No Such Thing As A Fish - 181: No Such Thing As A Shark Vending Machine

Episode Date: September 8, 2017

Dan, Anna, Andy and Alex discuss Spielberg's Great White Turd, maverick train carriages and how bird always know when they're in Aberdeen.

Hey guys, welcome to this week's episode. I know such thing as a fish. Before we begin, we have an announcement to make. What's the announcement, Dan? The announcement is that we're doing a live show. Get out of here. Yeah, at a book festival. No.

Yeah, Cheltenham Book Festival. We're so excited. It is in... Cheltenham. It's in Cheltenham. Nice. It's on the 11th of October. It's at 6 p.m.

We're doing it because we're releasing our book in November and this is gonna be the first ever event where we bring our book to. We're not gonna have the physical book with us. It's not published yet. We'll bring it to our heads because we've written it, we know it. Exactly.

So the whole event is gonna be a live podcast. We're gonna take our facts from the upcoming book and we're gonna do a Q&A afterwards and it's gonna be awesome. It's a legit book festival. It'll be really fun if you've never been to our live shows. So go to qi.com slash fishevents to get tickets for that or you can just look on the Cheltenham Festival website

11th of October. So I go to qi.com slash fishevents. That's correct. That's correct. Yeah. Do write that down. How do you spell QI? Okay, on with this week's show.

["Opening Theme Song"] 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 Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Chasinski, and Alex Bell.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Andy. My fact is that the original director of Jaws was a man called Richard Richards, who was fired because he kept referring to the shark as a whale. So you're not read the script?

I don't know if he had read it or not, but he had. He definitely had. He had because it's not, when you say he kept referring to it, it wasn't even like loosely in conversation. He was in a meeting with the producers. He'd ridden a treatment where all the way through the treatment, he kept saying, and then the whale. Yeah, the producers have got the rights

to turn the novel Jaws into the film and they took him for lunch and they decided to let him go. And then they gave it to Spielberg. That's right, yeah. Here's a classic bit of trivia that I bet everyone who knows Jaws knows, but again, I didn't know this. The shark has a name.

Oh, yeah. Not in the movie, just on set. So like we know on the back of his seat. The actors and directors, which was Bruce. Wasn't he named after Steven Spielberg's lawyer? That's right, yeah. He was named after his lawyer who was called Bruce Rainor and Bruce became the name of the shark on the set.

Bruce is quite a good name though, isn't it, for a shark? There's something about it. It's, I know it's an Australian sounding name. I think a shark's being Australian. It's the name, you and I, you're making that connection. It's the name of the shark and finding Nemo. Oh. That must be it, not to that.

It must be, absolutely. Well, it's a good thing they didn't give it the other nickname that it had on set, which was the great white turd. Yeah. And also Flaws, because they wouldn't know work. Yeah, which I like. Spielberg basically rewrote the movie a bit

because they couldn't get the shark to work. It was such a bad mechanical shark, which, I mean, you know, if you're filming anything mechanical in salt water, it's going to be difficult. Yeah. So they made three mechanical sharks so that they could film it from different angles

with different bits. There had to be 16 people on a nearby floating barge operating different bits of the shark. Because the whole thing was pneumatic. They had loads and loads of pipes to operate because they had motors, which all broke, so they had to put pneumatic tubes in to make it work, which meant they had to have a huge,

like, operating station just right off the camera. I know, and it all had to work at the set. They compared it to an orchestra in an article I read, so they all had to be doing the right things, all 16 people at the right time, so it all works properly. And sometimes there would be a bit where 15 people got a right,

and the shark comes out of the water as you're filming, but then its mechanical eyes are shut. They think, oh, well, that shark's wasted. So then you have to go back and do it again, and then something else won't be working right, or one of the fins will be waggling. Why have they given it mechanical eyelids? Don't just lose the eyelids.

Yeah, does Jaws ever blink? We need to re-watch that film. It's not a classic moment. There's no one-eye wink that he gives to the camera just before he eats someone. They wanted, actually, the producers asked Spielberg to train a great white shark, initially, for the film. Yeah. That is so Hollywood.

Yeah. Turns out you can't do that. That is amazing. He moved onto this. Did you know that for some of the shots, in order to make the shark look bigger, they used a body double for the guy who plays the main character,

and they used a jockey, because he was really small, so they used a 4'9x jockey to be in the shark tank, just to make it look that bit bigger. That's a bit like, I know, all these films, like in Casablanca, they had small people wandering around the cut-out of the plane in that famous last scene in the background,

because it makes the plane look bigger, so they didn't have as big a cut-out. All sorts of, like, suspected gags, like that. Do you know one of the main problems with Jaws, the mechanical one? It's the Jaws. The Jaws are not right in the Jaws of the thing. They're not right for a shark, or they just wouldn't work.

They're not right for a shark. I'm sure they wouldn't work at various points, but this is really interesting. I think great white sharks have a much weaker bite than you might suspect. They're not weak, no one's saying they're weak, but their jaws aren't attached to their head properly, so they operate with a separate muscle,

and what that means is, what they can do is approach you in the water, and give you a test bite, which is soft, and then if they like the taste of you, and they think you'd be good, they come back for a kill bite. So, loads of people who've had a tango with a great white shark and escaped

have probably been given a test bite, which is still serious, and you can still bleed to death, obviously, but they haven't been given the full kill bite. I do that with food. It's really weird, Alex. It's not like going to a restaurant with you. Because then you walk off around the restaurant

once you've given it a test bite. But the Jaws, obviously, on the mechanical shark, they don't have those two gradations, so it's just a massive hinge, and it just notches away. No, no, no, no, no, no. So why do they do the test bite? Why don't they just go in with a big bite?

Is it to save energy or something? Well, they might not like what they eat, you know? They might find, oh, it's all full of bone, and I don't want to eat the bone. They might say, oh, go off and find a seal to eat instead, because they're all blubber and delicious, so. I guess when you've got a mouth that big, you're kind of committing

when you're biting something. You've got to do something with it, yeah. What if it's a tree floating in the water, and you make a mistake? If you go in for a massive kill bite, it is chewing on bark from the start. You'll feel like an idiot, yeah, whereas if you give it a quick test, no, it's a tree.

I knew it was a tree. So here's something interesting. When they first put the shark into salt water, it sank. So when they were gonna film, and they had to retrieve it from the bottom of Martha's vineyard, and it's because it was salt water, and they don't, they ever tested it in fresh water,

which they were expecting that it was gonna work like it did in fresh water, but then it sank to the bottom, which is the exact opposite of how a real shark would work. And do you remember I mentioned this a few episodes ago on the podcast? They don't have a swim bladder,

and so they don't often go into fresh water because it doesn't work there, so they'll sink in fresh water. But I don't understand, so obviously salty water is more buoyant, and so I don't understand what would sink in salt water that wouldn't sink in fresh water. No one does.

I don't think this is one of those universal mysteries. No one does, by which I mean, I don't know. I've got something so bizarre that I found out. Of course, of this, which is that it is related, but you're not gonna get no why initially. So polygraph tests are sold very often across the US, like you can sell your polygraph testing services for various reasons,

and all the websites that advertise polygraph tests say, you can use these for, and then there's list of the main things you use them for, so for theft, arson, murder, robbery, infidelity, assault, and fishing tournaments, and it turns out, so I learned this looking at these shark-catching tournaments, and the idea is that you go out and you have to catch the biggest shark

that you possibly can, and one of the main uses of polygraph tests is having lie detector tests after these tournaments to check that people haven't cheated. No! Yeah, this is what, and it's on all these lie detector websites, they're like, yeah, murder, arson,

cheating wives, fishing tournaments, obviously. Why are you cheating? The shark comes in, you have to have a shark, surely. No, what you do is there are shark salespeople who collect large sharks throughout the year and keep them alive, and then they flog them to people who've entered the tournaments on the slide,

so you go and buy a shark. So you arrive at the tournament with a giant shark in your bag, get on a boat, and then slowly blow it up in your jacket. That's why bag searches originally come from sharks. Right! Who was the guy who wrote the original book? He really regretted writing it.

Yeah, so Peter Benchley regretted the fact that sharks were vilified via jaws, and suddenly it set off this spate of shark hunting and shark-murdering expeditions, and shark populations in America were reduced by up to 50%, some people say, not just because of shark hunting, but that was a huge thing,

and it still happens today, these shark hunting tournaments, caused by the fact that it created this bad reputation for sharks, who obviously only kill about one person every two years, whereas we kill hundreds of thousands of them every year. I think it's something like 100 million sharks per year that humans kill.

What? Yeah, it's huge. It's a massive number. There's also that great fact about how vending machines kill twice as many humans as sharks do. Yeah. Hmm. But if we had a shark in the corridor of every school,

I think the figures might start creeping up. Yeah. If you could only get a twix by reaching into the mouth of a shark. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is... Alex. My fact this week is that until the 1960s, high-speed trains in Britain would drop carriages off

at stations that they weren't stopping at. So, your train is going along. Yeah. And then all the people in the back carriage want to get off at the next stop, but the train's not stopping. It's a high-speed train, yeah. It's a high-speed train.

So, you have to run into the back carriage, and then they just cut it off. Yeah, I don't think everyone would... I think they would get in and sit at the back carriage, but you wouldn't just like run and jump as the carriage is leaving the train. But they would uncouple the train as they were approaching the station,

and there would be a guard in that carriage with a break, and then the carriage would just roll to a stop at station, which meant that anyone who wanted to get off at that station could, but it wouldn't slow down the train. So, what would they do with then the carriage? Oh, this is the clever bit,

because the carriages would then be picked up by the next slow train that was coming through. So, the slow trains would actually get carriages added on. Why is it only high-speed trains? It seems like they're the most difficult trains to accurately drop off a carriage at a station. I don't think the high-speed trains are going faster than the actual trains.

It's high-speed is in express trains. They're not stopping at the station. That's what takes so long is when you stop at every station. So, when did they stop doing this? Well, they did it for like 40, 50 years, and then finished in the 1960s. And now the replacement services,

when you get on a train and it splits in two parts, when you get to a certain station. So, that's what it is. That's so cool. So, like in theory, our grandparents should remember that. Yeah. If they lived in England, you know,

they might've been on one of the jettisoned trains. It was a pretty common thing. Wow. Another thing you could do until the 1970s, so this is from 1889 to the 1970s, anyone on the train could cause the train to break. And this still happens in trains around the world quite a bit.

Yeah. But now I think the driver has an override button. So, but I didn't realize this. There was a cord that ran all the way from, you know, where the driver's sitting and where the brakes are, all the way along the roof to the back of the train and a little cord drops down in each carriage

and you pull it. But what you have now is you pull the cord and the driver has three seconds to decide whether to override it. So, if the driver sees the cord's been pulled, he's got three seconds to make a crucial decision of, is it worth stopping for this emergency? I don't know what this emergency is probably

because a passenger's done it and I can't see it. Yeah, but what kind of information can he get in those three seconds? Yeah. How does that help? Well, exactly. I don't know. Maybe he's running late.

It can't be that bad. Or maybe he thinks we're coming into a station in a minute. So, let's do that. Maybe that's it. He has got a communication line with the passenger who's pulled the cord as well. So, he can't just shout, quick, quick, quick, what's going on?

What's going on? You wouldn't have time. Three seconds is not enough. I don't know. Most of my conversations with my father are about three seconds. We say everything we need to. Yeah, I was on a train to Edinburgh not too long ago

and in the bathroom, just above the toilet, there was a big red button that said stop. We're in the bathroom, wasn't it? It was in the toilet. I couldn't believe it. I've done a flush and it won't go down. Did you stop the train? Honestly, it was a train stop button in the toilet.

It's interesting you raised the toilet thing because there's a blog by someone who works in railways who says that this is a serious problem with the emergency button because it is in the accessible toilets and people often pull it thinking it's the flush. Yes. If you're an older person,

you're a bit confused or a bit drunk, then it often gets pulled to flush the loo and then you've braked the train. Okay, so one in 10 train carriages in the UK still jettison's toilet waste onto the track when you flush. One in 10. This was in 2015. So, they are trying to replace them all by 2020,

but it's still quite a large number. And that's why there are signs saying don't flush. At stations. At stations, but... It's pretty medieval, I was like... It's pretty medieval. Well, there was a massive report in Wales Online recently in which they said it's disgusting.

Look at all this excrement on the train tracks and they showed a picture of it, but then they pixelated everything you could possibly object to. So, it's just a picture of a train track. So, what do the others do? Do they have a sewage system rigged into the train? They just store it in a separate tank.

Then they fling it out over the countryside when they're... No, they change it when they're in service. Could they not build underneath the tracks, just speaking of the excrement bit? A nappy. Well, a big train nappy, yes. You just lay the train on its back on a massive mat. Sorry, Dan, what were you going to say?

No, it's honestly way better than what I was going to say. We'll leave it at that. Did you know we used to have sail trains in this country? No. What's a sail train? Trains with a sail. And these existed, as you'd imagine, in kind of windier areas, so, on the coast.

And in Yorkshire, there was one. There was one, in 1831, one opened, which took produce from the Strathmore Valley, which is in Scotland, to Dundee. But, obviously, it had the problem of, it's quite hard to tack on a train where you can't really control the angle at which you're going. And so, they had to have a horse trotting alongside it

at all times to take over when the wind dropped. So, it's very difficult to get every passenger to duck when the boom goes in. It's going to get injured. That in China, remember I had that fact in the super early days of the podcast about they have wheelbarrows in China? We still don't know about.

So, they used to do that in China, and there's descriptions of it, where this guy would see a fleet of sails coming when he looked over a mountaintop in a field. And what it was, is that they used to put giant sails on their wheelbarrows and let the wind help them carry along. That's so clever. Their load, yeah, it's amazing, isn't it?

Do you know what the longest train ever was? The longest train running at the moment, it's in someone's native country. Who knows where Dan's from? It's in Australia. Oh, it's in Australia. It's in Australia. It's called the gun, G-H-A-N.

Gun? Gun. So, the Sunday service of the gun is 44 carriages. It's 0.7 miles long. It's about a 15 minute walk. How far does it travel? Is it like it only moves about two meters and then it's at the next station

and you have to walk all the way out of the train? Oh yeah, it doesn't even need to go. Yeah, 15 minute walk is like, if you're at the wrong end and then the buffet carriage is at the back of the train. Oh, if you'd style that away. But, so, if you built a car that long, that's impressive. But a train, you're just adding carriages, right?

Yeah, yeah. Is that impressive? Yeah. Effectively, that could be much longer if they just added more. There's freight trains that are like five, six conferences long. Oh, so is this a passenger train?

This is a passenger train. Yeah. But you need platforms long enough. That's the brilliant bit. Those are the unsung heroes of the operation. Four in concrete for a year in the desert. So where does it go to? It goes across Australia.

Right, so it's a proper... Yeah, I think it goes all the way from the north coast to the south. Wow. It's a huge long route. Yeah, that's amazing. So you'd need that. You'd need that for a variety of fun. Variety of fun.

There's probably playrooms in there. There's probably a barbers. There's probably a cinema. There's probably... There's none of these things for facts. You can't just make up what your fantasy big train would be. I've never seen you look so angry at all. Someone's going to remember that.

And remember it as genuine knowledge. I said probably. I know, but... Yeah, I mean, that's... In itself is problematic, saying probably. Really? The balance of probability says there will be one of them. But it probably is.

There possibly is. There probably isn't. I think there probably is. You can't say there probably isn't. There's a microscopically small chance that there are all of those things you just listed as far as we can go with this fact, I think. Oh, God.

This is really cool. In Japan, they're now building new trains that are invisible. No, they're not. No, they're not. Come on. What they are is kind of invisible. They're sort of almost invisible. They've put this mirrored surface on the outside of it,

so it blends into its surroundings by reflecting. So if you're going through nature, for example, and you're surrounded by trees, blue sky, green grass, all that sort of stuff, if that's on the other side of it, that kind of mirrors off the side of the train. Therefore, oh, so you're not just going to see hundreds of passengers sitting and nothing.

That's not that, yeah. That's good. So if you're going on a nice countryside walk and your footpath crosses over a railway, then now you won't be able to see the train coming towards you. Yes, exactly. Sounds ideal. You would just see yourself coming towards you

at a high speed. Oh, that's true. You're like, what? That guy is running fast. OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is Chuzhinski. My fact this week is that birds in cages hop in the direction they're meant to be migrating. Wow, that's very sad.

Do they do that only during migrating periods? Yes, this is the amazing thing about it. If you've got a caged bird that's a migrating bird, then as soon as the time comes when it would usually be migrating, first of all, it puts on all this body fat because that's what birds do. So a lot of birds will double their body weight

in preparation for big migrations. So it'll put on all this weight and it'll get really, really restless and frisky and start flapping around the cage. And then when the migration period starts, it will then start moving towards the end of the cage that is in the direction of where it would be migrating. And it will stop at exactly the time

that it would have arrived at its destination. Wow. So perfectly timed. But it's now fat. Exactly. It's doubled its weight and it can't burn the weight off. And it's not where it wants to be. Oh, man.

Just in terms of observation of that, you obviously see the bird hopping that way, but it will reach the end of the cage. Yeah, it's a good point, isn't it? So it doesn't just hang by the end of the cage the whole time, right? Therefore, some people must observe the bird hopping the other way.

Yeah, so I think it will kind of maybe wander backwards a bit. This is actually not explained in a lot of the sources that reference it, but what it does do is it faces in that direction. It will try to flap towards that direction and then get rebounded off the cage, I guess. And also what they do is they'll sit on their perch facing the direction they're supposed to be going

and they'll flap their wings a lot, but stay motionless because they realize they can't get out of the cage during migration. That's extraordinary. So they'll fluster about. Do you know how they found out about this? Or one of the ways they found out about this is with a device called an emerald funnel.

Yeah. This is a very cool thing. So it's a plastic enclosure with a paper funnel leading out from the top of that. On the base of the funnel is an ink pad. So you put the bird in there, you cover the top of the funnel, so it can't just fly out

and then you track the direction it moves in and as it flaps, it leaves foot marks in the ink on the paper. So you can tell exactly the direction it's moving and flapping in. And they have at the surface, you can project different star constellations on the top to see if that has an effect because sometimes they go magnetically,

but sometimes they might do it by looking at the stars above them. That's horrible. That's like the Truman Show for birds. It is, yeah. Eventually they end up just writing messages in the ink saying, please God, somebody let me out of here. Once they discovered this,

then people realized you could do these brilliant experiments to work out what it was that causes birds to migrate in a certain direction. So as you say, Andy, you could change the constellations to see if they navigated by that. You change the magnetic field around a bird's cage. So obviously they navigate by the magnetism of the earth.

And so if you put a couple of magnets, you create a magnetic field around a bird cage and change the direction they think is north, they'll suddenly point in a different direction. I heard on the radio the other day that whales that suddenly get lost in the ocean, they think it's actually down to solar flares because the solar flares mess with the magnetism of the earth

if you get hit by massive ones. So suddenly the whales would just be put on a different course and that's why groups of them have been, that's not a solid theory, but because they just are trying to work out why seemingly healthy groups of whales get lost. That's amazing. Just one more thing related to this.

There was, so there was this amazing experiment done recently into reed warblers that were picked up in Russia. And it was to work out exactly how much birds can tell if you change the magnetic field. So scientists went and they found some reed warblers in Russia and they created a magnetic field around their enclosure that mimicked conditions in Aberdeen.

And the weird thing about this is that... That very distinctive magnetic flavor of Aberdeen. Lots of oil refineries that have been held in hard times recently, yeah. Exactly, some weather spoons. So they did this, but the weird thing was that Aberdeen is on roughly the same line of latitude. So the same distance from the equator as the place in Russia

where they'd studied the birds. And so you would have thought that for them, if they're just testing the magnetic distance from the poles, they would think it was the same place, but it turns out they can tell how far east or west they are as well. So what happened was all they did was change the magnetic field and the birds would usually point west because they were migrate to Europe, so south-west.

And as soon as you change the field, the birds swiveled round and they pointed east, knowing that they're in Aberdeen and they need to point in exactly a different direction in order to get where they're going to migrate to. They're very clever. Very cool. It's so weird that we're missing this thing that all these animals have.

It's so annoying. You've got nothing that even remotely makes us go, oh, I can relate to that, which is nothing. There's no sense of magnetism. It's crazy. The thing you said about how birds put on loads of weight before they migrate so that they've got enough energy to get them through, it's amazing.

Even their organs grow and shrink in this period. So all the organs involved with feeding, like the stomach and the liver and the kidneys and so on, they get bigger to support the fuelling process. But then, during the takeoff, the migration, those organs shrink and then the heart and the flight muscles, they all grow. So it's a complete reconfiguration.

They're changing the way the plane is built as they fly. Oh, wow. So cool. That is amazing. That is awesome. I should actually say that loads of what I'm saying comes from an episode of In Our Time, including the headline fact, which is on bird migration,

which is brilliant. You should look it up. In Our Time is always good. Yeah. Do you know, when Planet Earth was coming out, the David Attenborough documentary, I was sat watching Alistair Fothergill, who is the program maker behind Blue Planet

and Planet Earth. I went to a chat that he did of sort of talk at the BBC and he was talking about his favourite moment being the moment that the birds had to migrate over Everest. In order to migrate, they had to go over Mount Everest and it took every ounce of their energy. You get geese flying over Mount Everest. Dee!

You go to the top of Mount Everest. It's taken all your energy. You just see a flock of geese flying over you. Are they using thermals? Are they flying? They are flying. They never stop flapping their wings. They never glide.

They never glide? They never glide. Yeah, it's so rough for birds like that. There's only, I think, what is it, a tenth of the oxygen you find at sea level, obviously, when you're up that high, and they're still managing to fly it all the time. So they aren't panting, presumably, at that point. We worked out that geese couldn't glide.

As in, have we tried to make one? I think anyone's ever stuffed a dead goose and turned it into a glider. What I mean is, do scientists, knowing the makeup of a geese, know they could do it? They just haven't worked out to do it. They just don't have the confidence. Because, presumably, if they're up there and their wings are...

They've got wings, surely, just spreading them out, must buy them some glide time. Nothing? They're creatures. I don't know. I really don't know. No, they wouldn't be able to, because of evolution. So the ones that tried to glide a long time ago... The old evolution, the actual answer, because of evolution.

That's your answer every week. There was once a goose like you, Dan. She is always right to say that. When is God going to be the answer, are there? OK, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact is that each year, 26 tonnes of clothing is left behind

at the starting line of the Boston Marathon. That is one ton for every mile of the marathon. But why? I mean, why people just taking off all their clothes when they get to the start of the marathon? This is exactly what's happening. It's early in the morning. It's going to be cold. So they bring long trackies, a zip-up jacket or whatever.

And then when the marathon starts, they take off the outer clothing so that they're in the classic marathon runner clothing. And they just drop it where it is. That's going to be difficult if you ride the back of the marathon. You've got a huge... You're getting a horse jump to go. Yeah, really good point.

Yeah, I think they chuck it to the side. This is an article that was written about a person in America called Judy Patasi. And Judy Patasi used to help marathon runners if they needed somewhere, some coffee and some tea and stuff. It was just generally a helpful person, loved the marathon. And for years, runners would be doing this,

just taking off those bits of clothing, leaving on the ground. And occasionally, charities would come and collect some of them and bring them to charities. And in one year, no charities came. And they bagged up all the stuff and they threw it in the trash. And that really infuriated her because she said this is such a waste. So she's made it her mission to now collect all of these clothes. And to begin with, it wasn't as much as 26 tons.

It was even less. It changes all the time. The latest article, the article I'm specifically getting it from, it was 26 that they managed to collect. Obviously, it varies year by year. The exact quote from her is, now I have 201 volunteers. We cover all the way to Ashland Townline

and we've gotten up to 52,000 pounds, which is the equivalent of 26 tons. That is amazing. And the reason it's gone up dramatically is because there used to be a bus service right at the end of the Boston Marathon that would bring you back to the start so people could collect their clothes.

But they canceled the bus service. So now all of these clothes, people just go, we'll just leave it there. So they now collect these all and they give them to charities and raise so much money. There must be an awareness thing as well, though. If you run, you know what's going to happen to the clothes so you think, well, I might as well bring loads of clothes.

I would hope so because, A, I can't believe running a marathon is hard enough without having to admit to yourself that you have to lose an entire outfit in the process. And also, I'm the kind of unlikable person who would definitely throw my clothes aside, bear in mind where I'd thrown them and then walk back a bit later to pick them up.

And I'd be pretty irritated if they'd been sent to South to down by that point. So there's a thing about the Boston Marathon which is that it's for very good runners as in, obviously all marathons are very good runners, but only the fastest amateurs get in and qualify for the Boston Marathon. So there is a guy, his name is Derek Murphy,

he's an American man, and he is a marathon enthusiast and he's made it his life's work to spot people cheating in marathons from hundreds of miles away. Hundreds of miles away. Yeah, he's got this incredible telescope. Only 26 miles. Some really elaborate cheating going on. Like when you run the other way around the world.

Yes. So the BBC did a profile of him. He has this blog called Marathon Investigation and he started wondering, you know, whether people cheat to get to qualify for the Boston Marathon, they'll run another marathon, which you have to do. And he looks at suspiciously fast times and he looks at photos taken during the race

to see if he can track people down. So he's caught people who've used other people's bib numbers, or he's caught people who've perhaps missed out stages throughout. But he has also vindicated at least one person where the authorities thought that run-on was cheating and he managed to find the evidence to say, no, I don't think this person was cheating.

It's legit. Why is he, I mean, I really support vigilante justice in certain cases, I suppose. But is this a major problem in morality and crime? If you support Batman, you should support this guy. That's what I'm saying. In part of the downgrade that Batman would have to take to be doing that.

So in 1980, there was a woman called Rosie Ruiz who was declared the winner of the marathon. But then it was later found out that she'd taken the subway for part of the way. No one noticed her ducking out of the marathon, popping into a subway station. But you probably think someone's ducking out just to get themselves a drink.

Or ducking out altogether. Actually, this is not for me. And it can't be lined all the way, can it? This is 1980 as well. Maybe it was just less organized. But I think the suspicious bit is when you come out of the subway and join the race, that's the crucial bit. That's true.

Yeah. I read about a lady, because, you know, you can go off trail. A Florida woman who became lost during half-marathon when she just took the wrong corner. So she was found nearly 12 hours later in the middle of a 25,000-acre park. Oh, my gosh.

Just completely lost. Oh, no. At what point do you think you stop running? At what point is it obvious to you that you're now no longer running the marathon? Yes. Do you think she just thought she was way ahead? I didn't know that.

You know that you have to wear one of those bibs when you run a marathon. They have trackers in them, and they have mats across the marathon course. What? Which electronically log you making particular checkpoints along the way. That is amazing.

Anyone who's ever run a marathon knows that, but I had no idea. That's like in a computer game when you get to hit checkpoints. Exactly, yeah. And so sometimes that's the way of identifying cheaters if the bib missed out several checkpoints. Yeah.

Yeah. So another cheater was a woman called Catherine Swizer, who, so maybe your guy with a telescope might want to get onto her. She was a woman, and she tried to run the marathon in 1967, and she registered with just her initials. So it was gender-neutral,

so it wasn't known that she was a woman. And she ran the marathon, and people were quite supportive in the crowds, but then Jock Semple, who was the race official, was really against the idea of women running. People thought women were way too fragile. It kind of muddied the masculinity of the sport for men. And so he stormed onto the track

and tried to drag her off it, at which point her boyfriend came and kind of defended her, which is a little bit annoying from the feminist perspective, but her boyfriend came on and pushed Jock Semple out of the way. And she finished. Wow. And the nice thing about her is that this year was the 50th anniversary of when she did that,

and she ran it again. Great. Hang on, she wasn't a cheater, though. Was she? Yeah, she cheated by pretending to be a man. Technically speaking, she wasn't allowed to enter. Yes, right. Yeah, I guess so.

She's the bad guy in this story yet. The furthest away, I guess, that the marathon has ever been run off the course, since we were talking about that, is Senita Williams, who's a NASA astronaut, and she ran it while she was on the International Space Station, on the treadmill. So someone argued she was going way faster than anyone else,

because she was walking the Earth at the same time. There's a thing about the Berlin Marathon, which is that loads of records get broken on that marathon course, and not, for example, on the London one, or the Kuala Lumpur one, or the Boston one. And there are all these reasons which combine to make Berlin one of the best places to break a speed record. So it's really flat.

There are very few corners. It's never more than 53 metres above sea level, so lots of lovely oxygen. And it's in September, which is quite a good time of year, because the weather's not crazy, and it's mostly on asphalt. And so there are all of these different combination factors that conspire to make it a great, best-breaker record. Whereas Boston, the Boston Marathon course,

the finish line is so much lower than the starting line that it is ineligible for world record attempts. No way! Because you're running downhill. Yeah, basically running downhill. Wow, no way! Why don't they just move it then? I don't know.

I'll put it the other way around. Put it the other way around. Record breaking in the Boston Marathon is a quite interesting thing. In 2010, a guy broke the world record for the Boston Marathon. His name was Robert K. Cheerio from Kenya, but he broke the record that was set previously by a man also named Robert K. Cheerio.

By complete coincidence, no relation. No relation! So weird, right? He must have changed his name to... No, no. I mean, I suppose maybe it's a more common name. Maybe it's a bit like a John Smith for any name or something. That's amazing.

So the first African person to win the Boston Marathon won it in 1988, I guess, probably because logistics got easier for people to enter at that point, maybe from abroad. So 1988 was the first African person to win it. It was Ibrahim Hussein from Kenya. Since then, there have only been three winners who haven't been Kenyan or Ethiopian.

They all just went, oh, we're actually much better at this than these guys. Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast,

we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. Alex. At Alexbell Under School. And Chazinsky. You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep. Or you can go to our website. No such thing as a fish.com. We have links to the tour that we're doing at the end of this year. We have a link to the book that's coming out in November, and you can find every single episode we've ever done up there too.

Okay, we'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.