Pod Insights No Such Thing As A Fish Little Fish: Jurassic Bark About this episode Dan, James and Andy discuss YOUR facts, including hippos and hip-hop. Dan's joke-telling career reaches its peak. And we name eight more Friend of the Podcast fact custodians.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Stop the podcast.
0:01 Speaker 01 Stop the podcast.
0:02 Speaker 00 Hi, everybody. We are sponsored this week by Progressive.
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0:22 Speaker 01 Progressive offers customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage for you and your loved ones.
0:27 Speaker 00 They're basically the outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks, and baby gates of insurance.
0:32 Speaker 01 Don't wait. Get your quote today at progressive.com.
0:35 Speaker 00 Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. On with the show.
0:41 Speaker 02 ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.comPARENTS to learn more.
1:22 Speaker 03 Hi, everyone, and welcome to this week's Little Fish. This is the show where you send us some unbelievable facts. We say whether we believe them or not, and then we say whether you should believe them or not, because we've done some extra research on them. And then, at the end, we will do some extra other stuff. But in the meantime, I am joined by Andrew Hunter-Murray, Dan Schreiber. My name is James Harkin. And who is going to give us the first fact today?
1:46 Speaker 01 I'll do one. Go for it. Oh, all right. This is a fact from Simoneeda Popov. So, thank you, Simoneeda, for writing in. Terrific fact is that there is an area in Los Angeles, which is known as Silver Lake, right? And it's named after the Silver Lake Reservoir nearby.
2:02 Speaker 03 Uh-huh.
2:02 Speaker 01 And it is named not after the silver colour of its water, but after Herman Silver.
2:08 Speaker 03 Oh no.
2:09 Speaker 01 The LA Water Commissioner at the time the reservoir was built.
2:12 Speaker 03 That's quite early to get into the things that are named after
2:15 Speaker 01 People.
2:16 Speaker 03 People, but you think that it's gonna be things that their names are similar to.
2:21 Speaker 01 Yes. I thought the element of surprise is so important here. And the longer I leave it in the episode, the more likely you guys are thinking, oh, Andy's gonna do his blooming book idea now. But anyway.
2:30 Speaker 04 How much of a surprise is it to Little Fish listeners? Because we talk about it a lot on Drop Us A Line.
2:34 Speaker 01 I know, we do it a lot in Little Fish as well.
2:35 Speaker 04 Yeah, we do.
2:36 Speaker 03 We do it in real life as well, listener.
2:39 Speaker 01 The terrible thing is, in the inbox of Drop Us A Line, they're flooding in.
2:42 Speaker 03 Right.
2:43 Speaker 01 I'm now being bounced into doing this book by the sheer number.
2:46 Speaker 04 Well, it sounds like it's more normal than we realise. So actually, what I might write is the book of things that are named not for people who were named after the thing that it sounds like it's named after.
2:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:56 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's a good sequel book.
2:58 Speaker 04 Yeah. Well, it's a competitor at the Tills.
3:02 Speaker 03 Very nice. Any more on the, on the lake or just?
3:05 Speaker 01 No, it's just called Silver Lake.
3:06 Speaker 03 Very good.
3:06 Speaker 04 Do lakes look silver? I don't feel like I've seen a silver lake. Yeah. Well, give me an example. Where's?
3:12 Speaker 01 In the moonlight, the water is silvery, isn't it?
3:14 Speaker 04 Okay, alright.
3:15 Speaker 03 I think silvery is definitely a word that's often used to describe water.
3:19 Speaker 04 Yeah. Okay, I'm just thinking daytime. That's, that's not.
3:22 Speaker 01 Daytime, it'll be blue, blue to brown.
3:25 Speaker 04 Blue to brown lake. It doesn't add quite the.
3:28 Speaker 01 It's not romantic, is it?
3:29 Speaker 03 Actually, it's named after Stephen Blue and Arthur Brown.
3:36 Speaker 04 Shall I read one here?
3:37 Speaker 03 Yes.
3:37 Speaker 04 Okay, this is from Jonas Mortensen of Denmark, who says, "Longtime listener and fellow fact aficionado. During a Saturday low-energy TV watching with my kids, watching some random nature documentary, I discovered that the hippopotamus has the same body fat percentage as Usain Bolt at his absolute peak." So, uh, basically, sub 10%, uh, less than 10% fat.
4:02 Speaker 01 Hippopotamus is less than 10% fat.
4:04 Speaker 03 They're all muscle, Andy. They're all muscle.
4:06 Speaker 04 They're incredibly muscly. Usain Bolt, I, I read was about 8% body fat. He probably went a bit lower than that.
4:12 Speaker 01 But hippos.
4:13 Speaker 04 That's low.
4:13 Speaker 01 That's low.
4:15 Speaker 04 It's not like you.
4:16 Speaker 01 No, it wouldn't be high, would it? It was like, the amazing thing was he did it and, you know.
4:20 Speaker 04 Yeah.
4:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:21 Speaker 04 Hippos are about 2 to 5% fat.
4:23 Speaker 03 Get out.
4:24 Speaker 04 That's, that's the data online.
4:26 Speaker 03 It's interesting. That's true of quite a lot of animals are way less fatty than you think they're gonna be.
4:32 Speaker 01 That's really interesting. So they're all muscle?
4:34 Speaker 04 They're all muscle. Now, here's the question. We often get told hippos are faster than you realise because they get, they charge at people. A lot of deaths are a result of hippos. In a 100 metre race, who would win? A hippo or Usain Bolt?
4:46 Speaker 03 For me, a hippo, 100%.
4:48 Speaker 01 Okay. Is it from a dead start? As in they stopped before? Because I can imagine Usain Bolt taking off very fast and winning.
4:55 Speaker 03 He was actually a surprisingly slow starter, Usain Bolt. Like, he was famous. His start was, if his start was as fast as some other 100 metre runners, he would be even faster.
5:05 Speaker 04 That's really funny. Sorry, you're saying he was slow?
5:08 Speaker 03 I'd say he was slow.
5:09 Speaker 04 He was actually really slow, you guys.
5:12 Speaker 03 Oh, he was, honestly, he was always a faster finisher than a starter.
5:16 Speaker 01 That's very interesting.
5:16 Speaker 04 How do you do? I stopped watching after the first two seconds.
5:22 Speaker 01 Fascinating.
5:23 Speaker 03 Yeah.
5:25 Speaker 01 That's really interesting.
5:25 Speaker 03 I mean, it's all comparative, right? He's better than us.
5:28 Speaker 01 His slow start is probably quicker than my quick start.
5:31 Speaker 03 Oh, absolutely.
5:31 Speaker 04 Yeah. Yeah, he's better than us. Arguably, he's better than any human ever.
5:36 Speaker 03 Not at the start.
5:36 Speaker 04 Not at the start.
5:37 Speaker 03 Not at the start.
5:38 Speaker 04 Yeah.
5:39 Speaker 01 That's true. Okay, so I'm saying Usain Bolt will win over a hippo.
5:44 Speaker 04 You're saying Usain Bolt will win. Okay. Yeah, the, the answer is that Usain Bolt, at his fastest, reached 44.7 kilometres an hour, and a hippo gets to about 30. So actually, Usain Bolt, in that 100 metre sprint, would win.
5:59 Speaker 01 But put it over 800 metres, maybe we've got to tell some more.
6:02 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah. I mean, who knows? We've never tested it. I know Michael Phelps once swam against a shark, apparently.
6:07 Speaker 01 But a CGI shark.
6:08 Speaker 04 It was a CGI shark. We need a CGI hippo against a CGI at his peak, Usain Bolt.
6:14 Speaker 03 Yeah, okay.
6:15 Speaker 04 What's interesting is if these speeds are what they would be running at, Usain Bolt would pass the finishing line two seconds before a hippo. And the fact that you did, James, on the show ages ago, is roughly two seconds is the amount of time that Usain Bolt's feet are touching the ground over a 100 metre sprint.
6:33 Speaker 03 Not sure quite what that says about the world.
6:35 Speaker 04 No.
6:38 Speaker 04 But when you sit back and think about it, well, yeah, that's true.
6:40 Speaker 03 Usain Bolt's fastest speeds would occur in the 200 metres.
6:44 Speaker 01 Would they?
6:45 Speaker 03 Yeah.
6:45 Speaker 01 Because he's already going so quickly after the first time.
6:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, because it gives him a chance to get up to speed.
6:49 Speaker 01 Because he's so slow off the blocks.
6:54 Speaker 01 Hangs about, hangs about, doesn't he?
6:56 Speaker 03 Anyone who watches athletics will be going, James, you're absolutely right. He was famously a slow starter.
7:00 Speaker 04 But does it, do we hear the gun go and then we hear his coach going, Usain? It's got, what?
7:09 Speaker 03 Here is a fact. This is also about human beings and yours was about like fat content and stuff like that. This is more about height and it's from Oscar Matalainen. And Oscar says, after extensive research, I have figured out that Eminem is exactly 138.4 Eminem's tall.
7:34 Speaker 03 Okay.
7:34 Speaker 01 Lovely, that's lovely.
7:35 Speaker 03 Now, I've done some research of my own and I looked on the internet about how tall Eminem is and how big an Eminem is. And I don't think Oscar's figures exactly stack up.
7:46 Speaker 01 Interesting.
7:47 Speaker 03 But.
7:47 Speaker 01 Stack up, very funny pun.
7:49 Speaker 03 Thank you. I'm here all week.
7:52 Speaker 03 But the truth is that actually the figures that you get online of like how big an Eminem is, they vary quite a lot. Like on Amazon, it says one thing. If like on newspapers, they say other things and stuff whenever it's mentioned, which is not that often.
8:06 Speaker 04 On Amazon, because I often, they'll give the dimensions of like a book that you're buying. You get individual Eminem dimensions.
8:12 Speaker 03 I promise you it does.
8:14 Speaker 04 Who's reading, who's needing that info before purchasing?
8:17 Speaker 03 You don't want to order a bag of Eminems and then they're all 10 feet across.
8:21 Speaker 04 We've all done that.
8:21 Speaker 01 Exactly.
8:23 Speaker 03 So what I have done is I brought us some Eminems.
8:27 Speaker 04 Oh, nice.
8:28 Speaker 01 Nice foley.
8:29 Speaker 03 A little bit of foley there. Dan, I've got you some peanut ones and Andy, I've got you some regular.
8:34 Speaker 01 Thank you.
8:35 Speaker 03 And we're going to measure them.
8:37 Speaker 04 Can I open them?
8:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, but it's going to be hard to measure them if you don't open them.
8:41 Speaker 04 Can I eat one or is it?
8:42 Speaker 03 Yeah.
8:42 Speaker 04 Okay.
8:44 Speaker 03 Okay, so if you give me one of the peanut ones, we're looking at diameter, I suppose.
8:50 Speaker 01 I thought you were stacking them top to bottom, like putting them down flat.
8:53 Speaker 03 Okay, well, we can do it that way as well. But the one that you've got there is quite spherical.
8:57 Speaker 01 Hang on, there's my.
8:57 Speaker 03 Do you want to measure it?
8:58 Speaker 01 Oh.
8:59 Speaker 03 So I'm passing Andy a ruler.
9:01 Speaker 01 It's just over a centimetre. If I'm doing it longest, the longest dimension, it's about 1.3.
9:09 Speaker 03 Okay, well, you've got the regular ones, Andy, so let's go for that.
9:12 Speaker 01 Okay.
9:12 Speaker 03 1.3 centimetres.
9:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:14 Speaker 03 Okay, so according to the internet, now, this is another problem we have. The internet is also unsure about how tall Eminem is.
9:21 Speaker 01 Oh, boy.
9:22 Speaker 04 Right.
9:23 Speaker 03 But the general consensus is that he's five foot eight.
9:26 Speaker 01 Okay.
9:27 Speaker 03 He mentions in some of his rap lyrics that he's shorter than that, but it's not always clear in the lyrics if he's talking about himself or something else.
9:36 Speaker 03 It's a problem with, like, going to first-hand sources sometimes.
9:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:39 Speaker 03 In history, you don't know exactly what they're talking about. So let's say he's 173 centimetres tall.
9:46 Speaker 01 Okay.
9:46 Speaker 03 Which is what the internet thinks. And Andy, you think that your Eminem is what size?
9:51 Speaker 01 1.3.
9:52 Speaker 03 1.3 centimetres, then he is 133.07692.
10:00 Speaker 01 What were we trying to get up? What was our correspondent saying?
10:03 Speaker 03 He was got quite close, actually, 138.
10:05 Speaker 01 Oh.
10:06 Speaker 03 But we found that the peanut ones are a little bit bigger than that still.
10:10 Speaker 01 If I'm stacking mine flat, this one was about, I'd say, 1.1.
10:17 Speaker 03 Right, about 1.1.
10:18 Speaker 04 I mean, Eminem will shrink as he gets older, so we could
10:22 Speaker 03 That's true.
10:23 Speaker 04 eventually meet
10:23 Speaker 03 That's true.
10:24 Speaker 04 the amount we've just had.
10:25 Speaker 03 So going the stacking method, the A H M S M, the Andrew Hunter Murray stacking method, would be 157 M and M's.
10:34 Speaker 01 Oh, okay, okay.
10:35 Speaker 03 So it's worse still. So, yeah, Oscar, your extensive research, I don't know if it was the same as ours, as in actually getting the M and M's. But until we get the rapper in the room as well, we can't do a full
10:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:49 Speaker 03 experiment.
10:49 Speaker 01 But he's on, he's on next week, isn't he?
10:51 Speaker 04 Yeah.
10:52 Speaker 03 He is.
10:52 Speaker 04 He is, yeah.
10:53 Speaker 01 And he was very funny in the recording.
10:57 Speaker 01 Very funny.
10:58 Speaker 03 If I can't get a full 45 minutes without any swear words in, we might have to cut that.
11:04 Speaker 04 That's a shame. That's a shame. Okay.
11:06 Speaker 01 Here's a fact, um, from Stuart Dunster, who says, in 2024, the British Army was so busy that 137% of its personnel were committed to operations or exercise.
11:20 Speaker 03 What does that mean?
11:22 Speaker 01 This is amazing. Basically, you can do, if you're in the army, you can do a task like readiness training in parallel with other exercises or commitments or whatever. So.
11:32 Speaker 04 It's overtime, basically, right?
11:34 Speaker 01 Kind of. You need to be prepared to drop everything if you're called on to deploy, but also carry on with the current exercise you're doing. And it causes lots of work and paperwork and, um, it's, it's, it's a huge pain. Basically, it's a fun way of saying the army is under-resourced, uh, which is not a fun fact, but there we go. But there you go.
11:52 Speaker 03 When we say that there was like, let's say, let's say the Grand Old Duke of York had 10,000 men. It might have only been 8,000, but some of them are doing two jobs.
12:01 Speaker 01 He'll only have been able to deploy 2,000 of those men. Oh, 100%. Yeah. Many of those will be in logistics and supply and all of that stuff. Yeah. Uh, fun fact. Who was this fact from?
12:09 Speaker 04 You just said, uh, Stuart Dunster?
12:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:13 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
12:13 Speaker 01 Brother of.
12:14 Speaker 04 Oh, Phil.
12:15 Speaker 03 Really?
12:15 Speaker 01 Former guest on this podcast. Yes.
12:17 Speaker 04 Oh, very cool.
12:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:18 Speaker 04 Well, hi, Stu.
12:19 Speaker 03 I wonder if we'll get one from Eminem's brother?
12:24 Speaker 04 Uh, I've got another one here, which is from Julia Fisher, the subject line of which is, every word of this fact is dubious at best.
12:32 Speaker 03 Oh, great. Why did you send this one to Dan, Andy?
12:35 Speaker 04 I can't remember. So this is the fact, the oldest living dog is invisible and 11,000 years old.
12:44 Speaker 03 Yes.
12:45 Speaker 04 Yes. Now, this, this is genuinely fascinating. Um, so this is, this is the email from Julia. Basically, there is a kind of tumor that dogs can infect other dogs with, already unusual. This has been discovered to be a tumor which developed on a dog which was alive 11,000 years ago. That tumor then jumped from that original dog to a different dog, but it was still made up of the cells of the original dog. Those cells have been continuously alive in the bodies of different dogs ever since. It's only invisible to the naked eye because it's tiny cells, not magic or nothing. She wrote nothing. I just said nothing. I have absolutely zero qualifications in any biology, so please don't listen to me. However, I think this is correct.
13:29 Speaker 03 That's stunning.
13:31 Speaker 04 So this is called the canine transmissible venereal tumor. And this is a tumor that is exchanged during mating with dogs. So it's a genital based
13:40 Speaker 03 Between dogs.
13:41 Speaker 04 Between dogs.
13:42 Speaker 03 Yeah. Just you said mating with dogs. It's just, it's a very minor difference, but it just felt worth pointing out.
13:51 Speaker 01 We know where your red lines are, James.
13:56 Speaker 04 That's an important detail. That's right.
13:58 Speaker 01 Yeah. Dog on dog.
13:59 Speaker 04 Yeah. Now, what's interesting is this is one of only three known transmissible cancers.
14:04 Speaker 03 I know one.
14:04 Speaker 04 Yep.
14:06 Speaker 03 Tasmanian devils?
14:07 Speaker 04 Yes. The devil facial tumor disease. Yeah. And then there's the
14:11 Speaker 03 Between Tasmanian devils again.
14:13 Speaker 04 Yes. And then there's the Syrian hamster, which is the other one that gets it. Yeah. Yeah. So they're infectious agents and the tumors that form are not genetically related to the host dog. So it is this original dog.
14:25 Speaker 01 So you're saying it's these cells from this dog 11,000 years ago?
14:28 Speaker 04 Yeah. Now, the thing is, is the question is, was the dog 11,000 years old? There's a lot of debate going on. I think it might be 6,000, then they thought 11,000. And now they're saying maybe between 200 and 2,500. Doesn't matter. It's a long time ago and it's the same cells from this one dog. Yeah.
14:45 Speaker 01 We got to remake the dog, haven't we? We got to extract some of the cells, do a Richard Attenborough on it.
14:49 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
14:50 Speaker 01 Get that dog. Jurassic bark it.
14:52 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah. Jurassic bark.
14:55 Speaker 01 Give that man a raise. Jurassic bark. That's cute.
15:01 Speaker 04 Okay.
15:02 Speaker 03 That's, you know what?
15:03 Speaker 04 That's really good.
15:04 Speaker 03 That was a rare example of a joke being so good that the two people in the room were shocked more than amused.
15:11 Speaker 01 Inside, in my head, I was just going, oh, God, I can't cap that.
15:16 Speaker 03 Yeah.
15:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:17 Speaker 03 Might as well just retire. Okay. We're calling jokes cute.
15:21 Speaker 04 I think undone slightly.
15:23 Speaker 01 I called it cute because I was angry and insulted that I just couldn't come up with anything as good. So I thought I'll try and bring yours down, but it was really good.
15:29 Speaker 04 Jealousy coming through. Right.
15:30 Speaker 03 Well, anyway, fascinating. They're the same cells.
15:32 Speaker 04 Oh, interesting. Okay.
15:33 Speaker 03 I mean, they're not, are they? They're cells that have developed from those cells. As in, the original ones are long gone.
15:41 Speaker 04 Yep.
15:42 Speaker 03 But they've replicated.
15:44 Speaker 04 Yes. I suppose the main thing being it's not genetically connected to that dog. So I guess that's the cheat. But yeah, brilliant, Julia. Amazing. Thank you.
15:55 Speaker 01 Jurassic world.
15:56 Speaker 04 We've done it, buddy. It's been done.
15:58 Speaker 01 Dog minion.
16:01 Speaker 03 What?
16:01 Speaker 04 There was a.
16:02 Speaker 01 There was one called Dominion.
16:03 Speaker 03 Yeah.
16:03 Speaker 01 Was there? Yeah. Let's come back to it.
16:09 Speaker 00 Stop the podcast.
16:10 Speaker 04 Stop the podcast.
16:11 Speaker 00 Hi, everybody. We are sponsored this week by Progressive.
16:14 Speaker 01 That's right. So everyone talks about how challenging it is to raise kids, but what about protecting them? I'm talking outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks, baby gates. Where do you even start?
16:24 Speaker 00 Yes, it is a nightmare. Well, protecting your home and your auto is a great place to start.
16:31 Speaker 01 Progressive offers customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage for you and your loved ones.
16:36 Speaker 00 They're basically the outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks and baby gates of insurance.
16:41 Speaker 01 Don't wait. Get your quote today at progressive.com.
16:44 Speaker 00 Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. On with the show.
16:51 Speaker 05 Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.
17:05 Speaker 06 People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.
17:16 Speaker 05 And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.
17:49 Speaker 03 Let's do another fact. This one comes from Stav Berman and Stav says, "Space coffee fact. Coffee on the ISS is made with a machine called the ISS espresso."
18:03 Speaker 01 Lovely.
18:04 Speaker 03 It is drunk out of a specially designed zero G espresso cup.
18:09 Speaker 01 Now, hang on, I would assume that a zero G cup is just a cup with a lid. Am I wrong?
18:14 Speaker 03 Yes.
18:15 Speaker 01 Because any cup without a lid is not a zero G cup.
18:18 Speaker 03 Right, okay, so you've got a cup with a lid.
18:20 Speaker 01 Yep.
18:21 Speaker 03 Have you got a little hole that you can get the coffee out?
18:23 Speaker 01 You have to.
18:24 Speaker 03 So when you turn it upside down to pour it, what happens to the liquid?
18:28 Speaker 01 Good point.
18:29 Speaker 04 How's it coming out?
18:29 Speaker 01 Well, you have to suck it out.
18:31 Speaker 04 Yes.
18:31 Speaker 03 So you're sucking hot coffee? You're gonna burn your mouth.
18:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, true.
18:36 Speaker 03 So this was a problem that was suffered by astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, who was an Italian astronaut who went up to the ISS in April 2015. And they came up with this zero G espresso cup and it uses capillary channel flow.
18:55 Speaker 01 Oh.
18:56 Speaker 03 So that is, capillary action is that liquid will go into a tiny tube. It'll move up a tiny tube against the flow of gravity. Or in fact, if there's no gravity, against nothing, but it will flow inside a tiny tube. And that's because it kind of sticks to the edges of the tube a little bit. And also it sticks to itself. So once it starts going up, it starts pulling more liquid out.
19:21 Speaker 01 Okay.
19:21 Speaker 03 And this is a well-known sort of physics reaction thing that happens. And they utilized it to make this coffee cup.
19:28 Speaker 04 It's a shame it's a coffee cup because if they did tea, they could just call it gravity. Not as good as the Drastic.
19:34 Speaker 03 No.
19:34 Speaker 01 Nothing's as good as Drastic bug. Your career's peaked, that's it from now on.
19:38 Speaker 04 Let's go grab a tea.
19:39 Speaker 01 I loved it, I liked it, I thought it was cute.
19:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
19:44 Speaker 03 It was a good joke, but like, it's a curve. Your career is a curve, isn't it?
19:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:48 Speaker 03 You've just reached the very top a bit.
19:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:50 Speaker 03 So obviously the next joke is gonna be really, really good, just not quite as good as that one.
19:54 Speaker 01 I see, yeah. It was still great.
19:56 Speaker 03 So listener, just listen in to all of Dan's jokes for future. Listen to them get slowly and slowly worse than that.
20:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, so what I should do is just stop talking, right? And just allow for the presentation.
20:07 Speaker 01 That's not what we are saying.
20:09 Speaker 04 Yeah, okay.
20:10 Speaker 01 But if you come to that conclusion, then we're not gonna stop you.
20:12 Speaker 04 Yeah, okay, alright.
20:15 Speaker 01 That's a great fact.
20:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, thanks, Steph.
20:17 Speaker 01 Here's one from Evan M. Gildenblatt. This is about a rather special bridge between Cincinnati, Ohio and Covington, Kentucky. Right, it's called the Bailey Bridge. And the interesting thing about it is that it is named after a man named Clay Wade Bailey.
20:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, but you would expect that.
20:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. But there is a type of bridge.
20:41 Speaker 03 If they'd have called it the Clay Bridge and it was made out of clay, but it was named after him, that would be amazing.
20:47 Speaker 01 We'd have a ballgame. But the interesting thing is, it is not a Bailey-type of bridge, which is an existing, very famous kind of bridge. There's a Bailey Bridge, and the Bailey Bridge here is not a Bailey Bridge.
20:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
20:57 Speaker 01 It's a cantilevered bridge.
21:00 Speaker 03 Yeah, okay.
21:02 Speaker 01 And I just wanted to talk a bit about Bailey Bridges, because they're so cool, are they? Bailey was a guy called Donald Bailey, and he was a civil servant in the British War Office, who made model bridges as a hobby. Okay. Second World War breaks out, and suddenly lots of bridges are going to be needed across Europe. When D-Day happens, the Germans, if they're retreating, will be blowing up a lot of bridges. And in Italy, like lots of places you need to get to.
21:27 Speaker 03 They often made temporary bridges as well, didn't they, when they were moving tanks around?
21:31 Speaker 01 These were the bridges that Donald Bailey proposed and designed. So he literally drew the first model of it on the back of an envelope. It was literally on the back of an envelope, and he said, I think this could work. And basically, it's like a just huge Meccano. So it's all a slot, you don't need much special equipment.
21:50 Speaker 03 I think one thing they used to do is they used to have like tanks that were almost like in the shape of a bridge, and you would drive your tank into the river, and it would become the bridge, and then everyone would drive over there.
22:01 Speaker 01 That's clever. There are some devices called, I said, called Hobart's Funnies, which were specially weird. They were the really weird machines for engineering in the war. But over 200 miles of Bailey Bridge were built during the war. I mean, thousands of, about 5,000.
22:16 Speaker 03 Are any still extant?
22:17 Speaker 01 I think lots are, yeah, I think lots are. And Donald Bailey got knighted for it. Field Marshal Montgomery said they would not have won the war nearly as easily or well without Donald Bailey's bridges.
22:27 Speaker 03 Because we did win it quite easily in the end, didn't we?
22:29 Speaker 01 Quite easily. Bit of a push. And yeah, if you have enough engineers, you can build a Bailey Bridge in 32 minutes.
22:38 Speaker 03 That is very cool.
22:39 Speaker 01 Really cool.
22:40 Speaker 04 That's very cool. Have you guys ever played that app where you have to build a bridge?
22:43 Speaker 01 No.
22:43 Speaker 04 You've got to build a bridge using various angles that you play. So you don't, you have to work out how you can create a construction that allows for a van to cross. And so it usually collapses because it's very hard to build a bridge.
22:58 Speaker 01 No, I have started recently playing a game called Euro Truck Simulator, but um.
23:02 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
23:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
23:03 Speaker 04 How far in are you?
23:04 Speaker 01 I'm still at Dover. A lot of paperwork. Since Brexit, that game has been a nightmare.
23:10 Speaker 04 An absolute nightmare.
23:11 Speaker 03 Okay, that is enough of your facts. What amazing facts they were this week, indeed, as they are every week. But now it is time to go through our archive, the one that Andy has painstakingly typed up over the years, and take those lines from his spreadsheet and hand them out to you, the listener. If you are a member of our Patreon at the top tier, which is friend of the podcast, you will become a custodian of no such thing as a fish fact. We will send you a digital certificate and we will mention your name on this show. So whose name are we going to mention first today? Dan?
23:47 Speaker 04 It is Brittany Bentley. Congratulations. Your fact is now the world's largest saw is used to cut through mountains in Kazakhstan.
23:56 Speaker 01 Terrific. Terrific.
23:59 Speaker 03 I wonder if it's still the world's largest saw?
24:01 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:01 Speaker 01 Oh, yes.
24:03 Speaker 03 Although can't get much bigger than.
24:05 Speaker 04 A mountain cutting sword, yeah.
24:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's very cool. If you look at pictures of it, it's wicked.
24:10 Speaker 04 Is it?
24:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:11 Speaker 04 How many trips back and forth would it need to make? Because presumably it's not the size of a mountain.
24:16 Speaker 03 Or is it a circular saw? Like Dan's imagining like, you know, two people on either side of a saw sort of pulling it back and forward.
24:23 Speaker 01 Like a lumberjack.
24:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, like so Tenzing and Hillary were at the top if they just started at the top and slowly went down with a saw.
24:30 Speaker 01 I think it might be a circular saw.
24:33 Speaker 03 I think so.
24:33 Speaker 01 It rings a bell. Yes, it's a circular saw. I've just checked. I've just found an article which begins Frodo's journey to Mordor in Lord of the Rings would have been much easier if he'd had one of these things.
24:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, also much easier if he had a helicopter.
24:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
24:46 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:47 Speaker 01 Frodo's journey would have been made so much easier by modern tech.
24:51 Speaker 04 I've got a fact. This one goes out to Wine Cat. In Victorian speedwalking competitions, you were allowed to jog as necessary to relieve cramp.
25:01 Speaker 03 Very good.
25:02 Speaker 04 Yeah.
25:02 Speaker 03 You know what I remember most about this episode is you guys had all researched stuff about speedwalking and I'd researched stuff about cramp. And so I didn't have anything to say in this whole section.
25:13 Speaker 04 Really?
25:14 Speaker 03 It's the first moment like that where I realised that actually we should maybe coordinate what we're researching a little.
25:21 Speaker 04 And we're about a year into the podcast at this point, so.
25:25 Speaker 03 Because now, listener, what you don't know probably is that we send each other our headline facts and then we usually put a little steer as to which direction we might go in.
25:34 Speaker 04 Yeah.
25:35 Speaker 03 We don't tell each other what we've found, but we tell each other which direction we're going. So we all are kind of talking on the same subject.
25:41 Speaker 04 Yes, exactly.
25:42 Speaker 03 Yeah. This one is now under the custodian's ship of Jonathan Monday. And Jonathan, your fact is that the 2012 law prohibiting nudity in San Francisco was proposed by a politician called Scott Wiener.
26:00 Speaker 04 Lovely. How interesting that I'm flashing forward to another nudist fact that we did.
26:08 Speaker 03 Yeah.
26:09 Speaker 04 That we did years later, which was another one of yours. So someone one day will be custodian of this, but the nudist in America.
26:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, Dick Bacon.
26:16 Speaker 04 Dick Bacon.
26:17 Speaker 03 Yeah.
26:18 Speaker 04 The sort of nominative determinism of nudists, prominent nudists is quite amazing.
26:23 Speaker 03 Yeah. And actually, in Germany, I think a couple of major nudists in the early days were the Kochs.
26:30 Speaker 04 Yes.
26:32 Speaker 03 Mr. And Mrs. Koch, can't remember their first names. But I think it's a real missed opportunity by San Francisco not to pass this law and to call it Weiner's Law. Because then they could have gone into your book, Andy.
26:45 Speaker 04 Yes. Yeah, you've missed out on San Francisco. This was all, no one's ever heard of your city.
26:53 Speaker 04 All right, let's do another one now. This is Phil Wilde. Uh, Phil Wilde's fact is that so he could keep eating, Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus cut a semicircle out of his dining table. That was a little crescent which he'd put his stomach into, uh, so that he could be closer to the table.
27:10 Speaker 03 You know what that sounds like to me is like he had an extremely distendable stomach that as he ate would get bigger and bigger and bigger. Hmm. Which does happen to a small extent, but not enough.
27:20 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:21 Speaker 03 In my experience that you would need to cut a hole in your table.
27:24 Speaker 04 Yes, yeah.
27:25 Speaker 01 I think he was crazy, wasn't he? He did all sorts of mad stuff. He was an inventor.
27:30 Speaker 04 Was he?
27:30 Speaker 01 And he was, yeah, he was very, he was a very important scientist and philosopher.
27:34 Speaker 04 He was part of the Lunar Society, which was the sort of the leading brains at the time of science, who would only meet when it was a full moon so that they could walk home later night, hence the Lunar Society.
27:44 Speaker 01 That's very clever. Uh, here's one that goes out to Dominique Turin. And this is, this is one of my facts, actually. It's one I'm very proud of, is that Volkswagen sells more sausages than cars.
27:56 Speaker 03 Very good.
27:57 Speaker 01 I think it's that you got given a free sausage, a pack of sausages with every car you bought.
28:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, so there was like, I think there was like eight in a pack, so it meant that they sold eight times more sausages.
28:06 Speaker 01 Inevitably, yeah. There's no way they can get around that. And no matter how fast the car guys work, the sausage team are always gonna be a step ahead of them.
28:13 Speaker 03 However, can I say that I have got a Volkswagen in the last
28:17 Speaker 01 Oh!
28:18 Speaker 03 couple of years, last year in fact, uh, and no sausages came my way.
28:22 Speaker 01 Oh, really?
28:24 Speaker 03 Yeah.
28:25 Speaker 01 Now, that might be because you went electric, James, so there's no exhaust pipe for the sausages to be stuffed up.
28:30 Speaker 03 Is that how they deliver them?
28:31 Speaker 04 Yeah, probably, yeah.
28:33 Speaker 03 Oh, right, yeah. They're gonna put them in the charging port.
28:36 Speaker 01 That's a really nice idea. Because you've got that whole grid of charging points. Yeah, yeah, yeah, perfect, perfect. Um, no, you're right. I don't know why.
28:44 Speaker 03 Could fit like six Tipolatas in there.
28:47 Speaker 01 You've said that before.
28:52 Speaker 03 Okay, this next fact is under the custodianship of Chris C. Chris, your fact is the animal kingdom forgot how to have sex for 40 million years.
29:04 Speaker 04 What's exciting about this is we did this fact very early on, episode 50, and on our last Australian tour, we met the scientist who published this report. He came on stage and was put into the Hall of Fame.
29:18 Speaker 03 Yeah. Very cool.
29:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, he was in either Adelaide or Perth and yeah, we got to meet him and he wrote a book about sharks, which is out now.
29:28 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
29:29 Speaker 04 Yeah, shark guy.
29:30 Speaker 03 Yeah. And it's all about the fact that there was internal reproduction, I think, that happened many millions of years ago, and then it disappears from the fossil record.
29:40 Speaker 04 Yes.
29:40 Speaker 01 Oh, internal, not within yourself? Well, it depends who you are, I suppose.
29:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's like dog on dog, basically.
29:48 Speaker 01 I understand.
29:51 Speaker 01 That's a brilliant fact.
29:52 Speaker 04 That's very cool, yeah. All right, I've got another one here. This is to Zander Sinji, and the fact is the son of the man who invented shredded wheat, invented round shredded wheat.
30:04 Speaker 01 Beautiful.
30:05 Speaker 03 Brilliant.
30:05 Speaker 01 Beautiful.
30:06 Speaker 03 Perkins or Perky?
30:08 Speaker 04 Perky, Henry Perky, I think.
30:10 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:11 Speaker 04 And his disappointing son.
30:16 Speaker 01 Although now they're sort of a bit rounded, a bit square, aren't they?
30:19 Speaker 03 Are they? I haven't had a shredded wheat for at least 30 years.
30:22 Speaker 01 I'm thinking of Weetabix. Disregard whatever I've just said. I was thinking of Weetabix, which have rounded ends. Shredded wheat have-
30:28 Speaker 03 They're all like pillows, aren't they?
30:29 Speaker 01 They're like pillows. They've got sharp corners, but also rounded arches.
30:32 Speaker 03 I'm not doing a pillow fight with you.
30:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, and the thing is you can only have two, supposedly.
30:40 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:41 Speaker 01 And if someone has three shredded wheats in the morning, that shows that they're forced to be reckoned with. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the old. Isn't that? That's James. I'm looking at you here.
30:48 Speaker 03 Again, a little bit thinking Wheat Bix. Like, I'm sure we would like say, oh, you've had an extra Wheat Bix today.
30:56 Speaker 01 How interesting.
30:57 Speaker 03 Like if someone hits a long shot in the golf course or something.
31:00 Speaker 01 Oh, man. It turns out, I don't know, the difference between trying to eat a Wheat Bix.
31:04 Speaker 03 I don't know. It might be.
31:05 Speaker 04 In Australia, it's called Wheat Bix.
31:07 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
31:08 Speaker 04 And I can't tell you when I first moved there, how disent- it's like you're still in jet lag anytime you hear Wheat Bix.
31:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
31:16 Speaker 04 Just doesn't make sense. It's like a glitch in the universe.
31:18 Speaker 01 I'm so sorry. I've just checked it. It's an old advertising slogan from the 1980s. Shredded wheat. Bet you can't eat three.
31:27 Speaker 03 Okay.
31:28 Speaker 01 And it was when David Cameron, our prime minister, was saying, do you want to go for another term in office? He said, no, it's like shredded wheat. Two are wonderful. Three might be too many. As it was, he led a catastrophic referendum and was forced to resign halfway through his
31:40 Speaker 04 Yeah.
31:41 Speaker 01 second shredded wheat. Now he's got all the time in the world to eat shredded wheat.
31:46 Speaker 04 Meanwhile, you're stuck at the immigration queue as you're trying to get your virtual truck into Europe.
31:52 Speaker 01 Should we do one more? I've got one more fact. Here's another one. Here's one last one that goes out to Tyler Wittem. Wittem, possibly. Hi, Tyler. Your name's definitely Tyler. In the 1960s, a Canadian psychologist visited cafes across the world, testing how much couples touched each other. In Puerto Rico, it was 180 times an hour. In Paris, 110. And in London, it was zero.
32:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:20 Speaker 03 Very good.
32:21 Speaker 01 We just don't need to show off about it, all right?
32:24 Speaker 03 I feel like, I feel like we've become more international in the last 10 years since that fact. So I reckon there's more touching in the UK these days.
32:33 Speaker 01 Hmm. Oh, do you think so? Yeah, probably.
32:36 Speaker 03 Like, I reckon people give me way more hugs when I meet them now than they did 10 years ago.
32:41 Speaker 01 I think you have also dropped your guard a bit. You used to be a lot more standoffish about being hugged. And you used to make it clear that that's not on the menu.
32:47 Speaker 03 Yeah.
32:47 Speaker 01 Whereas now, I think you come across a bit more, you're wearing a floral shirt today. People are thinking, I can hug this guy.
32:53 Speaker 03 Excuse me. I wear this, knowing that the audience don't know what I'm wearing.
32:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, but you're not wearing anything else.
33:03 Speaker 03 Yeah, okay. I didn't, I never thought about that as part of my personality. I thought I was still as standoffish now as I ever have been.
33:10 Speaker 04 You've mellowed, you've softened.
33:11 Speaker 03 Have I?
33:11 Speaker 04 Yeah.
33:11 Speaker 03 That's living in London, isn't it?
33:13 Speaker 04 Yeah, it is.
33:13 Speaker 03 Imagine if I lived in Puerto Rico.
33:19 Speaker 03 Okay, that's the end of our facts given to you, and in fact, your facts given to us. But we do want to say thank you to Tyler, Zander, Chris, Dominique, Phil, Jonathan, Wine Cat and Brittany for becoming our latest Friends of the Podcast custodians. If you would like to send us some facts, then send them to podcast at qi.com, where Andy will go through them and pick out the very best ones for this show. If you would like to become a custodian of a fact, then go to patreon.com/clubfish and join us at the very top tier, which is Friend of the Podcast. And it is those special people who get their names read out on this show. If you don't want to do any of those things, then fear not.
34:01 Speaker 03 We will be back on Friday for another Big Fish episode. So it's goodbye from me, it's goodbye from Dan Schreiber.
34:08 Speaker 04 Oh, goodbye.
34:08 Speaker 03 And it's goodbye from Andrew Hunter Murray.
34:11 Speaker 04 Jurassic World 2, the bark, the barkening. I'll just keep bike shopping it. Bye.
34:17 Speaker 03 Bye.
34:30 Speaker 01 She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens. Zolair 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis.
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