No Such Thing As A Fish - 190: No Such Thing As A Magic Oven For Chimps

Episode Date: November 3, 2017

Live from Newcastle, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss British boomerangs, primate rock-paper-scissors, and why the Catalans are so anti-cat.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from the Stan Comedy Club in Newcastle! My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and no particular order, here we go, starting with you, Andy. My fact this week is that Britain exports over 50,000 boomerangs every year to Australia. And then imports them again, presumably. Yeah, this is just something that happens, but who knew that the post-Brexit Britain

is going to be boomerangst Australia, Colton Newcastle. Is this a recent thing? Oh, by the way, the phrase Colton Newcastle, is that well known here? Yeah. Yeah, because we tried it on some people in London, like young people, and they'd never heard of it. Yeah, that's true. Actually, anyone under the age of about 25 in London hadn't heard of it, maybe 30 even.

But actually, they import Col in Newcastle, don't they? Oh, don't you? Well do you? Yes, you do. Great. Well, in 2013, Newcastle imported 4.9 million tonnes of coal, the second most in the UK after somewhere in Scotland. Wow.

No way. What are they doing with it? Do you all get some? Is that? I think, yeah, then it's sent around the country for people to burn. That's what you do with coal. No, I know what you do with coal. I just didn't know what Newcastle was doing with coal.

What special thing do you think Newcastle does with coal? Well, apparently, they just send it back out again. It's like the boomerangs. The thing is, Dan, right, the UK is an island, and when we bring stuff in, it has to go into a port, and Newcastle's one of the best ports we have. Now I get it. I thought you meant, like, Manchester was sending coal to... I thought Newport was just collecting coal, and then went, now you can have it back.

Newport is somewhere else. Don't... Wait, so what's happened? Oh, my God. Can we recap? What's... Don't worry. I think you've trodden on enough toes.

It's a good thing James just said they've got the best port, kiss-ass. So we've won a few people over with that. Anyway, my fact this week is that Britain exports over 50,000 boomerangs a year to Australia. I looked at these boomerangs, and they don't look very boomerang-like. Well, wait till they hit you in the back of the head, James. No, well, they're toy boomerangs. Yeah, they've got three sticky outfits. That's true.

Yeah, are you sure? That's like fidget spinners, right? Yeah, they look like fidget spinners. Yeah. Big ones. They do. They absolutely do. But they're called sports boomerangs or something, and they basically fly for miles, and they

do combat them. Yeah. And the really cool thing is, the guy who runs the company which sells them, his name is David Strang, okay? And he moved from Scotland to Australia at the age of eight, and then at the age of 20, he came back. Can I just ask, just amongst us, did we all just exclusively look for facts where something went away and came back?

So it's just him, isn't it? It's just this one guy, this one company that's making them and exporting them. Is that right? So you know the song, My Boomerang Won't Come Back? Yeah. My Boomerang? I don't know it. It's a comedy song from the 20s, so...

Yeah, 50s, My Boomerang Won't Come Back. Everyone else knows it, right? Do you guys know it? It's a really famous song. Like six people are saying, yeah. How many people don't know it? I mean, that's huge. That's...

Yeah. All right, Minority. Do you know who produced that song? A certain George Martin, who went on to produce more famous songs by The Beatles. All right, I thought you meant the guy who wrote Game of Thrones. I did not. That was his big break, My Boomerang Won't Come Back, and then he went on to make The Beatles, yeah.

In the course of researching this, I actually listened to that song on repeat for about two days now. Did you? Yeah, it's very good. He is good. Although these days it's a bit culturally insensitive, so I am not going to praise it. Do you know who else owned Boomerangs? Tootin' Carmoon.

Oh, yes. No way. It's full of Boomerangs. No. It was a kind. Both are full of Boomerangs. If we get through these Boomerangs, we might find something. Tootin' Carmoon Back, as soon as you're chuckered.

Oh, God. No? All right, I'm sorry. So do you know what is the world record longest time a Boomerang has been in the air? No. Do you want to have a guess in minutes? Minutes? Minutes?

Three minutes. 37 minutes. 37 minutes? What do you think a bird flew off with it? Well, the answer is 1,440 minutes and nine seconds. Oh, come on. For listeners at home, Dan's wagging his finger at me, like, and I told you so. Hey, can you explain?

I can. And you're not going to like it. It's space, right? It's a guy called Jay Parrott, and he was at the South Pole, and he threw it, so it went through all of the different time zones. So technically went around 24 hours. That's awesome. I'm not the only one who didn't like it.

I actually have the Guinness World Record for the longest distance of... You have it. Congratulations. No, sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. I can't.

I can't. You hide your talent under a bottle then. Imagine if that was true. This was the first time we'd ever heard it. I like to brag. Yeah, no, 2005, the Guinness World Record was set for the longest throw of a boomerang, and do you want to have a guess of how far that was? Oh, like 80,000 miles.

If you could take my question seriously, mate. James, do you want to have a guess? Well, let's say I think it would be about 300, 400 yards. I've got it written down here, sir, for real. Okay, great. So why don't you have a guess anyway, Anna? Is it... I only have 427 metres.

Well, I've got it in feet, so I don't know what that is. Yeah, you might be right. Tell me in feet and I'll convert it for you. 1,401.5. 427 metres. So Anna was closest. So this was set in Queensland in Australia, and it was set by a guy called Mr. Shumi,

and Mr. Shumi, when he was asked about it, he said it wasn't really a boomerang throw, admitted Shumi, as it didn't come back. But weirdly, the Guinness World Records thought we'll just accept it. Because the record should be zero metres. Exactly, exactly. Well, the record for a returning one, which I think is the one that should really stand,

is a Swiss guy, actually, who threw it 238 metres out and then 238 metres back, which is further altogether than Mr. Shumi, isn't it? Again, you've thrown numbers that I don't understand. It is. We need to move on to our second fact. OK, so it is time for fact number two, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that the Catalan region

does regular checks of websites that end with dot cat to check that they're about Catalonia and not about cats. Are they the only two options? Well, no, but it seems basically they want all of the websites that are dot cat because that's the Catalan domain name. They want them to all be about Catalonia, but actually everyone else wants to put cats on the internet. And when you put cats on the internet,

what are you going to do? You're going to put dot cat, right? And so people do it all the time. And every now and then, they have to do an audit and they give people six months to shut down their websites or add a translation tool to translate their website into Catalan. So there is a website called, is it Nyan on Nyan? Does anyone know? Nyan, so it's Nyan. You'll all know about it.

It's like a little cartoon cat that's got like a rainbow on it and it's a stupid song that happens. And that was Nyan dot cat. And they were told they had to take it down until they put a translation tool. And so now you can watch Nyan cat in Catalan. Wow. Thank God.

Yeah, but it's really like for them, like for the Catalan people, it's really important, obviously a lot in the news at the moment, but I think they were the first sort of group of people rather than a country to have their own top-level internet domain name. Yeah, there were only eight. The only eight top-level domains were allowed and then the Catalonian people said,

no, we want a ninth. We want it to be our own space. And it was because one of the guys who organized it was Catalan. So that kind of helped. Oh, really? Yeah, he was called Amadou Abril E. Abril. And he was a lawyer and he was kind of part of the top-level internet thing. But he was Catalan, so he kind of managed to pull a few strings. They are very active internet users, though, apparently.

Cats, yeah. Cats, yeah. It's them that are posting all these pictures of themselves. The Catalonians, too, though. So in 2013, Catalan was the eighth most used language on blogs online, which is kind of extraordinary, given that there are eight million, eight to ten million Catalan speakers. They love the internet.

It'll never catch on. I think I heard that blogging is massive. Yeah. Sorry. Yes, it is. Dad. Yeah. And I have this thing.

It's called MySpace. All right. And you go on. No, it's because, you know, obviously they want to be independent from Spain. A lot of people in Catalonia, so they blog and they have message boards, which are all about Catalonian issues, and it's a very sort of adhesive identity, basically.

Yes. Yeah. Did you read about the guy, though, who has started a cat-based internet thing that is really cool? He started stalking cats around the world, and then he started posting up where they live online. So what happens is, if you post a picture of your cat on Flickr, or, like, what are the other ones?

Instagram. Ask Jeeves. You put a cat on Ask Jeeves? You can put a cat on Ask Jeeves, and he'll take the cat, and he'll scrape all the data from behind it for all the metadata. What? Who is this pervert?

Why are you telling us about him? He's not a pervert. He's someone who's trying to highlight the security problems online with posting your pictures up, because you often accidentally geotag yourself when you put pictures up. And so he's created this map of the world, and you can see all the cats that live in certain places. So if you've ever posted a picture of your cat up,

then you can go to where you live, and your cat may well be there. Or you might go to near where you live and see your cat, and then you'll note that it's cheating on you, and someone else has been posting pictures of your cat. But that's clever, right? So he's not posting pictures of actual people, because that would be a bit creepy,

but he's just posting pictures of their cats. Wasn't it the case that one of the greatest hackers that the internet has ever seen was caught, and they tried to break into his system to work out just to get into his computer to see what he'd done, and they're like, oh, he's going to have the most intense password ever. And it turned out his password was his cat's name,

and one, two, three, four. Yeah, that was... Scientists in Japan have studied cats recently, and they found that they do recognize their owner's voices, but they then choose to ignore them. So they test it. They played the cat a recording of the owner shouting the cat's name, and then they played it another recording of a stranger shouting the same cat's name.

They found that the cats have a much greater response to the owner shouting their name than to a stranger, but they still do not get up. But dogs are catching up online, right? In the last couple of years, I think dogs have become as prevalent online, whereas cats used to be much better, and I think the idea is that the age of the smartphone is more friendly to dogs because smartphones, I am told,

are good at videos and streaming them, and dogs are a bit more video-friendly. So cats are very image-friendly because they are still for 99.9% of the day. But now we can actually do the video thing and post that up easily and watch it, then dogs work better, and so now it's about 50-50 in terms of how many are being posted, respectively. I did not know that was the reason. That's interesting.

It's a theory. There is that place where you can feed a cat that's 4,000 miles away. Can't you? Oh, yeah. Oh, that site, yeah. There's a webcam set up for a cat sanctuary in, I want to say, Russia, and you can move a toy remotely, and you have to wait for ages in a queue

while other people get to move the toy around remotely. We did it at the office. We were not there that day. I was, yeah. That was great. That was a very long afternoon. So I was looking into all these dot-something sites. As we say, like dot-cat,

things get misappropriated for the country that they're meant to represent. So obviously dot-XXX is for porno websites, and that one is not a country, obviously, or if it is, I want to go there sometime. I don't know. Married ever kid. But dot-XXX is one that is allowed

because what they want to do is try and separate the porn so that you can actually identify it. The problem is no one's using it because then people can say you're definitely using porn as opposed to a dot-com website. You could just say, oh, no, I thought it was for people who are 30. And Roman. That's true.

So anyway, there's other ones. Dot-AC is the Ascension Islands. They have a population of 806, and that's used largely for academic websites. Dot-AC, it's also used for, I had no idea this was a big thing, air conditioning industries. It's a huge thing, air conditioning industries,

and they use AC. Dot-LA is for Laos, and that's being properly marketed as for Los Angeles to use that. And then I found dot-TV, and I remember dot-TV is a famous one because it's Tupelo, so I looked at, there's a list you can see of the most famous dot-TV websites that you can get.

And I found last night, and I was up, and I had a son, so I was up at about 3 a.m. after feeding him with a bottle, and my wife was asleep, and I was doing research for tonight's show. And I found right there, up on the list, there's all these different dot-TVs, hamsterporn.tv.

Oh, Daniel. And I saw it, and I thought, there's no way I'm not clicking that. So I clicked on it, and I was brought to hamsterporn.tv, and annoyingly, it was just a regular human porn site. There were just a bunch of... That must have been really annoying.

It was super nice. So it was all these just screen grabs of videos of humans doing porn, and as I was looking through it, and just slightly upset, my wife woke up, and she looked up, and she saw the screen,

and she looked at me and went, what are you doing? Are you looking at porn? And I said, no, honey, I'm sorry, I thought it was going to be a side of hamster porn. And she literally said nothing, and turned around in the bed and went back to sleep. I can't believe you have roped us all into your lie here, Dan. A week on Friday,

you're going to make your wife listen to it and go, see? The new top-level domains, though, just to get nerdy, that's a new thing. And so it used to be that your country, the .coms or the .co.uks, but now we can register stuff for things like... There's a big long list you can read,

but .hair, .wow, .weirdly, .... That's good, .weirdly. .Weirdly is lovely. We should do us a .weirdly, isn't it? Sorry, there's no .weirdly. I was interjecting myself. But there is .Ferrero and .Rosé,

but there's not .Ferrero-Rosé, and there's also .off, which just feels like you need to start registering the sods and the buggers and the X.off before they get snapped up. Just a really quick, geeky top-level domain name fact for Montenegro, a country in Montenegro.

It was Yugoslavia, and then it went to Montenegro, and so the top-level domain went from .you to .me. Oh, God, that's awesome. That's a sort of like Bruce Forsythe kind of website thing. Wait, no, like the Chucklebrothers website. Yeah. I think you were thinking, nice to see you.

That's what I was thinking. To see you. To see me, to see you, to see me, to see you. Thank you, James. Yes. We should move on. It is time for fact number three, and that is Chisinski.

Yeah, my fact this week is that when Walmart opened in Germany, it scrapped its policy of making employees smile at customers because the Germans found it too weird. This is a genuine problem. So Walmart started opening up stores in Germany in 1998, and they ended up in 95 stores opening, and it was just a disaster, really,

and Germany didn't really get along with Walmart very well. And one of the main reasons was these golden Walmart rules that they have in America, and they are, if a customer comes within 10 feet of you, you have to smile sweetly and offer help, and this is known as the 10-foot rule. And other things like if a shopper made a complaint it needs to be dealt with by sundown,

that's called the sundown rule, and customers' bags have to be packed at checkout, and it turned out they did this in Germany, and they did various studies, researchers looked at how it was playing, and it was playing badly. So smiling was interpreted as flirting or creepy, and the head of the Walmart trade union said in Germany,

just said, Germans don't behave that way, we don't do the smiling, and then the biggest German research institute said, in Germany, if people try putting stuff in a bag for you, the customer will just think, hey, I just paid for that, that's mine, what are you doing putting in a bag? So it didn't work, and it was just very interesting, so they had to cancel the policy

just because it's very different customer service in America to outside of America, it turned out. Amazing. I don't think of Germany as being unsmiley though. I think it's that America is very smiley. The 10 foot rule thing. Does that apply even if there's like a shelf in between you and the customer?

Yeah, you have to run all the way around. Yeah, and so Walmart's not in Germany anymore, is it? No. They all closed down. I read one of the things that they thought maybe was one reason why it didn't work, and that is because Walmart employees are required every morning to stand in formation and chant,

Walmart, Walmart, Walmart. And they thought maybe the Germans didn't really like standing in a row chanting things for obvious reasons. They would always make them do the charm, which was like, give me a W, give me an A, and apparently lots of stuff used to just hide in the toilets

for that part, as I think a lot of us would come if you were forced to do that every day. And also they had to chant every morning at the morning meeting at the end of every meeting. The boss would say, who is number one? And all the staff would have to chant the customer, of course. So I think staff spent a lot of time in the bathrooms. Magical kind of work and just chanting,

no such thing as this, no such thing as this. Well, if you turned up on time a bit more often, you'd see. In fact, that goes for all three of you, may I say. So in some countries, I read the New York Times said that they've had trouble in various places. In Korea, apparently, they ran into trouble because they had taller racks than those of local rivals. And so it was just a bit harder to reach the stuff

and customers would have to get on ladders. So I was like, oh, maybe the average height in Korea is a bit shorter. I looked it up. Koreans are exactly the same average height as British people. So it just apparently they slightly overshot the shelf height in Walmart. Yeah, but Walmart's ladder sales went hugely through the roof.

It's like a cult, though. I was reading a blog by a guy called... Sorry, Andy, a blog is where people just put thoughts and stuff. I was reading a blog by an ex-Walmart employee who was saying that they get really obsessed with boxcutters. So they get given a boxcutter when they join as a member of staff. This is in America and he said staff go apeshit for these boxcutters. And every staff meetings, they would have Sam Walton trivia contest.

Now, Sam Walton is the guy who founded Walmart. I don't know how much trivia there is about Sam Walton, but apparently enough to have a trivia quiz on him every staff meeting. And where the answer is always Sam Walton. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, is Sam Walton the best person ever? Yes, correct. Walmart, Walmart, Walmart, Walmart.

And then the winner of that quiz, who clocked onto that, would get a slightly pedabox cutter. And then this member of staff said they used to taunt the other staff with their slightly better boxcutters. But that's quite aggressive. Yeah, with a knife. So I was looking at like smiling around the world, happiness with different countries.

You always get these things where all the countries are ordered by how happy they are, don't you? And usually the same people in Costa Rica or something. But Denmark has won it for the last few years. And this year they were beaten by Norway into second place. But actually the guy in charge of happiness in Denmark said he was, he was very happy for them. Lying bastard.

He said we don't have a monopoly on happiness. Wow. That's, I mean, but that's the ultimate happy sentence to lose the happiness competition. That's almost, we're going to have to take the prize off you. That guy just went uber happy. That's insane. Yeah.

And that's obviously why he did it, the cynical bastard. He said, he said that and then he went, are we back at the top spot? Yep. Great. Where McDonald's opened in Russia, in fact, where, you know, the service industry has slightly different cultural norms. Staff were taught how to smile. The Russian staff were taught how to smile

because it's not a particularly normal thing. And actually there was a study that was done looking at how different countries view smiling. And in Russia, most people view someone who smiles a lot as quite stupid. Yeah. Whereas in America and actually in Britain, we view them as a bit more intelligent.

In fact, if someone smiles at you and they engage with you. It all depends, I would say, on context. If there's someone smiling at you on the bus and they won't stop. It is true, though, actually in Russia because my wife's Russian, so I go to Russia occasionally and they just don't smile in photographs. They do a bit now, but in the olden days

they really wouldn't smile in photographs. Yeah. And it was very much frowned upon. I'm sorry. I almost bottled out of that joke, can't wait. And I thought there's nowhere to go in it. But it is actually true. It is, yeah.

If you see old pictures of Russians from the, even from the 80s and 90s, they're just very... Yeah. Americans used to be really serious. They used to have a reputation for being serious until the mid-19th century. Really? Yeah.

So I was just thinking of the very old photos that used to get taken where nobody's smiling and you often read that and the reason that no one's smiling is because that just was the thing. You just don't smile. I didn't realize it's because of the long exposure of the photo, so it takes so long

for the photo to be taken and you don't know exactly what point it's going to be. You just had to keep a normal face. I mean, not in the 1980s. Camera technology had come quite long back then. Yeah, no. I mean, the super old school, we're talking like, I guess, the, you know, BC.

Yeah. Before cameras. Yeah. But so because, yeah, it was just, the exposure was too long. So to hold a smile, to hold the cheese, it would be so long that you would just look pained and it would be, yeah.

I have read a debunk of that, actually, just for the record, that maybe the exposure wasn't quite as long as we thought. It was only about 30 seconds and anyone could hold a smile for 30 seconds. But I don't know. No, but they were just getting used to smiles back then. So it would have felt a lot longer.

Yeah. They could have had a happiness hat. This was something in the news a few years ago. And the happiness hat was a hat, obviously, and it was made of metal. And it had like these kind of metal bits coming down the side. And then it had a metal spike. And whenever it sensed that you were frowning,

it would stab you in the head with a spike and remind you to smile. Oh, God. Really? Which shopping chain was this? Where was this? It was just one guy who invented it. Oh, really?

But he hit the news. Yeah. Wow. Should we move on to our final fact? Yeah, we should. OK, it is time for our final fact of the show. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that it is really easy to beat chimpanzees

at the game Rock, Paper, Scissors. Yeah. Really? It's chimpanzees have recently been taught to play Stone, Paper, Scissors, Rock, Paper, Scissors, Rushambo, whatever you call the game. And they actually, you know, the flip side is they actually know how to play Stone, Paper, Scissors.

It's amazing. And they can learn it to the level of what a four-year-old would learn it. So you could actually, at the moment, they've only been playing with computer simulations, so playing against a computer or an iPad. But if you were to play them, you could actually have a genuine game

with the movements of Rock, Paper, Scissors, and beat them. The reason you can beat them is they're really bad at learning from their mistakes. So whereas four-year-olds will make a mistake and go, I need to adjust, chimpanzees will be like, I'll use paper again. And then afterwards, when they're beaten again,

they'll be like, I'll go for paper this time. And then when you beat them again, they're like, oh, he's not going to see what's coming next. Good old trusty paper. But if I was playing against them, I might think they're not going to be stupid enough to go for paper again. As I would probably lose.

You're still sore about them as you lost. Actually, they're a lot better than you'd think, Dan. It's interesting, because it took them, the chimpanzees who learned, they tried it, I think on seven chimpanzees, and five of them managed to master it. It did take them 100 days to learn it. So it's a very, very long time for them to learn.

Yeah, 30, it's a simple game. I mean, I don't want to brag, but I got it in about 30 days. Anyway, but the really tricky thing that the chimpanzees didn't get was the circular nature of it. So they understood, rock beats scissors, and then they understood, okay, scissors beat paper,

but they found it hard to get the head around paper and then beats rock. Really? That makes it even more weird that they went for paper every time. But actually, I'm with them. Why does paper beat rock? I mean, I know it covers it. But that's not beaten, is it?

I mean, scissors is actually demolishing the paper, isn't it? And then rock is demolishing the scissors. Yeah, but if you hide a rock in some paper, you can smuggle it into a recycling bin. Got it. In Japan, it's Tiger, a village chief, and the village chief's mother. What?

And that's circular things. So the village chief's mother kills the village chief because she's angry with him. The village chief kills the tiger, and the tiger kills the village chief's mother. Do you know the Indonesian version? No. It's called ant human elephant. So the human tramples the elephant...

Er, the... Those tiny elephants, they have in Indonesia. I think I got confused between ant and elef ant. And it foxed me. Sorry. The human tramples the ant. The human tramples the ant, then the elephant squashes the human, but then the ant beats the elephant by...

Trampos it. Yeah. Is that the ant gets into the elephant's ear, and it tickles it. Oh. Really? I read that the ant crawls up the elephant's trunk and eats its brain. Maybe I was really... Oh, I'm sorry. I had parental guide locked on.

So I am very confused by the chimp fact. I didn't realise they were less good than us because there's no such thing as being good at rock, paper, scissors. There is no strategy. You can't learn from your mistakes because we all basically make the same mistakes and we can't really predict each other particularly. I mean, if you're really a pro, then maybe.

You've obviously not been on the rock, paper, scissors website. They have a lot of tactics on that. One thing is, if your opponent pays scissors in the first go, you can tell by how wide the scissor is what they're going to do in the next go. No, you can't. Well, no, you can't. I mean, they say you can.

Apparently, this is a trendy strategy. It's the exclusion strategy. So you never play, say, rock, and you keep doing different ones. You keep doing paper or scissors, and your opponent just gets obsessed by the fact that you've never played rock, and it just fucks with their mind.

That's great. That's a good idea, right? And that's the trendy strategy. That's how it'll be cool as someone who subscribes to rock, paper, scissors.com. You don't actually have to subscribe to a website. You can just... You can just go there and then go away. Some of them you do, like hamsterpon.com.

Children are very hard to play at rock, paper, scissors. They're very good at playing it because their choices are genuinely random. They haven't yet mastered the gambits that James is discussing, so they're much likelier just to go with whatever, and that makes them quite hard to beat. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

You don't want to overthink it. Hey, I found a cool thing about chimpanzees. Chimpanzees can recognize each other by face, like we do, but if they're just walking along and a chimpanzee's facing the other way and the butt is showing, they'll see the butt and be like,

Greg, they have an understanding of bums that they can just... If you put a lineup of bums in front of them, they'd be like Mark, Sonja, Alice, John... Is that what chimp line-ups are? Is it like any of these people, the people who pick-pocketed you the other day, Mrs. Chimp, and then she's like, that bum there?

It's good because once you've robbed someone, you run away, don't you, so you're likely to see the bum. Yes, exactly. Oh, there was... I heard an amazing burglary. Burl... Burl... Burl... burglary. Robbery? Robbery.

We did the audiobook the other day for the book that we've done, and it took forever for me to say basic words like that. The best one was when you misread February as January. It was truly bizarre. Yeah, so there was this fact that we got... we found the other day, which is that a burglar is always most likely going to knock on your door

before they burgle you. Isn't that weird? Is that so they can check if someone's in? Yeah, basically, but if you're going to get robbed, they're just always going to knock for us like in a polite fashion as opposed to just breaking a window or whatever. Yeah, I don't think it's out of politeness that they're doing it, but yeah. So have you read the thing about chimps,

that they, according to the New York Times, have the ability to cook if only someone would give them an oven? This is what scientists... I'm like that. This is something that scientists have just concluded, and they did this in a study where the researcher in Volve said, we invented a magic cooking device to test on the chimps.

As he explained it, it's two plastic bowls, and the chimp puts a raw potato in one of the plastic bowls, and then in the other one, there's a cooked potato, and you maneuver the bowls to make the chimps think that his raw potato has been cooked. Why this guy didn't just use the already existing oven that we have, I don't know. But it turns out that chimps do prefer,

if you give them a bit of raw potato, they prefer to put it in the plastic bowl that will then magically cook the potato, and then to eat the cooked potato, than just to eat it raw. And so that kind of shows that chimps have self-control. They're willing to postpone the potato to make it taste nicer. And also, according to the scientists who did the experiment, it shows they have the causal understanding

to make the leap to cooking, which I would argue, believing that you're putting a raw potato into a plastic bowl, and then leaving it for 10 seconds before getting a cooked one is not having the causal understanding. Yeah, that's true. But I didn't know they preferred cooked food. Yeah, neither did I. But I don't know how my microwave works.

If you told me that some scientists just replace it with a cooked risotto. I'll buy it. Okay, shall we wrap up? Okay, that is it. That is all 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've said over the course of this podcast,

we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland. You, Andy, are... Excuse me. Me, Andy. I'm at Chuckle Brothers. I just saw that was Bruce Forsythe. It's an anti-climax now, but at Andrew Hunter M.

James. At James Harkin. And Chazinsky. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing. You can also go to our website, nosuchthingasafish.com. And there's every episode that we've done that's up there.

You can get links to every bit of our tour. You can also buy our new book, The Book of the Year. It's out November 2nd. And we're about to give one away, actually, to one of the members of the audience who sent us a fact. James, you've got the fact. I have. It is from Scott Robinson.

And the fact is that cleaning your teeth is the only time you get to clean your skeleton. That's so cool. So creepy. Is that true? That's our skeleton? Not quite true, you just said. Whoa.

We've not had this on the show before. Right. Who shall it fight? I think what we can do is a game of rock, paper, scissors. Yes. Yes. So this guy here, who the quibbler, I'm going to call you. Yeah.

If you show in front of your chest what you want to do for rock, paper, scissors, and then we'll get Scott to shout out what he wants to do, and we'll see if there's a winner. Oh, wow. This is so exciting. I can't see it. Yeah. I can see it.

OK. OK, Scott, shout out. What have you got? His Scott's the winner. Yes. Oh. Oh. Scott, come and grab a book from us.

We'll be here. You went for paper. Let's do it again. He'll never do paper again. Oh, man. He won't do paper. OK. Well, we'll be back again next week with another episode.

Thank you so much for being here, everyone. Thank you so, so much. We'll see you again next week. Goodbye. Thank you.