No Such Thing As A Fish - 102: No Such Thing As A Water Mortar

Episode Date: February 26, 2016

Live from the Gulbenkian theatre in Canterbury, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss silly string, arrows in the air, frightened marmosets and the battle of the keyboards.

Hi everyone, tiny thing. The sound quality on this podcast is terrible. Really sorry about that. We had a few issues in the venue on the night. Hope you can tolerate it nonetheless. Okay, on with the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from Canterbury. My name is Dan Schreiber and please welcome to the stage is the three regulars Anna Chazinski, James Harkin and Andy Murray. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that the first water balloons were made out of socks. So sort of cotton made out of rubber, rubber socks. This was it was invented by a guy called Edgar Ellington and he was trying to come up with a thing that could kind of treat trench foot. So the idea that you would get your feet very wet and it could cause problems, he wanted to stop that. And so he wanted to make socks that were made out of rubber out of latex. The main problem he had was putting the socks on because they were so kind of latex and you couldn't get them on. And then once he even managed to sort that out, he thought, well, I'll just make sure the waterproof. So he put a lot of water in there. There was a

little bit of a leak and he was like, oh, a little bit of a leak. And he threw it and then it smashed on the floor water went everywhere. And he thought, aha. He called them water grenades. Yes, he did. Did he mean them for war or? Well, people still call them water bombs, I think sometimes. But yes, film not used for war. Water pistols not used for holding up banks. This is why my crime syndicate is not done so well. It's a shame nobody's invented the water mortar. There is a guy in America who did a Kickstarter campaign. He's called Josh Malone. He created a device that can blow up 100 water balloons in one minute. I think so it fills up about 36 at a time. It's very impressive. The worst thing about water balloons is when

you have to tie them up at the end. That's always really fiddly. But they have invented some self tying water balloons. Wow. Yeah, they sound great, right? I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal of Old Places about these things. And it said, works really well, you kind of fill it up and then you put it back together and it kind of self seals. But the problem is that the balloons are so well made that when you throw them at people, they just bounce off them. That's not well made at all, then. That is how water balloons work. If you want to get someone, you throw it at the ground. You never throw it at a person because it just ricochets off their head. You need to chuck it on the ground. I wonder if we've got the same idea. Throw it at a person but then chase after it

with a pin and then smash it as it hits the person. Is that your thought? It's not exactly. My thought was to make everyone in a water balloon fight wear a suit made of nails. So the Boy Scouts. Water weapons are slightly illegal in the Boy Scouts. You're not allowed to have water pistol fights in the Boy Scouts. You are allowed to have water balloon fights. But I was reading through it. There's a really odd tiny stipulation. You can only use water balloons no bigger than a ping-pong ball. What? Has anyone seen a water balloon that size? They have made ping-pong balls bigger recently because they wanted to make ping-pong better. Our table tennis is better on television, so they made the ball bigger so you'd be able to see it

better. That's not what you need to make this ball better on television. You need suits made of nails. I was reading this blog by a guy who works for the Scouts and he was saying, here is a list of things and these are like official things that you're not allowed to do as Scouts are used when you're fighting with each other or playing with each other out in the field at Scout Camp. So it makes sense. You know, bottle rockets, crossbows, big guns, tanks, anvil shooting. You're not allowed to shoot anvils at people. That's on the list. Boy Scouts have just gone completely health and safety bad. Boomerangs aren't allowed. Ninja weapons. How do you get your ninja badge there?

Do you know there's a university, I think it's just Texas University, where you are not allowed to have water guns on campus, but you are allowed to have actual guns. Yeah, water business has been banned this year on a campus where everyone's got actual guns in their lockers. Because water, you can drown in water, that's the thing. No one drowns in a bullet. So I was reading about balloons generally and sales of helium balloons have gone down recently because people are worried about the environmental impact of the plastic around them, which actually, if it's just an ordinary latex helium balloon, it's not that bad because it goes about five miles up into the atmosphere, I think, and then it freezes and it breaks into little

slivers and it takes about as long to biodegrade as like a leaf or something. So it's not that bad for the environment, but it is very wasteful for helium. And so it's really an article that because helium is a precious commodity and we're using it up very faster than we're finding it. So this article was saying, as an alternative to releasing helium balloons, environmentalists have suggested dropping non-helium balloons from a tall building, blowing bubbles or planting a tree. You're running out of ideas. That's amazing. We are running out of helium, aren't we? I read that prices have doubled in the last 10 years. And do you know who owns 35% of the world's helium? They use most of it for MRI scans

and stuff, don't they? Well, it's the USA. They've got a national helium reserve. They've stockpiled a huge amount of it because it's the second most abundant element in the universe. But on Earth, it's really rare because it just keeps floating away, basically. It's very useful for making... As you said, MRI machines. Is that why we invented balloons then? To cage it. But then people have said that's quite cruel and campaigners go around popping it and setting it free. There is a certain truth to that, I think, because one of the first people who might not have invented it, but one of the first people to make balloons like we know was Michael Faraday,

and he was using it for his experiments and it was experiments with gases and whatever, he needed a place to keep the gases, so he did then balloons that way. Anyway, we're going to run out of helium in 40 years if we keep consuming it at the rate we are. Really? So enjoy it, guys. Go nuts while it's still cheap. I was reading about toys that were invented for other purposes. So the silly string was invented by two guys called Robert Cox and Leonard Fish, and they were not trying to create silly strings. They were trying to create a spray on cast for broken bones or for sprays. Then when they were trying the different nozzles that they would apply it with, they sort of created one that made it really fun, basically. It made

it move like silly string, and they thought this could be a toy. So they made an appointment with this company in California called WAMO, and this is from the account on Wikipedia. It seems very detailed and well written. Fish describes how during that meeting, he sprayed the can all over the person he was meeting with, and all over his office. This person became very upset, and asked him to leave the premises. And then one of the bosses of the company walked into this guy's office a day later, and there was a bit of it still stuck in the lampshade, and he said, what is that? And he explained, and they immediately said, get them back here. We have to make that into a toy. And they used silly string in, I think, in the Iraq war to kind of find tripwires as well.

Really? Nice. I didn't know it was that strong. Yeah, no, it does, because it's just so you can see it. It's just like, you're not sure where they are, so you spray the silly string, and then if it lays on something, you know, not to what? Oh, I thought you meant we used the silly string. I read the, because the soldiers started writing home to relatives saying, can you send out some silly string? So supposedly the army realized this would be, the American army realized this would be a really good idea. And they wanted to transport it out to the troops. But apparently it can't be officially shipped, because it's an aerosol, and that's dangerous. Which maybe, yeah, but they transport bombs around the place. There were 80,000 cans stockpiled in New Jersey, because apparently

they just couldn't get it over. They eventually found someone who could ship it. I've got a test question, actually. So you might prefer Dan's, but I'm talking now. So my question is, if you line up a row of water balloons, and you get a gun, it's a magnum, and it's a magnum where the bullets leave it a thousand miles an hour. And you place the magnum nose first against the first water balloon in this long row of water balloons. How many balloons do you think it'll burst before the balloons stop the bullet? Oh, wow. Are we including that resistance? I'm just doing the calculation here, is it? But it's four balloons. So yeah, just every time you're someone shooting at you, you just stand behind four water balloons. Oh, yeah, exactly. That's the best armor. Why aren't

police going into a gang? Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that you can't write in French on French computer keyboards. You cannot type in proper French on French computer keyboards, and the French government are now changing. They've said we need to change all French computer keyboards. It's missing the accents. It's missing very basic stuff that you would need in order to write a normal sentence in French. And as a result, they think that the French language is really losing its way amongst the younger generation who were exclusively doing it through typing. Although so on keyboards, this is actually going to be really tense from here on in, because I think James and I disagree on this, but our

keyboards are not ideal. Some people would argue. Right, the QWERTY keyboard became the standard keyboard mistakenly. It was an accident. So in a normal working day, for someone who is a secretary who's typing all day, for instance, on a QWERTY keyboard, your hands, your fingers will cover 20 miles, which is amazing anyway. Very good exercise for your fingers. On a QWERTY keyboard, they'll cover that. And on a Dvorak keyboard, which is the suggested replacement, they'll cover one mile typing the same stuff, because it's just much better laid out. So on a QWERTY keyboard, all the most commonly used vowels and consonants are either on the top row or the bottom row. There's hardly any on the middle row. So I think 52% of strokes are on the top row,

which is absurd. It's exhausting. If your fingers are only walking one mile a day, when we all get fat fingers. And isn't that a good thing? No, it's probably not. August Dvorak, who invented this keyboard that you seem to be so keen on, he died actually in 1975. Just before he died, he said, I'm tired of trying to do something worthwhile for the human race. They simply don't want to change. Yeah, it's people like you who won't accept, for instance, the fact that the vowels on a QWERTY keyboard are distributed on both sides, which doesn't make any sense, because mostly in the English language, vowels are followed by consonants and vice versa. So it makes a lot more sense for the vowels all to be on one side,

and the consonants all to be on the other side. Otherwise, think about it when you get them. I'll give some evidence. The highest typing speed in history was 216 words per minute, and that was done on the QWERTY keyboard. And yet the vast majority of typing speed records have been broken by a Dvorak keyboard. The absolute fastest was on a QWERTY. I'm over it. I'm over it. You don't want to change. Fine. So 216 words per minute, that's the fastest typing speed in history. The fastest handwriting speed is 350 words per minute. That's done shorthand. Anyone read that? Normally the person who wrote it, I guess. And the fastest talking is 637 words per minute.

And this is a British guy called Steve Woodmore, who you can go on YouTube and see him talking, and not the standard word he's saying. But he kind of reads, like, to be or not to be, that is the question and stuff like that, and reads it really, really fast. If you look on his Wikipedia page, which he has, it says that he once read the entire United Kingdom tax code, and it took him five days to do it. And that's the fastest reader of all time. A gripping video. You do have five days to spare. And also on Wikipedia it says, fast talking aside, Woodmore also acts as an electronic salesman for Curries. The original QWERTY keyboard, the guy who created it, Christopher Latham-Scholls,

this was in 1867. And so this was before he thought of QWERTY. It only had two rows, and it was compared to a piano keyboard. And it only had eight numbers on it, because he said you should use the O and the I to be the zero and the one. So it was trying for maximum efficiency. Oh, wow! Okay, so there's a thing called the QWERTY effect. Have you guys seen this? It's where two people on either side of you have an enormous point that's round. Now that's a gorgeous effect. The QWERTY effect is much more positive than that. No, the QWERTY effect,

this is weird. And so people have tested this, and apparently it seems to be true, that letters typed with your right hand are considered to be more positive than those types with your left hand. And they've looked into it, and they found that, you know, since like keyboards have become regular, people with names with letters on the right hand have become more common and things like that. So it does seem to be in effect that people feel more positive about things with their right hand than with their left hand. The J for James is with the right hand, and the A for Anna and Andy and the D for Dan are all from the left hand. And the first study I saw published on this, it was a few years ago, said that typing sad

makes you miserable because it's left hand, and typing jolly makes you happy because it's the right hand. Maybe it just makes you miserable because the kind of people who are typing sad and typing email saying, I'm very sad today. It's true, because it also means that writing ace, breast, carefree or sex would make you sad, whereas writing pooing would make you happy. We need to move on to the next fact. You guys got anything else? No? Okay, it's time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that Archers at the Battle of Agincourt had three arrows in the air at any given moment. This was in an interview with a guy who's a senior archer, and it sounds kind of impossible, but it's sort of a reflection of how fast the rate of fire was

for a medieval longbowman. So longbows were the things which really clinched the Battle of Agincourt. They're about six feet tall, taller than a lot of the people who would have been carrying them, and they were just incredibly powerful. So for example, a medieval archer could fire at least 10 arrows in a minute, maybe even more, we're not sure, but there were 5,000 archers on the English side of the Battle of Agincourt, and that is even at six arrows a minute, that's 30,000 arrows moving towards the French men at arms a minute. And the big thing was they had the French had to move across a very short distance, it was about 200 paces to get to the English line. But during that time, what has taken them about four minutes at least, at least 120,000 arrows

would have been fired at them, maybe up to 200,000. They were so heavy duty to use though, weren't they longbows? So they were unbelievably effective and it is why at the Battle of Agincourt, the British, the English, with far, far fewer forces were able to defeat the French. But so heavy duty, so the draw weight, which is the weight equivalent of what you have to hold when you're pulling back the arrow, was up to 200 pounds, which is 14 stone. So it was the equivalent of lifting up a 14 stone person just with your right hand as you draw the bow and arrow. And when you look at skeletons of archers, you can identify them because they have elongated bones and like swollen bones in their in their arrow arm, and they have marks where they would have had the bow on their wrist and their

shoulder. So lots of these guys, the archers, the Battle of Agincourt, who are all English and Welsh, they were naked from the waist down. No. Like Donald Duck. They were naked from the waist down. Interestingly, Donald Duck can fire 10 arrows in a minute. Huge draw strength. No way. They were naked from the waist down. They had terrible diarrhea. They had dysentery. It was a huge problem. They were completely exhausted before the battle. They'd been marching many miles a day for about a fortnight. They were in enemy territory. They'd won one battle, and Henry just really wanted to get them home. But he had to march around France a bit, so it wasn't a completely wasted journey. They won the Siege of Herfleur, and then he said, well, we could go just home

immediately. But he spent a lot of time and money raising the funds for this war. So he sort of was embarrassed. And all the men had dysentery. And so they just sort of cut off their trousers. And why didn't they just pull them down? I have read the counseling. They cut them off. I actually read the main opponent who would have been, so obviously Henry V was fighting on the English side, and it would have been Charles VI who was fighting on the French side, but he couldn't fight because he was severely mentally ill. People think now he has schizophrenia. And he also had this thing called glass delusion, where he thought he was made of glass, so he couldn't really move or walk very much. But one of the things that his servants had to do

was cut his clothes off him because he never washed. And so his clothes had hit him so much that eventually they kept on having to cut off his clothes. Yeah, so he in a way suffered in exactly the same way those guys in battle did without having to be there. Yeah. So the place actually is called Azincourt, not Azincourt, isn't it? Yeah, it's a French town called Azincourt. And we've just kind of anglicised it. There is a battlefield museum there. It's shaped like a longbow, which is quite cool. It's not the first museum that was there. There was one before, which was quite a lot cheaper, actually. And they had a model of the battle where the knights were made out of action man figures. Were they naked from the waist down?

I was looking on Wikipedia for a list of famous archers, Jeffrey. It's a great list, Robin Hood's on it, citation needed. And the post, I read a familiar name, so I quickly clicked into it. It's a guy called Mad Jack Churchill, who, if you don't know him, is the greatest World War II eccentric hero you could ever learn about. So he used to go into war with a longbow, sometimes a sword, and most times bagpipes. He was just an eccentric. And so he's, yeah, he's credited as the only person in World War II to take the longbow. Amazing. Do you know how Henry V funded his war in Azincourt, this 100 years war? He crowdfunded. He wrote begging letters to lots of his friends and to towns, and he also lent

them royal jewellery and stuff. And one of the people who lent him money was Dick Whittington. Isn't that weird? There was a real person Dick Whittington, he was a rich cloth merchant, and he Oh no, he wasn't. It's alright James, he's behind you. So in America, a couple of years ago, they had a debate in a university about whether Henry V should be found guilty of war crimes, because after the Battle of Azincourt, he did, I think, kill a load of French prisoners, didn't he? And so former US Solicitor General Gregory Garry, who was arguing against Henry V, said that he didn't have a legitimate claim to the French throne

because he traced his claim back only six generations. And Cannon Shanmungam, who was arguing on the other side, just said, war against France is inherently lawful. Okay, all right, well let's move on to our final fact of the show, and that is Chasinski. Yeah, my fact this week is that right-handed marmosets are braver than left-handed marmosets. Yeah, this is true. How? Well, various ways, so they can tell how, they can tell if marmosets are right or left-handed based on what objects, what hand they choose to pick up their objects with. So you put an object in front of them, and if they pick up with the right hand, they're right-handed etc. And it's about 50-50 split right and left-handed marmosets.

And it turns out the left-handed ones, when they're faced with a predator, they freeze for longer, so they take longer to move and run away. They are much more cautious about sniffing out or tasting kind of new food. They have a more negative outlook. How do you think about the Chinese economy? So the way we know this is that they were trained to, they were given white bowls and black bowls, and in one colour there would be a reward, and in the other colour there wouldn't, and they were trained to choose the bowls with the reward and to not choose the ones without the reward. And then they started giving the marmosets grey bowls, and the right-handed marmosets took the grey bowl. They were like, it's a lot like the white bowl. I'm just going to have it. It's

probably got the food in it. And the left-handed marmosets didn't take it because they thought, it looks a lot like the black bowl to me. I'm not going to, I bet it hasn't got anything in it. It's a glass half empty and glass half full thing. Exactly. Are we all right-handers around this table? No, I'm left-handed. Oh, are you? Oh, yeah. And I am terrified. So you are, so humans are more fearful as well if they're left-handed.

There's a higher correlation. So for instance, the way they tested this, one of the ways, a bunch of studies have shown it, but they showed people silenced the lambs to film, and then they questioned them afterwards about certain scenes and asked them to recount certain scenes. And the left-handed people stammered and started and freaked out and screamed as they were accounting scenes. Who will cut this paper with these scissors? I will cut this paper with these because they will be right-handed scissors. Like, surely we just, we volunteer for more stuff as right-handed people.

That's a very good theory. You should take it to the theorizers. So the Roman poet Horace, when he made a mistake, he wrote Ego Livus, which we translate as silly me. It actually means left-handed me. Oh, really? Yeah. There's a long history of this stuff. Yeah, people don't like left-handed. We're not going to stand for it. No, we will. We're terrified. That's amazing about marmosets.

Yeah, it's really cool. I mean, and we think it extrapolates to humans. But marmosets are great. So one thing they've learned to do is learn from instructional videos. A marmoset was taught how to extract an object that it wanted from a box, that, you know, a well-locked box. And then it was filmed extracting that object once it had been taught to do that. And then the film of the marmoset doing that was placed in a room or a cage or whatever with other marmosets. And the marmosets watched the film, and then they were given the box, and they imitated what happened in the film, which is quite cool. Very cool.

Given that my cats don't know their own reflection. So I'm just thinking, I bet there's people listening at home who didn't know what marmosets are. And you've just gone 10 minutes talking about them. Are they marmots or are they marmosets? Is it marmots? Yeah, marmosets. You love them while you hate them, yeah. We've got prejudice sets in Australia, actually. Well, they're little tiny monkeys that live in South America, aren't they? They don't have wisdom teeth, that's one thing about them. They're the only primates with, like, tactile hairs that can

kind of feel things. They have them on their wrists. They go into torpor every day when the sun is hottest, or they kind of fall asleep, like have a siesta every day when it gets really hot, like Spanish people. And they're the only primates, apart from humans, where you can stare into their eyes, and they won't think you're being aggressive. They also, I read a new report about finding about them, is that their parents teach them not to interrupt them when they're talking. Yeah, it's a thing. So basically, if you ever hear marmosets talking to each other, they don't interrupt each other.

Actually, this is an interesting thing. I must read a similar thing, actually. No, they do a thing, and they actually train their children to not talk over them. If the child talks over them, they'll give them the silent treatment. So every marmoset conversation is really civilized. Although they are, so they've been compared to humans because they are like that with conversation. They do what humans do, which is if one of them starts talking fast or making its calls a bit quicker, then the other one will imitate as we join conversation. But they don't interrupt each other. They do leave five to six second pauses after one marmoset has spoken before they speak, which I think is not sophisticated as humans,

where we are capable of, when I stop talking presumably, it will not be an awkward six second pause before somebody else speaks. No, certainly not. All right, let's wrap it up on that. Thank you so much, guys, for listening. That's all of our facts. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on Twitter. I'm on at Shriverland, James, at Eggshaked, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M. Cherzynski. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yeah, or you can go to our websites. No such thing as a fish.com. We got all of our previous episodes up there. Thank you so much for listening at home. Thank you all here for listening to this here. And we'll see you again next week. Goodbye.