No Such Thing As A Fish - 369: No Such Thing As Quartz For The Courts

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss skillful french bunnies and ancient chinese sunnies.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

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 Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Andy. My fact is that the doctor who invented the first decent thermometer suitable for rectal use was named Thomas Orbutt.

It's the ultimate in nominative determinism isn't it? It is. It's just a cheap joke at the expense of a brilliant doctor who has done a lot more for the world than I ever will. Do you think I was trying to look into whether or not he got any sort of shtick for it at the time? If anyone made any jokes about it, couldn't see anything, it was just pure respect for the man.

Wow, missing a trick in those days, weren't they? Idiots. When was this? It was like... It was the 1860s, he invented it in 1866 I think. He worked with the manufacturers on the design and then he wrote an essay about it in 1868 in which he sort of described his making a bit. It's important to say, he himself was an armpit man.

What? Why do we need to know about his kinks? He said it's better to put, because basically it was the first decent thermometer for use on patients. All the ones before that took about 20 minutes to get a good reading and some of them were a foot long and some of them were even longer than that. It was the Wild West out there. He created a much more reliable one which was shorter and took very few minutes to get

a reading but he himself said, look the armpit is better and he wrote this essay saying that if patients allow single rectal examinations, which is doubtful, they will certainly rebel against their frequent repetition and this is as true of the coarser as the more sensitive natures. For in the former class of patients, the coarser variety, my assistants and myself have by such examinations, rectal examinations, excited comments, the narration of which would not tend to edification. Wow.

What does he mean by coarser? Does he mean people who seem like they're really hard? Socially rougher. Yeah, I mean, he was a doctor in Leeds, wasn't he? So you can imagine his Yorkshire, yeah, put in that thermometer anywhere nearby us. He was a proper good famous doctor, wasn't he, in Leeds? His mother was a friend of the Brontes. He himself was a friend of George Elliott and apparently a character, I haven't read

Middlemarch but I know Anna and Andy at least haven't done my have as well, but a character called Lidgate in Middlemarch, supposedly based on him, supposedly. That makes sense. He is the doctor character. I wouldn't be surprised if it was Dorothea. His father was a rector. His father was a rector and he was a rectal prober. Well, his father was the rector of a place in Suffolk called Debak-Kom-Bulge.

No. Oh my God. What? Yeah. That's a great... That's like really it. Yeah. So good.

Thanks for the links, as you were saying, James, with George Elliott. They were really good friends and she wrote about him a lot and that we have one quote particular, which she says, a good, clever, graceful man enough to enable one to be cheerful under the horrible smoke of ugly Leeds. Which was... They went then. Yeah. In fairness, that was a trip that George Elliott and her friend were making from Leeds to Bolton.

And if you're going to go to Bolton, anywhere is going to look ugly, isn't it? That's all right. Was it actually? Yeah. Oh, you must have been so excited by that. Did she give then a bucolic description of Bolton? I couldn't... I looked.

I must admit, I looked and I was more excited of finding out that she went to Bolton than I was about finding out his dad was from Debak-Kom-Bulge. That's how excited I was. Wow. When something excites you more than a rude name, you know you're a business. Yeah. Yeah, he was kind of had an unrivaled reputation in that area, I think. And then he quit doctoring in the late 80s and became commissioner for lunacy and kind

of looked at mental health problems. And the reason that he left, no one was quite sure why he left, but they think it might be because his uncle was very badly treated. His uncle was called Henry Olbut and he had written a book called The Wife's Handbook in 1885, which described contraceptive methods for women. And the people at the time thought that this should not be allowed, especially for working class women. And he was struck off from the medical register in 1887 because he'd written this book about

contraception. He said, knowledge may be alright for the rich lady who can afford to buy a guinea medical book and pay a big fee to a doctor, but it is an offence of an infamous character for a physician to write and sell a book at sixpence showing the poor how to better their hard lot. Wow. That is really interesting. What a family.

Isn't it? Yeah. Apparently, not a good sense of humour though. On the downside, Paul Colling to One Biography friends called him courtly and aristocratic in demeanor, gracious of mind and bearing, but serious and somewhat humourless. So he couldn't have seen the comedy in his own name. So sad. That is tragic.

Yeah. The first person to decide that temperature in a healthy person is always going to be about the same and that if you have a high or low temperature, it could be due to your disease was a guy called Carl Wunderlich. Wow. And he came up with that in 1868 and what excited me about that at first is because I did know of another Wunderlich that I'd read about recently, that's Jorg Wunderlich and he found very recently the world's oldest known erection.

This was in a spider. Spiders don't always have erections, but some of the old ones did and it was a harvestman and 99 million years ago, it had a direction and then was killed by some flowing sap from a tree which froze it in place and this knocked back the earliest erection by something like 30 or 40 million years. Wow. Did that previous oldest erection just immediately go flaccid? Anyway, that's your Wunderlich.

That's so perfect because obviously erections are often caused by a Wunderlich, aren't they? So it's extreme just explaining the normative determinism for anyone who didn't make the link. Thanks, Hannah. James, are they related to these Wunderlich? Or are you just using it as an excuse to talk about spider penises? Andy, I spent so much time going through if the Wunderlich family ever needs any genealogy,

I could help them so much because I looked through their entire family tree, looked through some really old records to try and find evidence of these two Wunderlicks were related. I'm just picturing you in the British library surrounded by dusty tomes all open to the Wunderlich page. I was thinking about the modern-day thermometers we've all used a lot recently over the last year and we've all thought, is this really working when you go into a public building or a place of work or a pub when we were allowed to go into pubs and you stand in front of those thermometers and they tell you what your temperature is.

The forehead gun. Or also just a screen sometimes, isn't it? Yeah, a screen, a forehead gun, the non-touch thermometers and I don't know about you guys but often you get a reading that is ridiculous, like 33.5 or something. But then I always take the screen off and put it up my rectum. They've had to replace those on the BBC so many times but they are very unreliable. So the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration found, first of all, that the seven widely used ones, seven of the most widely used ones, what they do is they compensate for imprecision

and unpredictability which can be caused by like, if it's a very hot day or if you've just cycled to the work or something, they compensate for that by normalizing the readings which essentially means that if they find a reading that they think is too extreme, they bring it down again. Really? Oh my God, I find that really interesting because I am quite a sweaty man especially when I've been cycling and I always cycle to the studios when we made QI and I always think I must be in the high 50s my temperature but it always comes up as 30, whatever.

I don't know what it is. I'm totally with you. I'm so with you. There must be a way for people to fail the readings otherwise what is the point? There is. So that's quite a broad overview of what they do. So basically the study found that you could have a core temperature of about 38.5 and it would readjust to 36.6 and its algorithms are trying to compensate for various other

environmental factors that they think might be happening but it's unreliable enough that you could also just have a temperature of 38.5 and register as 36 and they did another study in Australia I think where they found that in five out of six cases they missed a fever. It's really interesting in terms of coronavirus. There was one company called Kinsey Health who have smartphone connected thermometers and so basically they've been gathering data for the last nine years and in the lead-up to coronavirus they basically spotted it because suddenly there was this patch of high

fevers around the whole country. They said it was like this big swarm of just high fevers and they're going what the hell is this and they tried to report it to various different people but no one was taking the results as credible and so they think for the future these kind of smartphone operated data gathering thermometers might prevent us from ever really going too far down the line of an unrecognized pandemic. I just want to stick up for the good old fashioned mercury thermometer here which is out of fashion because apparently mercury is very dangerous and it turns out you can't buy mercury thermometers

any more in the UK. I can't believe you don't know that. I feel like they were bound in my childhood. They were bound in 2009. I think we had them at my school. I remember some mercury smashing on the floor in my school and everyone panicking and throwing sand on it and stuff. It's perfectly safe to...

Is that mercury? I think as long as you don't inhale the fumes I think it's fine to swallow it for example. Are we saying that really? Well, it doesn't matter. No one's got one anymore apparently apart from me and my parents who both work in the hat trade and they're absolutely fine. It's insane. The EU tried to ban barometers which also contain mercury because they contain mercury.

Antique barometers. This was a tiny amount of mercury. Nigel, you have lost the plot a bit here and I think we should emphasise that mercury can be very dangerous if you smash one of those flimsy barometers. If anyone agrees with Andy then there will be a rally at the White Cliffs of Dover. Bring your old barometer. We'll all together smash the barometers and drink the mercury and prove. And that is how survival of the fittest works.

Well you're like this Andy. You know who had mercury in them when they went to space? Oh, that does narrow it down. It does doesn't it? Yeah. Zhonglan. Zhonglan would have. The mercury astronauts.

Oh, you're kidding. They had mercury. Well, to an extent. All the mercury astronauts that went into space, they had all their vital signs being sussed out the whole way through. They sort of had all these pads on them monitoring their heart rates and stuff. But what I hadn't read before is they also had a thermometer up the bum for their trips. All the mercury astronauts, except for the final one, had a thermometer in their bum.

It must have been strange when the aliens got them and they started adally probing them. And they're like what? Someone's been here already. Yeah. So that was a thing. Was it up there the whole time? Yeah. How long were the missions?

These weren't long missions, right? They would go up. They would orbit the planets. I imagine they felt longer, didn't they? How do you know the difference between a rectal thermometer and an oral thermometer? This is very important, I reckon. This feels like a joke. It's not a joke.

Feels like it's going to be the smell. Or it's been used. How do you work it out before it's been used? Oh my goodness. Is it the size of the bulb or something? Pretty much right. Yeah. So a rectal thermometer will always have a round bulbous tip.

And an oral thermometer will have a longer, thin tip. And according to the website, I read it said a rectal thermometer should never be used to take an oral temperature. And an oral thermometer should never be used to take a rectal temperature. But either one can be used to take an armpit temperature. It's just a little tip. It feels like, is that not because of the danger of contamination? It does feel like just to be safe. They're saying, obviously don't put something that might have been in someone's bum in your mouth.

I think that's quite sensible in that direction. And then in the other direction, you don't want something spiky going up your bum. Yeah. That's true as well. And the other thing is, and the very important to get the difference between the thermometer and the barometer when you're putting it up. A rectal barometer. It's just got the pressure up there.

Your mind is taken completely off what the weather is going to be doing tomorrow. I was reading about nature's thermometer. And there was a scientist called Amos Dolbert who noticed that crickets would chirp at a certain rate. If you counted the number of clicks that they were doing, you could tell what the temperature was. And it was useful and unuseful because, A, he didn't specify what species of cricket it was. So everyone was just like, we've got the readings, but we can't find what the hell you're talking about. They think that it was a snowy tree cricket. But then they also have noticed that there are the field crickets that do it, but not all field crickets.

It's the weirdest thermometer. You need this one specific cricket in order to tell it. And then there's others that might tell you and others that will get it wrong if they're a different part of the same species. It's really bizarre. I think also, if it goes below a certain temperature, they all go to sleep and stop doing anything at all. But if you find that one species that we're not even sure is the right species, then you can tell the temperature. The advantage of the cricket thermometer is that crickets are not toxic, unlike mercury. You can eat them without any serious harm. But don't stick them up your bum. That will not work.

It's hard to hear them chirp. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that Cold War spy planes were equipped with rear view mirrors so that pilots could check they weren't leaving a trail behind them. Like a paper trail? What kind of trail we're talking about? Just dropping clues out the window. Then I shouldn't have done that. A con trail, or as some of you might know them, a chem trail. Oh my God.

Wow, straight into the density. I'm going to reverse out of that. They're just com trails. They're not chem trails. What does the con mean, is it? It's a big old con spawned by the government. So con trails are basically that kind of string of white that comes out of the bottom of a plane when it's flying. And it's created when water condenses to form ice crystals around the tiny particles of kind of soot and dirt and dust that are being emitted from the aircraft exhausts. And major problem for spy planes, because often a spy plane is so high up you can't see it. But what you can see is this trail, which if you follow it to the front leads directly to the plane that you need to shoot down.

And it was known about, they sort of started spotting them in early Second World War. And all planes had kind of rear view mirrors, or war planes did, because you needed to see if someone was chasing you, or most war planes did. And then after that they didn't. But it became apparent in the 1950s when the Lockheed U2 very famous spy planes were being made, that however high up they were, it wasn't going to work in evading detection because they were leaving con trails unless they had a way of looking behind them to see if they were and avoid it. And so they just have these little mirrors. So you've got the most high tech plane possibly ever. And then on a little pole on its nose, you've got a rear view mirror.

And if you check behind you and you see the trail, you can kind of change your altitude or change your speed or reduce the throttle and that can reduce the trail. Yeah, I think like certain areas of the sky are more susceptible to con trails, aren't they? The moisty bits, isn't it? The moisty bits. The moisty bits. Yeah, I didn't want to get too technical, but yes. But it changes lots, doesn't it? It's not like you can't fly between these altitudes.

It's only a few hundred metres of altitude that changes it, so it does feel very finessed what they're doing. So those spy planes are, they are incredible. Yeah, the U2. The mirror is literally the least interesting thing about it when you start looking to it. I mean, your fact is great, but what I mean is these planes were astonishing. So can I give my quick favourite fact about the U2 spy planes? Yeah. It takes two pilots to land a U2 spy plane, one inside the plane and one on the ground in a car chasing the plane.

It's because the outfit that you need to wear in order to go 70,000 feet into the air, which is how high these planes go, it's basically you need to wear astronaut gear and it's really hard to turn yourself and see where you're landing in these planes. So as you're coming in to land, the other pilot in the car is driving behind you and radioing in your position, going, you're nearly there, just a bit more, mate. Come on, you got better codes than that. But literally speaks you into a landing in a car going 140 miles an hour behind you. It's unbelievable. It's extraordinary.

Basically, it's a plane that's designed to be 70,000 feet up. It doesn't really like being at ground level. So it's got two, you know, the normal set of plane wheels are in a triangle. So you've got the two sets at the back of one at the front and you come down on the back one, set the front one, it's lovely, jubbly, you're on the ground. The U2 plane has got two sets of wheels which are lined up front to back like a bicycle. And I mean, it's just a nightmare to land. You basically have to slow down so much that it can't fly anymore.

That's how you land it. You get to about two feet above the ground and then you just slow down and slow down and slow down and it will just drop out of the sky onto these double wheels. Yeah, you stall it, don't you? You have to stall before you touch the ground. Every time. But then you don't properly stop until the plane tips over, effectively crashing. Like basically you have to crash land in order to stop the plane.

And what they have is these steel plates underneath each of the wing tips. So whichever side it keels over onto, that's the bit that starts helping them come to a full stop. It reminds me of, you know, when you're a kid and you're learning to ride a bike, I think that tends to be how you stop at first is you just wait until you fall off one side. It's like that. Same with me when skiing. There you go. When you're flying them, you were saying about stalling.

If you go too slow, then you'll stall. But if you go too fast, then the plane falls apart. And so there's only a 12 miles an hour speed window that you're allowed to fly in. And if you go too slow, you crash. And if you go too fast, you crash. So you're basically the whole time just looking at the speedometer going, oh. I think it sometimes, I think it can be as low as seven sometimes. It's called the coffin corner, which they've got to start rebranding some of their names

as if you're not scared enough. But yeah, it's, it's amazing. And it's because it flies so high is when you're flying high, your max speed is when you break the sound barrier. And the sound barrier gets lower and lower, the higher and higher you get, right? So as soon as you get high, you're going to break the sound barrier if you go not that fast. They're just such gorgeous machines. And I didn't realize they're so old as well. The model was first flew in 1955.

And I don't think any of those actual planes themselves are still in the air today. But the model has been adjusted a bit since then. But it's being updated now. It's probably going to be flying for another 30 years. It's probably going, this one model of plane is probably going to do 100 years in service, which is mad. Do you know what potentially I think we can say the U2 spy plane is responsible for a very exciting thing in the world of conspiracy. Is it the Joshua tree? I was hoping we get onto the U2 puns sitting here saying, you know,

who's going to crack first? Yeah. No, Area 51 in the Nevada desert, it was set. There were some declassified documents that came out a number of years ago, which showed that they needed a testing space for the spy plane for the U2 spy plane. So they needed somewhere to officially do that. And that is what Area 51 was set up for. Wow. Area 51 famously where the streets have no name. There you go.

There we go. That's number two. Keep counting. Anyway, let's talk about the elevation that these planes are flying at. Pilots often get vertigo. It's just for Anna. That was another. Yeah, I didn't get that.

Okay. I only got that. That was a joke when James said Jesus Christ after. Yeah. Did you get the one after that, which I didn't say Jesus Christ about? Was it vertigo? That seemed like an unusual word to throw in. The important point is when they're flying, whether it's a beautiful day,

whether they're flying over a city of blinding lights, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. I do feel like I have to punctuate these now. I've got a whole spreadsheet of these. So they're photographing. That's what they're for. The spy planes, it's for taking photos of territory the US is trying to observe. But they still shoot on film. And this was reported in 2018.

They're not using digital cameras at all. They have a lens the size of a dinner plate on the bottom of the plane. And then apparently they FedEx the film back to California to be analyzed. And this is that it has rolls of film inside at this plane, which are two miles long. Pretty cool. And okay, this is the thing. I had no idea how good the technology was, but they photograph all of Afghanistan every month. Just to see what's going on.

Even the edge. Yes. Sorry, Jesus Christ. There we go. He's the guitarist in the band. Oh, okay. So it's a new angle of buttons now. Nice.

But the photos are so good, or the cameras are so good that you can differentiate between objects, which are just eight inches apart on the ground. Are we going to talk about chemtrails? Let's talk about the government trying to poison us. So chemtrails is the idea that the government are trying to poison us by putting stuff in contrails. Or it might be that they're trying to change the weather. Or there's lots of things that they might be doing and they're almost certainly not doing. But there was a study very recently.

This was researches at the University of California, Irvine, and the Carnegie Institution of Science. And they asked 77 of the world's leading atmospheric scientists if they had any evidence that the government was spraying stuff out of airplanes, changing the atmosphere, or controlling overpopulation, or controlling food supply, or whatever. 76 of them said there is no evidence whatsoever. And one of them didn't say that there was no evidence. And so obviously people just jumped on that and went, Yes, but what about that one guy? But all he was doing was basically there was an area which had high levels of barium,

which there was currently no explanation for. And he was simply not ruling out the possibility that someone could have dropped it from an aeroplane. There are a million other things that it could be, but he just, as a scientist, like scientists do, until you have the evidence to rule it out, not ruling it out. And that's why he said, you know... Well, it sounds very suspect to me. That's all I'm saying. No, the sad thing about chemtrails, the really ironic thing about people who believe in chemtrails,

is that I think currently the predominant belief is that the reason the government are apparently putting these chemicals into chemtrails is to mitigate global warming. So people believe that to mitigate global warming, chemicals are being sprayed up into the atmosphere to block the heat from the sun. And so stop the planet warming. But people think that these chemicals are very bad for our health and very bad for the environment. Therefore, they're being kept a secret. However, the truth is that chemtrails are extremely bad for global warming.

So I had no idea about this. But it's so interesting. Basically, the kind of cloud they essentially create, like a fake cirrus cloud, is one of those really wispy ones. And so what that means is it lets almost all the sunlight through, but it traps all the heat underneath. And so it does the opposite of clouds, which at least don't let any sunlight through. So like big, big thick clouds don't let sunlight through, but they still trap heat. And there was a study done that showed that they are the main cause of aviation-based climate change. So when it looked at how much climate change was affected by various things,

50% was due to contrails, trapping the heat in and letting light through. And only 34% was carbon dioxide, which has to be qualified with the fact that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for ages, whereas the contrails are gone as soon as they've gone. But even so, I find that amazing. They're causing a massive, massive problem. Yeah, that's amazing. And that's why we need to find a way these days to not have the contrails. In the olden days, it was to stop the enemy from seeing where your plane is, but now it's trying to help the environment.

And there is a new system called Satavia, which uses AI to work out where in the world all of the... What did you call them? Moistly areas? Dan, I can't remember. Moisty. The Moisty. The Moistier areas and kind of sets up a map and can tell aeroplanes when to move into areas with low moisture. So they don't have as many contrails. Just one other thing to say about contrails is that the reason that they're bad...

We know the reason they're bad, but the reason they're so effective is that it's not just one plane that's leaving a trail in the sky. It's dozens of planes flying the same route, basically. And so rather than just one line in the sky, it's kind of like a massive string vest for the entire planet, which is obviously very good at keeping in heat. So that's the problem, really. Isn't it amazing? Because there's so much sky that you would think that a number of planes wouldn't be enough contrail to make a difference. There's a lot of sky when you look up. Yeah, that's where to look to find the sky.

I can't deny that. There's a lot of planes, though. There are, yeah. But I'm not seeing Andy's string vest in the sky every day. That's what I mean. There's not much of a string vest, but it keeps you warm. Very stringy string vest. Very revealing. Very sexy string vest. The other planets are dreadfully jealous of Earth. OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that in 12th century China, judges used to wear sunglasses in the courtroom.

Cool judges. Oh, because it was sunny in the courtroom? No, they were indoors. This was a thing that was done in order to hide the emotion of the judges as they were taking the case on so that no one could read what they were thinking. It was just a very clever way of putting on these quartz glasses. They're made of quartz, and you'd be like, what's he thinking? What's he thinking? I don't know. He's got his cool sunnies on. So, yeah.

That's cool that it's quartz for the quartz. Nice. But they must have gotten up so good in their advertising. Very true. I'm sure ancient China specifically had the word quartz and quartz. I think so. Yeah, and this is a fact which has led to what I think is an incredibly fun set of emails between James and Anna in terms of trying to verify. Could we quickly talk about that for a second? Anna, you've been trying to verify this fact for the last five years, it turns out. It's been a long, long slog.

And I think it's probably true. It's cited in, what's the guy called? James, then you joined the getting very obsessed bandwagon kind of overtook me, I think. Joseph Needham. Joseph Needham. Joseph Needham is like the historian of ancient China who does cite an original source saying that this is why judges did it, right? Yeah, he does. He says that someone called Liu Qi wrote in a book called Xia Ji Qi.

Now, I don't find any evidence that these books or this person exists anywhere else, but it could be because the internet isn't great on 12th century China. But he says that they wrote about this guy called Xi Qiang, who was a judge who used them. But he does say in a footnote in the bigger version of his book, this piece of information, which I fully believe to be true, comes from a paper on fire pearls and spectacles by Pi, which, though interesting, is full of serious and misleading mistakes. So, he's only got it from this one source and he says that the source is unreliable. But he actually believes it and Anna believes it. And if those two believe it, then I've got to say I have to believe it as well. Yeah.

Needham's got the instinct, you know? He can feel his way around ancient China in a way we can't. If he thinks it's true, surely. Well, Needham is extraordinary, isn't he? I mean, this guy was the authority on the old science of ancient China. Yeah. He was visited by three Chinese students in 1937 and suddenly got really interested in China. And he spent three years setting up an office in China and going up and down the whole of the country trying to find all these different sources.

And his book was described as perhaps the greatest single act of historical synthesis and intercultural communication ever attempted by one man. It's incredible. And all, you know, all these things where we say, oh, this was invented in China, this was invented in China. So many of them are basically down to this one guy's research. So, if you thought James and I were getting obsessive, he really is the pinnacle, isn't he, of going over the top. He was a pretty extraordinary guy. During World War II, he lobbied for UNESCO to basically add the S in UNESCO. There's a thing that is said that he is responsible for the S in UNESCO, which is science.

Oh, okay. Yeah. So it was United Nations educational and cultural. So it was UNECO. And then he was like, no, no, come on guys. It scans way better as well, doesn't it? Yeah. That definitely does.

Yeah. I guess we should say he's one of the first ever sunglasses. I know. Well, I'm sure they're pretty old sunglasses, you know, 800 years, 900 years. But we think that the first sunglasses were Inuit invention, and they were kind of goggles to prevent snow blindness made of carved wood or bone. And it can be really dangerous if you're exposed to ultraviolet light too much. And obviously, when the sunlight bounces off the snow and into your eyes, that can happen. So these are about 2000 years old, perhaps older, perhaps four.

And they've got a strap made from walrus hide. Do you remember we did ages ago, we talked about how they made everything out of walrus hide. Well, these goggles were no exception. And so they're cut. They're more snow goggles, I guess, than sunglasses. But they're a pretty good candidate, I reckon. There's no glass in them for a start. Okay.

All right. First tinted like glass glass sunglasses, I think, were from the place where you got all the best glass, really, which was Venice. I think we've talked about them before, how Venice had this amazing glass industry and they made lots of mirrors and things like that. These were called Goldoni glasses, and they were made in the late 18th century. And they weren't made by Goldoni, but they were popularized by him. He was a playwright and he always wore these particular like tinted glasses and everyone kind of copied him. All the gondoliers would wear them on the canals. And the other interesting thing about Carlo Goldoni is he is the person who wrote One Man Two Governors.

Did he? He did. James Gordon knows everything to him. Yes, exactly. He wrote an Italian, obviously, play called The Servant of Two Masters, which was adapted into that play. Very cool. He was a huge, huge deal, wasn't he? As I suppose you have to be to set an actual trend.

But he moved Italy away from Comedia dell'Arto and into more realism. But he did wear green glasses, which is, well, it's kind of comedic. But yeah, the lenders tend to be green on those old glasses because that reflects the sun best. And they were designed specifically for anyone on the water because of the glare of the water. So all gondoliers had these like, Wizard of Oz type glasses. How cool. So cool. There was that thing about Plenty of the Elder as well.

Wasn't there just talking about green tinted glasses where he said, well, he wrote that the Emperor Nero would watch gladiator matches through emeralds, which seems really far-fetched. It sounds like he's never seen an emerald. I mean, what would the possible point be? Oh, hey, maybe Nero was doing it because I know a physical effect that wearing sunglasses has. It makes your heart smaller, doesn't it? Not literally.

Oh, well, it makes you give less money to just give him. Yeah, it does. It absolutely does. That makes sense because it sort of removes you from a situation. This is my guess. That is the answer. Yeah. It makes you a bit more anonymous, not completely anonymous, but if you're more anonymous,

you are less inhibited basically from giving way to your selfish base instincts. And so they did an experiment at the University of Toronto. They got 80 volunteers and they said, right, we're going to give you $6, not a life-changing sum of money. And we want you to split it with someone else who's in the next room, let's say. And half of the people they did were just with, you know, nude face and half of them were wearing sunglasses. And people who were nude face, people who were in nude face.

Oh, actually, they weren't even in nude face. I think they were wearing normal glasses. What's going on? Are these all you two songs that I've never heard of? It sounds like you're really shoe-hunting some weird words into these sentences. Have you ever heard their hit album, Nude Face? Oh my God, James, it's a revelation. He's the bass player, I thought.

Basically, people who were wearing clear lenses, so are you more identifiable, they gave away $2.71 of the $6 they've been given. So pretty nearly even, Stephens, on average, people in shades gave away only $1.81, so they get more than four of the $6 for themselves. So that indicates that people are more willing to be a bit more selfish if they are hidden and anonymous in sunglasses. Makes total sense.

You know, when you see like a fashionable, wealthy-looking lady wearing huge Audrey Hepburn-style sunglasses, you do kind of think, I bet you're a dick. Turns out, they are. But then when they take the glasses off, they magically transform into a nice person again. Is that right? Yeah.

You know, he's not a dick who a lot of people thought was a dick for wearing glasses. Bono from U2. No. Bono, very famously, wears glasses, indoors, everywhere, never has them off. But it turns out, and he revealed this on the Graham Norton show back in, I think, it was 2017, that he has them on permanently because of a medical condition. Yeah.

So he suffers from glaucoma. And it means that his eyes, if there's too much light in them, swell up massively and can have huge problems, loss of eyesight, long-term. And so for someone who plays stadium gigs and is constantly having lights flashing in front of him, he could have been blind many, many years ago. So that's the simple reason why he wears the glasses.

Everyone thought he was being a dick. Well, why didn't you tell us all, 20, 30 years ago, before you let us all make fools of ourselves, taking a piss out of him? Because he's a rock star. He needs to come across as a dick. Oh, yeah, fair enough. The catch-22. There's glaucoma, come on more as you get older as well.

So maybe he was a dick and he's just now a dick with an excuse. Wow. I was going there. Possibly. I don't know him. Possibly. I don't know him. You know Ray Ban?

Yeah. Yeah. And Armani and Bulgari and Burberry and Chanel and Dolce and Gabbana and Prada and Versace. Sure. And Sunglasses Hut and Oakley and Target Optical and pretty much every kind of sunglasses you can name. They're all owned by the same people,

by the Luxot Teacher Group, which is an Italian group. They sell about a billion pairs of lenses and frames every year on all these different brand names. So some of them they own and some of them they make the sunglasses for the company that is owned by someone else. And this company is owned by a guy called Leonardo Delvecchio, who was the son of a vegetable peddler.

And he was sent to an orphanage at age seven because his mother was widowed and couldn't afford to support all of her children. And then when he became a teenager, he started working at a car parts place. And then at the age of 14, he put himself through design school and now he's the second richest man in the whole of Italy.

Wow. Yeah. God. It's extraordinary. It's amazing. Sounds like they just had a big brainstorm coming up with names. Couldn't besides they used all of them. And then why not just sell the one brand?

It's confusing. One bit of variety. I like Sunglasses Hut festival. What about Ray? Do you know where the name Ray comes from? Oh my God. I assumed there was a Ray involved as in it was like Max Factor,

who was a real person, wasn't it? Max Factor was real. So I assumed that there was a Ray ban. It was called Maximilian Factorovich or something, wasn't it? Yeah. That's right. So I assumed it was Raymond Banneville or whatever. Did you not do what I did, Andy?

Which is think, I literally went through that exact process thinking, Ray ban. I wonder if there's a Ray ban and then you get three seconds into that thought and you go, oh no, wait, they banish Ray's. I never got to that second part of the process. But they did the,

they did those big Aviator glasses, didn't they? Was it, was that Ray ban? I think so. Yeah. Yeah, invented the Aviator. They were designed by a guy called John McCready. And John McCready, as well as designing these Aviator Sunglasses,

he was the first person to test fly a crop duster aeroplane. He sent three altitude records flying up to 35,000 feet-ish, the first person to do that. He set the world endurance record of flying for over 35 hours, 35 hours and 18 minutes. He made the first nonstop coast-to-coast flight across America.

And he did the first aircraft engine repair while it was flying. So replaying an engine while the plane was flying. Oh, wow. And he became the first ever pilot to bail out of an aircraft at night. He did all those things and he invented or designed the Aviator Sunglasses.

Jesus. It's amazing. There's such a terrifying story about when he did break the altitude record, which is that his friend was actually trying to break it. A guy called Shorty Schroeder. This was in 1920. And this guy went up.

And at the time before they had your Aviator Sunglasses, they wore goggles. And because they were going up so high and it was incredibly cold, like minus 50 degrees, they wore goggles with fur lining. And if your eye was even a split second exposed, then you're absolutely buggered because it's far too cold for an eye to survive.

So this guy Shorty went up and his goggles completely fogged up so he couldn't see a thing. And he had no choice except to rip them off his face so he could see. And within moments, his vision went really blurred and his eyes completely froze over. Oh, my God.

Oh, the liquid in his eyes froze. Somehow his eyeballs frozen. He managed to land. And it was John McGreedy, his friend, who pulled him out of the cockpit and said, all right, mate, nice try. Bad luck about the goggles. Then he broke the record.

Then he went and found the sunglasses manufacturers and went, right, we better make some better glasses. That's amazing. Because I was just thinking, like, quite often when I talk to people, their eyes just kind of glaze over. And I wonder if it's due to the temperature, perhaps. That's what it is, James. It's the lofty, lofty conversation you have, James.

It simulates the altitude of 35,000 feet. It's incredible. You know, do you know progressive lenses in glasses? What these are, you can have bifocals where half of them are for short-sighted and half of them are for long-sighted. And you look in different parts of your glasses and you can, depending on what you're looking at,

a progressive lens. It still has your short-sighted bits and your long-sighted bits, but they're kind of blended into each other. So you're never jumping from one to the other. And the first US patent for one of these was by a woman called Dr. Estelle Glancy. And she, as well as invented that.

Oh, yeah. Glancy. I thought that was the whole point. Yeah, I thought, hey, there's more. You know what? I mean, so many of my facts are just this person's got a funny name. I do see why you thought that was the end of it.

But she also invented the first lens testing machine. And that is still used in most opticians today, her invention. And from 1918 to 1950, when she worked in the industry, she was the only female lens designer in the whole world for 32 years. She was the only one. Everyone else who did it was a man. And on the website for Zeiss,

who's like kind of an optical company, they said that women have faced a glass ceiling in many fields, but the glass ceiling in glasses may have been the toughest to break through. Brilliant. It's a great line, isn't it? But now women make up more than 76% of opticians in the US. So it's gotten better, certainly.

We've made it. Progressive lens sounds like a lens that only lets you read The Guardian and the New Statesman or something. That's nice. I have one tiny, this just made me laugh, because it's to do with one of my favorite movies, Contact. Contact, the movie, Jodie Foster,

almost got a really bizarre review from this guy called Anthony Lane, who is an American reviewer, because he was running really late to the cinema. And when he ran in and sat down, he forgot to take his sunglasses off. So he watched the first three quarters of an hour with the glasses on and the notes that he looked back on were notes going, very gloomy this movie.

Odd noir look for sci-fi. Creepy shadows in the outdoor scenes. And then suddenly realized he had his sunnies on. He was wearing contact lenses. Very good. Oh. I've got to move it on. So I read a fun story from 2017 about sunglasses,

specifically that police caught a man on his phone at the wheel because he took a selfie of himself of his face and he's wearing sunglasses. And the selfie says something like, single today, married tomorrow, scary times, something really cool like that. And he tweeted this and the police in his area spotted that in the photograph,

there was the reflection in his sunglasses of his other hand on the wheel of a car and the reflection of the view through the windscreen showing that he was mid-driving on a dual-carriageway. Oh. Tweeted at him, said, we've got a wedding present for you and it's a 200-pound fine and six points on your license.

They tweeted it back. They tweeted him that and then he deleted his Twitter account. No one comes across well in that story, did they? I don't think the police come across that well. And obviously he's driving while selfie-ing, so I just think... What you think of the police, that was a little bit, don't do it over Twitter, guys.

Don't do it over Twitter. Kick the door in like traditional, you know? OK, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that there is a species of rabbit that can't hop. So if it wants to go fast, it walks on its hands with its legs in the air.

Oh, I love these guys. They're so cute. You might have seen them online in the last couple of weeks. They've done a mini viral thing on the internet, hopefully not too viral that some of you won't have heard of it. But this is a species of rabbit called Sauter d'Alfort or the Alfort Jumper. They're a French species of rabbit.

And very recently, the reason they've got in the news is because there is a guy called Leif Anderson and his team at Uppsala University in Sweden and they have worked out what the gene is that makes it unable to hop like normal rabbits. So it's kind of a genetic problem they've got, isn't it? It's a sort of quirky, yeah. Do they get preyed on more, I wonder, because...

Well, they can't go that fast, maybe? They tend to not live in the wild very much. So the first we found out about them, there was a French vet called Etienne Letard and he was studying these rabbits that were unable to jump properly and he kind of... He was breeding rabbits at the time and he'd bred a few together and this strain had come out, which did this weird thing.

He said that they moved exactly like a human tightrope walker walks on his hands, so he kind of saw that association then. But the thing is, this is a very much recessive gene, so I think some might have escaped and some completely healthy ones have mated and now you get some of them in the wild that do this. But again, they won't really last very long. I don't think if they did that.

It's really impressive, isn't it? It's kind of very cool seeing them hands down the way along. It's kind of awesome. Oh, it's so wicked, yeah. And actually, he's quite interested in Etienne Letard. His father, Clebert Letard, was the first person to perform artificial insemination of a horse in France. Etienne did the first public demonstration

of insemination of a cow in France. Is that a step up or a step down? I can't remember. It's more showbiz, isn't it? It is, yeah. He took his father's penchant for insemination and he made himself a star. Gave it a bit of the old razzle dabble.

I wonder if that's a hard show to get people to come to. You know in Edinburgh, when you're walking through and everyone says, come, we've got naked Shakespeare. Come on, come on. Does anyone, you guys might not know this, but have you ever heard of the song Run, Rabbit, Run? Oh, yeah. Run, Rabbit, Run, Rabbit, Run, Run, Run.

Gums are farmer with this gun, gun, gun. Bang, bang, bang. Goes the farmer's gun. So run, run. Sorry, go on. What were you going to say about it? Is that a nursery rhyme or is that a big hit in the UK? It was a big hit back in the day.

Flanagan and Alan sang it. It was written by Noel Gay. And it became a patriotic song in World War II where they sang Run, Adolf, Run, Adolf, Run, Run, Run instead. And the reason that they got that song for World War II is because there was a picture that was in all the newspapers of this big sort of crater where a bomb had landed and someone was holding two rabbits and said,

ha, ha, Hitler, you bomb does, but all you managed to kill was these two rabbits. But actually that was a setup, that picture. And the rabbits had been bought by nearby butchers and they'd come to the hole in the ground and held them up. And it was like basically a bit of propaganda. But then as a result, this Run, Rabbit, Run song became massive during World War II.

How interesting. Because I have seen that as a fact around the internet that the first casualty of World War II to a bomb was a rabbit. And I think it was. This specific incident. Or is this a different incident? No, no, it's the same incident. There's this kind of propaganda,

but it's just to tell a true story. Because I believe, bizarrely, the first bomb drop was on the Shetland Islands because it was the Germans trying to get some of the boats in an inlet around the Shetland. And what happened was a few landed on the land and one of them killed a rabbit. Like all the locals were like,

oh, God, this is a big crater, this poor rabbit's dead. And there was a photographer who lived on the island who was like, oh, brilliant. I'm going to go and photograph that. But he's a smart cookie and has an eye for a good bit of press. And so he went to the butcher on the way to buy some rabbits to hold up

because he knew that that rabbit was going to be blown to smithereens. You know what you're saying, Anna, but I don't think you didn't play your Pulitzer Prize if you're going buying props for your war photos, can you? Yeah. Oh, come on. It was a bit of dramatic artistic license in the face of...

Because you can't hold up the sort of butchered remains. Yeah. So was there any... Do we have a photo that's sort of like in the archives of the butchered rabbit? Or did someone... Did some farmer go, I'm down one rabbit. It must have landed on that.

That's a good point. It's a big claim. Did it land on the hutch or was it just a loose rabbit in a field and we presume that it lost its life in the... But also starting with the Shetlands feels like a very toe-in-the-water strategy for your bottom campaign.

I have a plane and rabbit-related fact which is that in 2017, a plane had to make an emergency landing that was flying between Melbourne and Brisbane. It had to make an emergency landing after it hit an eagle and a rabbit at the same time. Oh, wow. It was...

The eagle had caught the rabbit and it was flying up into the air and it failed to notice. It was so intent on its lunch that it failed to notice the plane bearing down on it. The same questions about that. You're flying your plane and I guess you could see an eagle

but you're so fast that you're going to collide really quick, right? How do we know there was a rabbit there? It's such a good question. I just don't see how the pilot could have seen. I don't think we're relying on the pilot's testimony. I think they must have found some fur in the engine. Do you think or do you think someone went to the Butchers after the plane landed?

Exactly. There's one Butcher who's doing very well. Out of dodgy journalists. Do you know that the big reveal of the Simpsons was meant to be that Marge Simpson was a massive rabbit? What are you talking about? Yeah, this is a thing Matt Groening really wanted to do, which was...

He had a previous comic strip called Life in Hell, which was about a bunch of rabbits. And it was a very popular comic strip for him and then the Simpsons became the big thing that he did. But his big idea, which he pitched in a few meetings, was that underneath the giant blue hair that would one day get wet would come down and revealed underneath would be two giant bunny rabbit ears.

And we would be shown that that universe was connected to the Life is Hell universe. And everyone told he was mad and not to do it because he was going to do an episode. Then he thought that's the long game. We could do this as the final reveal. He was a massive rabbit all along. Still waiting for that final reveal.

They talked about it. He said in a DVD commentary that it's an old idea. However, there was a video game that was released of the Simpsons where in it, Marge gets electrocuted. And you know that classic cartoon thing of electrocution where you see the skeleton come through or the body underneath. In it, when she gets electrocuted, it sort of shows she has massive bunny rabbit ears.

So for one instance, she was in one part of the Simpsons universe. She is a giant rabbit. And that is a classic Easter egg, isn't it? Brilliant. Lovely. I know my tech terms. Rabbits are very stoic. Didn't know this, but yeah.

So rabbits, if they're really ill, they don't let you know. So many rabbit owners, when their rabbits die, they're like, it just came out of nowhere. They weren't even sick. But actually, they pretend to be healthy. They're like the opposite of possums, even if they're sick. And that's to just deflect attention from predators because if a predator sees a sick rabbit, it thinks,

I'm going to catch that one. Interesting. And so often they will just drop dead. But aren't they terrified of us? Aren't they terrified of human owners? I read a thing saying that when you pick a rabbit up and it's all still and quiet, it's just desperately hoping that you go away.

Yeah. They're rarely still and quiet. If you've ever had a pet rabbit, they will scratch your eyes out. Right. Oh. They're better at docile and sort of calm. No, but I think maybe your parents got a dead rabbit

from a local butchers and said it was a pet. That bloody butcher. You know the rabbits that we used in the Teletubbies show? Mm-hmm. They had to be so enormous because they were, because the Teletubbies were huge. Right. And it was like in a, they lived in a big field

and there was lots of rabbits jumping around all the time. Exactly. Yeah. And they were, they were Flemish giants, which I think are the largest rabbits on the planet. Or they're almost the largest breed that you can get. Because the Teletubby costumes, which are so massive. Anyway, this, I got, I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole

reading about these guys. And the problem was, firstly, the rabbits were always doing what rabbits do and trying to breed with each other. So they had to keep doing retakes because there would be a pair of rabbits in the background mating. And that, anyway, that's not really relevant

because the main fact I wanted to say, I didn't know this. The Teletubby costumes were so enormous and ungainly and difficult to move around in that they had to have seats inside them so the actors could sit down between takes. No way. Oh my God.

So if you see a Teletubby standing up, you don't know whether the person inside is sitting down or not. Do you think the reason the baby was laughing was because of all rabbits mating though? I can see his tinky winky. 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 Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thing as a fish.com. We've got all of our previous episodes up there. We've got links to any of our upcoming live shows. Also, you can check out the 20-hour-long marathon

that we did for Comic Relief. 35 videos are up there featuring 35 different fun comedy and pop science names. Do have a watch. And if you can, give to our Just Giving page, comicrelief.com slash fish. All right, guys. We'll be back again with another episode next week.

We'll see you then. Goodbye.