No Such Thing As A Fish - 220: No Such Thing As A Million Dots

Episode Date: June 8, 2018

Anna, James, Andy and other James discuss bouliganism, flying on Titan, and tiny, tiny wasps.Episode 220 - No Such Thing As A Million Dots

Hello and welcome to another podcast from No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly show coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Anna Tyshinski and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and fellow QI elf James Rawson and we are going to tell you our four favorite facts from the last seven days, starting with Rawson. My fact this week is that Usain Bolt could fly on Titan. Do we say Usain or Usain? Oh good question. I say Usain. Do you? But Usain Usain. Let's call the whole thing up. So Titan we're talking about the, oh is it Titan? No it's Titan. We're talking about the moon. We are talking about Saturn's largest moon and it has a couple of things going for it that

make it really great for human flight. Well one bad thing, lack of humans. Yes that is a bad thing but a good thing is that its gravity is only 14% as strong as Earth's so pretty low gravity and its air pressure is 50% higher than Earth's so really weak gravity and really strong nice thick air. So people have said anecdotally for years that if you could get people on their straps and wings on them they'd be able to fly like birds. But in 2014 some students from the University of Leicester actually did the physics and they worked out that if you were wearing a normal wingsuit which has a wingspan of about 1.4 square meters and if you were going to get 11 meters per second you would be able to run, jump up and take off and fly.

So great. So if you're a normal person you couldn't right? It's only if you're as fast as Usain Bolt. He is just him and a few others who are cracking that speed isn't it? So Usain Bolt can go at 12 meters per second or he could in his heyday. He's now retired so I imagine that he's useless. Usain Bolt in the day could do it. A normal person could do it if they could run at 6 meters per second but they would have a large and unwieldy wingsuit so they wouldn't be able to get away with the normal sort of day-to-day wingsuit that we're all wearing now. Very cool. You also need a very warm coat though wouldn't you because the temperature is about minus 180 degrees Celsius. Yeah quite a warm coat and actually a warm coat would weigh you down quite a lot

and then the physics probably wouldn't work anymore. Well if you had a very big coat do you remember when you were a kid and there was like high winds like gales and you would hold your coat out and then try and fly with it? Yeah that was great. Or your umbrella sometimes you'd fly with an umbrella? Yeah well I wasn't Mary Poppins when I went to school. But actually you couldn't do it with the winds because there's not much wind on Titan is there? No. And that's because the temperature is always very low and we get our wind on Earth because of the changes in temperature with the Sun and they don't really get those changes of temperature. Yeah which is why they because they've got lakes one of the reasons it's so great for human habitation

apparently is that it's got stable liquids on its surface hasn't it which is extremely unusual and it has an atmosphere that is sort of similar to Earth but it's liquids well similar. It's not similar it's got it's got a vaguely similar level of kind of thickness and it's got some nitrogen in it. It's got lots and lots of nitrogen there's no problem with nitrogen you like nitrogen you gotta love Titan but it's got no oxygen basically. So the lakes are made out of methane. They are it has a lot of methane and ethane in it which I imagine means that it smells really bad on there. Well in fact I think they might have looked into how the atmosphere there smells they've tried to recreate it. Scientists did this this year or last year and they got some methane and ethane

involved they got some nitrogen involved and it still wasn't behaving quite like Titan's atmosphere and then they added some benzene and that's the crucial ingredient that mimics the atmosphere and it smells like petrol. So the whole place if we live there smells like a petrol station. Yeah I love the smell of petrol stations can I just say it's one of my favorite smells. Yeah it's very nice I like that too but a lot of people kept saying how good Titan would be. And they were saying things like that you know it's got some liquid it's got an atmosphere it's the only other place in our solar system where it rains. Basically it just sounds like a recipe for a very bad picnic.

I think it's really really habitable compared to the other moons in the solar system which is a bit of a low bar. The other thing about picnics is instead of wasp flying around you have 100 meter runners kind of flying around. Another good thing about Titan since you're so busy about mouthing it is that this is so they've recreated also Titan's lakes because there's a plan for NASA to send a submarine up there in 2025. I'd send a spaceship if I was NASA but so on. You need to ride to them. They're sending a submarine up and they're going to get there and they need to dive so they need to deal with the coldness of the liquid but they've realized that ice books can't form so one of the people recreating this has said a really vital positive

is the fact that because the freezing temperature of these methane lakes is so low icebergs not a possibility so you won't get Titanic on Titan and also the submarine won't crash into any icebergs. Do you know who might be crewing this submarine that we're going to send up? Robots. Bacteria. Come on. Well it's a stretch but no they're um so they're a deep-sea bacteria which theoretically could survive there. But they can't drive a spaceship or a submarine can they? There'll be an intense training montage with the back of your head. No but they're called, oh this is a tough name, methanothermicoccus okinawensis and they can survive irrespective of temperature and pressure and vitamins and toxic chemicals and I think they live around vents very

deep in the sea. Vitamins did you say? Yeah they don't even, they won't even need to take vitamin meals in pill form when they're in space. I don't save on that too much. I think basically they just go into hibernation as soon as the conditions arrive for them to spring back into life they do. So we could possibly set up a submarine in front of those guys and just see how they did. I went on to Yale Scientific Magazine because they had an article why can't humans fly? We can't, turns out. We would need a wingspan of at least 6.7 meters to fly according to this website. That's 6.7 across the whole wingspan so 3.35 either side. Yeah it's still a lot and it would make the wings too heavy to function unfortunately and also the muscles that you need. So those

wings would need to have smaller wings helping them fly. Well we've sort of cracked quite an important human powered flight thing really recently didn't we because there was a prize set up in 1970 I think it was awarding £250,000 for the first person to make a human powered helicopter and it was thought to be impossible and all these studies were written saying it's impossible and I only found next I was reading a Washington Post article saying no one's come anywhere close to achieving this in 2011 and then in 2013 we did it or engineers from the University of Toronto did it and they've built this helicopter which is basically about the size of a football pitch with these powered by one human. Yeah it's unbelievably light it weighs

only 50 kilos but it's ridiculously large because as you say you've got to have really big wings and there's a little guy on a bicycle in the middle of it who's down but he's cycling up. It's amazing. And then well it's not as amazing as it wants to be. So my wife flies helicopters yeah and we always have to find a place for her to land which is not too many trees around and stuff like that. I think if your helicopter is the size of a football pitch that is going to be tough right. It's too big. I looked up a list of names of human powered flight machines. Oh great. They were called things like the reluctant phoenix. That's got a drag name isn't it. That does sound like they once crashed it in a ball of flames and they couldn't get it back again.

There was a reluctant phoenix the Perkins inflatable which I liked there was the puffin the puffin two and there were three called Icarus named after the name after the thing that the one who dies. Yeah they only read the first half of the story. This is great. Don't need to finish. Really respect this guy's confidence. Usain Bolt who I know you've touched on in the past but did you know that so he has scoliosis so he has curvature of the spine so his legs are actually significantly different length from each other. Like which of the third. Not quite as dramatic as Richard the third I don't think but his right leg is half an inch shorter than his left. The prevailing wisdom is that if you want to go in a straight line as fast as you can you

should be symmetrical and obviously he's not quite symmetrical and they don't know if he was symmetrical would he go faster or does this slight off balance somehow work in his favor because he goes pretty quick. You do know about the sport. For someone who doesn't like sport you've picked a very sport based fact involving both sprinting and flying. There is a sprinter at the moment called Brianna Liston and she's 12 years old. She's from Jamaica and in 2017 she ran the 100 meters in 11.86 seconds which is unbelievably fast and in fact if she'd have taken part in the 1896 Olympics she would have won by more than 0.1 of a second 12 year old girl. The team behind the Cassini mission which was

the probe that went to Saturn and it dropped off the how do you pronounce it Huygens is the moon lander that they dropped down. It's the only human thing ever to land on a body beyond the asteroid belt and now it's there it's going to be there for millions of years is very very cool. Anyway the Cassini probe the team behind it they spent 20 years working on it there's huge long project and they got so close that they had all these cool team things that they did together so they had a softball team called the roving marauders and whenever there was a big date in Cassini or Saturn or what at Titan history they would brew a special beer and they give it a special name. Do you think we should do that? We already do James but softball is only a three

player game and there's a no James's rule and I already turn up. Okay we should move on on to fact number two and that is my fact my fact this week is that in 1604 one of King James the first grooms rode from London to York and back five times in the space of five days for a bet. Wow did you choose a James fact because James Rossin is here today? I did yeah it's the first James. Yeah why have you never done a James fact before? I just never noticed you being here I guess. Yeah this this is really cool so this is a guy called John Lepton and it was first recorded in this amazing book which I wasted all my research time reading today which was this book called abridgment of the English Chronicle and

it was written in 1604 by a guy who died in 1605 so he just got in there and yeah it was a story that he sort of said that he reckoned he'd be able to go to and from London and York five times in six days and he ended up managing to do it with one day to spare. Wow it is really good that isn't it? Yeah is it different horse every time? That's the annoying thing it wasn't recorded how often he changed his horses. You would normally change your horse though on a journey that long I don't think. Would you? Yeah oh yeah yeah yeah yeah from my knowledge of horses. Probably swapping at Watford Gap. Yeah so when he finished this according to the book that I read it said I think this is probably the same one he finished his appointed journey to the admiration of all men

in five days and upon Tuesday the 28th he came to court at Greenwich to his majesty in as fresh and cheerful a manner as when he first began. Yeah although he arrived on so he was due to arrive on the Saturday night it's really cool this account because it really gives intense details of the time he arrived how long he slept for he arrived on the Friday night and then there is a gap in our knowledge for the Friday for the Saturday and the Sunday so you can only imagine he got absolutely hammered in York for Saturday and Sunday woke up with a heinous hangover on Monday and then struggled back to be cheerful on Tuesday sounds great. One thing that I think I read about this which I think is quite interesting from the Journal of Sport History it said that this could kind of

be seen as the first sporting record so it wasn't really until the 19th century that people became obsessed with like I've done this sport in this amount of time you know that kind of record breaking mentality. It was another two centuries before men began routinely to abstract the quantified performance as a mark to be equalled or surpassed but this is kind of the first instance of that happening he said I can travel this long in this distance distance. Yeah will you put money on it. Exactly that's really cool they do don't they they quote the first sort of sporting match that we have a record of but I was reading again in this book that there were lots of really weirdly progressive rules around it so it became a huge gambling thing you often bet on horse races

then as now but if you won more than a hundred marks on a horse race you had to give up all of your remainder to the poor so that was a rule that was introduced introduced in James's time there was an act passed in Scotland that said stop feeding horses hard meat in summer that practice being held one among other occasions of dearth of victuals which I think is basically the poor people need meat in summer and if people keep feeding it to their horses then the poor people aren't getting it which is very progressive. I feel like the national lottery. A lot like exactly like the national lottery. Where if you win more than a hundred quid you have to give the rest of the poor. Not quite like the national lottery. Do you know about John Lepton's other

horse feet? No do you mean hooves? Yeah hooves that's it. So surely after this event there was remember remember the 5th of November the gunpowder plot and a couple of days after Thomas Percy was a fugitive he was involved in the conspiracy everyone was looking for him so he had connections in Northumberland, Cumberland and Yorkshire in the north of England and people thought that he might be sort of hiding out there so our hero John Lepton was sent to see if they could find him. And according to my source John Lepton missed his man and his epic ride took him to Scotland before he realised that the trail had gone cold so in that instance he sort of overshot his mark a little bit. Well because he was so fast so he was probably going by the average time he

was told. He probably thought he was in Wolverhampton and then went around and he was in Scotland. I've got to think about a great horse racing bet. Oh good. Well this is a bet about distance and travel so there was a guy called Lord March who made a bet that he could get a letter 50 miles in an hour which at the time exactly was impossible. I would take that bet. Yeah exactly no horse couldn't run at 50 miles an hour for an hour even if you were on a cheetah it would be pretty hard. A cheetah couldn't do that. He won the bet. No. Yes he didn't use horses. Did he use pigeons. No that's quite a good idea although I don't even know I'm not sure they can get 50 miles an hour. What he did was this is very clever he put the letter inside a ball okay and then he hired.

Oh hamsters. No. He hired 20 expert cricketers and for an hour they threw it in a massive circle all the way around over and over again. The letter travelled more than 50 miles. No way. In that hour. Doesn't count. He won the bet. Well I wouldn't pay up. Pointless. Hasn't got anywhere. I think that's a really crafty Lord March. He's a clever man. I've got a couple of ridiculous wages from the 18th century so I think that wages really took off in the 18th century when it all just got a bit silly. In 1735 Count de Buchberg bet a large wage on riding to Edinburgh backwards on a horse which was accomplished in just under four days. I don't know if the Count did it or if he got someone to do it. So just to be clear the horse

is going forwards but you're facing backwards or is the horse facing backwards. I think it's like on a train where the train's going forward and you're facing backwards. You probably didn't need to make a train analogy there. It's like a horse going forward and you're facing backwards. And in 1770 I read this from The Gentleman which is just so great. Two L's bet that one could ride from London to Edinburgh and back in less time than it took the other one to draw a million dots. He's counting the million. I do not know. So they announced the wager but then there doesn't seem to be any sort of follow-up or result section in the following issue. So you don't know who won that. So I don't know who won.

Actually you only don't know who won because it's a very long line of dots and you don't know what happens at the end of the long line of dots. There's a lot of suspense. But he could make the dots in the most expedious manner that he could contrive which I think includes hiring people to draw dots or some sort of mechanical process to draw dots. Hiring a million people it's just one dot each. Just glue a million pencils together and make one dot. Just glue a million pencils Does it count the time that you take gluing the pencils together or? Yeah, that's all part of the problem you see. Like the time it takes me to press a dot, right, a dot, you're not going to be able to do one pencil gluing are you?

I would start gluing. I would start just drawing dots but I would instruct a friend to go and hire a lot of people immediately to come and join and hire and draw more dots. I reckon a thousand people at a thousand dots. Oh easy, yeah. But I'm paying a thousand people. Like peasants? Yeah. 18th century peasants? They just do what you tell them. But so many peasants are illiterate. I don't know if that's true. You can still draw a dot if you're illiterate. No, they were really illiterate back then. I just got lines. What if you get a paintbrush and just kind of flick it? Does that count as a dot? Let me revisit the word here. Amazing. But what a good bet because he would be drawing

dots, drawing dots and the other guy would be riding to Edinburgh. It's very exciting and suspenseful and there are different kinds of achievement as well. I think that would be really exciting to watch. I think if they had the Grand National and they also had some dots riding competition at the same time, it would be a hell of a lot more popular. There's another good bet which is another kind of crafty bit, a bit like Andy's, where someone was outwitted. This was in the 18th century and the Earl of Barrymore, who apparently was known as Hellgate or rake of rakes because he was big womanizer and a bit of a rake. He thought he was a bit of a sportsman. He was very tall and thin and his hair was all

big and fine. He liked to gather leaves. Yeah, like that. He fancied himself as a sportsman and this guy called Mr Bullock challenged him to a running race and Bullock was a massively fat, unfit man. He weighed 18 stone and he said, I challenge you to a race. All I'm saying is I want a 35-yard head start and I want to be able to choose the route and Barrymore said, yeah, sure, I'm way fitter than you. Look at you, you're a mess. And so lots of people put money on it. Everyone backed Barrymore and Bullock took those bets so he's the only one backing himself and the route he chose ran through an extremely narrow alley and so he ran the entire route with poor old Barrymore not being able to squeeze past him on either side and apparently sort of

wobbled from side to side as he went to make sure there was no way of passing. That is brilliant. I've got a fact about jockeys as we're on horse racing. So jockey posture, you know that weird posture that jockeys have? No. They're kind of crouched on a horse. They're all sort of hunched up. This only caught on in 1898. Before that, you just sit upright and try and win the horse race and there was a guy, a jockey called James Forman Sloan, he started doing it and it was like the Fosbury flop, you know, in high jumping. Within 10 years, everyone around the world was doing it and horse race completion times improved by five to seven percent over those 10 years,

solely because of this guy. Wow. Yeah. I can't believe they didn't figure that out before. It's so obvious. But it's not by reducing wind resistance, which you might think it would be. No, I wouldn't have thought that. I would have thought you were kind of getting a bit of a movement going. I'm doing the moves. It's grinding back and forth. When you're upright, you're like a sandbag and you jog up and down on the horse, but when you're in jockey position or if they call it martini glass position, you can move relative to the horse. So you are moving at a more constant speed and I think it just helps the whole figure a bit more smoothly, maybe for the horse and for you. Like finding a resonance almost. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Do you guys know that the precursor to the steeple chase was the wild goose chase? So I just came across this in an old book, which was referring to a wild goose chase as an actual race. And this was the main horse race that people bet on before the steeple chase. And what you did was the horses all started running and after racing each other, after 12 score yards, after 240 yards, whoever was in the lead was the one who chose the route from that point onwards. Amazing. So they all went into this really thin and it was mad. And so you'd like dodge about, you jump over a ditch and then suddenly you'd take them over a massive fence. They didn't know what they were doing. That's a really good idea.

But then if you overtake them, do you then get to choose the route? No, if you overtake them, then you've won. Wait, but if you overtake them, there's no route to get wrong, is there? So if you overtake them, you choose the route. That's why I was thinking, but actually that's the end of the race if you overtake them. That's the end of the race because apparently when you choose the route. When's the race end? You just have to run forever. This is why it was banned. Too many thousands of deaths. It was very dangerous and it was banned according to this sports illustrator or something in 1856, sports illustrator equivalent. It was banned because it was too hard on the horses and the riders because they would just collapse in the end.

They'd just go on and on and on dodging about and then one of them would collapse. That's amazing. But that's the original Wild Goose chase. In 2012, Prince Harry bought shares in a horse called Usain Colt. Amazing. James, you could edit that into either section of the show. I love that. That's so funny. Okay, we should move on to fact number three and that is Andy's fact. That's right. My fact is that there are species of wasps the size of amoeba. So cool. Very cool. And not a special giant amoeba either because there are giant amoeba

we talked about before on the show. Yeah, because I was going to say there's an amoeba which is 10 centimetres long. Exactly. So no. And the smallest dog is 9.65 centimetres. So there are dogs that are smaller than amoebas. So exactly. Amoeba, James. Yeah. Can we clarify plurals? Amoeba. Yeah. So this is a wasp called Mega Fragma Mimario Penne and it's 0.2 millimetres long. It's the third smallest insect known. The other two smaller ones are also wasps. So I've just picked this guy because he's been studied. But it's the size of an amoeba and it's got eyes, brains, wings,

muscle, gut. So it's obviously made up of thousands and thousands and thousands of cells, but it's the size of a one cell organism. And it's done that. There's been a study by a scientist called Alexei Polilov and it found that basically they're missing huge amounts of stuff and they have to cut down on their own brains and remove all the nuclei from the cells inside their skull just to make room for a few neurons. Really? It's incredibly weird. Well, so do they have nuclei and then they extract them as they grow or they just don't have any nuclei from the start? I think it destroys them until it only has a few hundred. This is what I read. Is it one of these that doesn't really need to make that many decisions in life?

Yeah. It's like it's simple. You don't need that many neurons, right? But it's only got a hundred perhaps as many as a bee. And bees themselves do not make that many decisions. No. Flower hive, flower hive. It's about the size of a human ovum. That does not help put things in perspective. No. Think of a very small full stop. Now think of a million of those. I'm afraid you've only drawn 999999 dots because this is a wasp. What's the name of the wasp? Megafragma mymeropenia. There's another one, which is small. I think it might be one of the two that's smaller than this one called dycopomorpha echmeptaregis. Something like that. And it's the males that

are really small in this species. I don't know if it's the same with yours. And the reason they're so small is because basically they never leave their egg. They kind of live inside their egg and they mate with their sisters inside the egg. And then the sisters fly off and they just die. Oh mate, broaden your horizons. That's crazy. Yeah. So that's their whole life. They just, they grow up in the egg, they mate with their sisters, they die. So are these parasitic wasps? Is it their own egg they're in or are they in someone else's egg? They're in their own egg. Okay. Yeah. But parasitic wasps are amazing. Yeah. Actually, you said wasps there instead of wasps. I'll say it again then. But do you know that wasp used to be wasps?

Really? Yeah. And then it got changed just through people saying it wrong over the years. That's very funny. As in it comes from an old Germanic word, wasps. I really hope it shows an etymology with whoops. It probably doesn't, but it would be nice, wouldn't it? What, like whoops? I've stepped on a whoops. Yeah, parasitic wasps are totally awesome, aren't they? Well, there's a piece by Ed Young who writes a lot about bacteria. He writes for the Atlantic. It's a great piece. He's so good. I just want to say he's probably my favorite, like science journalist, and you should all look at it. Yeah, I agree. All right, cut off my turf. Do you get, do you get his weekly email that he sends with all of his writings in it?

Well, I will say Ed Young today. There's a piece by him where he's saying everyone thinks the beetle is the king of the things because there are so many species of them. So he writes a bit better than saying the king of the things. I don't think he does. I don't think it's possible. So there are 380,000 species of beetle, which is a quarter of all animal species, which is a lot obviously. But there's a scientist from the University of Iowa called Andrew Forbes who reckons that there are so many parasitic wasps and that every single species of insect even has at least one and probably several species of tiny, tiny parasitic wasp inside it. He reckons that wasps outnumber even

beetles by about two and a half times. So is that like if everyone on the planet had an average of two hats, then there has to be more hats than people? Exactly. Okay. So the people are beetles and the hats are wasps. Yeah, exactly. There are shed loads of wasps given that we don't give them enough credit. I think there are just over 5,000 species of mammal and 14,000 of ant and 200,000 species of wasp. And even if the fig wasps have many thousands of species of fig wasp, don't they? So we need to pay them more attention. They're so small that no one notices them. Even if you find a new beetle, it's probably got loads of wasps living in it that you don't know about. There's an amazing quote from Josephine Rodriguez, who is an entomologist who was

responding to this discussion about there being more wasps than beetles. And she says, it doesn't surprise me at all that there are more wasps. I really think that only people that would disagree would be the fly people. So just like the politics within entomology is great. Oh, Perica McAllister isn't listening to this. She's a fly person. Has she been on that planet? We've had her on? Yes. Yeah, she'll be fuming. She'll go out and find 100,000 different species of fly today. There's a really cool parasitic wasp called the green eyed wasp, which parasites of a ladybird. So it lays its eggs inside a ladybird. And then when they hatch, they come out and they immediately weave this cocoon between this ladybird's legs. And this paralyzes the

ladybird, but it also sort of possesses the ladybird. So it turns it into a zombie. When you say so weaving the cocoon between the legs, which paralyzes them, is it like tying someone's shoelaces together? It's exactly the same as that. Except also, if you tie someone's shoelaces together and then you injected their brain with some kind of chemical that turned them into a zombie. That is a next level prank. You get two detentions for that one. But yeah, this is really cool. So this ladybird sits there and it's possessed, which means it twitches involuntarily, which scares away any potential predators. So it's just standing there like this great fort with the babies all in between its legs. And then

they crack out and leave and the ladybird, I guess, dies. No, not true. Really? A quarter of the ladybirds recover and some of them are even parasitized again. So no. Do you want to hear about my favorite messed up wasp? Yes, please. Oh, no, it's not. It's a fly. Anyway, Erica will love this. Okay. It's this is the smallest fly that exists. Okay. Okay. And it feeds on itself really tiny ants, not even normal sized ants, really small ants. And what it does is the egg hatches inside the ant parasitic fly. It goes into the head of the ant from inside. And it starts eating it. So it feeds on the the muscles that control the mouth parts, which are very big and muscular bits. So the ant then can't chew. So he's walking around thinking, I can't chew anymore. And then

this tiny fly eats the brain. So the ant now can't think anymore. But you can't even think I can't do anymore. Exactly. So the but it stays walking around. It walks around for another fortnight while this fly is inside it eating it. And then finally, the fly lover dissolves the membrane, which keeps the ants head on and the ants head comes off. And then the fly just lives in the decapitated head for another fortnight, which I think is the most goth thing I can possibly imagine. How cool is that? And then once it's an adult, it just leaves the head leaves this decapitated head longer. How insane. It's all fucked up, isn't it? It's horrible. You know that it's so fucked up it made Charles Darwin question his belief in God. Parasitic wasps, he wrote a letter to a

fellow naturalist, Asa Gray said, I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps. He used the technical term with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars. Yeah, wow. It's a good point. It's not a nice thing to do. If there is a God, he's a goth. He then goes on to say, or that a cat should play with mice. So that also seemed to upset him quite a lot as well. Oh, no, they're just having fun cats and mice. We've all seen Tom and Jerry. Fortunately, he didn't live to see that tarot. Do you want to hear my favorite parasitic wasp? Yeah. Oh, we've all got one. It's so nice. So it's Asacodes abitasis. And it's a

parasitic wasp, which lays its eggs in another wasp, which is called Dibrakis bukianus. And then that lays its eggs in the pupae of a species of ikneumonidae wasps, which then lays its eggs in the caterpillar of the Cracopia moth, which lives and feeds in a popular wild cherry or apple tree. So that means it's a parasite inside a parasite inside a parasite inside a parasite inside a tree. Wow. I think this is where my hat metaphor falls around. It's the inception of the wasp world. Yeah. I was thinking it was the most disgusting Russian doll you could ever be. Do you want to know my least favorite wasp? Yep. It's the Tarantula hawk. And it's a type of wasp. And it has the worst sting probably of any wasp. And the recommendation

if you're stung by this wasp, and this is in a peer review journal, is to lie down and start screaming. What does that do? Well, apparently what happens is it's so painful that you're not going to be able to maintain verbal or physical coordination after you're stung and you're likely to just kind of run off and hurt yourself or whatever. Also lie down. And so the best thing to do is just lie down and scream and hopefully someone will come and help you. Wow. It's such a good name as well. Is it a tarantula? Is it a hawk? No, it's a wasp. The smallest fly in the world is named after Arnold Schwarzenegger. Nice. Is that an ironic kind of thing? No, it's because it's got big arms. It's a small, it's a tiny fly with massive arms. It's 0.395 millimeters long

and its arms are big relative to its body. It's not the size of Arnie. You don't just see a pair of arms lying on the ground with a tiny thing in between them. And the scientists who discovered it, Brian Brown said, as soon as I saw those bulging legs, I knew I had to name this one after Arnold. Legs. It doesn't have, of course, they don't have arms. They've got front legs, haven't they? Is that what you call your arms? That's what I call my arms. I've never known why you walk on all fours. But we're all mammals have two arms and two legs or four legs. But I believe flies are not mammals. Well, we don't have time to give them the time. We should probably move on. We should go on to fact number four and that is James's fact. Okay, my fact this week is

when petonc players getting to fights, it is known in the French press as booliganism. It's amazing. Love it. That's very good. So I read this in a recent Telegraph article and it is all about how they're trying to smarten up the reputation of the sport of petonc, which is French bull. So for anyone who doesn't know that, it's basically you have a big iron ball. It's not that big. It's about the size of a cricket ball. Iron ball and you throw it towards a small wooden jack and whoever gets closest wins. And they're trying to smarten it up. They've stopped people from wearing jeans. And also they're trying to stop this booliganism, which is alcohol fueled brawls between players, which has been tarnishing the sport for the last few years.

And it's an extremely traditional French pastime. I've seen people playing it. People playing in a square near where I used to live. On the peace. I've been to play in that square. It's brilliant in South London. It's very nice. You love it. Yeah. And you hire the equipment out from the pub. Did you get into any fights? Huge brawls. I'm not allowed back to South London actually. Well, I thought this, I thought this can't possibly be true, but it goes back about 10 years. So in 2017, some referees had to be given special protection from booligans. There were death threats at the World Cup in 2016. Yeah, it just, there are so many stories. One team said they were going to rip the heads off another team. Exactly. They didn't let them win.

And then the tournament organiser said, this sort of incident happens quite often in petonc, in response to that. There was one guy who got a 200 euro fine and a four year ban for hurling a bull at his rival. Wow. They are hard bulls. They're super hard, aren't they? You don't want that. There was, I think one guy, according to an economist article, was jailed for shooting dead a petonc rival when one of his bulls landed on his foot. What? What year was this? It didn't say. It just said in brackets, it was an economist article about petonc. And then it was just like, for instance, the guy from Grenoble who was jailed for shooting dead a rival when his bull landed on his foot. Close brackets, no more information. Oh my God. So I found three examples

of people who've died in the last 10 years playing petonc. And I was not looking for them. They just kept coming up in my search results. One of them was trampled by a runaway circus elephant, though. So I don't know if that counts as the dangers of petonc. That's what eventually cleared us off the South London. Right. Actually, this thing about them not being able to wear jeans, it's annoyed a lot of petonc players. And one player has protested by turning up to an official tournament game dressed as a clown, which now I hear about it seems a little bit too soon, almost. Yeah. Although, at least if another player's ball lands on your shoe, it probably won't hurt your foot. There is one thing that petonc players are now allowed to do, which they weren't a little while

ago, which is to drink during matches. And this is competition players. And yes, you're right, they are trying to professionalize, aren't they? Because they want it to be an Olympic thing. But they did persuade the world. This is a very French thing. They did persuade the world anti-doping agency. It is okay to have a glass of pasties or whatever during a competition. And they've been allowed to as of 2008. But they are still asked to abstain from steroids, growth hormones, heroin and cocaine. I can't imagine heroin is going to help you play for talk that much. No, it's a slow game. I mean, steroids aren't going to help you either. Oh, come on, you can get some proper power in your... Yeah, if you're really big, you can just kind

of lean over and put the ball down. It doesn't make your arms lengthen. Yeah, I don't really fancy it. I think a stretched arm's strong. I can't get over how full both of your arguments are. Andy's stories don't lengthen your arms. And James, it's not really a game of power. Look, we'll have a game soon. But there are a few different shots you can play. One where you just try and get it close to the jack. And another one where you try and bash the other guy's ball out of the way. It's kind of like Quidditch. Is it? Yeah, because in Quidditch, there are people who are trying to score points. And those are the people in Patonc who are shooting for the jack, the tiny wooden thing. And then you've also got shooters in Patonc who would be the

bludgers who try to, you know, they just attack other people. But they're not flying, are they? Yeah, they played it on Titan. Look, every now and then he breaks down eventually. I'm just saying you've got scorers and knockers. Do you? Talking of knockers, can we talk about kissing the funny? Smooth. Thanks. So kissing the funny is when if you lose a match 13-0, you then have to kiss the funny, which is where you ideally have to kiss the bear bottom of a lady called Fanny. But as there isn't always one available, you can kiss a picture of the bear bottom of a lady called Fanny, or quite often they have like small statues of fannies nearby that you can kiss the bottom of. So is that part of the equipment list for a match? I assume it must be.

Every club has its own model Fanny in France. Wow. They have them specially made. There was a match where someone lost very badly and a local waitress, I think, called Fanny said, you'll have to kiss me on the cheek if you lose. And then when the bear lost really, really badly, she said, well, you have to kiss me on the bum now. At some clubs in Provence have special rugs to kneel on while you're kissing the statuette of the woman called Fanny on the ass. It's a weird kind of prayer ritual. Do you know why England is not so good at petonc? Is it because we have crown green bowling or tempin bowling, so we don't really play it as much? That's a nice idea. I think, well, my theory as to why it's as to why we're not a

world leading petonc power is that we like to wear jeans a lot, so we won't be able to play anymore. That's another one. This is a bit more historical is that ever the third for bad people from playing, legally, you were not allowed to play, especially if you were an archer. And this goes back, you know, loads of sports were banned if you were an archer because you had to be doing your archery practice. But until the 18th century, artificers, laborers, apprentices and servants were banned from playing any time outside Christmas. Really? Yeah, which is not good for training. And also, yeah, because in Christmas, the ground's going to be cold, snowy maybe, so you might not be able to play anyway.

Poor playing conditions. Good point. Yeah, it was thought of as a kind of corrupt sport, wasn't it? Like only people of ill repute played it. It was associated with saloons and gambling and stuff like that. All back to the gambling. Well, you say that Britain is in a petonc powerhouse, but we do have teams in 2002, Pursil sponsored and paid for the kit of the British nude petonc team. Paid for the kit? Yes. So I think it was mostly sweat buns. So do you say same as Pursil? Pursil, so exactly the clothes detergent brand. Why do you associate yourself with something as risque as nude for top? Risque and also not terribly popular, I imagine.

Pursil makes your clothes disappear? I mean, what are they trying to tell you? Do they turn up to competition saying, look, we're not wearing jeans? I've got a quote from Pat Thompson, the team manager and president of British Natureism. We might not have a Beckham or an Owen, but landing this sponsorship is set to boost the profile of natress petonc, just as we go head to head with the World Cup. Head to head. What year was that? 2002. And see, did anyone pay attention to that World Cup? I think not. Peton kind of advertises itself as being good for kind of all ages, all genders. It's not a

super physically testing sport. Even to the extent that you can buy magnets attached to cords so you can pick up the balls without having to bend down. And there's a thing. That's good. That's really cool. It's all like you go fishing for your petonc balls. Exactly. Yeah. But it won't pick up the wooden one, will it? No, no. God, you're right. What do you do about that?

Long hoover. You can get those claw things that park rangers have, you know? Yeah, you're right. That's called a piglet. It's called a cauchonette, that little wooden thing. Yes. Or like we would call it a jack, right? Yes. One of England's best players is called Jack Blows. Really?

Really nice. So prior to researching this, did anyone else assume that petonc was an onomatopoeic name? Yeah. Petonc? I mean, it is onomatopoeic. I just wasn't named for that reason. Yeah, just not intentionally so. There was an old man who loved to play ball, which involved taking three steps and then throwing your ball. He had terrible rheumatism, so I asked if you could do it sitting down.

His friend said yes, and they agreed to be stationary when they threw the ball as well. And that is petonc, which comes from the Provence words, ped tanco, which means feet still. And I think that's really nice as an origin, because it originates in basically early disability rights. Because it used to be much more active. So I think in Provence, it was called Provence long, and you threw the ball really far. It was often about throwing the ball quite a long way. And the ball, for some reason, I couldn't discover, was sheathed in nails.

And it resulted in so many injuries in the 18th and 19th centuries that it was banned almost everywhere. So, sorry, can I just say, so the nails, the spiky bit is on the inside, right? Yeah. Because the way you said it, it could have possibly been sticking out. So it's basically cork, and then you would stick a load of nails so that the outside of it was the heads of the nails. And so that's how you got your iron kind of ball. So that's how you got the weight or whatever. Yeah. So it's not like a hedgehog or something.

Yeah, got it. That would be very dangerous though. Yeah, but maybe more fun to use a hedgehog. No, I was thinking of the sticky out ball thing. Oh, sorry. Yeah, I was thinking, oh, this is Alison Wonderland. I'm sure I've read this before. With a real piglet that you threw at the beginning. Well, you know why the metal balls came about from the technology of the First World War. So sort of making small mines and bombs and stuff. Using that technology that was improved in the First World War, they could then make

petonc balls. Wow. Yeah. So it was good for something. It was. So war, what is it good for? Petonc. Finally, we've answered the question.

Petonc balls are dangerous objects officially. According to the Federal Transportation Safety Administration, you're not allowed to take them onto aircrafts. Oh, yeah. Did you find an example of that? No. I found a guy who, he's a star player from Jersey, Keith Boliad, and he had his luggage seized en route to a big competition in Denmark,

because it had three suspicious looking perfectly round iron balls in it. And obviously they thought, oh, this could be a bomb. What is it? And he had to borrow another set and someone else's trousers because he traveled in jeans. And the umpire wouldn't let him play in the competition. So his game suffered very badly because he was playing with a set he wasn't familiar with. Do you think it's important to use your own balls? Well, he says that they have slightly different weightings and possibly even different sizes, or just that he was used to the feel of his own balls.

He decides. Is this the nudist pattern? Okay, we should wrap up. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back again next week with another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish. In the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, you can do so on these guys, Twitter accounts, James is on. At James Harkin. And he's on.

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At Jay Rawson. And also he is in control of all of our other social media accounts. So if you want to abuse him anywhere, that's where to do it. In fact, if you want to abuse anyone anywhere, just do it on social media. It's fashionable. If you want to get in touch with us as a group, you can get in touch with us via at no such thing or email podcast at qi.com. That's all for this week.

We'll see you again next week. Goodbye.