No Such Thing As A Fish - 337: No Such Thing As A Triangular Rectangle

Episode Date: September 4, 2020

Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss advanced spatial mathematics, linguistic philosophy and a really really big cow Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hey guys, Andy here. Just before we start this week's show, we have an exciting announcement to make which is that we are returning to the stage. We have a show. It's a live show booked in and it's going to be at the London podcast festival later this month. It's going to be on the 27th of September at Kings Place which is in London. It's going to be at 7pm and it is going to be so much fun. But Andy, I don't live in London and or I don't want to go to a gig because I'm a bit worried about leaving the house at the moment. Can I see the show? Of course you can James because not only is it being done very carefully with only a very limited number of tickets being sold so it's all socially distance, you can also get streaming tickets. So you can go online and at

that time you can watch us make fools of ourselves with stupid facts on stage. So how do I get these tickets Andrew? James all you have to do is go to qi.com slash fish events and I'll say that again qi.com slash fish events and when I say events I mean event because it is the only thing in our diaries. So for your possibly last ever chance to see us on a stage just go there. No we'll be back on time next year. Oh I hope so. But Andrew what is going to happen next? The show is going to happen next. Oh I better do that. Yeah on with the show. On with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of no such thing as a fish a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Shriver. I am sitting here with James

Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Anna Chazinski and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with you Anna. My fact this week is that by complete coincidence the center of North America is called center. It's amazing. It's mad. This is so a lot of people weirdly put quite a lot of effort into working out the geographic center of various places and this is the latest research on the center of the whole of North America so you've got and it's mainland North America so not including the islands and this research was done by a university of buffalo geologists called Peter Rodgerson and he worked out this mathematical way of defining the center of a place which has

never been used before and essentially he ran his sums ran his algorithms and the place that was thrown up was a place called center in North Dakota so by total chance it's insane it's tiny isn't it it's 1.24 kilometers square yeah so it's not even like it's a big place that had a big chance of being it. No it is quite weird because there's no way of actually working out the middle of somewhere there's no universally agreed way so his mathematical definition is that the center's location minimizes the sum of squared distances to all other points in a region so if you want to work out the middle of something there you go that's how you do it but the way he changed it is that he realized the way we've worked out the middle of places before hasn't accounted for

the curvature of the earth and so that actually affects distances whereabouts on the curvature of the earth you are so he used this special 3d projection and I wonder how many different methods he came up with before it yielded somewhere in the center. Well he reckons that his isn't exactly perfect because he hasn't taken into account that the planet is a slight ellipsoid so that it's not a perfect bowl so maybe when he moves through Puma he might find out that it was yeah. Oh see this is where they're going to get shot in the foot that they're only 1.24 kilometers if they were a bit bigger they might still be the center but this this is a very small fraction out of them. Well maybe there'll be a massive population boom of people flooding to the area given this exciting news.

I love it though I love I love the competition between different centers because there is so much skull-duggery going on so I'm sure you guys will find the place that was rugby rugby in north also in North Dakota so quite near center probably they announced that they were the center of North America in 1931 and they put up a stone monument and they they used to hold a they might even still hold a misgeographic center beauty pageant every year and every September they have a geographic center day which features a mechanical bull and a basketball tournament for reasons that are not immediately plain. I think because they're both quite American things that Americans like to do isn't it. Yeah it'd be weird if they had a paella making competition and a boomerang throwing competition

so this place rugby it could be that when they take into account the fact that the earth is shaped a little bit like a rugby ball that rugby then becomes the center of America would that be nice. Yeah I'd love that. Fingers crossed calling on mathematicians to force that so there's another place which is a in North Dakota that also claimed to be the center of North America called Robinson and it was the mayor who declared that it was the center and specifically a bar that he owns called Hanson's Bar was the absolute center and quite nicely for he had this idea when he was drinking with his buddies in the bar and his name is Bill Bender which is a perfect going on a Bender drinking is a nice little question. Yeah but so both of these two towns

Rugby and Robinson are furious that it's been calculated that center is in fact the center. Yeah although you've got to be suspicious of the guy who was randomly drinking with his mates in a bar and thought let's try and work out where the center of North America is and it happened to be the bar they were drinking. It's his bar. This is a complete con designed to get people to build that bar. It's infuriated because there was a big New York Times piece about it and the New York Times because they're very diligent fact checkers they said how did you calculate that you are the exact center of North America and his words were it was trial and error I can't give you an exact formula and then he said it was bar room science that they'd used and then

when Rugby got involved because Bill Bender registered his bar as the legal owner of the phrase geographical center of North America because Rugby had let it lapse in 2009 foolishly they took their eyes off the ball and Bill Bender grabbed it so when Rugby sent a legal letter to him he offered to fight the mayor of Rugby. I don't think he's not reputable enough to own the center of North America in my opinion. I think he sounds like a wily businessman and you're jealous that you haven't come up with any such idea to sell your various shows and products over the years. By the way I looked on Wikipedia of places in America called center and there were over 15 actual towns and then there's places where no one lives that are called center but

roughly 15 places that are all called center all for the exact same reason that they claim to be the center of Alabama or wherever it is that they are all except one which is center in Georgia which is actually named after a man called Mr. Center that's the only one. It used to be that in America you would put your kind of county hall in exactly the middle of your county because they thought it was like more accessible like for instance if the parliament in the UK is in London obviously the people in Scotland have to travel a long way to get there but if it was exactly in the middle of the country the idea is it's more accessible for more people. Yeah I think that that is sort of the only reason to work out where a center is isn't it to work out

where to put your seat of government and then to satisfy weird facts lovers. There is a problem with being in the center of America someone found out there's this massive problem that was generated for someone who lives quite near the center of the US in fact and this is to do with a company called MaxMind have you read about this story about IP addresses okay so it's so weird basically MaxMind is this company who about sort of just over 10 years ago started calculating the location of loads of IP addresses so you know with your computer you've got an IP address MaxMind figured out whereabouts they all were geographically and then it could sell that information to companies like Google and Facebook and lots of other people but often when you're trying to work out

where an IP address is you can't get it exact and sometimes it'll just say this is somewhere in America or somewhere in the US and so for all of those MaxMind just default assumed that they were in the middle so they got the coordinates of roughly the middle of America and said okay all the IP addresses that we can't quite place they just are here and it turns out here is a rural farmhouse belonging to someone called Joyce Taylor who now has 600 million IP addresses and it's a complete disaster because basically if there's a troll online or if there's someone who's hacked your company or if there's someone doing criminal activity online and the police are tracking them down they chase up their IP address and they constantly find it's at Joyce Taylor's farmhouse and she's

just inundated with kind of abuse and people writing her threatening letters and had no idea why for about eight years she was just like why am I being what's happening to me until this journalist tracked her down are we definitely discounting the fact that Joyce is like a massive cyber criminal is that she's she's a criminal mastermind an 82 year old criminal mastermind it's possible that's Barney oh poor Joyce and they used to work out the middle of America by doing a cardboard cutout of the whole country and then balancing it on their finger and wherever it that's where the center was isn't that amazing it seems like is it quite a good method yeah they got this they got it accurate to within 20 miles of the current center what did they do I know that

they they use the exact same method for countries that have islands that sit around because they're obviously apart do they include when they do the cardboard cutout do they sort of just slam that onto the end or do they include the ocean bit that's difficult isn't it because you couldn't just slam it onto the side because if it's further away from the pivot it's going to be weighing more but then you can't attach it because then the thing you've attached it with weighs something so that actually sounds like it might be a slight flaw in the system that's true the UK I looked up the ordinance survey website and found out how they calculate the center and they actually said on they say on their website now we calculate the center of Great Britain using the gravitational

method so that is the one you're talking about that is the cardboard cutout wow that's the news effectively yeah do they probably do like a simulation of a cardboard cutout using a massive supercomputer they don't go into detail actually which makes me think it's probably a cardboard cutout where is the center of the UK it's in Lancashire isn't it yeah it is it's a place where the forest of Boland oh yeah there's there's one claim that it's a place called Meridan yeah Meridan I think is the center of England because I've been to the center of England yes forest of Boland where my grandfather I think was born is just enough no it's central Lancashire I think right but there is in in the Meridan one there is a monument that stands there it's been

there for 500 years you can go and visit it I have done them of course no way of course I have I was once within 20 miles of the center of the UK with my long-suffering wife and said oh like I've just noticed somewhere I could take a photo and we drove that extra bit wow that's really funny James have you been to the center of the EU I don't know where is it oh yeah is it come on the odds are astronomical but basically there's a real problem with calculating the geographical center of the EU which is that the membership of the EU it changes every few years so it used to be in a particular place then it changed in 1986 when Spain and Portugal joined then in 1990 Germany was reunited and that shifted it a bit and so it keeps moving it's just moved

again due to Brexit and also what did you do before Brexit what did you do with the United Kingdom do you just sell a taper onto France or do you include the bit in between right I can't remember and in fact I suspect I never bothered to find out so where is the center then where's the current one do you know actually this I'm now looking at the one for Europe which I think might be slightly different to the EU but the one for Europe is in Lithuania and it's got five reviews on TripAdvisor and they're all from James saying my wife was really pissed off sort of ruined the whole experience the center of the EU the new center is going to be or is now a field in Gadheim in Germany which has they've already erected a red and white pole there and various flags flying

all around it and in fact they got really impatient there was an interview with I think the mayor of nearby area saying because Britain took so long to figure out when it was leaving the EU and they're just desperate to announce themselves as the new middle they eventually erected a sign saying future center of the EU just to prepare people so it wasn't too much of a shock I was just thinking right bear with me if you um if you wanted to influence an election say a Brexit election then you might do a lot of online work so you might send a load of fake news and fake adverts and stuff like that and what would you need you would need to find a lot of IP addresses to send all these things and who would have all those IP addresses someone in the center of Europe

and who has a motivation to want Brexit the people who are in the center of Europe so you're saying it's the farmers of Gadheim who have clubbed together and swung the election for Brexit exactly what I'm saying it's possible that's a really good that would be a great crime thriller I don't know if it would I don't know if that's getting made they'll get the tourist boost though that's what they count on they think they'll be flooded but the warning comes from the previous center that's now been deposed which was somewhere else called Festingrund where the local baker there said we thought Chinese buses would be coming there every week when we became the center but it didn't really turn out that way

James have you and Polina been to the center of the world where is it is it in Russia it's in Ohio oh no I haven't been to Ohio in America what's that done center of the world it was set up by a sort of eccentric businessman called Randall Wilmett in 1845 it's when he first moved to this area and he set up a business there he set he settled there some houses were built and he thought to get the attraction of people and give it a name he called it the center of the world which I believe it's still called till this day to this day and he just seems like a really fun character he before doing that lived in New York where he had an establishment called the beginning of the world so when he left the beginning of the world

he went to the center of the world and he was there for a very long time and then eventually business dried up and he moved 13 miles away to courtland in Ohio where he set up a grocery store called the end of the world and that was the last thing major thing that he did so it's a guy who had in three places the beginning center and end of the world so he's saying that the end of the world is only 13 miles from the middle of the world yes I don't know if those mathematical calculations are rigorous this is the previous ones this guy sounds like a distant ancestor of Bill Bender I have to say do you know what the the roundest country on the planet is the roundest country I do know that is it Ivory Coast or something I don't think you do know it's somewhere

no wait is it somewhere in Africa it's not Cote d'Ivoire no it's Sierra Leone Australia you were so close is it so there are various different ways of working it out you can define rectangularity as well which is how much of a country overlaps with a rectangle of the same area and you might be able to get this one the most rectangular country on the planet it's very rectangular that's your clue is it somewhere like Libya oh you're so close in that case Egypt yes Egypt oh with the pyramids that's amazing me yeah well no just amazing that the sort of national shape that we know it is the actual shape of the country well no because the pyramids are more triangular than

square aren't they yeah Dan what have you seen only half built you're talking about ziggurat no I I thought we said I thought we said oh what did you say rectangular I did cool nice it just sounds very similar to triangle doesn't it it does it's amazing those primary school kids managed to gather this at all so any chance the most triangular country is Egypt you've got to look into it I'll get back to you guys okay it's time for fact number two and that is James okay my fact this week is that the modern door handle was invented by Ludwig Wittgenstein now this is my favourite fact ever I love it that's incredible I mean he was quite recent yeah he was more recent than doors yeah I thought

no one no one could get through doors until he gave a lug they were just walls just empty houses but when you say the modern door handle this is what fascinates me because it's as though there was a kind of archaic bad door handle and then he fixed it well that's kind of what happened so Wittgenstein philosopher mid 20th century very well-renowned pupil of Bertrand Russell and kind of influenced pretty much everyone who came after him but also inventor of door handles I read this in a in an article about door handles in Apollo art magazine and Wittgenstein was working as a school teacher and he'd hit one of the kids because they'd upset him and he'd had to kind of be taken out of the school and be suspended and stuff like that I think he got fired actually

and so he kind of was sat around feeling sorry for himself didn't have anything to do but he came from an extremely rich family and his sister Gretel decided to distract him from everything by commissioning him to design the interior of a new house that she bought and he was extremely distracted by this because it took him a year to design the door handle alone it took him two years to design the radiators but what he came up with was a really modern kind of I want to say like minimalistic kind of design of a house and the door handle which he invented was kind of short coming out of the door and then a long straight bit with a little kink in it if that's it's not a great explanation but that's basically yeah if you look at a door handle now most of them will

be that kind of design and until then it was more kind of knobs or it was straight handles or stuff like that so all future door handles were kind of influenced by this one that was invented by Wittgenstein in much the same way as all future philosophical thought was influenced by him too I wonder how much that was seen you know like he probably was asked to do a lot of talks in the way that we have like Ted talks now and he'd always email back or write back the time going do you want the philosophical chat or the door handle lecture I've got both ready I think it was probably he'd be giving a talk and there'd be questions and answers at the end and everyone only wanted to ask about the door handle I bet every time he'd be like come on guys talk to your own philosophies

it sounds really different to the house you grew up in so as James said it's a very minimalist place this place in Vienna but the house he grew up in was he grew up in a palace this was how wealthy his family were so the forecourt had sculptures in it by Rodin and there was someone who was employed in the house for the sole purpose of bowing to visitors that's what I read sole purpose wow I know they had seven pianos this house it had an organ built in had a fountain inside it well they did have I think they had the largest private fortune in Europe possibly neither Wittgenstein's really they were loaded yeah so but he was really trying to simplify when he designed this new house you know against the kind of incredibly opulent Viennese style

I never thought of it that way about his previous house because when he moved to Trinity College after he became a famous philosopher his rooms were completely devoid of furniture he had no furniture in them and when he left Cambridge he became an assistant gardener at an Austrian monastery and slept in a potting shed so maybe he was just trying to escape from that opulence yeah yeah well he gave all his money away as well didn't he he inherited a lot and he he just gave it to his brothers and sister and should have given it to the kid he was hitting at school which got him sacked from the job well to be honest later on when he kind of had a bit of severe introspection after the war he kind of went to live in Norway and he did a lot of confessions so anything that

happened to him previously in life which he felt bad about he went to those people and apologised for those things and he apologised to to this at least to one of the children whose ears he had pulled did he yeah it was he was the original the original my name is Earl is that what that is oh yeah yeah you guys remember my name is Earl right yeah is that tv series about that guy who committed loads of crimes and then spent his life going back apologising to them well it sounds like that's exactly what I think it's based on this sounds like my name is Ludwig Wittgenstein and my father is an Earl one of the reasons he became a teacher was that he essentially gave up on philosophy didn't he

he wrote in he wrote this thing called tractatus logico philosophicus and it's a series of numbered bullet points it's not a well it's a tough read I would say it's a dense read tried to get through some of it he was very a man after our own hearts because it opened with things like the world divides into facts the world is the totality of facts the world is determined by facts the facts in logical space are the world he sort of should be our mascot but then he he wrote this thing with some impenetrable bullet points in it and then he believes that tractatus cleared up all the confusions that had tormented philosophy until that point and so he decided it was never necessary to write again and that was when he disappeared off to the elps after the first world

war he's like I've solved philosophy yes now about these doors you're welcome although then he decided against that and I think went back to it by 1929 and wrote his other great work so he he initially studied at Cambridge as James said under Bertrand Russell and when he arrived there he seemed like a bit of a cocky dick when it came to philosophies like as in I'm surprised Russell didn't go get out of here at some of the stuff he did I read an obituary that Russell wrote about him and he describes his first encounter and he says he maintained for example at one time that all existential propositions are meaningless this was in a lecture room and I invited him to consider the proposition there is no hippopotamus in this room at present

when he refused to believe this I looked under all the desks without finding one but he remained unconvinced I mean if I tried pull that on you guys you'd kick me out of the room right it's true like it was do you remember that time you tried to convince us that triangles and rectangles were the same thing that's true I'm still got a job yeah maybe maybe isn't there a story about Vic Constine and Russell I might be wrong about this because I haven't written it down but did he not go to Cambridge and Russell said tell me why I should take you on as a student and he gave him a piece of paper with one sentence or one word written on it or something and Russell looked at it and then kind of threw it away but gave him the job based on that and we

no one knows what was on that piece of paper I think that's true wow that's that's the story yeah I only know drawing of a door handle or something yeah that that is the story I don't know if it's apocryphal but yeah he had such a full life it's amazing I mean he fought in the First World War which we haven't even mentioned as I guess loads of men of that age had done he also had been an engineer before being a philosopher so he built an aeronautical engine which actually proved useful when helicopters were being designed later on and then this is a really really really full life he had yeah and he was a genius but he's basically the philosopher's philosopher isn't he like all other philosophers said this is the smartest guy you've ever met guys so maybe he

was justified in that arrogance but he in his lectures he used to throw students out when they didn't insult him basically so he if students didn't ask him pertinent questions or lay into him about his arguments he'd kick them out of the lectures and at one point there was just one person left in his lecture at the end because he'd kicked everyone else out for being too stupid and accepting wow and that was actually a guy called Francis Skinner with whom he planned to emigrate to the Soviet Union in 1934 he wanted to become a manual laborer what and he in fact visited the Soviet Union to kind of do a recce of it and be like is this place good for manual labor and he came back and decided against it as I think you would if you were considering manual labor

in the USSR in 1934 there's another reason why he was a man after our own hearts I think because one of his famous things that he wrote was if a lion could speak we would not be able to understand him and what he means by that basically is that you can translate one human language to another human language and that's fine because we've all had the same kind of life we all have the same experiences we all feel the same we all smell the same we all see the same and so it's easy to translate those words to other words but with lions we just do not know what it's like being a lion and if they could tell us stuff we just wouldn't understand the single thing they were saying and it was a point he was making about language but it's the point that I always make

that a lion doesn't even know it's a lion. Don't try and pass yourself off with the air to the 20th century we see we see you. Can we talk a bit about his family as well so I'm sure you guys came across this book The House of Wittgenstein which is a book about the entire clan and it sounds insane I mean the book sounds remarkable but the family also they were dreadfully unhappy as people so he was one of five brothers three of whom took their own lives and the other two of whom seriously considered it so the two brothers who who didn't were Ludwig and Paul and Paul was an amazing he was a pianist who lost an arm during the First World War but stayed as a pianist a one armed pianist and he commissioned one-handed works from lots and lots of composers so Strauss

Prokofiev, Britton Ravel which could have been a really nice tool for other pianists with one arm but he declined permission to other one armed pianists to actually play the pieces this is the worst thing even if he couldn't play them himself because he found them difficult he would not let other people have a go he wrote back to Prokofiev thank you for your concerto but I do not understand a single note and I shall not play it but he was because they came from a rich family they were all kind of spoiled brats in a way except Wittgenstein who it seems eschewed all that so Paul eventually had to flee to America because he'd impregnated this woman in their first piano lesson in fact that he was giving her and so he fled to America sorry during the first piano lesson he got her

fragment he should have been just practicing his fingering they played the piano differently then I had so many piano lessons once did you get pregnant I didn't so he impregnated this student fled to America and he didn't have a valet once he was in America which he wasn't used to he didn't have to live without that so for instance he was staying in a hotel and he just took off all his clothes and left them outside the door of the hotel assuming that a valet would come and wash them and return them to him and they all got stolen and so wait shortly outside the door of his room not outside the door of the hotel it's also outside the door of his room can I also say if he decided he wanted to get his clothes

washed by a hotel every single time then he would have lost the entire family fortune in about three weeks if your experience is anything to go by yeah look let's not go let's not revisit my hotel bill from our US tour last year it is a great way to lose your entire family reason the tour lost money but he sat around wearing bedsheets he just wore a sheet over himself until someone eventually sort of heard about it said shot me to be your PA because it seems you don't know how to live in the world and she was hired and there was another anecdote about him walking out into the street and someone had given him a hat and he was wearing the hat but it was still attached to its hat box

because he didn't know I guess how to put on his own hat wow that is posh what about Gretel we mentioned her earlier who was the person who bought the house which fickenstein designed she found it by following a trail of sweets to the door so Gretel was the subject of a portrait by Gustav Klimt and you know Klimt won the greatest artist of the early 20th century but she just hated it and so she just kept it in her attic I mean you know fancy having your portrait drawn by Klimt and then just thinking I don't like it very much have we have we is it out of the attic yet do we know what it's like maybe he was having a really bad day no it's good I think it's good I mean she has quite a long neck in it but

it might be but not the diddly arney long it's just like it's slightly longer than a normal person's neck she's still she's still fitting into onto the canvas right she's not such a long neck she had to chop off the top of her head she had to chop off the hat box at the top she wasn't very nice I don't think well she was a bit of a Nazi wasn't she in fact both the sisters were a bit had Nazi tendencies and in fact sided with the fascists against Paul and gave away a lot of their fortune to the Nazis and they all kind of hated each other the siblings they ended up variously estranged from each other as well as all sort of committing suicide it's a very sad family there was a lot of obviously there was a lot of Nazism about at

the time Ludwig was actually a classmate of Adolf Hitler's no yeah was he he was they were at the same age and they were at the same school but Wittgenstein was put forward a year and Hitler was taken back a year dodged a bullet so Hitler was taken back a year yeah yeah wow so they ended up two years apart yeah exactly even though they're so they probably wouldn't have known each other now they knew each other it was a small school small schools oh okay that's embarrassing for Hitler that's like Dom Jolley and Osama bin Laden yeah they were at the same school sorry Dom Jolley and Osama bin Laden went to the same school yeah they went to the same school I can see that you're kind of putting Osama bin Laden and Hitler in the same bracket but Dom Jolley and Ludwig

Wittgenstein I'm not I mean he's a great comedian but Trigger Happy TV is the tract artist logical philosophical of its day in my opinion he was another one who recorded when he masturbated oh good Wittgenstein before I think but yeah who did we mention had done it in a previous episode was it hook Robert hook yes that's it but Wittgenstein continued that tradition and he wrote in his diary during World War one he would write in his diary when he'd masturbated and actually this is a I couldn't find a verification of this except in a Slavoj Zizek book but I think we trust him and he said that Wittgenstein used to get annoyed because his fantasies while he was masturbating kept on being plagued by mass problems and he found this very annoying

distracting I think I think it's a problem that we've all had he wouldn't be the first person to be thinking about an ex very strong wonderful okay it is time for fact number three and that is Andy my fact is that in 1801 England had a celebrity ox which had its own coach and horses amazing yeah so um this is from a great book called Jane Austen's Country Life by Deirdre Le Fay which is all about life in rural England in the early 19th century um and there was this ox which had been bred by a man called Charles Colling of Kettenhall uh in Durham and um it was uh known as the Kettenhawks at first and it was renamed so it became the the Durham ox and um Colling was interested in cattle breeding

and he was one of the pioneers of breeding animals to make them really really big and the Durham ox was a huge success and I mean that in every sense um it was reported as being between 170 stone and 270 stone the stones weren't standardized at the time but it was well over a thousand kilos this this bull and um it's about four times the size of a modern cow basically it was really big it was impressive it sounds impressive because cows are big already they're quite big yeah there was it's interesting because now there's a lot of pressure on celebrities to lose weight but it sounds like back in the day there was a lot of pressure on celebrities to be as heavy as possible that's very true something that's changed as well as the fact that celebrities

cows back in the day can I just say a fact about a celebrity animal because I was going to do this as my fact next week but I think I'll say it now anyway to see what happens in the third series of french big brother uh one of the housemates was a dog really and it was a dog called saucisse and part of the rules were you had to have a secret and all your the housemates had to work out what your secret was and saucisse's secret was that he once ran for the mayor of marseille and did he spill it on the first day did they have to work out what the secret was did you say yeah they had to work out each other's secrets that is absolutely impossible to work out from what the dog's giving you

unless I know what you mean but saucisse the dog doesn't really have an ability to form complex thoughts so he's also a disadvantage well it's like vittgenstein said he said if saucisse the dog could talk we wouldn't understand his platform to be the mayor of marseille sorry andy we should talk about the arc sorry no actually genuinely I'm quite interested in talking more about saucisse where did he place where did he place on the I think in the final I can't remember I haven't done the research on it because it isn't one of my facts yet yeah yeah um so anyway that's now comparatively dull ox which never as far as I can tell ran for elected office anywhere lazy but it was it was bought by a man called john day for a couple of

hundred quid and they had a special carriage and it was pulled around by four horses it toured england and scotland for five years it played 200 different venues across the UK many more gigs than we have done as a podcast put it that way yeah it played international gigs as well it played madison square garden yeah which it did okay so a couple of weeks ago I've mixed up my famous celebrity oxes uh it was a different ox very sorry back out on that one okay I can't wait to hear about this other celebrity ox that's a spoiler for later in the show yeah um it wasn't just size that it was renowned for you can't just be big it was also symmetry apparently they're the two attributes and if you look at news articles from the time

it's always about its size and its symmetry so you had to be you had to be balanced on each side and it was uh bulls would be advertised as having been sired by the Durham ox wouldn't they and there was sort of like a type of ox that was called Durham ox after this he was so famous that he became his own so breed I suppose well do you know about the breeding of his parentage it's please tell us it's very incest heavy this honestly makes gamer thrones look like rosy and jim so there was a bull called favorite who was bred with his own mother his mother was called phoenix they produced a cow who was called young phoenix so favorite had been bred with his own mum to produce his daughter slash sister young phoenix but then favorite was bred with his own

daughter slash sister young phoenix to produce the Durham ox so as far as I can tell the Durham ox's dad was his grandfather and his mum was his half sister yeah or you could say that young phoenix was simultaneously favorites daughter sister and sexual partner oh boy well it saves on giving presents a christmas time doesn't it what are you gonna get your daughter sister mum and sexual partner probably just get her a necklace it works that in breeding I mean if you if what you're going for is massive cow then it well you didn't want to get any genes involved that were inferior and I think it was pioneered first by a guy called Robert Bakewell who was this massive guy in the agricultural revolution who sort of made all his cows chag each other within their

own families and he revolutionized selective breeding really and Darwin cited him quite a lot and he was incredible at building cows to the ideal size and shape and the Durham ox has an entire town in Australia named after it it's called Durham ox that it's got 74 people living there and I went on the australia's guide website which says there is one thing to do within 20 kilometers and that thing is a jumper shop so it's quiet did you say a jumper shop yeah in a shop that sells jumpers sorry yeah that's the near the jumper shop is the nearest local attraction um okay but it's the safest place to live in the state of victoria so okay in 2015 new the news reported that there had been just seven crimes in five years wow okay this is how it broke down jump 2014 there was no

jumper theft as far as I can tell um 2014 there was an arson thing okay that's quite a serious crime 2013 no crimes 2012 no crimes 2011 there was one drug offence but in 2010 there was an abduction there was arson there was a weapon and explosives offence and there were two counts of disorderly and offensive conduct it sounds like the biggest year in Durham ox's history ever but wait was was that all one event kind of like this is my sister lover and I didn't mention any incest related crimes but there is um do you know what the second most safe place in victoria is no I thought I might as well check it out you really go the extra mile this is brilliant so this is a place called speed okay so again they've had very very few crimes it's very small

place um but one thing that they did used to have a problem with was speeding because um when when you drive into speed it's on a main road there's a big sign that says welcome to speed and people took that as an invitation and would start going really fast in the town and so in 2011 the residents of speed started a campaign to get the name of the town changed to speed kills and they got 32 000 likes on facebook to try and get their um name changed and they in the end they renamed the town for one month to speed kills and as part of the campaign as part of the campaign there was a local farmer called Phil Downe and he changed his name to Phil Slowdowne no that's the second safest place in victoria um Durham ox had a sort of quite sad end in a way

well it died yeah yeah so it dislocated um its hip uh while being let out of the carriage the famous carriage that we've spoken about uh while in Oxford and it had to be slaughtered two months later but day ever the showman turned that into an event itself and I believe correct me if I'm wrong guys there was an autopsy which was sort of shown to the public on the day uh that it had died and I think they might have shown you might have been able to buy a ticket to watch it die basically to watch it die yeah but then it was yeah and then it was chopped up and part of the merch stand that he set up was selling offcuts oh no of the Durham ox yeah I don't think that's cool when you go to a butcher I don't think you say you know can you go to merch stand over there and get a leg of lamb

it's not branded well it could be branded if it's a cowl I guess yeah okay um I found another famous ox actually a couple of famous oxes and this was over in America there was two oxen called Mount Cotardin and a Granger named after the two biggest things sorry does anyone else feel a Madison square I'm really excited to know what kind of venue they might have made so they were named after the two largest items in Maine at the time that's where they got their names from and um they were humongous they were supposedly I can't find anything to contradict this the biggest and tallest oxen respectively that the world has ever seen so Mount Cotardin weighed two and a half tons so they they were tall they were wide and they were celebrities

and they went around and they did a lot of gigs and eventually they played Madison Square Garden no no yeah oh my god yeah Madison Square Garden which um yeah we said a couple of weeks ago when Sarah was here Sarah Pasco that um or you said I think that was it Emmeline Pankhurst played Madison Square Gardens and she had a crowd of 3 000 in a 19 000 CETA stadium do you know how many people went to see the um the oxen actually I assumed that it was the current Madison Square Garden with the ginormous 18 000 capacity but actually it turns out that it's been rebuilt a few times and she actually played the second iteration of the Madison Square Garden which had a capacity of 8 000 people so she still was kind of suffering in the sales department she

only sold 3 000 that's less than 50 percent but it's not as great a discrepancy as 18 000 uh so yeah so apologies to all the people on twitter who've pointed this out very very sorry um but this is the very same Madison Square Garden Madison Square Garden 2 where these two giant oxen played in 1906 they must have somewhere a you know how some venues uh in the UK have a like a book for all the acts that play there to sign yeah presumably somewhere in the basement of Madison Square Gardens there is a book which has got the signature of Emmeline Pankhurst and a poof print of a giant ox how cool yeah we can only assume we haven't actually said what mox is oh it's a it's a castrated male cow um but and they they used to be really popular uh for farming and

they used to be way more popular as draft animals pulling plows and things than horses um but there were a few disadvantages and gradually they they went out of fashion a bit slower and a bit less versatile one of the problems is you can't change their shoes like you can a horse so horses stand on all four legs um and and when you want to change a shoe you can the horse can stand on three legs it can cope with that um and you can change a shoe and then you put that down and you change the other shoes oxen can't do that they can't stand on three legs so to put shoes on an ox which is necessary if you're farming with them what you have to do is you have to push it over onto the ground and then you have to have a basically a massive fork to to gently hold it

in place by the neck and then you tie its feet together so you don't get gourd a pitchfork like what you can't put a fork in its neck around its neck like it's gone either side so it's like that a kind of collar it's like in action films when someone always has a pitchfork kind of thrown at them and it lands on either side of their neck doesn't it it's exactly like that oh yeah like in all action films is that in diehard i'm not sure i don't really remember it it's in one of the sequels um but and so that's one method you said and then and that's pretty hardcore you have to be pretty brave to do that the alternate method is to use a thing called ox sling which is this massive framework of beams and you get the ox into walk in and then

you just lift it up off the ground and you have it hovering in the air and then you have to fit the shoes like that so you can see why they went out of fashion yeah fun for the ox though the sling one i prefer that to the lying on your back with the pitchfork and your neck and your legs tied together if you had the choice next time you're in plaques and buy these shoes this is like diehard okay it's time for our final fact of the show and that is my fact my fact this week is that the world's least frequently published newspaper is released once every four years on leap day the print edition costs four euros seventy or you can subscribe to it for a hundred euros per

century that's a cool subscription um so this is la bougie du sepeur which is a satirical newspaper that began in 1980 two friends decided that they wanted to do this as a thing and they made it a reality so the title translates as the sappers candle and it's a reference to a cartoon character who was called the sapper camembert and he was born on the 29th of february he joined the army just as he'd celebrated his fourth birthday that's the reference to the title but yeah it's a it's a wonderful newspaper that is still going to this day and it has a huge readership that just keeps growing and growing and lots of lovely little in jokes they have a last minute section that they managed to squeeze in you know late news into it sometimes obviously if you've done the

crossword you've got to wait four years for the answers to appear um and sometimes they make the decision not to publish it until eight years later the answers and just keep people hanging so yeah they've they're really fun these guys i was surprised that they had that you get that subscription because there was an interview with the editor in 2012 who said he had considered offering subscriptions but it would be too difficult to find people because the likelihood is they would have moved house between publication dates so he's obviously got a better way of tracking his well it's a good way it's a good way of getting a hundred euros out of people isn't it they had a sunday supplement in 2004 and the next one is going to be in 2032 so they kind of like

do a kind of each day of the week thing which is quite cool i think that's really good and they're not working on this full time are they but they can't be no they don't want to once say every four years they kind of meet up in a in a restaurant i think in paris and drink champagne and kind of come up with what funny ideas they're going to put into it brilliant that's so good yeah but the editor the current editor has been working on it for you know over a decade at least and certainly has been the editor for about three issues or so so it's got you know stable staff which is good and it has does have a print run i think this year of 200 000 which is not to say that's the number that we'll sell but that's a print run so it's got big tickets on itself yeah yeah there's

some interesting stories in this week in this um not this week's this what you say quadrennial edition uh they talk about brexit of course there is a interview with cedric villani the mathematician cum meryl candidate there is an story about morris the cockerel do you remember this so they're basically talking about all the things that have happened over the last four years and one of them was morris the cockerel who became really famous because um people were complaining that he was cockrelling too loud and um the people who lived in the countryside said well this is what the countryside sounds like so if you don't like it go back to paris kind of thing uh and they came up with a law basically protecting the sound of the french countryside um show you

guys remember that story but um i found out that since the magazine came out morris died he died in june is there any merch that we can get hold of of morris since maybe maybe a breast or a leg he actually um he died in may uh but it was announced in june because the owner said that what with lockdown people already had enough to worry about without having to think about morris the cockerel's death right that just would have been the cherry on the icing wouldn't it damn you 2020 um so i was looking into some other uh interesting or innovative newspapers and i don't think we've ever said this quite a few newspapers used to have space that you could add your own news in okay this is so cool so the first ever evening paper was launched in 1696

by a guy called ecobod dorks and um such a good name da wk not uh d o r k great either way what a name it's called dorks newsletter there's the name of it um and basically there was just space so that the buyer uh who might be the the grosser or it might be the individual but you could write your own news in you could or you could say hello to an individual subscriber but it's amazing the only docs are going to be bothered to do that right wait but what do you mean you could write a message to a subscriber so who was who was allowed to write the news in the blank bit anyone anyone anyone is but if you're the let's say it's the the local news agent you could say hello mr jenkins thought you might like to know that morris the cockerel is dead uh waited to

tell you until now because you would have been sad and then you can add that in or as even as the end user of the newspaper you can also write in it and then hand it over to your wife saying i've made you some nice pie if you write in that that's very cool it's so cool i was reading about it's now online it's called the antarctic sun uh but that used to be a paper that was published for people who live the scientists who live in antarctica and it'd be sent round to them all and it would cover sort of relevant news to them as opposed to news from the rest of the world so is there a weather report getting very slightly warmer but um before them before they existed there was another paper which was called the mukmurdo news the sort of predecessor

to them and that was then followed by the mukmurdo sometimes because the publishing schedule was so erratic that they couldn't promise that it would always be consistent and that lasted from 1960 to 1980 uh as a as a paper i love that although did you know the mukmurdo sometimes changed its name halfway through to the mukmurdo sometimes explain that it was the mukmurdo sometimes in 1960 but it was spelled s o m e t i m e z and then for some reason in 1972 they decided to change the name to spell the word sometimes correctly that's right so what happened then maybe they got a publisher without a sense of humor bizarre um the latest article in the what is now the antarctic sun did you see what it was about no well this i think andy might want to subscribe maybe move

to Antarctica because it was called masses of mosses it was about the moss that's taking over Antarctica get me on a plane brilliant i imagine that's probably also covered in the dark times or whatever it was and as soon as you said that i thought which which thing am i going to be slammed for now is it going to be moss or is it going to be funicular railways it's going to be one of the other things i developed an unlikely crush on in the last six years and did you manage by the time i did the big reveal did you manage to have worked out which was more likely to exist in Antarctica i thought that can't be many funicular 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 you can get us on our twitter accounts i'm on at schreiberland james at james harkin andy at andrew hunter m and anna you can email podcast at qi.com yep you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or go to our website no such thing as a fish.com all of our previous episodes are up there as well as bits of merchandise and so on thanks for listening guys we're gonna be back again next week with another episode we hope you're well we'll see you then goodbye