No Such Thing As A Fish - 245: No Such Thing As The Very Sexy Caterpillar

Episode Date: November 30, 2018

Live from Brighton, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss the police force made up of criminals, why mice walk so loudly, and the world's first crossword.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from our Book of the Year 2018 tour live in Brighton! My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with Anna Czazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go! Starting with fact number one, and that's my fact this week, my fact is Australia's first police force was made up of Australia's 12 best-behaved convicts. Wow, it's weird you didn't do this fact when we actually were in Australia, Dan.

Yeah! And it's weird that we hope to go back again. So this is because when they got there, the first fleets that went out to Australia, they were very underprepared, they barely brought any agricultural equipment, they sort of arrived and just went, okay, we just need to make do. So they had a few people like the Royal Navy who were out there, the British Royal Navy, who were trying to police a few things, but that wasn't their job and it's not what they were doing.

So they said, we need a police force, and they realized we have no police. So they looked around and went, okay, who are the best-behaved convicts that we've got here? They found these 12 people and they were like, would you be the, you know, the police? And they were like, yeah, of course, that's it. That's a dream. How do they define best-behaved? I don't know how you spot the 12 best-behaved people in society out of all of them.

I guess maybe they might be looking at the crimes that they were sent over for, because the criminals that got sent over was for very basic things, as we know, as for stealing a bit of bread or, you know, urinating on the streets. Well, there are a lot of different things you could get sent for. That was a murderous. I made up the urinating on the streets one, but I imagine that might have been a thing. So you could get sent there for recommending that politicians get paid. No, no, what?

You could get sent there for stealing fish, for starting a union. There was, in 1843, a guy called James Priddle was transported for bestiality with a donkey. Nice. And in 1850, Lieutenant Robert Gates was sent to Australia for striking Queen Victoria with a cane. Wow. I agree with that one. Yeah.

With him doing it, with him being sent away. With him being sent to Australia. Right. OK. Actually, there were quite a lot of bestialities. There's a list. Sorry. Can I just clarify?

I was not talking about the bestiality one. I was talking about... You don't need to feel bad about it, Andy. I don't feel bad about it. There's nothing to feel bad about. OK. The Australian government actually has a list of all the crimes that people were transported for.

So I was reading through this list and there are 13 for bestiality, but there are some that are really weird. So one is bad notes. Bad notes. What does that mean? Oh. 27 people for bad notes. Counterfeiting money, I guess?

Yeah. There was... Counterfeiting was a separate one, weirdly. I also learned a new word. It said that about 40 people were done for hammersucking, which I've never heard of. Hammersucking? Yeah. You've never heard of that word?

No. So I think this must have just gone out of use. It means to break into someone's house and assault them with the intention of assaulting them. And it's different to... Sorry. Assault them with the intention of assaulting them. Sorry.

To break into someone's house with the intention of assaulting someone and then assault them. As opposed to stuthreaf, which people were also sent for... What? Yeah. Stuthreaf. These are just words that I'd never heard. Do we know what that is? Yeah.

That's breaking into someone's house without the intention of assaulting someone, but someone pops up, so you have to assault them anyway. Oh, it's really hard to prove one way or the other whether you were hammersucking or stuthreafing. In a way, you need the victim to go, it was my fault, really, for popping up. There's some very specific ones, though, so it really goes down to detail, especially with theft. There was theft of a hairbrush, one person, got sent to Australia for that. A bunch of six chickens, 17 people, 17 separate people stole six chickens, theft of bacon,

theft of shovels, people were stealing left, right and centre, and yeah, they were all getting sent away. So one thing that happened when you boarded the transport ships was you got given a bag of cloth if you were a woman. So Elizabeth Fry, who's the social reformer, she's on banknotes now, she's on the £5 note. Is she on the current £5 note? I think she is. Anyone?

No. No? I think it's that one man who I'm going to trust completely. Someone check a £5 note, surely someone has a £5 note. She definitely has been on the £5 note, but anyway, she had this kind of social programme going, which was if you were a woman being transported to Australia, as you boarded, she or her representatives, would give you a bag and it contained lots of scraps of cloth and needles and thread, and the idea was that you could make a quilt on your way over and

then sell it when you got there to give yourself a tiny financial start. But everyone else has also got a quilt, because they've also been on the boat. You want to really diversify, don't you? You're just quilt-swapping as an entire society of quilt-swapping. Which was a separate offence. You could be sent to Australia for actually. One thing I really love about that is, so you were badly behaved in Britain and you got sent to Australia, but if you were badly behaved in Australia, then they'd send you even further

to Norfolk Island, so you go to one more island. And I want to know what happens if you're badly behaved in Norfolk Island. What happens then? Back to Britain. Going round and round. Yeah, Norfolk Island was very bad, wasn't it? Yeah, it was a real problem. In fact, I think people used to on Norfolk Island try and commit other crimes, because

what you would get is a death penalty, and for that you get sent back to Australia and you'd be on death row and they thought, that's way better than this terrible Norfolk Island place. Have you heard of the Cascades Female Factory? No. This was somewhere where, again, it was, so I think most of the people who were transported were men. It was maybe 80%, but the Cascades Female Factory was a kind of workhouse for female convicts

when they were sent over. It was a kind of distillery slash prison. And when they were in there, they weren't allowed to speak to men, these women, but they did devise a scheme where they bribed a corrupt warder, and I swear to God, this is what the source I have says. It says, they smuggled love letters to the men they wanted to communicate with, inside chickens. Now we know why they were stealing all those chickens.

They smuggled love letters, inside chickens. Yeah. I don't say whether they were living chickens or dead chickens. Or were inside. I think it goes in the bit where the egg comes out. Okay, not through the beak, or under the wing. That's what I do. These guys in this factory, they famously protested in 1832, and the way that they did

that is the governor of Van Diemen's Land, which is now Tasmania, came along, and turning right around, and at one impulse, they pulled up their clothes showing their naked posteriors, which they simultaneously smacked with their hands, making a loud and not very musical noise. But on another occasion, some dozen or 20 women seized the governor, took off his trousers, and deliberately endeavored to deprive him of his manhood. Wow. That's not what you want.

Now what happened to the chickens doesn't sound so bad, does it? People always think that, I think, the people that were sent over to Australia, though, were kind of from the lowest of the low in society, like the really lower class, working classes. The whole range of people was basically anyone unwanted in Britain. So there was really a good article by Thomas Keneally, the Australian author, who was describing the kind of people that would go, and he was saying there was a lot of members of the gentry in the bourgeoisie, but people who sort of had gambling debts, or who'd got themselves

into trouble, or he said bluff English lads who weren't particularly good academically, or who had impregnated the maid, and then you've got to go. But you know, just because, so Ned Kelly is obviously relevant to this, so this police force was created, and the police became quite corrupt and hated, and then you've got these rebels in Australia who were kind of hero villains, and Ned Kelly is the main one, but I didn't know that the world's first feature length film was the Kelly Gang, so it was the story of the Kelly Gang. It was made in 1906, and it was banned almost immediately, because it was shown in Australian

cinemas, it was super successful, and then people started committing kind of imitation crimes, so a bunch of kids went and held up a photography warehouse, I think, and stole a bunch of stuff from it, and held up some school children at gunpoint, and yeah, they cancelled, it's alright, everyone was fine, so yeah, they cancelled it. But it was really successful, and the reviewers got kind of annoyed about it, because the way they did films in those days was people went to the cinema, and they showed the film, and they also had a lecturer standing by the side of it explaining the action as it happened, because obviously no sound, and then they had actors behind the screen who

were giving it the dialogue, and apparently the Kelly dialogue and sound effects were so loud that it really upset people who were used to quite silent films, so there was something called the Kelly Bellograph, which reviewers referred to, which was going to the cinema to see the Ned Kelly film, and you'd just be deafened by these thunder claps that they were doing behind the screen. I love the idea of a lecturer, just by the side, just filling you in on who everyone is every scene, for any Marvel superhero film, I would like that to functionalise him. Why are we all trying to get the rocks?

Just speaking of famous Australian convicts from that period, so Ned Kelly more an outlaw than a convict initially, there was a guy called Moondyne Joe, Moondyne was the place he was from, and this guy, he'd arrived with the boats, I don't think it was the very first fleet, but he kind of served his sentence there, and he was let free, so they must have sorted out that system that I said they had a problem with earlier, and he started doing things like branding cows for himself and keeping them, so he got arrested and put back in prison, but he escaped, so then he got arrested again and put back in prison, and then he escaped, and then he got arrested again, and he just kept escaping, and there was nothing

that they could do, so they eventually had to build him his own custom cell, which is completely on their own, and they said to him that if he escaped that, all would be forgiven. He's like, you go free, we don't know what to do with you if you escaped, and you're not going to believe this, I forgot to write down the answer to that. When in that story did you realise that you didn't have the evidence? You know when I was going, and then he escaped, and then he was in that moment, I think I threw in a few more escapes, this is where my lecturer system will be able to sweep

in and say, he did not escape. I looked up modern Aussie police, so I thought that it might be interesting to see what they're up to, so there's a town in Queensland called Birdsville, and it's amazing, so it has one police officer, and it's Birdsville and a surrounding region, and his jurisdiction is the same size as the United Kingdom, it's 93,000 square miles. What does he do? He drives a lot. A lot of mileage expenses.

So because it's a tiny town, it says the population signs say the population is 115 plus or minus 7,000, because there's a horse race in September, which brings a lot of tourists, so almost all year it's 115, and then in September it's 7,000, and Buzzfeed wrote this huge long piece all about him, and they interviewed him, and the piece says about Birdsville, if you want to buy a coffee, you have one option, the Birdsville Bakery. If you want to visit a restaurant, you have one option, the Birdsville Hotel. If you want to see a film or live music, you are in the wrong town. Well, he's not getting re-employed by the tourist department for Birdsville.

As I was googling all this stuff and googling Australia, I found something that I just want to share, even though it's not really on topic, and it was a news story that a 21-year-old Australian has been labelled the unluckiest man in Australia after he was bitten by a spider on the penis for the second time in five months. It was his first visit to a portable toilet since his last encounter with a spider. It was the same spider, it saw him coming and it thought, I'm going to get you again. Oh, God. Oh, God.

It's his family. Honestly, it'll be fine. It's a one in a billion chance. Oh, the worst thing, I mean, this is so sad. He went to the hospital and all the nurses remembered him for the last time. Shall we move on? What the Aussie police these days have to deal with. I just looked up recent Australian crimes, and there was one who was a man who was a drunk driver who started driving laps around the car park of a Sydney branch of McDonald's after they refused to sell him 200 chicken nuggets at 5am on Remembrance Day.

He started screaming, I want my effing nuggets, I'm going to eff you up. He drove around a load of laps before changing his mind and asking for 200 hash browns instead, because it was breakfast time. Police were called, but before they managed to arrest him, the perpetrator had demanded a refund but was unable to remember what he had ordered and wanted a refund for. Not for nothing did those brave men and women sacrifice themselves. Anyway, we hope to be touring Australia again next year. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Chazinsky.

My fact this week is that in the first newspaper crosswords, the answers did not have to be actual words. So this is just this so weird thing. I was reading the telegraph released a book of the history of its own crosswords, and it talks about their first crossword, which was in 1925. And I think that was pretty much the earliest newspaper crosswords in the UK was in 1925. And you would have clues like, you know, I don't know how much everyone knows about cryptic crosswords. I assume everything. Strap in everyone.

If you've got an anagram in a cryptic crossword, you'll have a word like muddle, or mix up, which shows you it's an anagram, and then you know you've got to mix up the letters. But in one of these early crosswords, the clue was just a muddled life, and the answer was ilf, I-L-F-E, not a real word, or... Surely it's file and you've just got it wrong. It's ilf, it's ilf, otherwise it didn't work. Another one I liked, and this really is for the cryptic fans, so apologies to everyone else, but this has its tail dislocated, means you take the word this,

and you take the tail of it, which is the end, which is the S, and you dislocate it and put it on the front, so the answer was C. There was a moral panic about crosswords when they were first really popular. So the first modern crossword was in a New York world, which was a magazine in 1913, but in the 20s they became really popular, and in 1924 the New York Times said that they were a sinful waste, and they said that the utterly futile finding of words was a primitive sort of mental exercise, but they added, fortunately the question of whether the puzzles are beneficial or harmful

is in no urgent need of an answer, the craze is evidently dying out fast, and in a few months it will be forgotten. They also had the libraries of New York complained that people doing crosswords were ruining libraries because they were coming in and dominating all the dictionaries when people who actually wanted to use dictionaries were not able to get there to use them, so they released a statement saying that the puzzle fans swarmed to the dictionaries and encyclopedias so as to drive away readers and students who need these books and their daily work. Can there be any doubt that the library's duty to protect its legitimate readers,

and it was basically, yeah, this is the death of libraries, because these crossworders... Well, as we've just learned, a dictionary is useless to you in filling out old crosswords. Very good point. What were they doing? There was a psychologist from Columbia University who said that crossword puzzles, and this was around the same time, he said, the reason they're so popular is that crossword puzzles satisfied the 45 fundamental desires of the human species. Not all 45.

Well, I looked at a longer list of fundamental desires as I could find, and they included curiosity, which I think is fair, order, like putting things in order, that works. Physical activity, kind of, maybe. Romance, no. Romance. Not in any crossword I've completed. No.

Vengeance. Actually, yes, vengeance. I think you're doing it wrong, and definitely doing it wrong, eating. That's what you do at the end, that's why they're always on rice paper. Apparently, people started writing into zoos and demanding of the zookeepers to know a three-letter word which meant a female swan and things like that. Yeah, because back in the day, I guess there was no internet to just sort of, when you've given up. Exactly.

You just had to write to a zookeeper. That reminds me, and there was no internet as well. There was a news story, maybe one of you guys found it, I haven't written it down, but there was a guy in the UK somewhere, and he was doing a crossword, he was about 80 years old, but he had the internet. It was about five or ten years ago. And the question was Asian ass, and he decided to look it up on the internet. Oh, no.

And he said, basically, he didn't know this kind of thing existed. Although it does rather sound like his wife came down and said, what are you looking at? Yeah. Frantically going through a thousand crosswords to find any clue which might explain it. I found a crossword that I really like. It's an art piece which has been displayed in art galleries, and it was lent to Nuremberg's Neuers Museum, and it was up there, and a 90-year-old woman went to see it and filled it in,

and it was worth £68,000. But it's surely worth more when it's completed. Well, her argument is... In that case, I've got some crossword books to sell you. This one's worth a fortune, Andy. It's completely completed. That's a really good point. Yeah, no, she only got a couple in before someone noticed that she was writing on a bit of art on the wall. And so, yeah, so she's on trouble.

They raised out her contribution to it. But she has claimed that she now holds copyright because it's a new work. She's now a collaborator. Fulfilled through all of vengeance. I like... So, crossword setters are always kind of heroes, but one of the first ones was Arthur Wynne. I think he was the first one who set the New York World one.

And the first crossword puzzle he set to try and convince his publishers this is the thing worth doing, the newspaper publishers, the word dove appeared twice. So, it's the first ever crossword. You've got the entire dictionary and non-dictionary, apparently, at your disposal. And he couldn't think of something that wasn't dove for that second clue. Was it the same clue? No, one clue was bird and one was pigeon.

And then the other words were just bizarre. It had the word nafe, a female serf. And it also had dove as in Homer Simpson. Did it? The original dove. What was the clue? It was Homer Simpson's catchphrase. They were hard.

And do you know what he published it as? It wasn't called a crossword. It was called a word cross. That was the original. At some point down the line, we went better the other way. No, it wasn't that. It was a few weeks later, it was a mess up in the type setting. We switched it round to crossword.

And the guy went, go! Actually, just on that weird words, there was a guy called, an editor called Arthur Maurice, who noticed that the words that Americans were using in the late 1920s were a lot shorter and had more vowels in them than they were before that. And he put it down to the crossword craze. Basically, he's saying, if you're writing crosswords, you need lots of these small words like do or whatever.

And actually, he noticed that more people were using words such as a bet, acute, adept, ick, elan, eon, things like that. So it actually changed the way that people speak. What words before people were saying, oh, Zephyr, and oh, rhythm, and I kind of think of a single other word, which is not one of the concepts. Crystal palace. Crystal palace. I still can't believe they're the longest words

that your two collective minds can come up with. Consonants. Just loads of consonants. A sort of consonant heavy. Please, the floor of course. Don't help her with chrysanthemum. You're not allowed to use chrysanthemum. Strick mean.

Right, surely it's time to move on. Yeah, that's pretty good. So lots of setters have their own characteristics and they all have their own, not powers, but their own idiocy. We don't understand the Marvel movies, do we? I thought there was so little crossword action in the latest one. I'm tempted not to go back.

There are fewer than a hundred professional crossword setters in the UK for obvious reasons. It's quite a niche thing to be doing. But there is one setter called Mark Bremen, and this year he launched what he said was the hardest in the world. He estimated that it would take two years to complete. He said, I'm not saying that this crossword cannot be completed, because of course it can.

But nonetheless, it is finishly tough and significantly harder than anything I've ever compiled before. Based on the feedback of other compilers who have seen it or tried it, mine is about a hundred times harder. If that description is indeed correct, then it stands to reason that it would take the average enthusiast a hundred times longer to solve it. This amounts to a hundred weeks or just over two years.

It was solved within two hours. He hadn't even finished that speech. To be honest, I lost faith in him when he said it amounts to a hundred weeks or just over two years. It's funny to know he's got some miscalculations going on. The guy who solved it said, some of the clues were definitely tricky, but two years would be a stretch.

Just on the question setters, The New York Times had quite a fun run last year of a whole year of celebrity question setters. So Bill Clinton wrote a crossword for them. My favorite one, Weird Al Yankovic, wrote one. Do you guys remember Weird Al Yankovic? He wrote one. His was mainly filled with cheese-based puns.

So he answers that were allowed with feta attraction and a few gouda men. But interestingly, they set rules to it, so he was disqualified when he tried to get a clue where the answer was fondue the right thing. They said, we have strict cheeses that you're allowed to use in this crossword, and fondue is not a cheese.

It's a style. So if you're doing a cheese crossword, you have to really stick within the cheese category. Yeah, it has to be just a cheese, I guess, within the word. Yogg? That's mostly consonants. I didn't know you were still playing that game. I'm going to be playing it all the way home, aren't I? It is time for fact number three, and that is Andy.

My fact is that in the German Renaissance, it was briefly fashionable for women to have themselves painted as a biblical character halfway through decapitating a man. So there's this biblical story, which is of Judith and Holophonies. I think that's how it's pronounced. But he's dead, so it doesn't matter. There's a biblical story of Judith and Holophonies, and Holophonies is a very brutal general

who is about to destroy Judith's home city, and he's outside the city. She is a widow, and he lets her into his tent because he fancies her, basically, and she comes in and she gets him drunk. He passes out and she decapitates him, and she takes the head away in a basket. So she's quite a heroic figure.

This is Old Testament stuff, obviously. And there was an artist in the German Renaissance called Krannach, Lucas Krannach the Elder, and he painted eight different versions of this scene. So loads of artists have painted it. Caravaggio did it, dozens and dozens of artists have painted it over the centuries. But there are at least eight different Judith that he painted,

and they're all wearing modern dress, and they've all got completely different looks. And we now believe that several different women in the Saxon court commissioned paintings of themselves halfway through decapitating a man. That's pretty amazing. And we should clarify, when you say modern dress, you mean the modern dress of the time?

Modern 21st century power business suits. It speaks to sort of a burgeoning, angry feminism, doesn't it? That women have suddenly gone, God, I'm allowed to be painted decapitating somebody. Brilliant. And this, just for anyone who thinks they don't recognise this from the Bible, it's not in the Protestant version of the Old Testament that people use.

It is in the Catholic version. And most people think that it's... I mean, what they think of the whole Bible, I don't know, is that everyone knows that this is non-historical. And some people have called it the first historical novel, because it's so obviously not true, because there's a lot of anachronisms and, you know, Nebuchadnezzas in here.

Anachronisms? She's wearing a wristwatch at one point. It doesn't stack up. Oh, 747 flew overhead. This is implausible. Did you know, just speaking of sort of fashions in art, the fashion in art for painting Mary Magdalene covered in hair from head to toe? This is so weird.

Like a Bigfoot. Yep. She looks like a Yeti. And this is a trend in medieval art. Depictions of Mary Magdalene are covered in hair, and it's because she was sort of often referred to as having very long hair, and it sort of covered her genitals sometimes in art, and it seemed to grow out of that

in some versions of the telling of her story. It was that after Jesus died, then she became a desert hermit and repented of her prostitution and stuff, and she stopped caring about her appearance at all, so all of her clothes fell off eventually, and then as sort of a mercy, God covered her in hair. And there were these paintings of her all over medieval art,

and she looks like a Yeti. She's covered in hair, head to toe, but with a little space, a face of skin. That's so weird. And also, they used to paint Moses with horns, didn't they? They did. And they reckoned that that was maybe a mistranslation or something.

So it was a Bible mistranslation because it was describing him coming down the mountains, and so they were doing it purely out of we think that this is what was written. So there's a word that is Karen, like the name Karen, and in Hebrew it can either mean horn or ray of light, so he came down with a ray of light in the Bible,

but some guy misread it and just went, oh, he probably had horns. There is a painter called Daphne Todd, and she is a modern portrait painter, and she revealed a few years ago that she was commissioned to paint someone who was extremely rude and extremely uncooperative all the way through the portrait painting process,

and as a result, she has given that man a pair of horns in the painting and then painted over it with his hair, but in 50 or 100 years' time, it's going to be revealed that this guy has horns in the painting. So other fashions from Renaissance time, the Chopin or Chopin,

it was platform shoe that they wore, especially around Venice, and the idea was you wore it over your shoes because the ground was terrible, there was loads of poo around and loads of mud and stuff like that, you don't want it on your shoes, you don't want it on your dress, and so they got these nice high platforms, but then it kind of turned out

that the higher you got, the better your status was, and they got higher and higher and higher and higher and higher, and eventually they were getting examples that were over 20 inches high platform shoes in Venice. So just to put that into context, that would put Anna, if you wore them, three inches taller than LeBron James, a basketball player. But it's so hard to run up and down a basketball court

in 20 inch heels. OK, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that mice can't hear their own footsteps. Now, is this because they are quite deaf or because they walk very quietly? Because they're selectively deaf.

So there is a noise that happens when a mouse walks, and in theory it could hear it, but its brain just goes, no, I'm not going to listen to that, and it just turns it off. And it could be that this is true of actually all animals and maybe of humans as well. Like if you walk down the street, you don't really notice your own footsteps,

but let's say you're walking on some gravel or some leaves or something, you might hear it. And this is a new study that's recently been done by Janani Sundarajan and Richard Mooney at Duke School of Medicine. And what they did was they put little buttons on the bottom of a mouse's feet. And so as it walked along,

it just made little beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. It made little beeping noise. Like you know that movie, Big, when he's on the keyboard, isn't it like that? But it was the same note every time. And they checked the brain of the mouse and they realised that it could hear this, reacting to this noise.

But then as it went on after a week or two, it wasn't reacting to it anymore. I bet the other mice were still reacting to it. And what they found was is that basically the mice had been trained to just not listen to the sound anymore and it's just natural in their brains. And the ones which had got used to this sound, they were much better than other mice reacting to predators.

So if you had like a cat paw coming to get them, the ones who couldn't hear their own footsteps could get out of there, but the ones who could hear them would put off. They reckon that this maybe is why humans, possibly and other animals, can't hear your own footsteps. I guess the human brain is very good at zoning stuff out that is repeated, right?

So if you're a heavy breather, for instance, you wouldn't necessarily know you were a heavy breather. Everyone else would know that you were doing it, but you wouldn't necessarily know it. The people you were phoning out would know, wouldn't they? You would know if you were a heavy breather, wouldn't you? And you would know. Yeah.

Oh, what are you saying? Sorry, what are you saying? You're an extremely heavy breather. I am not a heavy breather. Well, we don't need to go into it now. I am a normal breather. You're fine. It's very distracting in the office.

But yeah, I think there is. Can I just ask for the... Just to make sure I get this clear. By cancelling out the noise, it means that every other dangerous noise is amplified and they don't crossfire with their own noise. Not amplified so much as you just easier to hear because you're not being constantly annoyed

by the sound of your own footsteps. Yes. So this is the thing with conversation in humans, as in when you're... It's why it's quite tricky to develop really good, kind of artificially intelligent hearing implants is because listening to it... The human brain has an amazing ability

to identify a voice in a lot of other noise. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, but it does get harder when you've got a human voice against the background of a lot of other human voices. So this gets called the cocktail party problem where it's quite hard to focus on an individual voice. Which gets worse with age, as we know.

So, you know, once parents will not be able to be in a loud room. But the cocktail party problem is... It does feel like you've just stopped them from being in a loud room. You wouldn't enjoy it. Andy's in there. He's breathing. You can see bins of things go flying past with my huge breath. The cocktail party effects was described by someone called Colin Cherry.

I think it was in the 50s or the 60s, possibly the 60s. And the way he tested it was he played two sentences to the study participants, one in one ear and one in the other ear, and he told them to listen to only one of them. So he told them which one to listen to. And then he'd ask some questions about each sentence. And it was the case that the one they hadn't been told to listen to,

they couldn't really tell him anything about it. To the extent that if the other voice, the other sentence in their ear was in a different language, they very often hadn't even noticed that. So that's how good we are at kind of, you know, zoning out the stuff we're not supposed to be listening to. Wow. And it's also called that because I think this is right that you hear, if someone says your name,

you kind of just hear that really, really loud if you're in a cocktail party. Or in fact, very bad advice for a cocktail party. A discovery that was made recently, if someone speaks who you love, then you'll hear them. So they did this study where they exposed you to a lot of peripheral sound, and then they have someone they don't know say something to them, and then they have their spouse say something to them,

and people are much, much better at understanding and hearing what their spouse has said. Hang on, sorry, do we know what the reason for that is? Is it just... They haven't speculated. It's quite new, but I... Evolutionary, maybe? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, but what do you want to reproduce with?

We are going home. It's important to get that message when it comes to you. Plants can hear themselves being eaten. What? That is dark. What? Yeah. Hang on, when is...

Think about that, halfway through your next salad. They can sense the vibrations caused by, for example, a caterpillar eating their leaves. Yeah, so I think, for instance, let's say there's a plant being eaten by a caterpillar, they can sense it, as you say, and then they'll give off some defence. Exactly. So scientists tested this. By putting some caterpillars on a cabbage plant,

they recorded the sounds of the caterpillars going... And then they played... I don't know why they laughed at that. That was a really good impression. Yeah, I thought it was. I think you're going to be on the audiobook of the very hungry caterpillar. But what's with the caterpillars breathing problem in this audio box? Is this the very asthmatic caterpillar?

It's the very sexy caterpillar, more like. Did you get to the end of that? No. They put the caterpillars on a cabbage plant, they recorded the sounds of their meeting, and then they played the vibrations back to a group of plants who were not actually being eaten by caterpillars, and those plants heard those vibrations

and they thought, I'm being eaten. Wow. I don't know if your actual salad will be able to detect and protect itself. I think the salad is generally dead. Yeah. Although like a carrot, for instance, a carrot often can be alive when you eat it,

and you can see that by the fact that if you cut the top off and then put it in some water, it'll grow. So yeah, that could do. I have a fact about the relationship between your eyes and your ears. When you move your eyes, your eardrums move too, and we don't know why. So if you sit where you are,

and you just look straight ahead of you, and you flick your eyes left and right, your eardrums are rotating with your eyes. Wow. Yeah. And no one knows why. And this is the amazing thing. The eardrums actually move 10 milliseconds before your eyes do.

What? So the brain is saying... They're controlling the eyes? The brain is saying, well, they're not controlling it, the brain's controlling everything, but the brain says, I'm going to move the eyes,

so eardrums, please get into position. Can I not trick it into just like... Ah. Ah. Because you are cleverer than your own brain. I don't know if you're cleverer than your own brain. I reckon James thinks he is. That is amazing.

He's been holding me back my whole life. 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. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Chazinsky. You can email podcast.qi.com. Yep.

Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or a website, no such thing as a fish.com, where you can find everything from upcoming tour dates. You can find our book, link to our book.

You can listen to all of our previous episodes. And actually, we're about to give away a copy now. So, James, have you got our winner? No, I think Hannah has. Oh, you're Hannah. Yeah, OK. So is the great fact,

is, there was a British man who changed his name to Tim- p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p prize just so telemarketers would have trouble pronouncing it. And... That's awesome.

You nailed it. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. We'll see you again next week. Goodbye!