No Such Thing As A Fish - 115: No Such Thing As A Hummingbird Pilot

Episode Date: May 26, 2016

Anna, James, Andy and Anne discuss alarm clocks in space, ripped-off national anthems and crows holding grudges.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Anna Tyshinski and I'm joined today by Ann Miller, James Harkin and Andrew Hunter-Murray. And once again we've gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here they are starting with Ann. My fact is that the alarm clock on the mere space station made the same noise as their emergency alarm. That would wake you up wouldn't it?

It would wake you up with a start. So this is Helen Shryman who was the first Brit in space who spent eight days up there in 1991 and she was interviewed recently and said, quote, you'd wake up unsure if it was time to get up or if you were leaking oxygen. It got us out of our sleeping bags pretty quick. And was that why they did it, do we know, or was it just like they didn't have any other sounds on file? I like to think they just thought, we've got one alarm, that'll work, that'll do.

It does sound like a really effective way of getting out of bed, I mean terrifying, wake up fearing for your life. That's pretty much how I feel waking up every morning. Did you know that her mission, the Juneau mission, was actually a commercial mission and while she was up there she had to do an advert for Interflora? No. Was it because Interflora, like Interstellar, was that the reasoning? You should work in advertising, Andy.

I'm not sure, actually. Like the Flora Company, Interflora. They actually weren't Interstellar though, they were probably closer to the Arstella than they were on Earth for some of the time. They were Interplanetary. Yeah. Yeah. For whoever you're into, get them.

Anna, you should not work in advertising, Anna. The ear sounds incredibly shonky, so there was a thing about how the solar panels were damaged. I find it really odd that space stations are solar powered, I suppose it's obvious, but often the lights would go out and they'd just have to wait in the dark until they came back on, really. Yeah. Yeah, it was really dodgy, wasn't it?

They had a few very near disaster incidents, it caught fire in the 90s, in 1997 a fire started and they tried to extinguish it with a wet towel at first, I think, which made it worse and just made everything very smoky, so they all had to put their respiratory masks on at which point they realised that half the respiratory masks didn't work, and so while they weren't working and they were all suffocating, they tried to pull the fire extinguishers off the wall and I think seven out of the ten fire extinguishers were actually stuck to the wall so they couldn't be removed to put the fire out. How did they get it out?

They got the other three fire extinguishers and used those instead and they were fine, but it sounds entertaining, sounds terrifying. Wow. Do you think they call that a mere mess? I hope they did. So the mere space station, when it was decommissioned, it just had to be sent back into the Earth's atmosphere to shatter over the Pacific and it looks really beautiful, so I really love that idea and when the International Space Station is decommissioned, is de-orbited,

that'll do the same thing, I think, so it just gets brought back into Earth's orbit and then you make sure that it gets brought back at a place where it's not going to rain down over a well populated area and it looks like a whole, it looks like a meteor shower or something, doesn't it? Is that where they all land in Point Nemo, Andy? Yes. So Point Nemo is the area of the ocean that's furthest away from any land and is it full of...

I remember you told me this, it's full of spaceships. It's full of old spacecraft, that's where they try and get them all to land or they sort of, they work it out, so that... There's a remote spot. Exactly, yes, so there's the least chance of fun for life, unless you're on a fishing expedition to Point Nemo. To get away from it all. Fun finding Nemo-themed expedition in your life.

Oh, it's the ISS. Here's a cool thing I found out, once you get back, so in space, basically, you're a bit like a superhuman, Chris Hadfield said, you know, you could move a massive fridge or whatever with tips of his fingers, I don't know why he was moving a fridge around on the ISS, but he said that when you get back, obviously you're much weaker because your muscles atrophy in space, but the other thing he said is that you can feel the weight of your lips and your tongue and you have to get used to speaking with a tongue that weighs something.

Oh great, now I can feel the weight of my tongue. He was saying that in space, he had sort of automatically learned how to speak with a weightless tongue because you're all weightless, so you don't really realise at the time and when you return, it's a little bit harder. That's amazing. Is it also harder to keep your eyes open? I think when you come back to Earth from outer space, surely you feel the weight of gravity. When Helen Sharman came back, she said that she kind of felt a bit weird and that her

brain felt heavy. Wow. Maybe she just got way cleverer in space. Learn more stuff. Is that what happens that your brain gets heavier the cleverer you are? Yes. Everyone knows you get smarter in space and your brain gets heavier when you get cleverer. It's like how a full kindle with a tiny, tiny point of a gram more than an empty kindle.

Hang on, surely if you learn something and new connections are made in your brain, they weigh something though, don't they? Those cells? I mean, doesn't that mean that a really clever brain will weigh a tiny bit more than one with no information? That's why they used to try and examine Einstein's brain and stuff, didn't they? They thought they had the secret of big brains or small brains. I don't think anyone knows.

I think this is a conversation for the Neuroscientist podcast rather than a bunch of idiots who don't know anything about neuroscience. I can tell you a historical thing about this. I think it was Galton, but it was certainly someone like that from the Victorian age who was kind of believed in eugenics or something. He thought the people with bigger heads must have bigger brains and must be smarter, but he needed to work out how to weigh people's brains and how to find the size of their heads. What he would do is he'd go into a pub and find two people with kind of big heads and

then start an argument between them and say, this guy says your head's small, and he'd go to the other one and go, this guy says your head's small, and he goes, but don't worry, I'll measure your heads and I'll tell you who's the best, and then he got his measurements that way. Was he, had he just had a lot of refusals going up and politely asking people, so he had to come up with a way around it? Don't measure my head. I'd just say yes though if someone asked me to measure my head.

I'd be well up for it. Yeah, if anyone wants my head measured. If you ever see Anna in the street. Hurry and take a measure. Happy to help. Can we talk about alarm clocks? Alarm clocks. So the first alarm clock only went off at four in the morning that I found.

Yes, that's fantastic. How good is that? After it was invented, it took another 60 years before the first alarm clock was invented, which you could not. People want to get up at four a.m. It was just one guy, he was called Levi Hutchins. He was from New Hampshire and he started work soon after four a.m. So that was the time he got up.

So he just set it. It was totally unadaptable. And so the first alarm clock that you could adjust was patented in France in 1847, but he was 1787. I have a type of alarm clock. This is from a designer called Randolpho and it's called the Good Morning Underwear. And it's a pair of pants that vibrate to wake you up in the morning. Wow.

Right. This is a designer who kind of likes to do electronic clothing or wearable tech, especially underwear. And he said, I finally wanted to make a garment that my girlfriend would actually want to wear. And while it might be hard to believe, when I made the clap-off bra, it was not really for her. The clap-off bra?

Yeah. So what you do is you clap and then your girlfriend or wife's bra falls off. That's fantastic. So what if you went to like a comedy club? Yeah. Just have to hope everyone is really bad. I read about two simple alarm clocks, one of which I would say is higher risks than the other.

One is that you can build, if you build your house, so when you have your bedroom so near the window where the sun comes in, then naturally you'll wake up in the morning, which is a lovely idea waking up to the sunrise. The other idea is that you just drink loads of water before you go to sleep and your body will wake you up. I do that. You hope. And it works 80% of the time.

But supposedly it's a Native American thing, isn't it? And that it's still got practice even into the 20th century. What was? The drinking thing? Yeah. Oh my gosh, I am so connected to my fellow Native Americans. They used to drink water, not Pinot Grigio. I read that alarm clocks is one of the most common things displaced by smartphones now.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I've still got three alarm clocks actually, so I'm keeping the industry going. But have you? I've all set at different times. Two of them have broken. Oh, okay. Why do you still keep them? Because I have this fantasy that I'm going to go into the back of one and fix it one

day. That's an incredible fantasy. Your dreams must be amazing. It's pretty wild inside of my head. Clock fixing and stamp collecting all night long, my dreams. So just a couple more weird alarm clocks. These are off Kickstarter. These are current Kickstarter alarm clocks.

One of them is as soon as you wake up, it gives you your estimated life expectancy and your financial information, and it's supposed to be the most depressing alarm clock of all time. Is that worse than the emergency alarm going off? I think it is, because it says you're going to die in 20 years and you've got no money. Not necessarily. If you're a billionaire child, then that's what it's supposed to be like to have. You wake up like, I'm winning.

Yeah. I have no idea that it would force you to get up, because you need to make more money and spend as much time awake as possible before death. I think it's a bit like a memento mori, which is kind of, it just reminds you that you will die one day and it helps you grasp life. No, not remotely. OK, fine. I try to cheat it by killing myself immediately and be like, you were wrong.

Well, you're going to be the winner there. Just immediately spend a load of money on Amazon and kill yourself. In your face, Mr. Alarm. Was there another one, James? Here's another one. The money shredding alarm clock. This is a guy who combined a clock kit with a USB paper shredder and basically put a load of money in there and then the alarm goes off and the slower it takes you to wake

up and turn the alarm off, the more of your money gets shredded. That is fantastic. Wow. A tip, hot tip for people out there. Put your partner's money in it. You can sleep for as long as you like. There's somebody who doesn't have a joint bank account. OK, time for our second fact, and that is from James.

OK, my fact this week is that the Bosnian National Anthem is almost identical in melody to the theme for the movie National Lampoon's Animal House. That sounds fun. Who came first? National Lampoon came first. Basically, Bosnia is quite a new country. When it became a country, they needed a national anthem and they found a guy to write it. We think that perhaps he might have been somehow influenced by this movie.

Because if you were going to pick a movie to nick the theme tune of, it probably wouldn't be National Lampoon's Animal House. That's true. Although if you googled National Anthem and spelt it slightly wrong and it said, did you mean National Lampoon? National Lampoon? This will do. The other thing is that the National Anthem of Bosnia has no official lyrics, so you

really are just listening to the theme tune for National Lampoon. And Google it. Go on to YouTube and listen to them because they are remarkably similar. This fact actually comes from a book that I read, a fantastic book called Republic or Death by a guy called Alex Marshall, and it's a follow-up kind of QI fact about National Anthems. I absolutely love it. I've found so much stuff in there.

So he, Alex Marshall, is quite firmly sympathetic towards the guy who wrote this, isn't he, Dusan Sestik. That's right. And says it implies that it really was a subconscious thing. And I think this guy might have been screwed out with quite a bit of money from the Bosnian government now who are refusing to pay him because they didn't like the lyrics that he wrote eventually. Yeah, the lyrics have been written and they've been approved by one body, but they still

haven't been approved by a council of ministers, so at the moment there are no lyrics. The Spanish one hasn't got any words either, has it? Oh, is it not? I read that they had a competition to give words for it, but no one really liked them, so they took them out. Oh, really? They're amazing. Yeah, South Sudan, obviously, it's still the world's newest country, isn't it?

Yeah, it must be. They had an X Factor-style competition for this, which literally had a row of judges, and you had to present it. And I did not know that South Sudan was nearly called the Nile Republic, was it? It was one of the names they considered, yeah. So there's a story attested to in the 19th century, which is that the Sultan of Malaysia visited Queen Victoria, was invited to visit Queen Victoria in 1888, I think, and they didn't have a national anthem at the time, the Malaysians, but when the Sultan got to

meet Queen Victoria, her aide said, oh, by the way, when we're formally welcoming you, we want to be able to sing and play your national anthem, so what is it? And the aide was too embarrassed to say we don't have one, and so he just thought of the first tune he could think of, which was some local tune from the Seychelles that he'd once heard, which was a French origin, I think, and hummed that. And to this day, that is the Malaysian national anthem. No way. Didn't they change the Malaysian anthem when they became independent?

Because Benjamin Britten wrote one for them in 1957. Oh, did he? But he had, he'd only been in the country for a few hours, he didn't particularly have the best time. The lyrics are all about the airport. He was the first to go. They have great Toblerone, and lovely duty-free. The lyrics are a bit pricey, like he was supposed to go and visit a rubber plantation, but instead

spent the whole trip terrified he was going to be under attack. And he said, quote, we had a taste of what it's like to live always armed and in fear of one's life. And at one point they were stuck in a thunderstorm and spent the entire hour terrified that someone was going to find them. And did all these quotes make it into the lyrics he wrote for the national anthem? They didn't go with his national anthems, because they had a huge competition in the 50s, and they didn't like their entries, so they thought, well, I'll spend it in Britain

and see if he can come up with something, and instead they went with a cabaret song, I think. Oh, I have a fact about cabaret songs and national anthems. So the Germans only sing the third verse of their national anthem, and that's partly because the first verse begins, Deutschland, Deutschland, Ueberlanders, very heavily associated with Nazi times, obviously. So after the Second World War, West Germany had no official national anthem, because there was a big program of what was called denazification, where they were trying to

restore civil society as it had been before, 1933. So at football matches, people started singing a carnival song as their kind of unofficial national anthem, which was taking the mickey out of the allied powers, who were still obviously occupying at the time. So that was another carnival song that got used as a national anthem. Could they actually use it as a national anthem for a while? No, it was always unofficial. Sometimes they started playing it, and Belgian soldiers who were occupying heard it, and they

stood up thinking, oh, this is the national anthem, then. That's great. Isn't there a verse of God's name, the Queen, that we don't sing because it's got a line that rebellious scots to crush? I always sing that one. I only sing that one. Good. I feel very secure sitting here.

God Save the Queen, wasn't that the national anthem for a lot of countries when it was first written? Like, Liechtenstein had the same tune, but I think they have different words. Liechtenstein was... It would be amazing if they had the same words. It's already done. We could just change it. God Save the Queen and Liechtenstein.

Apparently, when Liechtenstein played football against Scotland, they always get their national anthem booed. That's so rough. My favourite story ever of Scottish people that played football matches when they went to Italy. And allegedly, we're singing, we're going to deep fry your pizzas, I just think. So I think a lot of countries had the English national anthem before anyone else had a national anthem.

So I think God Save the King was the first that came up in 1745 and became our national anthem. And lots of other countries thought, okay, that sounds like a good idea, national anthems. But didn't think to write their own. And so, you know, within a few decades, the German states, Russia, Denmark, the Kingdom of Hawaii, they all had the English national anthem as their national anthem, as in that melody. And Liechtenstein is the one that still kept it, couldn't be bothered to ever drop it.

I read a list of national anthem titles, and there are some from around the world which are unbelievably good. Great. Let's hear some. So I think the best around the entire world is Bhutan's The Thunder Dragon Kingdom. Awesome. Amazing. Poland has Poland is not yet lost so long as we still live.

Very lively. Equatorial Guineas is let us tread the path of our immense happiness. That's quite nice. I like Vanuatu's, which is yummy, yummy, yummy. Is it really? Yummy, yummy, yummy. It's so good in my tummy. It's the second verse, isn't it?

It means we, we, we. As in us, us, us. Yeah. Not as in you're in, you're in. I mean, they have to be insane, wouldn't they? The cleanup operation is awful after everyone's sung it. So Burkina Faso, their national anthem is one single night, and these are the opening lines.

This is in translation, obviously, but against the humiliating bondage of a thousand years, rapacity came from afar to subjugate them for a hundred years against the cynical malice in the shape of neocolonialism and its petty local servants. Wow. I prefer yummy, yummy, yummy. The English public don't want God Save the Queen to be their national anthem, mostly. So at the moment, I think a bill was proposed in Parliament at the start of this year to have an English national anthem, because weird English people get upset that we have

to share our national anthem with the Scottish and the Welsh. You're also not thrilled. Yeah. And the Northern Irish. And the Northern Irish. And the Lichtensteinian. And the Lichtensteinians. Okay.

Too many people are sharing God Save the Queen, and there's not enough to go around. So there's a movement to change the English national anthem. And I think one of the popular choices is obviously Land of Hope and Glory, which I think 55% of the English public would like, which is a catchy tune, but which Elgar, who wrote the tune for it, didn't like. And he really hated the way that it was appropriated for kind of jingoistic causes, and it was sung to get the English troops riled up in the First World War, and Elgar already disapproved of that.

He didn't like the lyrics that were written to it, which were written by someone else. So when you're singing that, feeling patriotic, you should know that the man who wrote it was not up for that. I think we should ask the internet what should be our national anthem, don't you? Oh, God. Queenie McQueen face will win by a country mile. It would be something like It's Raining Men or something. The Marseillais, a strong candidate for the best national anthem ever, really, really

exciting, was written by a royalist. The composer was a massive royalist, and considering it so revolutionary, that's a bit surprising. Oh, really? Yeah. He was asked to write it by the mayor of Strasbourg. Can I just say a quick story about plagiarism? Yes, please. That really entertained me that I'd never read.

It's just about a nature writer, this seems like a bit of a crowbar, but I read something written by a nature writer called Paul Tolme, and he visited South Dakota in 2005 to write an academic article on black-footed ferrets. He noticed a few years later that a bodice-ripper kind of raunchy book by a writer called Cassie Edwards contained verbatim his description of black-footed ferrets. So he says that she writes raunchy stories about Native Americans having forbidden relationships with frontierswomen. Oh, I thought you were going to say with ferrets.

No, bizarrely enough, there's just a scene where they have raunchy, I've said the word raunchy a lot, there's a scene where they have sex, and after they have sex they start having a chat about ferrets, and in that chat about ferrets there's a really incongruous description, an academic description of ferrets, and he said, yeah, it was a sudden dialogue between a hunky American Indian and a lustful pioneer woman, which was the height of absurdity. OK, on to fact number three, and that is Andy's fact. My fact is that crows can bear a grudge for nine years and two generations. What have you done to these crows, Andy?

There's a crow I know called Inigo Montoya and I killed his father. Is that a reference to something I don't get? The Princess Bride. So this is from a book that's just out, it's called The Genius of Birds, it's by Jennifer Ackerman and it is a fantastic book. So basically crows can remember a face, they can remember a load of faces, and they can teach their offspring and their friends to dislike you as well. Why do they do that though?

Basically a load of scientists put on masks and then bothered crows and basically, and they captured them or they used the word abducted in some write-ups of this, but they just sort of captured them and then released them, wearing a particular mask so they had a caveman mask for one of these experiments, and then when they were released the birds remembered which kind of face had treated them badly or which kind of face had treated them well or fed them and then they would dive bomb the threatening masks and then they left it for in some cases up to nine years and the mobbing still happened. The birds had remembered from years and years previously and other birds which had not hatched

at the time of the original attacks were taught to join in this mobbing and then when they saw you there after they would mob you because they knew. Why were they wearing masks? Is it because they didn't want the crows to hate their normal faces? I think it was because they were on the university campus and you can't just teach all birds on campus to hate you. I know why this was. It's because they were worried that if they didn't have masks, it would be something in

their facial expressions that the birds were reacting to. If it's a mask, it was sort of controlled for each time they did it. It's not like there was an old scientist who once did this experiment and then all the birds in the whole world hated him. I'd rather have to wear a mask when I was doing the bird experiment than have to wear a mask at all other times. So they study one thing that they did when they were wearing masks. I don't know if they were real ones or a replica crows.

They carry it. They look like a dead crow to sort of taunt the crows and then they'd be like, that's a bad person. They've killed a crow. They also did it with pigeons. A pigeon could not care less if you had a dead pigeon. They didn't look. They didn't do anything.

So crows empathetic pigeons. I'll let you go. That's fantastic. Well, they are very advanced crows, aren't they? So corvids are my favorite type of bird by a long way because they're... Sorry, it's just funny to have a favorite type of bird. Better than hummingbirds. They're pretty cool.

Don't bring your hummingbird biases in here. This is a podcast about crows. If you wanted a podcast about hummingbirds, you should have gone elsewhere. So are they a family or a genus? Corvids are a family, I think. So they're like ravens. Ravens, crows, jays, magpies, all birds like that. They're much better than parrots are at talking, for instance.

They can vocalize more impressively. So parrots can copy your words, but they always speak in that parrot voice. And whereas I can imitate parrot voices very well, they can't imitate mine. But crows can do all the accents. Crows can do all the accents. Actually, you know, the radio show Dead Ringers is just all crows. There's a man who's trained his raven to chant nevermore from the Edgar Allen poem. So he chants it because he's so good at mimicking his owner's voice

in this terrifying man's voice. That would give me nightmares. Did Edgar Allen Poe in life take advantage of the fact that his surname and the word poem are really similar? Another Edgar Allen poem? He should have done. I mean, maybe he wouldn't have died penniless at the age of about 40 if he'd only had a bit of commercial mass.

He had a terrible life. Everyone around him died incredibly young. And yeah, he was completely blighted. He made no money from his poems. But if he'd have had commercial expert Andrew Hunter Murray with him. Yeah. So one thing this is, it's called mobbing behavior, basically when birds all attack an individual at the same time.

And birds mostly deal with birds of prey. So small birds will attack big birds. But basically, they will defecate or vomit on birds of prey so much that the bird of prey has to leave. Because they can be quite corrosive. Obviously, like vomit is very acidic. And the bird of prey will have to leave because its feathers might be damaged. I think that is very bold.

I wouldn't approach a tiger, for instance, and vomit on it. Hoping that it's fur would be eroded fast enough before it ate me. Well, you might find yourself defecating. But if your family were all with you, you might all go and vomit on the tiger. Worst trip to Nosley Safari path ever. But there is a video online of otters mobbing a crocodile. I mean, it is unbelievably good.

Wow, really? Yeah. The otters are all advancing on the crocodile. And it's backing away, scared from them. I mean, they're not vomiting or... But they could be about to. Maybe. And occasionally, the crocodile snaps a bit. But it is losing, basically.

But a crocodile is aquatic. If it did get vomited on, it could just submerge itself and then come back up. I don't think the otters are vomiting, are they? They're just being aggressive. They're just being aggressive and advancing on it. And now I'm thinking about it. I don't think this has happened, but it's possible someone just reversed the tape of a crocodile about to eat a load of otters.

Crows like to pull tails of cats and animals. They like to tease them playing with them. What? And I read, so you know that trick you do when you see somebody and you tap them on the shoulder, but you're actually on their other side because you've reached round. Jackdaws do that to rooks. So Jackdaws sneak up to a rook and pull its tail.

And the other Jackdaws on the other side will go and steal whatever the rook was eating. No way. Yeah, it's like a distraction, like a two-man con. So one taps and another one's like, yes, dinner. That's great. Oh, they're so clever. Yeah. You know, when crows hide their food, so they hide it in the ground,

and they also remember where they hid it, but also remember how long that food has before it goes bad. So they won't bother going back to food that's gone bad. No. Yeah. And also, similar to the ravens, if crows have crows that they're friends with or around, they're fine. But if a crow who they don't like is in the area,

they'll go back and then hide it somewhere else later. Wow. Because they think they've been observed. Yeah, well, hummingbirds can fly backwards. James, will you drop this insane hummingbird fixation of yours? I read an article on Atlas Obscura talking about crow brains. It was a bit weird. They asked, can they fall in love?

And the scientist said, we don't and probably can't know if they fall in love, but we like to consider it. And then the article goes on, just for good measure, we asked whether, given a machine designed specifically for the purpose, a crow could drive a car. To which the scientist said, I have no idea. I think probably I have an idea that they probably,

they can't even reach that well. Did you see that stroke? What was it called? When dogs, like can dogs fly a plane or something that was on recently? And could they? Well, they claimed it was flying the plane. I think the dog was just sitting in a seat. I saw that.

There was a copilot. Yeah, I mean, you'd be mad to send sensitive cameras and stuff, expensive filming equipment, with an unaccompanied dachshund. On a 747 to Inverness. Imagine sitting in your seat and over the tannoy. You'll probably do it again in English in a minute. So actually just going back to that,

what actually happened on this TV show? I can't remember. So the pilot took them up and then they handed over control to the dog. And there was a trainer behind the dog. I think what it was, the dog had a... The paws were kind of through the joystick. Is it a joystick?

Yeah. Whatever steer was the plane. The dog had that. And I think it made some turns, but there was someone next to them and they were... So they trained it what to do. I think crows would have had a better chance. Because crows didn't actually fly anyway.

They were flying out where it was on the floor. Absolutely, yeah. And because they can talk, they can make the tannoy announcements uncomprehensibly. What if it was a crow and you didn't know? Would you be angry or thrilled if a big reveal at the end of your 747 flight was a crow coming out of the cockpit and going,

Surprise! I'd be a bit of both, I think. Yeah. I'd be surprised, certainly. Yeah, James is a stagger that the hummingbird hadn't done it. Why are you flying backwards all the way? I just wanted to say one thing about grudges. It's just quite funny.

Not now, Anna, not now. Let's talk about it after the recording ends. Andy, it was my last biscuit. It was four years ago. Men are more vengeful than women. We'll see about that. That's just my fact. There was a study done saying men bear grudges more

and they aren't as good at forgiving people when they've been wronged, until you explain to them how they might have also done that. In words of one syllable. Exactly. So it seems bizarre. It seems like when you show men how to empathise, then they do forgive as easily as women.

So in this study, the women who remembered their wrongs were no more likely to forgive those wrongs when you reminded women that they had also wronged people. But the men became much more likely to forgive people who'd wronged them when you reminded them, oh, but didn't you do this person wrong? So it's just men need that little extra reminder. They're like simple crows, aren't they?

Women are the hummingbirds to the male raven. Let's move on to the final fact, and that is my fact. My fact is that in 1959, the man who set the record time for swimming the Panama Canal was declared an honorary ship by the Panama Canal Authority. That's amazing. That's amazing. Although on the way back,

he did have to carry a load of 450 cotton bales. This is a guy called Captain Robert Leg. Good old Bob Leg. With his bob leg, with his bobbing legs, they called him as he swam by. And he made the journey in 1958 in 21 hours and 54 minutes, which is pretty fast, to swim the 77 kilometers of the Panama Canal.

And yeah, the next year, the governor of the Panama Canal Authority, Mr. William Potter, presented him with a certificate, which announced that he was an honorary ship, an honorary vessel in recognition of his achievement. That's great. I like that if you work hard, you could become anything.

Yeah, when he was a kid, they probably said, little bobby leg. What do you want to be when you grow up? He's like, I want to be a ship. You dreamers. Yeah. Well, can you be a bit more realistic, please, Bobby? You'll be an accountant.

That's fantastic. It is good. Another thing I liked is that people who attempted to swim the Panama Canal were treated like ships in another sense, which is that they had to pay tolls as they went through the locks, and they were weight-based tolls. So they had to be weighed and sized up to work out how much they had to pay.

And so Bob Legg had to pay 72 cents for each lock crossing, which was actually the weight of a one-ton vessel. But the first man who swam it paid 35 cents, I think, because he was declared a small proportion of a one-ton vessel. I have 36 cents on my file. I don't know which one's right. He was called Richard Halliburton. Yes.

I love Richard Halliburton so much. So he was an amazing guy. Well, he disappeared in 1939. We assume he died. I mean, he's probably dead now. But he crossed the Alps by elephant. He descended into the Mayan Well of Death. He was an amazing guy.

He flew a biplane over the Taj Mahal upside down. That's fantastic. Can I ask what the Mayan Well of Death is? You can ask, James. If I had read that, that would be the first thing I googled. I wasn't curious. The Mayan Well of Death is a sort of sacred well. I think it's in Columbia.

So lots of people have fallen in there and died and things, but not Halliburton. He was unbelievable. And he wrote these newspaper columns and books all about his adventures all over the world. And there was quite a lot of embellishment in them. So some things need a pinch of salt. But he swam the Panama Canal.

I think it was the first one to do it. He was the first one to do it. It's going through all the locks as well. Because the first people to actually swim from one end to the other were two people who worked on the canal because they thought the honour of swimming it should go to people who worked on it. And because they worked on the canal six days a week,

they could only swim it on Sundays. And so it took them quite a long time in stages. I like this headline from when Halliburton swam the canal. So it was 1928 when he did it. And I just read a headline from the time which is, Alligators annoy author swimming Panama Canal. And I just thought, I think that's the wrong way round.

Like he's the one who's in their canal. You should have brought some otters to skow off. So about the prices that you have to pay, the most that anyone's ever paid is a cruise ship called the Norwegian Pearl. And they paid 375,600 US dollars to go through. You pay by birth, by the number of people you can carry.

And there's a thing called priority passage. So if there's a queue, quite often there's a queue of a load of ships waiting. There was one time there was a seven day delay and 90 ship queue waiting. And these people paid kind of extra money so they could kind of jump the queue. And they paid 220,300 dollars

and it would normally have been 13,430. Wow, they really wanted to get their wares over. Yeah, I know, but that's... Isn't it great though? Can you imagine sort of getting there and there's 90 ships ahead of you? I don't know how they would overtake each other though. Because they are huge, aren't they?

They're made to... The ships that go down the Panama Canal are often made specifically in order to fit through the canal and the technical term for them is panamax, which is the maximum width you can be in order to get through and they look ridiculous if you look at them. So is it panama with an X at the end, panamax? You've got it, you've got it in one, James.

And the Edgar Allan Poe had that kind of forward thinking. Do you want to hear my favourite canal fact? Yeah. In 1978, there was British Waterways group were cleaning out the canal dredging it and they pulled out a chain with a bit of wood on the end and it was a plug and they drained the Chesterfield canal. No.

How the fuck is it? Oh my God. And I thought that can't be true. And I was googling it and then it has a... I found a thing with the guy who did it, it was called Bill Thorpe and his aunt told the story and said that Bill couldn't believe it and the canal trust said that every canal has some sort of draining system that's how they're maintained.

So you can drain a canal and it gets better because I thought this is amazing. And I found in 2009 there is an aqueduct near Wrexham and it needs to be drained for inspection to see how it was all doing. And so a 10-year-old boy won the chance to pull the plug in the competition. Oh. They let him drain the entire aqueduct. Really?

A canal can be drained by a 10-year-old little weakling? This is the aqueduct. So it released 1.5 million litres of water in the aqueduct and he said it wasn't actually that hard to do. Wow. And he said it was really cool to drain the aqueduct. He's right. It is cool.

I want to do that. You know there was a phase in canals between when we decided that having mules pull our things along the water wasn't going to work and between that phase and when we came up with diesel there was a phase when canal boats were supposed to be electrically powered and there were quite a few built especially in Germany and France and Belgium I think

and a few in America which had cables running along the top of them so it was like electricity lines and the canal boats would be connected to the electricity lines above them and then be carried along like that. That sounds very dangerous. Like water and electricity. And you in the middle of it. Your hands on the till.

They're still one left. It's the Straussi ferry in Germany if you want to visit. They look really cool. That's amazing. So when they obviously they used to have horses pulling them along the banks and then obviously that's a problem when you get to the tunnel because you can't just shove the horse in the canal and make it go along inside the tunnel.

So they had men called leggers and what you would do you would lie on top of the boat and you would stick your legs into the air and you would use that to slowly push against you sort of upside down, walk the canal boat along through the tunnel. That's so cool. It's really interesting. I used to love reading a book called Saucy Jane Family

and that was the name of the canal boat. Saucy Jane? It was about a family who had a canal holiday and at some point they sent the horse over the hill because they were going through the tunnel but they didn't explain how the boat carried on moving. So now I know. Someone on the top was pedaling against the ceiling.

Yeah, that's so cool. Saucy Jane, lay on her back with her legs in the air. Don't ruin my childhood. Why would you want to leave that out? Okay, that's all of our facts. Thanks so much for listening and if you want to get in touch with us you can contact these guys on Twitter.

So Anne is at... At Miller underscore M. James. At egg shaped Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. And you can email me on podcast at qi.com. If you want to listen to any of our previous episodes you can go to knowsuchthingasafish.com

and we'll be back with another episode next week. See you then. Goodbye. You