No Such Thing As A Fish - 170: No Such Thing As A Love Potion For A Vole

Episode Date: June 23, 2017

Anna, James, Andy and Alex discuss stinking ice, smart seeds and the world's greatest fly swatters.

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 Lightning and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tijinski and Alex Bell. And once again, we've gathered around the microphones and we've got you our four favourite facts from the last seven days. So in no particular order, here we go. Starting this week with my fact, and that is that early ice skating rinks stank of pig

fat. Rank. It's a rank rink. Rank rink. Ice rank. So this is the fact that the very first artificial skating rinks used as kind of ice substitute because they didn't have the technology to make proper fake ice. So instead they used a substitute which consisted of various salts and hog lard and people would

just skate around on it and they also had mounds of hog lard just at the side to look like fake snow. Yeah. And it didn't last very long. It lasted six or seven months. When did you say that was? That was in 1844. Okay.

So that was, and the first one of those was made in 1841, I think, wasn't it? Yes. Sorry. So this was the first one that was sort of properly open to the public. Yeah. So what was made in 1841 was only six foot by twelve foot, so I don't think you're not going to play much hockey on that, are you? That was like his investment lure at one.

So he made that first one and it was basically like the thing you'd take on Dragon's Den to say, if you give me £10,000 for 10% of the company. Well I'm afraid it smells like pig fat, so I'm out. It's weird when you see pictures of the olden days. So for instance, there's this beautiful picture of one of these early ice rinks from the 1840s and everyone always looks very, kind of, they're all dressed very beautifully and always looks lovely like Jane Austen era and you can never see the picture of the smell, which was so pervasive everywhere.

Everything smelled of horse manure or pig fat. Did you expect that they'd be skating around with like clothes pegs on their noses and stuff? Yes. Green smoke lingering above them. Yeah. You can't see the trotters poking up through the ice. Do you remember last year when in Japan, I think we might have mentioned this on our

new show, in Japan, they filled the ice rink with dead fish, didn't they? They got like hundreds of dead fish. So I looked this up again, but I didn't realise at the time when you do this on the show that it's, the Japanese theme park is called Space World and it's like a space themed theme park. There's no reason to put fish inside your ice rink. They froze them far so that you get a kind of whole shoal of fish mid swim, so it did look quite cool.

But then they also spelled out the word, hello, dead fish. When you take a step back from that, that's like, what are you doing? Like, who thought that was a good idea? Like, how far down the meeting did you lose sight that that was mad when you're like, let's spell out the word hello of all words in the ice? At the very least, you could put hello in Japanese. Oh, was it in English? Yeah.

I think it was in English, wasn't it? It was, yeah. But they got a massive trouble over that and then they said, don't worry, the fish were already dead before we put them in the ice, as though that sort of makes it better. Well, it kind of makes it better because then it's just like, if they were just buying it up as if to eat. Yeah. But people complained at the time that the fish looks like they'd been frozen in time.

There are people saying, it looks like you've just put them in there alive and they've frozen to death because their mouths are open and their eyes are big and wide. But if you've ever been to a fish monger, that is just what dead fish is like. I see what you mean. I don't think it's better. I do think it's less bad. Well, that's what better means. I think it's still bad.

Do you think it was, because it was spelled out in English, maybe they thought this is a kind of weird stuff that the Brits are into, isn't it? We'll spell it out in their language, we'll get loads of tourists. Well, they correctly surmised that it was going to be in British tabloid newspapers, didn't they? They did? Well done, Japan. I think it was going to be in Hello Magazine.

Maybe it was sponsored by Hello Magazine. Anyway, yeah, so they didn't have another proper artificial ice rink until 1876, and that was when they had actually developed the technology, but even that one had a layer of cow hair under the ice. Did it? Yeah. Was that for some kind of sort of cold insulation? Because they ran cold types under the ice, didn't they?

You had concrete, the base layer is concrete, and then on top of that you have layers of earth and wood and cow hair, obviously. And then on top of that, as you say, they put these pipes, and they ran a chemical solution through the pipes, which froze the water surrounding the pipes, and it froze the water. How cool is that? It's very, very cool. They were called Galatiariums, weren't they? Yeah.

Galatiaria, maybe. But they were incredible. I didn't realise these things existed, and they were, it sounds amazing, so they were floating. There was, I think, the second or the third one that this guy, John Gamgee, who invented them, made, was a floating one on the Thames, just where the Hungerford Bridge is. So it was this big floating ice rink, and it had a glass ceiling that went all over it.

So it was indoors, glass-ceilinged, floating. Why don't we still have this? That's very cool. Yeah. I find it hard enough to skate on an ice rink that's on solid ground, but one that's also, like, you get a seasick on as well, that's going up and down. Maybe it cancels out, and it's just like walking around. I think, I'm imagining, everybody sliding to one end, and then sliding to the other

end, and then not moving, and always getting bunched up on one side. So John Gamgee, then, after doing this, he went into perpetual motion. He invented a thing called the Xerometer, which supposedly would power ships through perpetual motion. He put the same, a similar kind of liquid through the ship, which is really cold, that would take the heat from the water, that would propel the sails and the rotors, which would then put energy back into the water, and that would supposedly be a perpetual motion machine. Unfortunately, it didn't work.

Unfortunately, he didn't count on the laws of physics. Yeah, and he spent the rest of his life and all of his money on that. He was an extremely accomplished vet, John Gamgee, so he was really good at this. He founded this vet school and a vet journal, and there's now the John Gamgee Award, which is basically the only remnant that has his name, which is an award that's given to those who excel in the field of veterinary science. And it says in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that if he'd have carried on being a vet, instead of going into ice skating rinks of perpetual motion, then he probably

would have been the best vet of all time, maybe, or one of the best vets. But we wouldn't have ice rinks, so swings and roundabouts, isn't it? But we would have the pig rink still. He didn't invent that. We'd still have the pig rink, thank God. That would be probably fine. Can I just... Because such a cool thing about Gamgee is that his brother was a guy called Sampson Gamgee.

Sam Gamgee? Well. So Sampson Gamgee was a doctor, and he invented a kind of tissue that was used in surgical instruments, which people called the Gamgee tissue. But Tolkien wrote a letter saying that he'd got the name Samwise Gamgee from that, because they used to refer to the Gamgee tissue at the end of the 19th century, and it was to go with Rosie Cotton, who's Samwise Gamgee's wife in Lord of the Rings. So this guy who invented the ice rink, his brother, was Samwise Gamgee.

That's amazing. He was Lord of the Rings, and the other guy was Lord of the Rings. It's not quite true to the text, is it, saying that he's Lord of the Rings, but we'll allow it. Hang on. So Sam Gamgee is named after a cloth. Yeah. And his wife were both named after surgical instruments.

That's so funny. Surely that's a bit of a hack move, isn't it? It's like the least Lord of the Rings-y thing to do. You'd think it'd be named after some god or something, yeah. It's like being called Trevor Goz, so Neville Butterfly Stitch. What if all the characters in Lord of the Rings are named after all this stuff? Maybe they are. Maybe they are.

So we should talk about the machines that go up and down ice rinks, fixing the ice. It's what the public are crying out for. You mean Zambaisies? Zambonies. Zambonies. Zambaisies are a river in Africa. Very rarely freezes. I assume they were named after that.

Yeah. Sorry, you mean Zambonies? Yeah, I do, yeah. Yeah, of course, they're huge here. That's very optimistic that I'm going to edit that up. Yeah, I didn't realise the previous procedure, which was so laborious. You had a tractor, right, on the ice, and that would pull along a scraper. Because obviously, as people skate, there are all these little shavings that get sort of cut out of the ice.

So you have a tractor pulling along a scraper. The scraper scrapes it all up, and then you have to have someone walking behind, pulling the ice with water, and then squeegeeing it up to mop it up. So you don't have too much water on the ice, I don't know. I think it's basically shaving the top layer off the ice, so you've got the smoothness, and then putting a new layer on that's smooth. It's basically like repainting, but with water. But then does the person walking behind leave a lot of footprints in the ice,

and then another machine has to come behind to sweep up. It's another person, actually, with slightly smaller feet. Yeah, they're great. So these are apparently a big deal in the world of ice hockey, which I'm not very afraid with, and in America, but they're invented by this guy called Frank Zamboni in 1949, and they were first made out of old World War II parts, weren't they? So the first one was made out of bits of a...

Spitfire. It was a tank, wasn't it? It was a Douglas bomber, so it was an airplane, but I think other bits were made out of tanks, maybe. I think the whole thing was that when he made the machinery, he then put it on like a military buggy and drove it around, and that was like a... Oh, really?

That's so funny. I went on the website, the official website of Zamboni, and on the biography it says, if necessity is the modern invention, Frank Zamboni is probably the father, which I think it is a bit of a... He's one successful, quite specific invention. No, have you seen the other things he invented? Go on.

One of them is called a black widow. It's a machine that is invented to fill in the dirt on top of cemetery vaults. Effectively, levelling the soil on top of a vault is very similar to levelling the ice on a... Yeah, he's a typical one-trick pony, isn't he? He's not a one-trick pony. But he's adapted a trick, because he's also invented the Astro Zamboni,

which removes rainwater from astroturf. And when they had the 50th birthday of the Zamboni proper, Zamboni Classic, they had a Zamboni Driver of the Year competition. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Which was won by a guy called Jim McNeill, who said it was a thrill right up there with getting married and having children.

Wow. Did you see what he did next? Obviously, you also... Get divorced. Abandoned his children. Actually, it was a bigger thrill. Just packing all his stuff up and driving away on a Zamboni. In 2006, two skating rink workers were fired

after driving a Zamboni to a Burger King drive-thru. They got fired immediately, and the director of Park said, when we interviewed them, they didn't seem to be too concerned about it. They leave the Burger King floor extremely smooth. I don't know. We should move on, guys.

Can I tell you a really cool thing you can do with ice super quickly? If you get a bit of cheese wire and you hang weights on either side of it and you get a big block of ice, make a big block of ice, a bit of cheese wire, hang two litre bottles of water on either side of the cheese wire, and you put it over the ice so it gradually cuts through it. And the ice refreezes behind the cheese wire as it cuts through it.

So, the cheese wire will cut all the way through the ice, come out the other end, and you've got a completely intact block of ice. That's amazing. So, you spent all that time, and all of your objects were exactly the same as they were when it started. Exactly. It's almost a futile activity.

Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Anna. Yeah, my fact this week is that in 1912, the Toronto government ran a fly swatting competition. It was won by a 15-year-old girl who killed half a million flies. So, it's so weird. I think I read about this on a site called Knowledge Nuts, which I've actually discovered. It's a really great site, guys.

I felt like I had to mention it, because it's not in many other places. So, this is this contest that flies were a massive problem in 1912. They spread lots of disease. There was manure everywhere. There were big parts of rubbish everywhere in the streets. The flies aren't causing the manure. They're going to cause very small amounts of manure.

Yeah. So, they're adding to the problem, I would say. Well, actually, don't they eat the manure, and then they just produce a different type of manure? What's interesting about that is they take manure and then they replace it with manure. It's very much like Anna's ice cream. They redistribute manure.

They're a redistributing manure on people. The government didn't like it, and so the chief medical officer in the Toronto government got together with the Daily Star, launched this contest. Every contestant had to be under 16, and they said they'd give away cash prizes to the children who brought in the most fly corpses. And there were people which came,

and they came to this guy called Dr. Hastings, who was the chief medical officer, and they brought their fly corpses to him every day, and he counted them up. There were lots of quite strict rules, so you couldn't try and pad out your pint with other material. That was against the rules. You couldn't breed the flies once you got them

in order to make more, because that kind of defeats the whole object. How do they know you're not going to do that, though? Exactly. They just asked you not to. It was on trust. That's like what city was it in China that started offering a bounty for every mouse

or rat you killed or something? Rat tails or something. Yeah, and then people just made rat farms and then just mass bred these rats. It's quite crafty the idea of padding it out with other stuff, though, because that's in a Greek myth, isn't it? Someone is going to pay the gods some tribute,

and he puts in this sack of rubbish offal, but then he puts a nice steak on top of it, and the gods think, oh, a sack of steak, and then they work it out because they're not complete idiots. There was an old scam that they used to do with vegetable oil

in that they'd sell you a massive tank of vegetable oil, but actually it would be water with oil on top of it, because of course oil floats, and you'd only see the oil pot. And that is why cooking oil now always comes in transparent bottles. You've got to see it all the way down. So we've established that piling rubbish underneath

and putting the valuable thing on top is a common trope, and the Toronto government anticipated this and said, please don't do it, kids. Why was the competition only for 16 and younger? If this was a genuine problem they were trying to solve, why would they then suddenly... People have got jobs, Alex. Well, kids, have school.

I bet this girl, Beatrice White, scribed a lot of school to get this good. So this is the girl who won it, and she set these proper traps, and if you look up, if you go to the old newspaper archives, you can see pictures. They're quite elaborate,

so she put raw liver underneath them, and she designed a one-way funnel, and then she'd agitate flies, so they flew towards the raw liver, went through the one-way funnel, and then they get stuck in these contraptions she built out of wood and wire, and then she'd collect them at the end of every day,

and she delivered 500,000 flies to the government. It is amazing. She killed them with poison as well, didn't she? Yeah. I wonder what poison kills flies. Oh, I know one. What? Arsenic.

Because flypaper used to be full of arsenic, didn't it? And people would soak flypaper in water, let the poison leach out, and then you'd have poisonous water, and people would, people murdered each other in the 19th century with flypaper water. Did they?

Yeah, you'd say, have a nice glass of water. There's a woman called Florence Maybrick in 1889 who poisoned her husband and was convicted of arsenic poisoning her husband using flypaper. Really? Oh, yeah, but didn't she claim that

he liked to self-medicate with arsenic for his libido? And there wasn't enough evidence either way, she escaped being executed for it, but she did stay in prison for a long time. That's not how crime works. We think you did it. We're not totally sure,

so we're sort of going to go for a bit of a sentence, but not a full one. What they should have done is stuck her on some flypaper for 20 years. If she was a Greek parable, that would have been what they'd done. My husband in life actually liked shooting himself. It was good for his libido.

Well, they did used to use arsenic in some medicines, I think, but they didn't, they had tiny amounts. So maybe, yeah. It's plausible. I'm a believer. So for many years in many places, collecting flies and giving them to the government has gotten you money.

So in China, officials in Luoyang offered $125 per 2,000 dead flies during a campaign. Really? Each fly was worth about seven cents. Was that a massive amount for a fly? Was this recently, sorry?

That was quite recently, yeah. In Pennsylvania, in Mansfield, Pennsylvania, in 1914, it was five cents per pint of flies. You would get. In 1988, in Manila, it was $4.75 per 1,000 flies. So all the prices are very different. Yeah.

And there was a guy called Mr. Belen. About whom James has nothing interesting to say. He just wanted to get that name in. Mr. Belen. It would be great because he was collecting flies. It'd be great if his name became a verb to collect flies. I belend.

He belend. He belend. No, he was delivering an average of 200,000 dead flies per week, making about $1,000 a week. Wow. How was he doing that? Well, he wouldn't give away his tricks. What tools was he using?

Well, people suggested that he was hatching maggots himself, an allegation he denied vehemently. Well, you would do, wouldn't you, with $1,000 a week? He said that catching flies are a lot like hunting or fishing. First of all, you have to find out where they hang out, and then you go there. And he used a giant fly swatter, which he invented himself. When you say invented, was it just a fly spot but much bigger?

He wouldn't give anything more away in the article that I read. You said that to catch them, you have to go to where they are. Yeah. So the second place in this competition in Toronto in 1912 went to a girl who lived quite near a 90-metre-long heap of manure. She never thought that would be an asset when her parents were buying the house. I earn so much with the fly-catching competition.

I can actually afford a slightly larger heap of manure now. But they ran the competition the next year. They ran it for a second time. And there weren't any flies to catch, because Beecher is wide. Scoot them all up. But her sister came second following year. And her sister's still caught $200,000 or something. No, she caught $50,000.

It's nothing. There's still a lot of flies. That's true. The newspaper, the Toronto Star, they tracked down Beatrice White, who would have been about 71, I think, and they ran a headline, The Queen of Fly Killers Found Alive. And they gave her a can of insecticide to thank her.

Yeah. And she said that the $50 that she'd won, she desperately wanted it to pay for her music lessons, and her dad had kept it for himself. Really? Yeah, tough times. That's horrible. That is bad.

I think each housefly can carry 6.6 billion... Sorry, obviously not billion. Each housefly can carry 6.6 million bacteria on it, many of which are bad. I know some are good. We all know that from the Yakult adverts, but some of them are bad. You wouldn't lose down a pint of flies, though,

in the vague hope that some of the bacteria might be friendly. I gotta say, though, the difference between a million and a billion, it's like, it's hardly as if, oh, thank God, it's only a million. I wasn't thinking, don't be ridiculous, Alan, they couldn't have a billion, they must have a million. It seemed silly to me.

OK, it's time for fact number three, and that is Alex. My fact this week is that, when animating 101 Dalmatians, Disney photocopied the dogs. Is that why they're black and white? Was that at the office party after the shoot had ended? We photocopied our bums, what else can we do?

Do you know who first came up with the idea of photographing your body parts? No. A genius of some sort. Yes. Einstein. No, Andy Warhol. Really?

Apparently, it seems like he was possibly the first person to do it. In 1969, he walked into an art supply store, and he knew the owner, who's called Donald Havanick, and he convinced him to let him do some photocopying of himself, and there are images of him with his face on a photocopier. He didn't do his bum as far as I know.

I would wager that the first person to do that, knowing the human condition, would have been the person who invented the photocopier moments after inventing it, because that's going to be the first thing you ever do in a photocopier. I don't know. I would be impressed by it, because everyone

now has photocopied parts of themselves using the flatbed on a photocopier. I want to see the person who photocopies himself using the document feeder. That would be amazing, yeah. Sliding yourself through. What do you think they photocopied the dog? This was in the late 50s.

Disney had made Sleeping Beauty, and the way that they made that was that every single frame of the film has to be really painstakingly drawn, and then painted onto glass cells. This is a really expensive and time-consuming process, and then it didn't do very well at the box office. Disney was thinking of shutting down their animation offices.

They had to come up with cheaper ways of making these films. One of the creatives at Disney got some equipment from Xerox and modified it, and found a way of basically photocopying certain elements of the drawings, and putting them onto the glass cells.

They then next made 101 Dalmatians, and realised that they could specifically photocopy the spots on the dogs, because they're going to stay the same, and you need a different combination of spots on each dog, and it needs to be the same dog and stay the same, and then the backgrounds need to stay the same.

They came up with this way of identifying the dogs by thinking of the spots as constellations, and it cost about half as much as the film, as it would have done, and kind of saved Disney, and then transformed the way that they would animate films from then on until the computer era. Does that mean all the spots on the dogs

were constellations? No, they were thought of like constellations. Tell them to remember them. It does mean that it would have been like three Dalmatians if they didn't have Xerox in the technology. She just made a tiny, tiny little glove out of it.

Maybe the Xerox machine only did 100 copies as maximum. Do you know what toner is made of in photocopies? Is it pig fat? It's pig fat. No, of course not. It's different from ink, isn't it?

It's different between toner and ink. It's not ink. It's like electrostatically charged particles. You do know what it is. Well, it is, but it's this incredibly fine powder. A lot of it's rust.

Rust. Iron oxide, yeah. And there's plastic as well. And there's lots of plastic. Modern colour photocopy toner is 95% plastic, milled into a tiny, tiny, tiny powder, which then gets fused by heat

with the paper. OK. I had no idea. The photocopy toner is not ink. That's why it's so expensive. Yeah. Because you always see that it's like 10 times more expensive

than champagne or something, don't you? Yeah. And it is done by electromagnetism, isn't it? So I think it's a really complicated process, but you make the bits that you want to have toner on be kind of magnetic and then it

attracts the toner to it. So it needs to be charged. So the toner has the opposite charge to the bits of the paper. That's amazing, isn't it? Did you know this? I didn't know this. Did you know that Canon has been

warning people to take better care of their office equipment? It's how they put it. This is reported on CNET, but especially during the festive season, it says the Christmas season leads to a 25% hike in service calls due to incidents

such as backside copying pranks. So there is actually a big increase in photocopier accidents during the festive season. So they've asked us to stop doing it, please. Well, I won't. I don't care what those squares

at Canon have to say. And he just replies with a 20 copies of his own. Do you know using a lot of people use Xerox, especially in America as a generic word for a photocopier? Yes. And according to an advert from

2003, Xerox said, when you use Xerox, the way you use aspirin, we get a headache. And they really hate the way people do this. And the reason being is something called genericide. And what it is, is it's when you

have your brand becoming so ubiquitous that everyone uses it, it means that you can't really claim intellectual property over that word. And so it means your trademark is basically dead and buried. And that's why Google don't

like you say, I'm going to Google it. They want you to say, I'm going to search it online using Google.com or Valkyrie, they might speak or Valkyrie. Yeah. Obviously there are advantages

to that because you become a very famous brand. But then at the same time, it's very difficult to protect your trademark. I mean, it hasn't worked for Google, for instance. Where are they now?

Yeah. It's crushed under the mask. Jeeves juggernaut. There was a bug in 2013 in Xerox machines, which meant that sometimes numbers would be randomly replaced in photocopies.

Photocopies are really important documents. And then I think fours would change to ones. And then this guy... That explains 404 dalmatians. The guy did like a TED talk on it and kind of revealed this bug.

And then Xerox took him on board and fixed the bug. Wow. Yeah. That's good. That's amazing. So the guy who invented the photocopier, or the Xerox, is so

nice. It's a really happy story. It's just from start to finish. This guy's called Chester Carlson. And he was brought up really poor. So he used to have to sleep in a chicken coop sometimes. He spent a while having to sleep

outside. What? Where did the chicken sleep? They slept in his four-posted bed actually. But he came up with... He came up with this amazing technology, which was really

complicated. And when people talk about it, it combined loads of different techniques that no one had ever thought of combining before. And was rejected by more than 20 companies. And it's since been called the

most important thing to happen in printing since the printing press. Wow. Because his technology also was what laser printers do. So he basically came up with modern printing and photocopying. But he eventually...

You know when you expect to get to the end of these stories, it'd be like, oh, he sold the rights to someone and got a tenor. He then went into perpetual motion. He didn't stop spinning for the rest of his life.

He got a 16th of a cent for every single Xerox copy made throughout 1965, which was a lot. No way. That's why it's so expensive. No, as long as that is about ten years, the period. Through to 1965, yes, from when

he made it. But he lived really humbly and he never bought much stuff. He gave all of his money away. He would never, ever wanted his name to be on stuff. So when he gave his money to universities and stuff, he asked

them to put it in honour of the teacher who'd inspired him and things like that. Is it possible that that was just cover story and that what he did was he invented a photocopier and then just photocopied money?

No one really caught up with him for years. Well, it effectively is printing money. Basically printing money, yeah. A 16th of a cent for every Xerox copy made is unbelievable. Yeah, that's insane.

Yeah, but I know you're right. He gave it all away. But he had a business partner at the start. He was a guy called Otto Kornay. I think he might have been Austrian, I'm not sure.

But he walked away about a year into the process. He said, I don't see this going anywhere. Oh, dear. And he could have been a multimillionaire, but I know. But Chester Carlson, the reason

he tried to invent a photocopier in the first place was because he worked for years as a law student and a patent attorney. And he spent like all his time copying legal documents by hand and develop chronic arthritis because of it.

And he was just so pissed off that he had to do this. Oh, really? That he was like, I need a machine for this. Oh. He had other inventions. Oh, here we go.

A contextual motion machine. A raincoat with gutters to channel water away from trouser legs. Now, actually, that is a good idea. He invented a toothbrush with replaceable bristles.

He invented a transparent toothpaste tube, which seems really unnecessary. No, that's, I would love that because how do they get the stripes in it? Yeah. And if it's transparent, it

means that people can't hide awful inside your toothpaste. The top millimetre of toothpaste and the rest is just pig fat. The number of times that Aquafresh have got me with that

trick. Do you know where photocopying has been banned? Oh. In the Bank of England. Oh, that's a good idea. North Korea.

Well, it may well have been. I don't know how many photocopies there are in North Korea, but in 2010, in Tibet, it was banned. People in the capital would have to register their name if they wanted to make

photocopies. Basically, the Chinese authorities were worried about people spreading literature saying, hey, maybe the Chinese should leave Tibet.

And so they said, well, no more photocopying for you. Fuji has developed a new robotic printer that moves around allowing your office bringing documents to the person who printed them.

That's a great idea. That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, our office is quite secure. I'm not sure how much use we get, and it's got a step in the middle of it.

Yeah. So if you're in a public space and you have some documents which are quite secure or sensitive and you want to print them out, but you don't want anyone else to see them, you don't want to

print them and then have to go over because there might be someone stood there and they might read your anti-Chinese propaganda. And so I've said sorry about printing that using the office printer,

right? And so if they come to you, then it means that you'll always get the right ones. I guess, but isn't there a minimal intercepted on the way? Yeah. You know, if people look at my

screen and the constant they see I'm on free Tibet.com, and then the sensitive document robot keeps on shuffling back and forth to me. Actually, photocopies and a holding sensitive document is a major issue that there's

someone, this guy is trying to highlight. So I didn't realize this, but every time you photocopy something, then it stores exactly what you photocopied on a hard drive. So since 2002,

they photocopies have got a record of every single thing that's been through them. So there's this guy called Jun Toonan who has a digital security company. And he tried to prove how risky this is by buying randomly

buying up some secondhand photocopies. So we bought up four of them to show that they hold all this digital information. He actually said we didn't even have to wait for the first one to warm up.

One of the copiers had documents still on the copier glass from the New York police crime division. Oh my God. What? They hadn't even taken it out of the thing.

They hadn't even taken their sex offenders list off the flatbed in the photocopier. So he opened it up and got that. Wow. But he hacked into the hard drives and he got, for instance, 300 pages of people's individual

medical records. So all details of the medical records. Like blood prescriptions, blood test results, diagnoses. He got lots more lists of sex offenders.

He got lists of pay stubs and people's bank details that they photocopied. So, yeah, this is a thing. Old photocopiers are holding. Was one of the photocopiers he bought from the New York police sex crimes department or something

like this? It must have been, right? It must have been. He probably was waiting, hovering on the eBay button for ages and ages. Slam. Got it.

Okay, it's time for a final fact and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that seeds have brains. And James doesn't. How similar to our brains are they? Are they the same?

Well, they're smaller. If I was talking to one at a party, how long would it take me to notice that I was talking to a seed? It's similar to a person. I think that you don't, you tend to make that decision not

just based on people's brains. Okay, let's say it's got a face painted on it. You stop talking to people if you notice their brain waves aren't working. I think that guy over there is an acorn.

So anything in case I was being rude. So what this is, is they've taken some seeds and they've worked out how they make the decision of when they need to germinate and they've looked at all the different cells and they

found that it's just a few cells that make this decision. And it's very complicated, but the way they make the decision is quite analogous to the way that animals make decisions with their brains. And so the people who have done

this study are saying that basically it's very similar to a brain, but much smaller, much simpler, but it's similar. Now, that doesn't mean that they have brains like us because they don't. But it's basically quite

interesting because the last time plants and animals had a common ancestor was like 1.6 million, oh, sorry, stupid. 1.6 billion. And even though it was that much time, they've kind of come up with the same solution to the

problem, which is by using these cells to communicate with each other and then saying, okay, now that we've communicated, we're going to release these hormones, et cetera. So it's about the cells communicating with each other

within the seed. Exactly. And that's, I mean, what is a brain apart from a few cells communicating with one another? Yeah, it's all minors. It's kind of like you guys. But it kind of sounded like it's

slightly, well, in the Oscar, it rolled it down a bit to half of the cells are saying, like, grow, grow, grow. And the other half is saying, like, don't stay, stay here because stay a seed. And it's just up to, like, then

it's then deciding which one to follow. And it's just like when you're in bed and you're like, stay in bed all day or get up and do stuff. Yeah. And it's pretty analogous to

that because for, for a plant, it can't sprout too early in case the temperature gets cold again. But it can't wait too late. It can't stay in bed too late because then all the other seeds will have sprouted and they'll

crowd out the resources. So it is like that. You can't get out of bed too early because it'll be dark and you'll get bump into things, but you can't get out too late. Otherwise the tube will be very busy.

There was a good headline in New Scientist, which is quite misleading that said, it just said, plant parents tell their seeds when to sprout by passing down their memories. And I thought this is going to blow this podcast wide.

Oh, plants have memories and they transmit their memories to the children. This is unbelievable. They can't transmit memories to each other. Actually, what it is is, but it is still quite interesting.

So as you say, it's important when seeds sprout, and actually sometimes they might want to sprout earlier or later, depending on the weather, and the plant parent can work out. So if it's warm weather, it knows that it'll make a slightly thinner

casing for its seeds. So it sprouts quickly to take advantage of the weather. Whereas if it's cold weather, the plant senses that and automatically makes a thick casing for the seed and that means when it's dispersed, it takes longer to hatch out and

the weather will have got warmer by then. So in a way... That is clever. That is very clever. It's like me saying, if I put my baby in a hat, that I'm passing my memory to it.

So on plant seeds, you know argan oil? No. I went to Morocco at the end of last year and they were banging on and on about argan oil in every single market. They're like, you love argan oil,

don't you? From Argan trees. Is it Argan or Argon? Argan. So it's a thing that's really popular now apparently for girls to use in their hair. It's a big deal.

I could see why you thought we would know. Look at Andy's hair. It's riddled with argan. Dripping with argan oil. I'm hoping it's argan oil. It's actually water that I was sold as argan oil when I

unscrewed this trainer in Morocco. But anyway, this is kind of... This is a massive boon, how popular it is, for places like Morocco where it's made. I thought argan trees were the ones where the goats live.

They are. So 60% of argan nuts, which is where you get argan oil, are distributed by goats. So you're right. Argan trees are the ones that goats climb up and they can get up to eight metres up a tree

and then they eat the argan leaves and the fruits and stuff. And the seeds, they then regurgitate within about a day and they spit them out somewhere else. And that's how they're distributed.

So this argan oil that you ladies and gentlemen are putting on your skinnier hair or whatever it's for has been dispersed by tree-climbing goats. That's very cool. I have a fact about those goats. Go on.

It's that the domestic ones don't know how to climb trees and they have to be taught by keepers, human keepers, how to climb up. How do they teach them? I don't know. I haven't found any footage beyond

just that fact. It's well worth Googling argan tree goats, isn't it? Yeah. If you haven't seen that picture before, it's... Yeah. Or you can watch the special

feature of how to do QI research on volume two of the QI DVD box set. Which is all about argan trees and goats. Oh, that's how I must have known that. Me too.

So elephants transport seeds as well. They can transport seeds up to 65 kilometres away from the tree that they've eaten, the fruit or whatever. Wow. And that's by far the biggest

mover of seeds out for any animal at all. Wow. You know, like three times more than any bird. Really? Or anything like that, yeah. That's incredible.

And it comes out in their feces presumably. It does. Okay. So they travel 65 kilometres between poods. That's what it sounds like, doesn't it?

I've done that on a motorway before. You transported the seeds from South Mims to Carby Services. Where do you think 75% of Mexico sesame seeds go? So they go into Andy's car to travel up the M6.

Is it they get turned into Halva paste? Nope, they go on. They say they go to McDonald's. They do. They all end up on McDonald's burgers. Three quarters of all the

sesame seeds in Mexico. I think that's amazing. That is amazing. Wow. Wow. What else do you use them for? Halva paste. No one else?

Is that another hair product? No, it's a mouth product. If you put it in your mouth. It's delicious. Is it? Okay, great. I'll look it up. So it's a food then?

It's a food. Or as I call it, a mouth product. I read an article about Mexican farming the other day. It was about the avocado farmers in various cities. They've now formed their own militias because they were being

ripped off and blackmailed and extorted by gangsters. And they have proper, you know, assault weapon militias, concrete bunkers, all this stuff just to protect the avocado crops because it's so valuable to them. Isn't it avocados, though, that

they would be extinct if it weren't for humans eating them because they lost the mechanism to distribute their seeds? That is true. It's because avocado seeds are too large to pass for any animals that are currently extant.

So the thing that avocados evolve to be distributed by has been extinct for 12,000 years. With a very large anus. It was thought to be distributed by Piers Morgan. It was a ground sloth, guys. It was a three-meter-long

ground sloth called the Megalonix Jeffersoni and it ate the avocados and then it was able to distribute the seeds. But they haven't existed for 12,000 years and we don't know why avocados have managed to exist without them because humans

surely haven't been distributing avocado seeds in a systematic way for 12,000 years, it seems unlikely. And yet they've stuck around. Really good. Can I just say something about brains?

When you sleep, your brain cells shrink to half their normal size. As you sleep, your brain cells literally get half as big. Does your head shrink to half its normal size? Can you understand? Is your brain literally

50 per cent the size of it is? Have you never seen a sleeping person? It's like an all-size body and then like a doll's head. No. It's incredible. It's unbelievable.

Is that why you yawn when you wake up? Because you're like re-inflating yourself. No, so they found this out recently. They can shrink by up to 60 per cent while you sleep and they think

this is because I think we've mentioned that they've recently discovered that the purpose of sleep, they believe, is to flush out all the waste from your brain. So it allows fluid to travel around your brain cells and in between them and kind of flush out all the

useless stuff. And that's why your brain uses the same amount of energy when you sleep as when you're awake because it's doing all this stuff. And it's thought that by shrinking, it creates more space

around the cells so that the fluid can flush through them more easily and get rid of all the waste. That is amazing. That's so cool, isn't it? So cool. Yeah.

That's amazing. If you get a vole and you put it in a female vole, this is, and you put it in a cage with a male vole and then you stimulate certain parts of its brain, then the female vole will fall in love with the male vole.

Sorry, which brain are you stimulating? The females. Really? Yeah. Why would you do that? Is there some kind of Shakespearean comedy where they have a love

potion administered? The taming of the vole. No, this is just a study that was done in Atlanta and they got this vole and they stimulated it and put it in with the male and then they put the female vole into another cage with both that male

and another one and she always went for the one that she was hanging out with while she was being stimulated in her brain. And then they did it with another vole who hadn't had her brain stimulated and she would more often go for the new guy.

Oh, really? Is it got anything to do with because vole is an anagram for love and if you're scrambling someone's brain out there just saying like, I'm a vole, I'm a vole, I'm in love. I didn't know we knew that

voles felt love. I'm excited. I think we might be extrapolating in the same way that I extrapolated that this was a brain and a seed. Don't believe anything you've heard over the last half an hour. OK, that's it.

That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said, you can find us on Twitter. I am an Andrew Hunter M. James at egg shaped Alex at Alex Bell

under school and Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. You can also go to our website which is no such thing as a fish.com and you can hear all our previous episodes on there. And what about our tour, Andy? We're going on tour.

We're going on tour all over the UK in October and November of this year. So go to qi.com slash fish events to get tickets for that. Anyway, I'm going to go back and carry on writing our new book. Oh, we've got a book coming out.

We have. That sounds great. What's it going to be about? It's going to be about the news of the year and you can get that by going to qi.com slash fish book. OK, we'll be back again next week with another podcast.

Thank you so much for listening this time and goodbye. Bye.