No Such Thing As A Fish - 184: No Such Thing As Dinosaur Diaries

Episode Date: September 29, 2017

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss snakes that eat snakes, mathematical street performers, and the celebrity most likely to give you a virus.

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'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Anna Chazinski 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, James. Okay, my fact this week is that Avril Lavigne is the celebrity most likely to give you a virus.

That's rude. What? That's rude. Why? You can get viruses in lots of different ways. Oh. Not always in rude ways. Oh.

Okay. That's rude. You could be stood next to her on a tube and she's got a cold and she touches one of the poles and then you touch it just afterwards and then you touch your face and then you might catch a virus that way. Does she use the tube very much these days? That's why she's the most likely. She's an obsessive public transport.

Of course I'm talking about computer viruses and this is a study by McAfee and it's the most dangerous celebrities TM study. Hang on. Is it McAfee? I thought it was McAfee. I always said McAfee. I said McAfee as well. Okay.

Well, that sounds like you three are all right and I'm wrong. No, not necessarily. No, who knows? Who knows? I don't think anyone's said it before now. Have they not? You always see it written down, don't you? Why would you speak it out loud?

Yeah. It's like Microsoft. So the problem with this right is that if you start Googling Avril Lavigne, it leads you to websites where you can get viruses. It can do. Apparently 14.5% off. Yeah. I Googled her seven times in the course of research of this podcast and my computer

is now riddled with the list of viruses. Yeah, exactly. I've got no research on Avril Lavigne. I just stopped. I closed my computer. I have got a stonking case of Stuxnet. It's weird because McAfee speculated about why it could be and they said that viruses you'd normally put a virus in from the most popular searches and so they think that the

reason she's become the most virus laden person is because interest in her has suddenly peaked because she's working on a new album and there's an internet conspiracy that she's been replaced by an imposter. That's right. I would still say that she is not the most popularly Googled person on the internet in 2017. I can think of one more. Oh, yeah.

Christine Aguilera. That's right. Yeah. Her husband Chad from Nickelback. Did they not split up? What? They reunited. Did they?

Yeah. God, James, do not do that to me. I know, Dan, you're a big fan. No, I'm just worried that Chad will get sad, build up more material and release another Nickelback album onto the world. Keep him happy. He's got nothing to say. So they do these charts every year, don't they?

So in previous years they've had other celebrities. I think maybe in 2015 it was Ellie Goulding who was the most popular and there's a men's women's chart as well just because I don't think we couldn't possibly be expected to compute people of different sexes or both giving you computer viruses. Well, I think women are susceptible to different viruses maybe. Is that it? I don't know. Well, who are some of the male ones?

So Bruno Mars, I'm reading this list of celebrities and I'm trying to work out which ones have been and which ones are women, such as my pop culture knowledge. Justin Bieber, I'm pretty sure he's a man, Sean Diddy Coombs and Zayn Malik, I think are the only men in the top 10. Is that Puff Daddy, Sean Diddy Coombs? It is indeed. Yeah. Yeah.

And Celine Dion's on there. Nice to see Celine making an appearance. She's a Canadian pop star. Yeah. So according to... Actually Justin Bieber's Canadian, isn't he? Justin Bieber. In fact, this is a very heavy Canadian list.

Yeah. So supposedly, Celine Dion is the top-selling Canadian artist of all time and apparently Avril Lavigne is number two. James and I were trying to work out surely, like surely she can't be in it too, Avril Lavigne. I had thought she's now a twin because she's got a lot of country fans. Yeah. Yeah.

I didn't know she was Canadian though. Have you checked that? I didn't know. Well, you brought her up. I didn't bring her up. What? I did. I said she's number two and you went, what about Shania Twain?

No. I said, what about Alanis Morissette? Oh, yeah. He said Alanis Morissette and then I said, no, pizza and Shania Twain. Right. Yeah. That was me. Until now, I have been laboring under the misapprehension that Avril Lavigne and Alanis

Morissette are the same person. Oh. Really? I realize now they're not. They're very different people. Yes. Cool. Let's gloss over that.

I'm going to say, Anna Kendrick, number 13. I don't know who she is. Oh, come on. She's a very famous actress. Hailey Steinfeld, number 23. Don't know who that is. Don't know who that is. Don't know who that is.

Tiana Taylor, number 45. Don't know who that is. No. And Zendaya, number 50. Don't know who that is. I'm impressed you know all the others. Well, the others were Will Smith, Jackie Chan. So I heard of them.

Doesn't ring any bells. Attenborough? Is Attenborough anywhere? Which one? David. David. All riches. No.

Actually, neither. Any dimblebees? Make a list? No? Your computer's safe, Andy. Okay. It's the idea that you are downloading things related to these people. So you're downloading wallpapers or ringtones or whatever.

I think that's it. Yes. So if you were to search for Avril Lavigne and try and find a little knockoff MP3 of one of her hits, then that might give you a virus. I understand. Which I think explains why a few of them are pop stars. Yes, of course. Yes, because dimblebe didn't release an album.

Well, he releases 45 minutes of absolutely blazing comment and analysis every week. So anyway, I was looking up computer viruses because as we've ascertained, I didn't know research whatsoever on Avril Lavigne. And the first ever human to get a computer virus got one in 2010. Is this like a cyborg? Yes. Ah, really? So there's a guy called Dr. Mark Gasson from the University of Reading and he had a chip

in his hand, which he used to go through. Should have put it on his shoulder. He used it to go through security doors and unlock his phone and stuff like that. The BBC described it quite sniffly, I thought, as a sophisticated version of ID chips used to tag pets. And he gave himself a virus as an experiment to see whether people could, for example, hack into pacemakers in future. And this is now one of the big worries.

And what happened when he gave himself a virus? Did he come down with a cold? I think he couldn't get into his phone. Wow. That's worse than a cold. Yeah, the future looks bleak. The first computer virus ever was the Cookie Monster virus, right? I mean, I think there may be various claims to what constitutes a virus.

But in the late 1960s, there was this Cookie Monster virus, which was malware that froze your computer until you typed the word cookie at it and then it kept freezing your computer until you typed the word cookie and you had to incessantly feed it cookies. And it was just created at Brown University to piss off their fellow students. But if you typed the word Oreo, it cured it. Oh. That's very good. It is good.

And there was one version of it which would demand that you type cookie incessantly until you literally couldn't do anything because you just have to type the word cookie over and over and over again and then eventually it would crash and the message would come up saying, I didn't want a cookie anyway. It was good in the olden days when computer virus makers were just having fun. Yes. There was like a golden age of computer piracy. There was one called Casino, which would, you know, well, actually it would remove

all the files from your computer, so it was quite bad. But it will also swear at you, you know, it would say, you asshole, say bye to your balls. And then it would give you a jackpot slot machine. You've got five chances to spin the wheels and get three matching icons, like a fruit machine. And if you didn't, then it swore at you and then deleted all your stuff. And so it was bad, but at least it was a bit personal. Yeah, at least you had a bit of fun before you lost all of your life. Yeah.

They used to have a sense of humour, didn't they? Before the PC Brigade. Do you know what the PC Brigade? Nice. Do you know what the American government has stopped worrying about this year? Nazis. No, this is definitely about computer viruses. Right.

Stuxnet. No. Being hacked into by other countries. Yeah, they stopped worrying about that a while ago, I guess. The thing that they've stopped this year is they've stopped providing updates on how they're going to deal with the millennium bug with Y2K. And this is thanks to Trump. Basically, there's an obscure rule that means that federal agencies are required to keep providing updates on how they would deal with the Y2K bug. And basically, they've noticed that it was just costing a lot of money in terms of time,

because it was all this paperwork constantly being having to be filed. So, they finally have had it stopped. The Americans are no longer looking at how to prepare for the millennium bug. That's quite sensible of Trump, actually. And I know you don't hear that very often, but if he was the only person who realised that the millennium had passed and nothing had happened, then good on him. I bet he was, because he made that a big feature of the campaign, didn't he? Do you remember?

Stop that bug. Do you remember the crowds chanting? Have you heard of DEF CON? Not DEF CON the security setting, where you say we're at DEF CON 5 or whatever. This is a hacking convention which happens in Las Vegas every year. So, they converge on this hotel in Las Vegas. And one of the things they did this year was they hacked into US voting machines and they re-crawled them. They got them to play Rick Astley songs instead of making them...

Well, they got the voting machines to play Rick Astley songs. Yeah. But why have they got microphones and speakers on them? Well, presumably they say things like, thank you for voting. What do you mean presumably? I don't know. I've never voted. You've never voted? Oh, God. Not in America, no.

That's weird though, isn't it? In America, what we're saying here is that if you vote in America, it gives you a little tune afterwards. Well, no, it's not what I'm saying, but it's what I presume. I presume they have microphones somehow. Guys, if you're in America, can you write in and listen to if your voting machines talk to you as you vote? There's a terrible thing about when you're a normal guest staying at this hotel during DEF CON, you're just being constantly hacked into at all times. So there's an account of a journalist who went there and he basically had to turn off everything. He had to turn his iPhone into a brick, turn off Wi-Fi, turn off 3G, not use anything.

And the local UPS store, you know, they do printing and stuff, they said, we are not accepting any printing of a hotel guest from links in emails. We're not accepting USB sticks. We're only accepting very particular kinds of things, because people just kept on hacking into the UPS store as well. It's like having a bunch of kind of card and criminals, even if they're not actually committing crime in this case, to stay in your hotel and you would lock up all the minibars.

Yeah, it's like a pickpockets convention. And all the people in the hotel who don't know about the convention are just constantly having their pockets picked. Do you know who claims to be the most popular hacking target in the world? Oh, is it John McAfee? It is indeed. Mr. McAfee himself says he's the badge of honour for any hacker, because he's Mr. Anti-Hacking software. But he tricks people by changing the pronunciation of his surname willy nilly from McAfee,

which it clearly is. So, another celebrity whose name is associated with hacking is Britney Spears. And Britney Spears has an Instagram account, and there is a thing with malware called command and control system. It's quite complicated, but basically, if you're a virus, you need to keep getting updates, so you keep needing to go to different websites to get your updates. But the website's always moved so that people can't catch them.

But you need to know where the websites are. And so what these hackers are doing is they're using comments in Britney Spears Instagram accounts to hide the addresses where these CNC systems are held. Hi. So, if you were to read all the comments in Britney Spears' Instagram, you'd be able to get... And I do. And you do. Have you noticed any URLs hidden in the...

I mean, they're quite well hidden in code and stuff. Oh, well, then I haven't. You read them all on face value, don't you? Yeah, I do. Keep being great, Britney. So, all they have to do is delete Andy's comments, and the ones that are left are going to be CNC systems. Does this mean that hackers have to have this massive knowledge

of Britney Spears filling their brains now, because they've had to plow through these series of comments about her in order to find their code? My feeling is that the computer probably does it automatically. Because the one thing that computers are best at, probably, is going through large amounts of data and sifting out the important bits. Oh, so they don't get to read the... I prefer to know when she was bald kind of comments below.

But they might see the photos, right? If it's people doing it. I mean, when you're on the internet, you often see pictures of Britney Spears, whether you want to or not. It's quite nice, though, that even though they are doing this illegal activity, that if they did meet up, they will have all got a good knowledge of what she's up to in life,

and there's a common thing they can talk about. Yeah, so you reckon when all of the hackers kind of meet up once a year, they probably chat about Britney? They're probably like 45 minutes on the malware stuff. Let's leave a good 15 for Britney. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is, there is a type of dinosaur

which is almost always found on its back. Mmm, sexy. Sexy. It's like lie back and think of Gondwana land. Yes. They didn't die having sex, guys. Okay. Because then you'd have to find an equal number on top of those...

You're right. Ankylosauruses. So there's been a new study into them, which is a lot more than other dinosaurs. And there were loads of theories about why, like they got turned upside down by predators because they have a really big shell on their back. So you'd be able to eat the soft underbelly.

Exactly. Or that after they die, their bodies filled up with gas, and then they rolled over onto their back because of that. And none of these theories are right. And it's really obvious in the end, the conclusion, is that they got swept out to sea, and then they turned upside down because the gas in their bellies was lighter,

and then they sank to the seabed that way and they stayed upside down, and then they became fossilised. And other animals don't do that, so that's the difference. I wonder why they bloated another animal's den. Is it because of their heavy shell? I think they all bloat, but I think it's the shell, which makes a difference. And this is the cool thing, to study this,

the scientists from the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ontario, they studied armadillos, because that was, I guess, a close equivalent in the real world. So they had a proper hardened shell-like thing on their back. Have we said the name of the dinosaur? Yes. Ankylosaurus. Do you know what that means, ankylosaurus? Is that anything to do with...?

Fused ankylomines, so like fused together plates. Oh, okay. So these guys, just to give you a picture of what they look like, they look a bit like armadillos, don't they? They've got this big, heavy shell. They look a bit like a tank, but then they've got a massive tail with a big knob on the end. Yeah.

Have we known about them for a long time and now we've just worked out why they're upside down? Yes. It's not like the new dinosaurs that we thought, obviously, were different, upside down. Because we couldn't recognise them upside down. Yeah. We thought they were tables.

It would still be an upside down table. It would, but a table's more easy to identify when it's upside down, whereas a dinosaur is completely impossible to recognise. I'm trying to think of something else with the legs. I'm trying to think of something else with the legs in the air. Battersea power station. That's what we thought they were. Thought they were mini power stations.

And they've got, I think they've got very thick skin and this is part of the reason why this happens, because their skin's so thick it can take the gas pressure, the pressure of all those decomposing gases building up. And so that means they float for a while on their backs before sinking. Okay. And scientists call it bloat and float. I understandably.

Ironically, seeing as they sink. Sure. Sink doesn't rhyme. Well, exactly. Then shrink and sink. Bloat and float, shrink and sink. What rhymes with fossilize? So this massive knob at the end of their tail, you would think that they would kind of swing it around

to batter people with, which they probably did, but it's their tail. There weren't no people, though, so I guess, yeah. That's probably why they did it. But they weren't kind of whippy their tails. They were fused. So they were kind of straight, hard tails that they would bash people with the knobbly bit.

Do you mean it was like effectively like a javelin then, in that it was a sturdy... It's like a javelin, but with a shot putt on the end of it. Yes. But then it's fused to your spine. Yes. It's like a javelin, but if you threw it, you would fly with the javelin,

because it didn't throw its tail off every time it was under attack. What do you mean effectively it's like a javelin? I mean, I'm trying to picture the sort of shape and length of it. You know tails that animals have. Yeah. It's like that, but it's solid. Like a javelin. Well, like a javelin, yeah.

It's a really strong simile. I don't know why they're laying into you, Dan. I don't know where they came up with it. Here's an interesting thing that combines James's javelin tail with Andy's upside-down table dinosaur. They've worked out recently plesiosores, which had

the longest neck of any of the dinosaurs, I believe. 23 foot long. What they couldn't work out, and this has been another dinosaur underwater mystery, is how they could swim at speeds with that neck, because the pressure of the water pushing the neck around just wouldn't work, and what they think now

is that they actually extended their neck and held it like a rod, like a firm javelin, as they swam through the water. Did you accidentally research javelins for this? Is that what you want to talk about? So, one thing about the docus necks,

originally it was thought they held them straight and upright at about 60 degrees like a giraffe neck, which obviously was wrong, but then it was thought they held them level in front of them and counterbalance their tail, but that also has fallen out of favor, and the latest theory is that

they had a sort of swan-like curve to their neck. Yes, because almost all land vertebrates, which are studied, like birds, for example, are at their necks in that sort of upright-ish curve. Like a pelican.

Like a bent javelin. Like a bent javelin. Although there are some, and some calculations say that if it had held its head completely upright or at a rigid, upright angle, using traditional methods, it would have had to use half its energy

pumping blood to its brain. Using traditional methods. Maybe it had untraditional methods. I'm supporting it on either side. Using the old ways. Whichever way a dinosaur does it, it must be more traditional than whatever way we do it.

On animals lying on their backs with their legs in the air, I was looking for examples of animals doing this. It's actually quite rare, and quite hard to look into, but there was a new scientist forum where someone posted a question which was, when I was younger,

my mum used to drive us past a field with a horse in it. And the one that read, this horse is not dead, he sleeps that way, and the horse was always lying on its back with its legs locked straight up in the air. Does anyone know what was going on?

Is this common? Are they sure it wasn't the table? Were there answers on the forum? There were lots of answers. Most people said the legs in the air make sense because horses have a locking mechanism which makes their legs, so when horses go to sleep,

they fall over. But no one could quite answer the question of why it was sleeping on its back with its legs in the air. They all said that is quite unusual. Maybe it's just a special horse. I love having to put a sign up. This horse isn't dead.

Don't knock on our door. I think I would put that sign up if I had a dead horse and I didn't want anyone to know about it. It's just a sleep. To save you having to go and bury it or everyone knows that they have these tiny arms which look really impractical.

There was a theory that they would use them to stand up because did T-Rex's lie down to sleep? I guess they can afford to, but then how do they get up again? Or do they sleep like a special horse on their back with their legs in the air?

The latest theory suggests that they did not use their arms to get up because they sometimes went a month without using their arms for anything. Isn't that amazing? How do we know that? You know what that sounds like? It sounds like one of those charity months that you do for something.

Like, no um... Burr. We can set that up. How do we know that? That is a really fair question. I have no idea how we know that. It must be in the diaries or something. But then how do you write a diary

if you're not using your arms? It was just an empty month for that diary. Go straight from first-gen to second-feb. Sorry for not writing. I've been raising money from dippadokas around the corner. Yeah, successful November. OK, it is time for fact number three,

and that is my fact. My fact this week is that snakes that eat snakes can eat snakes that are 139% of their body length. Wow. So that is the equivalent of me as a six-foot-one person

eating an eight-foot-four-inch-tall hot dog in one bite. But the hot dog is also as broad as you. Yeah, it's a massive hot dog. It's a big hot dog. We should really be talking about where I got this hot dog from.

A eight-foot hot dog is like one of those... It's like a mascot in a sports thing. And they'll be about human size. You could be one of those guys. Yeah, so I found this on a website called snakesalong.blogspot.co.uk and the reason I found it

was I saw a video earlier this week of a snake eating a snake. And what I didn't ever stop to think was when they eat snakes, they do actually start with the head and they just eat it as a snake. They just like the equivalent of like a train going into a tunnel.

Like it just disappears. If you're a snake, one, you're not going to eat it bum first, are you? Because that's disgusting. And then two, you're not going to eat it sideways like a car on the car bus or something. So it's the only obvious way to eat it. That is highly what I thought, though.

I thought they would eat chunks of it. I didn't know they swallow everything. I think I would eat a snake bum first if I was a snake. Well, for a start, you get the bit you don't want to eat really very much out of the way first. It's like saving your roast potatoes for the end of a roast dinner.

It's exactly like that. I don't have a second there. The good thing is that it fits into you more neatly because you fit the body of the snake exactly into you like the length of a snake. So you're much more like a Russian doll of snakes. Yes, that's true.

So here's the issue, though, and which is what the headline fact is meant to be. Highlighting is that they can eat snakes that are longer than themselves. They do have to eat it in one go. Otherwise, if they take a break halfway through a snake,

the rest of the snake can start rotting, which is really bad for them in the digestive system. Or they have to haul another snake with them if they're escaping a predator. So they've doubled their body size and their weight in order to escape. Because obviously they can eat like deer and stuff that stretch out their skin.

So presumably they just fold the snake up inside themselves as they go. That's the issue because of the length of the snake. Their stomachs don't go all the way to their tails. They have actually a lot of muscle down near the bottom. So obviously it can only go as far as deep as their stomach goes. So that's the issue they need to work out

when they're eating the snake. How can they fit that entire snake into their body? Yeah, but don't they just fold it? They sort of concertina it. They concertina their ribs. And then the dead snake inside them is squished up. And then the living snake outside can stretch out. It's like an accordion.

So there is a myth that snakes, domestically, stretch themselves out next to their owners or next to family pets. So they're measuring them to see how long they are. This is not true. I went to another website about this. An amazing snake website which said,

false, snakes have no sense of measurement. They are not rulers. They do not know how long they are versus how tall or long anything else is. I think that can't be true, can it? But it's true that they don't, in the wild, measure out that they're planning to eat.

Because it would run away. They must know how long they are, though. Like if it's so you know if you're escaping from something, you know that your tail's out of its reach and stuff. Do they have a sense of self, I think, is the question we're asking. Do they even know they're a snake?

That's true. But I think they must have a basic idea of how long they are. Otherwise, they'd keep thinking they were hidden well, but actually their entire body... They just hide and seek. They just put their tail over their eyes. They can't see me.

They do sometimes eat their own tail, don't they? Yes, they do eat themselves. When they get stressed, I think. Oh, so that's not by accident. Sometimes by accident. Because they're like, I'm not that long that this tail could be here. It must be someone else.

Instead of a prey on themselves, they get up to about half way along themselves and they think, oh, hang on. They do that. Never eat bum first. It always happens when you do that. Yes, they sometimes eat their own tail and it might be if a predator has been on their tail

and it's got the smell of it and a lot of them just work by movement and if the tail's wiggling around it smells like prey. But they're not supposed to. It's not useful to them to eat themselves. I was reading about an Australian guy called Tony Barton

who saw a snake eat another snake. So he saw a red-bellied black snake eat an eastern brown snake in his garden. He took a picture of it and the snake, as snakes do, then went for a sleep because they can't chew. They always go away and have to have a sleep

so their stomach can digest what they've actually eaten. And he went back a bit later to check on it and he said the black snake had his mouth a bit open and he saw a pair of eyes inside the mouth and then he photographed the snake hauling itself back out of the other snake's body. So it latched onto the snake that had eaten its jaw

and pulled itself out and then slithered away, covered in mucus. That's interesting. I wonder if that means he was eaten bomb first, though. No, he was eaten head first. He turned round inside something. That's very impressive. I don't think I'd have the wherewithal to do that.

Do you think you'd back up? I think I'd just lie down and die. It might be completely swallowed by a snake. I don't think I'm going anywhere. I think I'll think of it as... It's going to make Brexit a failure. Yeah. One thing about when snakes eat animals,

they completely change. They almost become another animal. Not quite. What? For example, when a python eats a whole deer, its metabolism gets 40 times faster and its blood goes milky because it suddenly has all these fatty acids.

Its heart increases by 40% in size. It completely changes. And this is so cool. When humans eat, we increase our oxygen consumption by about a quarter because we need to speed up our metabolism. We need to get more oxygen into our body to digest the food, right?

After a python eats an animal, let's say 65% of its weight, it increases its oxygen consumption 36-fold. Wow. It's a huge amount. So humans, when we're sprinting, we increase 10-fold. Snakes do 36-fold. And if a snake was to eat a prey that was bigger than it was,

let's say 1.5 times it was, like you said, Dan, it might be taking it 100 times as much oxygen as it normally would. So when I was... I don't know if I mentioned this, but I was in Peru a few weeks ago. And when you're in an altitude and you're eating, you're always out of breath.

You have to keep stopping. You can't really talk and eat at the same time. And now I know, like you say, it's because you're taking in more oxygen. You shouldn't talk with your mouth full anyway, James. I've been meaning to say that for ages. But for snakes, it must be 10 times worse, right? It's just to speed up their metabolism.

That's why they have to lie in the sun after they've had a big meal. And it takes so much energy to digest the meal that when a python has had a big meal, half the energy it gets from the meal goes on digesting the meal. Ugh. What a waste. You know, when we say it takes up more energy to eat a stick of celery

than you get from it, do you know it takes more energy to eat one of those baby deers than you'll actually get from the deer? It's completely pointless. OK. It is time for our final fact of the show. That is Anna. My fact is that medieval street performers

multiplied numbers together in public for entertainment. That's great. And presumably, they were quite hard numbers. They weren't things like six times nine. Well, they weren't that difficult. I've got some change here somewhere. James, where's your hat?

This is something I found in a book online, a book called Lost Discoveries, the Ancient Roots of Modern Science. And it's basically the fact that in sort of late medieval times, Arabic numbers were coming over from India, so the numbers that we use today.

They come over here. They count our sheep. Migrant refugee Arabic numbers were coming over from India and they were better than Roman numerals, and you could do things like long multiplication and non-division with them. But the authorities in Europe didn't trust them,

so they sort of banned them. So it meant that there were these street performers who kind of had this secret knowledge of Arabic numbers, and so they could do what seemed like incredible multiplication. I mean, it was quite simple. It would be like 12 times 16, which obviously we can edit out

the huge pause while we all work that out. 4 times 4 times 3. Oh, well, it's not that then. So it's 64 threes. 192. Who would be there to sort of fact check them? Yeah, that's a really good point. That's such a good question.

I guess they just took on face value. You come back, you say, I've got some multiplication, it's correct. Trust me, and they put money in your hand. Hang on, when did we get Arabic numbers in the West, in Western Europe? Was it Roman numerals until... Renaissance times, I think.

What, are you serious? We didn't get them until after... This is what's so fascinating about them. They were known to exist from the 6th century, and they started coming over. They hated them in the 10th century into Europe, and the authorities hated them. They hated zero, for instance.

Can I just ask sorry to interrupt, but which pope was it? Like, popes famously don't use Arabic numbers, do they? It's always pope pious the X or something. Yeah, you're right. So they're the ones who are sticking with it. You're absolutely right. It was Pope Sylvester II.

He actually... He got in a lot of trouble, because his real name was Gerbert of Ariac, which I like. So Gerbert went to Spain, and so he got from Africa some knowledge of these Arabic numbers, and he went back to Italy, became pope,

and tried to spread this knowledge, and people just thought it was black magic that he could actually add numbers together and do division. And so they labelled him as a sorcerer, and this dogged him throughout his papacy the fact that he could perform this weird black magic. I find that absolutely amazing.

I would have thought in the Doomsday book, you'd have the number six. And we're saying that is not the case. That is incredible. As James said, early Renaissance. And I was reading quite a lot about zero, which was seen as the pinnacle of the evil of Arabic numbers,

because it represented nothing nurse and that was seen as really ungodly, but merchants in Europe kind of picked up on this underbelly of Arabic numbers and realised it's much easier to use them. So they had to use them in secret, and so they'd flash zeros at each other,

which meant I use Arabic numbers. We can use Arabic numbers in this transaction. So they flash zeros at each other. They gesture with the hands. They do a ring with the hands. You know that game when you're at school and you do a ring and if they see it below your waist, you're allowed to punch them in the arm.

Unless you get your finger inside it. Unless you put a one in there. Do you reckon that's an ancient kind of... That's definitely, I think, where that traces back to. This is actually why, the word zero comes from a word syphor, which is also where the word syphor comes from, because zero was used as a secret syphor thing.

And the person who named zero was a guy called Mohamed Al-Khorazimi, who also invented, based on his name, the algorithm. So the algorithm is a corruption of the name Al-Khorazimi. Cool. There was a guy called

Johann Martin Zacharias-Dazer, he was German, and he once multiplied two 20-digit numbers together in six minutes, which was considered extremely good at the time. And I think now. Was that in his head? In his head, yeah.

It depends on what... If it was just a billion time, or a thousand billion times a thousand billion, that's not actually that difficult, is it? It's true, although a thousand billion is still a long way off 20 digits. It is, isn't it? You're right. He managed to do it, and then he managed

to multiply two 100-digit numbers in eight and three-quarter hours. Eight and three-quarter hours. Who was sticking around to watch that full show? I think you'd stay for the first hour and a half, wouldn't you? You'd want to come back for the ending, though. You wouldn't want a message.

And you don't know when the ending's going to be, do you? Exactly. So it's mostly a tension thing. Wow. Sorry, we think he did this in his head, or he did this? In his head. This mathematician, Carl Friedrich Gauss, said that someone skilled in calculation could have done the calculation

in half that time with pencil and paper. Okay. Which I think is a bit harsh, really, for someone who's multiplying 100-digit numbers. Yeah, I think it is, yeah. I think it's a bit sniffy, actually. And in the book, Gerd Lescher Bach,

which we have downstairs, they talk about this guy, Daisy, and they say that he had an uncanny sense of quantity of sheep were in a field. Wow. I mean, again, it all depends how many sheep there are in the field, because I like to think that below a certain threshold

of sheep, I could just tell how many sheep there are in a field. Well, this is interesting. So what is that number? You could definitely tell if there were four. I could definitely tell if there were four. But if there were 12, by just looking, would you know there were 12? No, I wouldn't.

What's the level? How often does that happen? Very seldom, from my studies. Because all you've really worked out there is that there's a three and a four. You've calculated the 12. I would instantly say there are 12 there. Sure, that's because your multiplication tables are so good.

Thank you. You should be a street performer. Really low rent, three by four kind of stuff. Give me any number between one and four. This guy could do his sheep thing up to 30. Up to around 30, he would know. Wow. That's a quick look and just see.

He must have been a real screamer party. No, we don't want to go out of the field again. No, come on, just once more. Take me out of the field, I'll show you. Do you think he'd walk into a party and immediately go, oh, there are only 42 people here? If you were in a party and you could tell how many people were there

and you could look at a plate of canapes and know exactly how many canapes were on the plate, you would know whether you had to quickly go for the canapes. In my experience, there are very few people at the party and I never have to go for more canapes. I never have to go for more canapes. But the Arabic zero numeral has come in very handy indeed.

Do you know in Moscow as a street, as a busker, you have to go through a really rigorous process now to be able to busk. And so this is to be able to play on the Moscow subway. Musicians have to actually go through this proper selection process

where they are selected by a jury, so they go in and they have to do this full performance to a jury of professional musicians and to a bunch of people from the TV talent show Voice of Russia. That's a very high buzz. Imagine going in as a busker and Simon Cowell is there.

But also imagine that you are Tom Jones on the voice in the UK and then as part of your job you have to go and watch a load of buskers. I can't imagine that happening. But isn't it true on the Tube that there will be a certain standard on the London Underground?

There are rules. I think you can have people who are completely crap because you need to bid for the slots as well. And also London has a code of conduct which advises buskers on. One of the tips that it gave out was if you only know a few songs move to a new location when you've played them.

Very good advice. In Russia you have to perform two hours of original materials. Two hours? Because people tend to want the hits, don't they? You never want to hit a busker's new stuff. No. I don't want to hit Paul McCartney's new stuff.

Okay, that's 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, James at James Harkin. What happened there?

Wow. Okay, new Twitter handle. Andy at Eggshamed. Finally got in there. This clown I've been following for years gave it up. Actual Twitter handle. And at Andrew Hunter M. You can email podcast.qi.com.

You can go to our group Twitter account which has changed too. It's now at No Such Thing. Or you can go to our website NoSuchThingAsAfish.com On it you will find all of our previous episodes. You'll find links to our tour dates. We've added a bunch of new tour dates to 2018.

So check that out. You can also get a link to our book which is coming out November 2nd. The Book of the Year. And you can also join us if you want to chat about this episode on Facebook Live on Mondays at 5pm on London Time. We'll see you again next week with another episode.

Goodbye.