Good Job, Brain! - 73: Lie, Cheat, and Steal

Episode Date: August 7, 2013

Tsk tsk tsk. For shame! Tales and trivia about notable cheaters: the marathon runner whose time seemed too good, the journalist whose reports seemed too colorful, and the gutsy guy whose casino caper seemed too easy. And of course, the awesome anti-cheating mechanisms, like plagiarism software and RFID tags, to battle against sneaky behavior! And how a couple of Canadian thieves got themselves in a STICKY situation.  ALSO: Squarespace Internet Quiz, Pop Quiz with vacationing listeners! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an airwave media podcast. Hello, gleeful, glowing and glamorous global gladiators. Welcome to Good Job, Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. This is episode 73, and of course, I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are your minks with lynx thinking about sphinx and sphincter. Whoa. Whoa. I'm Colin.

I'm Dana. And I'm Chris. All right. Time for our first general trivia segment. Pop Quiz Hot Shot. And today's Pop Quiz Hot Shot is a little different because we had two very special listeners who came and visited us a couple weeks ago on their summer vacation, Truman and Julia. Super cool kids and...

This is what they wanted to do on their summer vacation. Yep. On their summer vacation, they were by chance in Berkeley and they wanted to come hang out with us. So we let them. Because why not? Yeah, why not? They actually had fun pressing our buzzers for us.

Yes. It was very cute. The first ever in studio visit for a good job, right? Yeah, very exciting. And so here's what happened. In our studio, a.k.a. Collins' apartment. We're joined by Truman and Julia. Truman is 11. Julia is 8 and they're going to press our buzzers for us, yeah? Thanks, you guys. They nodded. Yeah. Yes. They nodded. Here we go.

What rapper refers to himself as Jigga and Jehovah? Yes, Julia pressed. Jay Z. JZ. Do you guys know that? I didn't know that. Did you know that? Truman and I don't listen to rap, apparently. All right. We were talking about Disney earlier. Here's Disney question. What children's movie was the top-selling video of the 20th century? Truman knows. Do you think you know? That's your buzzer. Oh, he's going to buzz in for me. I have a guess. You want to press mine for me? Is it Little Mermaid?

Incorrect. Okay, so it's the top-selling video of the 20th century. Oh, oh. Chris has. Is it Fantasia? Incorrect. What was your logic? behind that. That's because it was really popular. Yeah, well, I heard fan hagea was really big

on VHS, but... Got it. I'm selling children's video. It is the Lion King. Oh, really? I think it's because it's, it's not princessy. It works for both families and boys and girls. Right, but still, that's pretty impressive.

That movie came out when? At the, 90-something? The tail end of the 20th century? Yeah. Also, I believe, a top-performing Disney soundtrack as well. Circle of Life. A great soundtrack. Kuna Matata.

They play that in the background of Toy Story when they're trying to catch it. Oh, really? That's some good trivia. That's a good Easter egg. That's a very good piece of trivia, yes. And now you guys know that Truman is real, and not just somebody that we made up. Okay, what 1980s cartoon series featured an 18-wheeler, not done yet, named Optimus Prime. Everybody.

Transformers. Yay! All right. Do you guys like candy? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, here's a good candy question. I like how you pointed to Julia, truly.

I'm like, Julia loves candy. There's only one right answer to do you like candy. Yes, yes. What candy bar did the Mars family name for one of its horses? What? Huh. Yes, take a guess. Snickers?

Yes. Wow. That does sound like a horse's name. Yeah, Snickers. Ooh, cartoons again. Lots of cartoon questions. All right. Middle initial is shared by Homer Simpson, Elmer Fudd, and Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Julia Press. Do you guys know? I know. Homer J. Simpson. Yeah. Do you know what Bart Simpson's middle name is, Colin? You're a Simpson's fan. Yeah, it's also J, isn't it?

Well, it starts with the J. I don't know what it stands for. Oh, like the word? Yeah, it's Jojo. Jojo. Wait, like full middle name is Jojo? Yeah, Bartholomew, JoJo, Simpson. All right.

last question do you guys like soda this is a really unhealthy quiz I know I'm so sorry they look at each other a lot when they ask these questions like do you like soda I don't know man do we like soda? What should we say all right what soft

drink had the tagline obey your thirst this might be this is back in the 90s right obey your I believe so I think I know I'm waiting to see if anybody else wants to take a big stab at this Obey your thirst. Hit me, hit me.

Sprite. Yes. Yeah. Good job, everybody. Thank you Truman and thank you, Julia, for joining us and pressing our buzzers for us. That's very nice. Oh, it's so nice to have people to do that for us. We should get with permanent people.

I always kind of dreamed if we became famous. I wouldn't have to press my own buzzer anymore. You would hire a button. I would hire a button presser. Just save wear and tear on my fingers. Yeah. Well, Truman, Julia, would you like to say good. bye to everybody. Yeah? Come on to the microphones. Let's do it together. Let's do it

together. All right. Everybody, bye. Bye. Yay. All right. So thank you guys, Truman and Julia, for visiting us. And you guys can expect the bill for the visit to show up any day. Yes. Our rates are extremely reasonable. Yeah. I got a piece of mail. You guys have been saving your allowance. What's an invoice? What is the Castorium Collection Agency? All right. Time to jump into this week's topic.

At trivia, at Pub trivia, we usually get a lot of questions that are in the true or false format. So the quiz master would ask, true or false, blah, blah, blah, blah. And on your answer sheet, you say true or false. When you know, in school and test, when you have a true or false test. The T and the F. Yeah, the T and F. So like, T for true, F or false. and I'm sure every kid has done this

or at least has thought about doing this as kids you'd be like oh I'll write a T and I'll put a little line across the T and I'll maybe extend the top of it a little bit less to the left than it is to the right so it could pass either way or like erase the line but still leave it that's what I would do I would do the one and then erase it

yeah so you could maybe maybe plausibly argue it either way Oh, my erasing wasn't good. The trafalce. Yes. The classic trafalce. I've done that. Have you guys done that? Generations of school children.

I think I might have considered doing that once. Like maybe I see if I can get away with it, but I probably my goody two-shoes nature prevented me from doing such a thing. It was always one of those efforts of cheating that even I was embarrassed at my effort. Oh, I did. I would try to a couple times. I look at it and like, oh, really? Has it come to this? I remember I had a spelling test once, and the word was America.

And I was like, I don't know how I was to fill America And the kid next to me was like, oh my God, look at the pencil And it was American favorite pencil And so like I wrote down, I wrote down American though Because I didn't know You said to put American pencil Yeah, I know That would have totally given it that

Yeah, that would have I was so excited and then it didn't work So this week, relay Lee, we are going to jump into the world of uh exploits and cheats and sneaky stuff and uh shadiness so this week we're talking about cheats and sneaks your cheating heart will make you cry you cry And cry I'm trying to sleep

So fellow listeners You'll be as impressed as I was When you find out that Karen this morning Actually ran a marathon Before coming in to record the show Thank you It was a half marathon But still, I'm very proud of them

I'm only half impressed I'm very achy So I want to talk to you guys In the vein of cheating about one of my favorite all-time cheating stories. And, you know, if you play enough trivia, if you go to enough pub quizzes, eventually you're going to be asked a question

about Rosie Ruiz. Rosie Ruiz. Rosie Ruiz. All right. So I'm glad it sounds like maybe you haven't heard of her so I can enjoy a little bit of the story here. Chris seems to be nodding appreciably. The topic of the show is cheating.

So let me just cut right to the chase here. And she may have been a cheater. So, you know, Karen, in the world of marathons, the Boston Marathons is, I mean, if not, it's one of the most, if not the most prestigious marathon. Right, right. And I mean, you had told me this a while ago. I mean, it's a big deal. You have to qualify.

You know, you can't just, I'm going to go sign up and race this year. Right. You have to have post a good enough time, right, to get in. You have to have a time within your age range and your gender, there is a qualifying time. You have to make that or faster in order to even get, not even a spot, but just to enter the range. If you're racing the Boston Marathon, you are a good runner. You know what you're doing. So in 1980, let's go back many years here in the Wayback Machine, to 1980, the Boston Marathon.

Rosie Ruiz crossed the finish line with the clock at two hours, 31 minutes, 56 seconds. Yeah. Now, that's a... Some context for those of us who are not Karen and don't run marathon. Yeah, so Karen's reaction should put that into context. Yeah, now this, yeah, for a little bit more context... That would have been the fastest time a woman had ever run at the Boston Marathon. Okay.

It would have been the third fastest time ever run by a woman anywhere in a marathon. So it's not a good time. That's a great time. Right from the start, people were a little suspicious of her time across the line. Why? Just because it was super fast. No one had ever heard of her. Right.

For one thing, exactly. Like, no one ever heard of her. And a lot of these people know each other. You'll have frequent winners, you know, two or three years in a row sometimes. Or they're Olympians sometimes, too. Sure. There were other more obvious signs that perhaps something was amiss. She didn't really seem to be out of breath at all.

She wasn't even really sweating all that much. Her shirt was really comparatively dry. People were sort of really eyeballing her like, what is going on here? And in fact, the winner of the men's division, he kind of went up to her and outright really doubted her story. He's like, you know, he was asking her things like what your split times were. And she didn't really seem to know or care. What's split times? Splits are, so if you ever race, splits are usually kind of like,

landmarks, right? So at the 5K point, this was your time. At the 10K point, this is your time. And so as you're running, you'll kind of know what kind of place you're in. If you're an elite runner, especially. And it's just before the time of like GPS run tracking or whatever that can just tell you through your headphones like with your time or your paces. Well, was his time close to hers? Because it would be like, I ran 26 miles and I did not see you. Well, no, you're absolutely right. The second and third place women were like, no, we, she didn't pass us. We didn't see her. We don't We don't know who she is. We did not see her on the course.

And then on top of all of this, right? Now, as I say, you had to qualify to run the marathon. So she had run in the New York Marathon earlier that year, which is also a fairly big deal marathon. The time that she posted was 25 minutes slower. So to make an improvement of 25 minutes in six months is a big deal. So nothing was adding up. People were really, really suspicious of Rosa Ruiz. But she was good enough to qualify.

And that's the thing. She's still good. That's the thing. And so for a lot of people's minds, it's like, all right, well, how did she trim this time off her race? What was she doing? She must at least have some running skill, but what's, you know, what's her angle? So over the course of the next few days, there was also some other information that came forward that was really damning to Rosie Ruiz's case. There were a couple students, friends, who had come out to watch the race, and they said, oh, we saw her burst out of the crowd of spectators like half a mile from the finish and kind of just barge her way onto the race course.

and at the time they remember thinking like who is this lady what is she doing they didn't think much of it and then when they saw you know later in the news reports they're like that's the lady we saw in Rosie Ruiz we saw her kind of just come out of the crowd half a mile from the finish so it seems to be I have to say

and this is what year by the way this was 1980 1980 so no cell phone cameras very few no one's tweeting crazy lady came out of the crowd at half mile mark there might not be a lot of actual physical evidence and before the times of you know smartphones and stuff. Every runner nowadays have a bib, right, that has their number, but also

built into the bib, or actually they give you a little tag that you put on your shoe as RFID, like tracker basically for each personal runner. So as you're running through, say, the 5K split, there's something built on the ground that will communicate with your RFID tag and then puts it in the system. That was their split time. That RFID thing. Do you remember there was a A celebrity who gave their personal trainer, like somebody who's running with two. Oh, no. They're like, they're like, clock my time for me. Unfortunately, that happens.

Some people will run with multiple bibs. Yeah, right. The time is really recording the time of the RFID tag crossing the finish line. That person. But the most damaging story that came out was from a woman named Susan Morrow. And Susan Morrow was watching news reports. And she lives in New York. And she recognized Rosie Ruiz.

She's like, I know this woman. I ran into her the day of the New York City Marathon. So Susan Marlowe was on her way to watch a friend running the marathon. She was... She was heading to the finish line, and she was taking the subway. On the subway, she sees a woman on the train wearing running gear and looking kind of down. She went over. She sat down next to her.

They got to talking. Turns out this is Rosie Ruiz. And Rosie told Susan Morrow that she had dropped out of the race of the New York City Marathon, you know, a little bit before the halfway mark. She had hurt her ankle. But, you know, we're going to the same place. We're going to the finish line together. Oh, my gosh. She's taking the subway to her.

She took the subway to the finish. They took the train. They went to the finish line of the New York City Marathon. And together, they walked. And because Rosie Ruiz had her runners gear on, they were getting waved through barricades. They were getting through without anybody really questioning because she looked like, you know, she was limping along.

She was an injured runner. They got to the finish line. And at that point, they separated. and Rosie Ruiz went over and declared I'm an injured runner. They pulled her in. They recorded her time. And that was her registered time in the New York City Marathon. So she got a fraudulent time that she then used to qualify for the Boston Marathon six months later.

So Susan Morrow came forward with her story. And to this day, Rosie Ruiz maintains that she ran the race. She has not fessed up. So does she still hold the title as like the third fastest? No, they stripped her time. and they awarded, they moved all the prizes down to the other women. No asterisk. Yeah, it was, and she, she never really had any plausible story for how, you know,

her best story was, I was just feeling really energetic this morning when I got up. That was about the extent of her clip. And not sweaty at all. Right, right. And it is because of Rosie Ruiz, Karen, that they started instituting measures like RFID tags. Wow. This was really sort of the biggest catalyst to them moving over toward that system. You know, when Rosie Ruiz finished somewhere in the middle of the pack or whatever it was,

nobody was really paying any attention because she didn't win any prizes. And it was just sort of like, okay, well, she finished with this time or she didn't finish with this time. It doesn't really matter, right? When she wins first place, when she wins it, and sets a literally almost superhuman time, then, and only then, you can go back and then that the evidence starts coming out that there's enough of a spotlight on her that, like, the cheating is discovered. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, to Chris's point, if she had maybe been a little less ambitious, she might not have gotten caught, you know? I mean, the experts, they all kind of say, like, she just,

she just didn't know what she was doing. Like, she cheated too well. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Wow. Wait, so when did they introduce RFIDs? Was it, did they have the technology, like, 1981?

They started within just a couple years. Oh, wow. Yeah. And it's so easy because it's like, you don't, no one has to really keep a time. It's all automatic, and they can go online

and check your time right when it happens. Of course. Of course. It's all posted to the web today. I checked my time like a minute after I crossed the finish line because I was like, I don't know what time I haven't. Oh, right there on the website. I didn't even think about that. But of course they would have it, yeah. So, well, speaking about sticking with your story to the bitter end, I would like to start off by reading you guys a passage from the New Republic, very prestigious American news magazine, political news magazine from May 18th, 1998 issue. And this is the first paragraph of an article that was titled Hack Heaven.

Ian Restill, a 15-year-old computer hacker who looks like an even more adolescent version of Bill Gates, is throwing a tantrum. I want more money. I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Man comic number one. I want a lifetime subscription to Playboy and throw in Penthouse. Show me the money. Show me the money.

Over and over again, the boy who is wearing a frayed Cal Ripkin Jr. t-shirt is shouting his demands. Across the table, executives from a California software firm called juked micronics are listening, and trying ever so delicately to oblige. Excuse me, sir, one of the suits says, tentatively to the pimply teenager. Excuse me, pardon me for interrupting you, sir. We can arrange more money for you. Then you can buy the comic book, and then, when you're of more, say, appropriate age, you can buy the car and pornographic magazines on your own. This was the lead paragraph today. this story in the New Republic that was a really hot story because this was 1998 it was just absolutely

capturing the imaginations of people you know of the sort of nascent silicon valley culture of teenage kids getting one up on on you know emerging computer companies and it was an amazing amazing story and it was also completely 100% made up totally totally fake this was written by sounds so real It sounds so real, and it sounds so good, and it turned out to be too good to be true. So it was written by Stephen Glass. 25 years old at the time, he had been working as an editor at the New Republic for a few years. He had been the executive editor of his school's paper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, and, you know, he was well respected. It was a great writer.

Everybody liked him. The staff at Fortune, Fortune Digital, their sort of website that they had at the time, wondered how exactly they had been scooped on this. because they had not heard of a company called Juked My Kronix, and they had not heard of a hacker. The guys at Fortune were like, well, this is our beat. We're going to go to the New Republic and to Stephen Glass and to his editors and just interviewed them about the story and just asked them about it because, like, where did it come here?

Yeah, we're just taken totally off guard by this. There was little enough evidence in 1998. It was really tougher to sort of prove that something didn't happen because, you know, reporters were still just sort of meeting with sources and there's not like digital recording. And what ended up happening was with the Hack Heaven story, they hammered him on all of the things they could not find anything. He said to them, like at one point, you know, I'm increasingly beginning to feel like I have been duped. And the story he then told was these hackers, and this is all from reports that came out later. Vanity Fair did a really big article that was turned into a movie called Shattered Glass. And he had talked about like, oh, these hackers, you know, I think they convinced me that there was this fake made-up company. This company didn't exist. Yeah. So his editor took him to the hotel where he had said that that meeting between the 15-year-old hacker

and the juked my chronics company had happened. And I mean, and he would just start spinning up this whole story about like, oh, I sat there, and then he came in the lobby here, and then I walked up and talked to him there. And then we went through these doors, went to this conference room. There's all this on the spot. And he was, and he starts producing for his editor, Stephen Glass starts producing business cards, emails. He made a fake company website for this company. He even went so far as to give his editor,

his brother's Palo Alto, California phone number, and the editor called up that number thinking that was an executive at Juked Micronix, and his brother was in on the whole thing and, like, answered, you know, for him. He made up the whole story, and then as they started asking him more stuff, he started creating a false trail of evidence. Be like, of course the company exists. Here's the dude's business card.

Of course the company exists. Here's the website. Oh, here, email this guy. Oh, we didn't get back to you? Oh, the email's been killed. Let me find you another email. And just trying to spin it out as long as he possibly could. Eventually, finally, he says, okay, I wasn't actually at the meeting.

They told me about it. And I wrote the story as if I had been at the meeting, but they had just told me that it had happened. Which would itself be a breach of journalistic ethics. but not nearly as serious as making it up out of whole clock. The thing is it, you know, it starts out with fabulists, and that's what they call people like Stephen Glass. You know, it starts out with little things. It starts out with fabulous, as in people who create fables, not fabulous.

They might also be fabulous. Fabulous, fabulous. Yes. You start out with little things. You know, you start out by like, oh, you know, I need a good quote in this story to really tie it all together. I'll just make one up. And then nobody catches you.

Right. And then you start making up, you know, maybe it's half made up and half true. You know, maybe you're just sort of, you're doing some of the reporting and then you're just sort of fleshing it out with other stuff that you made up, which probably sounds true. It might even be true. You know, you just didn't really do the legwork on it. And the next thing you know, you don't get caught, you don't get caught, you don't get caught, you don't get caught. You are fabricating entire people, companies, everything out of thin air because you think that you're invincible. Stephen Glass currently has been working as a paralegal in the state of California and actually wants to get a license to practice law and that case is I believe currently in front of the California Supreme Court because whether or not he can be allowed to practice law as the state of California because he's proven he's unethical oh yes oh big time and that is exactly the sort of the

foundation of the case that's in front of the Supreme Court and so this was a while ago but I haven't been able to find any updates so I don't know if the Supreme Court is going to cast a judgment on that. Does that mean that he applied to be a lawyer and someone said no, and now he's suiting him? Oh, yeah. The bar, no, no, no, the bar association. He'll try to stop him from ever, yeah. Oh, wow.

Oh, he has. He's passed him with flying colors. The guy's incredibly smart. But, like, you have to, they have to allow you to practice lies. He's been working with paralegal. You can be disbarred for moral reasons. Oh, of course. Yeah.

Or never admitted to the legal profession in the first place. Wow. Yep. So, I mean, you can cheat by lying outright, or you can also cheat by stealing other people's work. That's right. Talk about plagiarism. Did you know that plagiarism, the Latin root for it, is kidnap? No.

Yeah. So it's like you kidnap somebody else's thoughts. There was a poet who said that this guy kidnapped my verses. I like that. That's actually really fiery. Oh, yeah. Very poetic. It's very poetic.

A poet said that, yeah. Have you ever heard of Leon? I know you're going to ask, have you guys ever plagiarized? The answer, my surprise. Yes. In fourth grade. Did you? What did you do?

All my reports were just copied out from the encyclopedia, word for word. Right, right. Well, there's actually, I mean, plagiarism is a sliding scale, right, Dana. I mean, there's copying right out of the encyclopedia word for word, and then there's other degrees of plagiarism as well. But I think maybe back then it was more of a test on resourcefulness and less on the actual content. Like, maybe like being able to find that right information. like matching information. Because I still had to read all of it.

I still had to flip to the right page, you guys. And, you know, the thing with plagiarism, if you cite your source, now you're researching. Yeah, it's fine. Plagiarism is you kidnap the word. You're pretending that it's yours. You're passing it off somebody else's ideas or thoughts as if they were yours. But if you said, oh, Encyclopedia Britannica says, you can just quote a whole page. One page down.

That was the name of Karen's report. It was just Encyclopedia Britannica says by Karen Chu. It's a lot harder for kids to get away with plagiarism these days than maybe when we were in school. There's all sorts of plagiarism programs now. Computer programs where they search through a database of other student papers. And if your paper is too close to somebody else's, they'll flag it. So that's how the main, like the most popular one works,

which is called turn it in.com. And it will find, it will find pastiches, too. If you've taken things from multiple sources and kind of jammed all the sentences together. It will find those. It will find, edit, find, replace, you know, it will find, like if you just take something and just drop in a bunch of synonyms, it will find that too. It will find you out. They can tell if your writing style changes over the course of your page. So it's like, all of a sudden you start using really complicated words in this section, then you go back down to like normal words for your grade level, whatever. I don't know if

Turnitin does that, but other plagiarism ones do that too, which I thought it was cool. So Harvard recently, a bunch of kids got expelled from Harvard this year for plagiarizing. There was 279 people in the class, and about half of them cheated on their final exam. Or they think they plagiarized each other? Well, so it's not illegal, but yeah, Harvard can kick you out. But in school, it's really frowned upon. You're supposed to come up for your own ideas. Right, yeah, exactly.

I mean, that's the whole thing, right? I mean, it's coming up with, it's adding something to the discussion and not misrepresenting scholarship that someone else did as an idea that you came up with. Yeah. Back to journalism, though. Have you heard of Leanne Spider-Baby McDougal? Have you heard of her? Only just in the last few weeks did that name enter my consciousness?

Only just now. That's a crazy name. Well, Spider-Babies, her web name, her professional handle, maybe. Okay, her handle. So she's a horror critic or a writer-reviewer. She's also Quentin Tarantino's girlfriend. Oh. And very recently, she got busted for plagiarism.

Big-time plagiarism. What does she do? Many of her posts on FearNet, they found, were written by other people, by other bloggers. And you could see different chunks of her reviews taken from other writers. She kind of would paste them together, edit them together. Wow. And she was a draw on the site, too, right? So she's taking down all her articles, and she had this, like, big apology on Twitter recently.

It's kind of said, embarrassing. It's embarrassing. It's embarrassing. Do you guys know that the novel, Assesson of Secrets by QR? Markham. It was released in 2011, published by Little Brown, to acclaim. It was a spy thriller. People were like, oh, you know, a fantastic debut novel. It was just really, really great. And it turns out the entire book was just a pastiche of paragraphs and sections and chapters and stuff taken from other people's spy novels. Lots and lots of stuff like that. They didn't notice? Nobody noticed. He just strung it all together so expertly, essentially. It was just going to say. Well, yeah, I mean, didn't.

You know, you change the names to your character's names and stuff like that. But you just described like this is you just swap out the names and that's how it works. They was discovered very quickly after publication. And confirmed. And confirmed. Oh, because the passages were identical. That's why we were surprised it even got published. It was like they didn't even.

Right, right. Well, nobody put it through the plagiarism software basically. That's surprising. So they do that with books too? I don't know. They don't think they're apparently not. They published it. They maybe should.

So do people get their money? back if they bought the book? No, it's probably a couple of years. I was just never kind of order to read it. I'm curious how it hangs together. That's cool. Yeah. I mean, it's bad, but neat.

I've made fake sources before. No. This is a real confessional for you. Karen is a fabulous. But I was a kid. I would make up like people, like author names and stuff. I remember one source I made up was Mary Miller. You're good at it.

I would get too elaborate. it, and then I'd freak myself out, and I'd have to take it out. Millicent Perry Winkle. Yeah. Eugenia Blackwell. And I'm like who sounds too. These all sound like Dickens characters. And I'm like, delete.

This is not going to work. Bad job brain. I was young. I had no idea. Sure. You were like, what, 21? Twenty-two. I know.

It was like 12. Okay. All right. In honor of our sponsor for this episode, Squarespace, online platform for creating websites and stuff. I've commissioned Colin, even though I didn't pay him, but I've asked him very nicely. By order of Karen. Yeah. I mean, we're all pretty web-savvy, but I would say, Colin, you're probably the most.

Oh. Web-savvy out of all of us. Because of Squarespace being online and stuff to make an online internet quiz. Yes, I have a quiz for you guys called Webmasters. With a Z, webmasters. With a Z. Yes, as Karen, as you alluded to, these are all questions about the internet, the web, famous things in that sphere. So I will read out the questions.

You guys get your buzzers ready. I hope they're challenging because all of us are pretty good. I would say you guys are all pretty good. I hope there are some challenging ones in here, but tried to make it fun. All right. So let's start off. When the domain name system was introduced in 1985, okay, now we've found. talked before about domains on the show, right? So dot com is a top level domain. All right.

So when the domain name system was implemented in 1985, there were originally six three-letter top-level domains created. All of them are still in use today. I just gave you one.com. Would anyone like to take a stab at listing all six? We can go around. Oh, yeah, I can do an order. I think Chris, though, why don't you take a whack at it? Okay. Dot com.net.gov.com.com.e.com.com.com. Um, dot org. Dot org. Did you get Gov?

Yeah, I got Gov. One more. Orcomnetgov, edu. Dot mill. For military. Oh, interesting. Do they use that at all? They do, in fact, use it.

It's exclusively reserved for the use of U.S. military-based sites. The U.S. doesn't own the Internet, but a lot of the early domain rules and regulations were set up in the U.S. bosses yes yes right uh yeah that's right but dot com of course quickly became the de facto default well originally dot com was supposed to be for commercial websites then dot net was supposed to be for things that were of a non-commercial use if i was just to have my own website or whatever right that's

generally right they imagine dot net might be used for networks of sites that all kind of resolved to a similar place right oh web rings i had some i was in some web rooms The oldest online language translation service, and still in operation today, was named after a tiny yellow creature from what famous novel? Dana, eagerly. Is it Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Yes, it's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And the Babblefish. Babblefish.

The Babblefish. Yes, I remember that. Yes, Babblefish created by Digital Equipment Corporation and Alta Vista originally. And it passed hands a couple times from Altavista. Yahoo owns and operates Bapplefish today. Still running, still operational. I forgot that was in Hitchhiker's Guide. You put it in your ear, which was crazy. I looked up his original passage from talking in the book. He actually describes it as a small yellow leech-like character. So leech is in the air that basically it would absorb brainwaves and convert them to other. He would absorb languages and convert them so you could understand any language. I have a thing about things in my ear.

why it's so vivid to me like I thought a lot about it now you guys may have heard of a little company on the internet called Google maybe what twice yeah you also probably know that Google is named after a real-life concept of Google D-O-O-O-G-O-L yes what is a Google Dana one with a hundred zeros that's correct it is one followed by a hundred zeros what power is that that's well 10 to the hundredth power yeah oh Yeah. And Google is a fun, silly word, and you guys may have heard the story before. This is true.

This is an absolutely true story. The term was coined by the nine-year-old nephew of a mathematician named Edward Kassner. And he was basically trying to come up with a name to really get the idea of an unimaginably large number, but that is a real number. And so his nine-year-old... That's a really hard question to ask him. Well, you know, you ask a nine-year-old, and nine-year-old Milton came up with Google. And he also came up with Googleplex. Oh, really?

Yes. Now, this is where I, this one always tickles me. So Google's headquarters down in Mountain View is called the Googleplex. Google Complex. But a Googleplex was also introduced as a mathematical concept by nine-year-old Milton. Do you know what a Googleplex is? I believe that's Google times a Google. It is 10 to the Google power.

Oh. So it is an even crazier unimaginably large number. 10 to the Google power. 10 to 100. Right. 10 to 100. So one with 100 zeros after. Yes, 10 to 10 to the 100.

That's right. Okay. A lot. Scientists have said, you could not possibly write this number out. It would exceed the span of a human lifetime by so many orders of magnitude. It would take up more space than is available in the universe. You could not write this number out. Got it.

Milton's definition for Googleplex originally was one, followed by writing. Writing zeros until you get tired. So it might be less than a Google. Yes, yes. All right, I'm going to read you guys a list of items. And I want you to tell me, what makes these items special? What do they have in common? All right, here we go.

A Toyota Tersell, a Superman lunchbox, a broken laser pointer, and underwear autographed by Marky Mark. Oh, nice. Karen. Are they all first thing sold on eBay? That is correct. I cannot believe you No, I didn't put that together. I was like plastic.

Way back in 1995 when eBay was still known as auction web. The story goes that... Oh, broken point. Yeah, that's the one that, why would you buy? That is famously said to be possibly the first,

certainly among the first items ever sold by the founder, by Pierre Omidar. He had sold a broken laser pointer for $14.83. He was shocked when somebody bought it, yes. The story goes that he contacted the buyer It's like, you're aware this is a broken laser pointer And everyone's like, oh yeah, I collect broken laser pointer

You know, and thus just proving the proof of concept It's like, oh, this is going to work Matching up the item to the one person who wants it, yeah Wow All right, we'll close it out here with one more for you guys What is an octothorpe? What if I asked you to draw an octophorpe for me. Keep in mind the genre

of questions we were asking. Yeah. Yeah. Something you might encounter out on the web or the internet, it is very common. I can practically guarantee you guys see it every day. Chris. Is this a hash mark? Yes. An octothorpe is one of the many

names for... The pound symbol, the hash mark. The pound symbol, the number sign, the hash mark. Yes. The octothorpe is one of the more technical sounding names for it. Like ampersand. Yeah, yeah. Frustratingly, there are several origin stories behind the word octothorpe.

Some people say it comes from old map-making terms. I don't tend to buy that one. Engineers at Bell Laboratories claim that they coined the term. And I tend to put some stock in that because it was used in phone systems. You know, it's the pound key. And they claim that they introduced that name for that symbol because they felt it needed a better name. Why do people call it hash mark now? Is that also...

Well, it is hashes. I mean, that's in drawing, right? Oh, okay, like cross-hatching. That is definitely, yeah. That is definitely, yeah. I guess pound is weird to say. There's another theory that it may come from the word, Hound, good job, brain.

Like, that's what you're wrong. Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, in the course of reading this, that, you know, someone made the point, like, they don't call it the pound sign in the UK. And I was like, oh, of course, because of the obvious confusion with pounds. What do they call it?

They tend to call it a hash. Got it. Because their money's the pound. Right. Which raises the question, what do we call it the pound? You know, historically, was used, to stand in, like, for pounds in weights. Oh, really? So, like, if you were at the

groceries, you know, it might say pork price 10, 10, 10, hash mark, meaning this is the price for 10 pounds of, you know, pork or whatever. Wow. Yeah. Not like you're buying 10 pounds of pork, I don't know what you're making. Yeah, that's true. Don't worry about it.

Don't you worry your pretty little head about it. That is a total normal amount of pork to buy. Not of your business. Oh, great. Right. Well, listeners, I hope you enjoyed our little web quiz. Hopefully it inspires you to maybe go make your own website. And you can definitely go to Squarespace.com for your free trial and additional 10% off. And all you have to do is use our super awesome code, beaver butt.

Steve Cubine and Nan McNamara's podcast from Beneath the Hollywood Sign. Mary Astor has been keeping a diary. Mary writes everything down. And so this torrid affair with George S. Kaufman is chronicled on a daily basis. In great detail. And I. Pulse pulls out a box and gives McAllister a ring saying, here's something to remember me by. This article caused Daryl Zanick to hit the roof.

Actress Ruth Roman followed that up with playing a foil to Betty Davis in Beyond the Force. I mean, if you can stand toe to toe with her, boy. And she does because she plays the daughter of the man that Betty Davis. as kills out in the hunting trip. And it's directed by King Vidor, so he's no slouch. How do you go wrong with that? Speaking of the Oscars, talking about what I call Beginners' Luck, it's all about the actors and actresses who won an Oscar on their very first film.

Get your fix of Old Hollywood from Stephen N on the podcast from Beneath the Hollywood Sign. You can spend less time staying in the know about all things gaming and Get more time to actually play the games you love with the IGN Daily Update podcast. All you need is a few minutes to hear the latest from IGN on the world of video games, movies, and television with news, previews, and reviews. You'll hear everything from Comic Con coverage to the huge Diablo for launch. So listen and subscribe to the IGN Daily Update, wherever you get your podcasts. That's the IGN Daily Update, wherever you get your podcasts. So I have a story, and it's not necessarily cheating, cheating, but it's definitely sneaky.

Okay. And it's kind of an exploit. And 100% shady. And this was inspired because last week at Pub Trivia, we got the question, and we got it wrong. The question was, what was the largest Canadian export in the 1700s? Yeah. Now, to be fair. Everybody's like, because we said the right answer.

We just didn't pick the right answer. It was one of the, it was one of two we were considering, which was we were considering fur, and we were considering lumber, wood. Turns out it was the fur trade. Yes. The largest export of Canada for a couple of centuries. They realized, hey, there's a lot of animals and we can get fur from, and they're coming from England and France.

Why not send some people and go on explorations? Kind of Lewis and Clark, but in Canada. Skin, skin everything you find. That's right. Go deeper. See what other animal you can find and kill it. Guys, so far, every animal we've seen has had some fur on it. I think we should keep looking.

It gets cold of you. Just keep going. Why didn't you read that a week ago, Karen? I know. I know. But then this research led me to this sneaky, kind of crazy sounding story. A member from our rival pub trivia team actually mentioned it. And when we were kind of talking about, you know,

pub quiz and stuff. He's like, oh, you didn't hear about this and this. And I was like, what, that sounds crazy. So I read about it. So there was a giant theft in Canada that happened. It was a big deal because what was stolen was valued at $18 million. Whoa. The thing that was stolen is really weird. It's maple syrup. Oh. 18 million. The real stuff. Yeah, the real good stuff. Canada has something called the global strategic maple syrup reserve.

Instead of changing oil reserves. It is strategic maple syrup. Exactly works like or analogous to the oil reserve.

If one year there's bad harvest they've got maple syrup. They can release syrup out of the reserves, yep. And because

they produce the world's like three-fourths of the world's maple syrup, you know, they need to they need this

reserve to kind of control, yeah. It's a big deal. So, Obviously, all of the syrup has to live somewhere. How much syrup does the global strategic maple syrup reserve hold? It holds, right now, estimate, 46 million pounds of syrup. Oh, my God.

Wow. I did some calculations. And that's about how much 23,000 blue whales would weigh. I was like, oh, I got to put this in context. Oh, yeah. It's a much more standard unit of measure. Right. The blue whale.

Imagine. Providing the blue whale conversion. animal on earth, 23,000 of them. That's how much maple syrup. Wow. That's a lot of syrup. It is. So the theft, they made out with probably 10 million

pounds of syrup, which still is a lot, and it's syrup. Did they just tap into the tanks, or were these, like, in trucks? Like, where... How did they do it? Yeah. Just a giant straw. I mean... The wedge, I just imagine. The giant straw. No, Mrs. Butterworth's bottle.

The big is the statue of liberty. She's like, me hungry. And then she just drinks it all. Oh, she's not alive in my fantasy. She's just a regular bottle. She was like the stay puffed

marshmallow man. Oh, yeah. So the global strategic syrup reserve, they keep the syrup in drums and barrels, a large industrial types. And at that time, the original warehouse

was being remodeled and they actually had another storage unit, a warehouse that the Federation reserved to put some of the extra syrup in there while they're remodeling. The thieves rented another portion of the warehouse for an unrelated business. So they're sharing that space. So that enabled them to drive large trucks with forklifts into the building and, you know, people won't get suspicious. And so when no one else was around, the thieves gradually they emptied the

syrup barrels and actually some of them were even filled back with water just so that they would It's like what you do at a mini bar in a hotel room. Karen, this thing We're finding out what sneaky string of confessions

stuff that you've pulled over your life because now it's spiraling, now you can't say you were 12 bringing the hotel mini bar and replacing it with water. No, I'm just saying I'd say I'd say I'd do It's this tip of tongue, so we're like, oh. No of it. Yeah, I know of it.

I've never done it. I've never done it. And what do they do with the syrup? I mean, they sold them. They set up a kind of legitimate maple syrup dealers, basically, and they would sell the maple syrup to other Canadian provinces that don't produce maple syrup sold to the U.S. On the brown market. More of an amber. Oh, that's good.

The amber one. Did they bust them? Did they get the people? They did. I mean, this sounds all ridiculous and all, but it's still, it's important business. It is. It's a big part of Canadian economy. And if the thieves had succeeded, your normal maple syrup probably would go up price by, you know, a lot. So it does have this effect. The companies that were buying the stolen syrup, how would they know? Like, it's maple syrup. Like, you can't prove this barrel of syrup is the stolen one or is not the stolen one. So, I mean, that really kind of delayed the process.

of nailing these guys, too. Wow. It was smuggled inside McGrittles and then carefully extracted. Put it in balloons. It's like a Canadian Ocean's 11. Got flying across the country swallowing balloons full of syrup.

Oh, man. My life is a syrup mule. Memoir. A shocking expose. It was so sluggish, I bet. All right, well, I will wrap it up our tales of cheating and shady behavior here with one last little segment for you guys. So you know, no surprise to the three of you at least, that I really love Las Vegas. Kind of surprised to hear that. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. But okay.

Really? All right, great. I do. I love it. I just, I love gambling in general. You know, I got it under control, guys. It's not a little. I love the fake and glitz and shine. So not only do I like going to Las Vegas to play blackjack mostly is my game of choice. But I love stories of heists and swindles and cheating. And as you might imagine, you know, casinos are a just a tantalizing opportunity for cheaters and swindlers. If you figure out the right scam, you can make lots of money. So, you know, there have been any number of stories over the years of people with, you know, electromagnetic devices they've smuggled into effect the roulette wheel and all kinds of crazy, you know,

radios that communicate with each other at the tables and various high-tech things like that. But there is one incident that supersedes all. of these in terms of cheating, which is just outright theft. A few years ago, there was a brazen, brazen robbery at the Bellagio. You guys may have read about this. This was a big deal. This was in the early hours of the morning, a guy rode up on a motorcycle, parked it outside Bellagio, without taking his helmet off, strode in, he's got a gun in his hand, walked

up to one of the craps tables, one of the higher limit craps tables, stole a million and a half dollars worth in chips. Wow. Oh, he just took it. Just walked right up. Yep. table, people were kind of stunned, like, you know, what's going on? And, you know, it was really early in the morning. It was not really a lot of people around. Yeah. Next thing you knew, he's back

out the casino, hops on his, he escaped, gets on his motorcycle and rides away off into the night, into the Las Vegas night with a million and a half dollars worth in chips. Now, you might be thinking, like, that sounds like a lot of chips. Now, it is a lot of chips, but many of the chips that he took were $25,000 chips. Oh, okay. So the smallest denomination they took were $100. So, I mean, this was a big deal, and the cops obviously wanted to. to try and catch this guy, but... Wait, hold on, but in order for him to actually get the money, he still

has to trade in the chips for cash. That's right. So, you know, presumably he had one of two plans. His plan was either all come back and just sort of spend them slowly over the next weeks months. Yeah, because they don't, because they didn't get a picture of my face or whatever it is. Yep, yep. Or I will sell them to other

gamblers. Sure. Because why don't you just take one of those $25,000 chips and sell it to some totally other random dude? Yeah, for $20,000. That's for free $5,000. Now, the casino, aside from being put out of just the affront on their security, they were not particularly worried. They weren't out any money because they instantly did two things. They instantly put a new set of chips into circulation that looked different from the old chips.

And they basically declared, these other chips are no good anymore. Now, on top of that, they also deactivated the chips because every single one of those chips contained an R.F. ID 10 inside the chip. So, I mean, probably not the, I mean, was it the $100 ones or just the $25,000? So this is really interesting. It only costs, they say it costs about $2, $250 to embed an RFID chip in a chip. So it's worth it to them for really, chip and a chip in a chip. So it's worth it to them for pretty much any chip all the way up.

Part of this is for security so they can do things like instantly taking the chips out of the system. And if someone tries to redeem that chip, they're like, no, this is stolen. Or this is deactivated. Where'd you get this? It also helps them with things like just routine management of chips. You know, you can dump out a tray of chips on an RFID reader and tells you, oh, here's the value of this pile that you put out there. Oh, that's so smart. It's really smart.

It's really smart. Wow. That makes their job so much easier. Like, no, seriously. You know, when you watch movies and, like, someone wins the giant slot in five. Yeah, it's raining down. It's like, oh, man, I'd hate to be the person who I have to count every single one. Can I just scan it?

Yep, yep, yep. So overnight, not even overnight. Within an hour, this guy's chips were totally zero. Zero. That's right. So eventually, he did get busted. He got caught in a sting doing exactly what we talked about. He got caught in a sting trying to sell the chips online for a bargain.

And he was, you know, quickly taken into custody and sentenced. And, yes. Wow. Well, that is the end of our show. Lots of, lots of shady business. My own secrets coming out. No, now we're like, oh, Karen is pretty speaking. Just volunteer at all.

Yeah. In every segment, Karen's like, oh, yeah, you just do this thing. Anyways, well, I hope you guys learn a lot about anti-cheating mechanisms. We don't want people to cheat, hearing about people who cheat, and then, you know, the companies and the people who try to stop it, I think, is super interesting. It's super smart, too. Fabulous lists. Fabulous. Fabulous. Sure.

Plagiarism, casino cheating, maple syrup heist, and also marathon cheating. Some crazy stuff. You can find our show on iTunes, on Stitcher, on SoundCloud, and also on our website, Good Job Brain, which is built with Squarespace, who is our sponsor this episode, and we'll see you guys next week. Bye. From the terrifying power of tornadoes to sizzling summer temperatures, Acuether Daily brings you the top trending weather-related story of the day, seven days a week. You can learn a lot in just a few minutes, with stories about impending hurricanes, winter storms, or even what not to miss in the night sky.

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