it absolutely brilliantly.
So if you want to listen to that, then go to thebabyfact.com. check wherever you get your podcasts and in fact at the baby fact check is the place to go on instagram to learn more and if you want to know more about greg in general then go to greg fut that's g-r-e-g-f-double-o-t dot com and everything will be on there on with the podcast
No, not on with the podcast. Hi, James. Hi, Andy. We have more news. One more exciting announcement. We are doing a little run of live shows. This summer, we're going to the Royal Institution. Venerable. Home of science. And now us, temporarily.
uh we're going to be in the lecture theater it's amazing oh it's an amazing thing we did a show uh last year there and it was so much fun it's such a an amazing historic wonderful venue it's where the royal institution christmas lectures are and we are going to be there on the 21st 22nd 23rd and 25th of july they're all at 7 30 p.m uh the one on the 21st is going to be live streamed and available on catch up for two weeks so please come on down come and see us
ruin the home of science and its reputation with our stupid jokes uh if you want to get tickets you can go to nosuchthingasafish.com slash r i summer okay come and see the show come and see us can i do on with the podcast now yeah yeah on with the podcast so Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, coming to you from the QI offices in Hoban.
My name's Andrew Hunter-Murray, and I'm here with James Harkin, Anna Tijinsky, and Greg Foote. Hello. And once again, we've gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. So, in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, that is Greg.
Tests have shown that a Volvo 240 used to be the best car with the right vibrations to calm down a crying baby. Wow.
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Chapter 2: What is the Baby Fact Check podcast about?
I was told this by one of the UK's leading infant crying academics, by the way.
Wow.
Leading infant crying academics. He goes to all the annual crying conferences, he was telling me.
LAUGHTER
I was going to say whale of a time, but that feels too soon for us.
You've come to the right place for jokes like that. That is amazing. I think remembering back where I was three or four years ago when my baby was very young. If I heard this, I'd be straight onto auto car and find myself a Volvo 240.
Except you said used to. Have babies changed or have Volvos changed?
Well, I was picturing the Volvos, that big old boxy car, isn't it, from the late 70s, early 90s. I think cars have got quieter. I think they probably dampen the vibrations a little bit more as well. So, yeah.
So James needs to go secondhand.
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Chapter 3: How do vibrations affect a crying baby?
And then I spoke to the experts and the expert was like, nope. Oh, great. Thanks so much. It just doesn't work. Unless the parents have contextual information, it's not a thing.
I mean, I think that is the truth is that babies cry and you just basically try everything that's worked in the past. You try all those things until one of them works again.
And to save possible parents a lot of time, There is almost no reliable evidence on the best way to raise children at that age because the studies have not been done. So there are good studies that say don't neglect or abuse your children. They have a bad time.
But there aren't good studies that say if you hold and stroke your child for eight hours a day as opposed to 10 hours a day, they will grow up to be, you know, really independent.
Because it's just so hard to get any evidence with that level of detail. Exactly. With enough of a sample size.
Exactly, and across enough time.
Because there are a million variables.
Not particularly ethical either. Just leave that one crying.
But look after that one and let's see what happens. How babies keep crying is insane. Because babies can cry for hours and hours, right? And if any one of us were to scream for several hours, we would be in pain.
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Chapter 4: What interesting facts about white noise were shared?
Well, funny you ask, James, because I've been having problems finding a designer willing to work on that. Yeah, I've had the advert out for ages and no one seems to think it's a good idea.
Well, the way that you need to go is Squarespace, because Squarespace is the place to go if you want to build a website. They have all sorts of amazing things.
There are search engine optimization tools, so that when people want to Google things that are named, not after the obvious seeming reason, but for someone with a strangely apposite name, anyone Googling that phrase will be served my website first. I'll be able to sell things on that. There's just so much that Squarespace offers and they make it simple and easy.
Absolutely. So if you would like to build your own website, then make sure you go to Squarespace and take advantage of this offer. If you go to squarespace.com slash fish, you will get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code fish to save 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.
That's right. Did you know, James, the website was named after Sir Adrian Website, who created the first website in 1782?
Someone, please help me. On with the podcast! On with the show!
All right, time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is, in 1654, a public competition was held between a team of 30 horses and a vacuum. Yeah.
And the winner was?
The vacuum.
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Chapter 5: How do modern parenting methods relate to baby sleep?
Look at that. Magdeburg hemispheres. You're welcome.
I guess we should say what causes them to stick is basically that the air pressure on the outside is pushing in so hard because there's nothing on the inside. There's nothing to push out. Right.
Exactly.
You're essentially pushing against atmosphere, aren't you?
Yeah. It was controversial. Well, not controversial, but, you know, no one thought he was right about this until he demonstrated it.
Well, they thought that vacuums couldn't exist for most of history. Yeah. One of the ancients said nature abhors a vacuum. And the idea was if one ever came in nature, somehow something would fill it. Yeah. Right.
Makes sense.
Yeah, it does make sense, but it's not true. As we have seen right now, we can make them. But yeah, this guy, this guy, how do you say his name, Andy? Otto von Gierke. Von Gierke. He did this in Magdeburg and Magdeburg had very, very recently been the victim of the worst atrocity in the 30 years war in where the population went down from 20,000 to 4,000 due to an enormous massacre.
And this public competition was almost like, look, we're back, guys.
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Chapter 6: What historical context surrounds the use of alcohol in baby care?
If it's a small plush car made by Honda, maybe not. Cozy goop. There's a monument to him or to the spheres in Magdeburg now. It's beautiful. It's one of the sets of hemispheres and one horse at either end and they're straining away and it's not coming apart.
I know. This guy, von Gierke, he was like, I'm really surprised that his name doesn't come up more. It seems like he was absolutely massively important in loads and loads of physics, but just never got anything named after him. Yeah. It's a hard word to spell.
Is that a university?
There's a university named after him. Oh, that's cool.
But it's not like Pascal after whom the pressure is named after or... He did write this up in his book, which was only published in English in 1994. Bloody publishers. Great news, we've got a translation deal. What? You've been dead for 350 years.
Guys, what do you think would happen if you got into a vacuum? Die.
Yeah. Explode?
Not necessarily. Well, not immediately. You would die very soon, but not as quickly as you might think. In the 1960s, when it was more okay to do this kind of thing, they put various animals in vacuums to see what happened. Because, you know, it was the age of space travel. They were thinking, what will happen to humans if they end up accidentally dying?
And so in 1965 they put dogs in a vacuum and they found that dogs in a vacuum for 90 seconds always survived. Always.
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