No Such Thing As A Fish - 55: No Such Thing As Samurai Nail Clippers

Episode Date: April 3, 2015

Live at the Soho Theatre, Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss internet for plants, smoke jumpers and super-wet water.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from the Soho Theatre in central London. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting with James Harkin, Andy Murray, Anna Chazinski, and once again, we have our four favorite facts. We're sat around our microphones, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that firefighters use wetter water than we do.

Is that in everyday life as well, just cleaning their teeth and having a shower? No, just for putting out fires. So what do you mean by wetter water? Well, it's just about how weird water is really. Apparently, if you put certain polymers into water, there is less friction in the pipe, so it shoots out of the pipe quicker. So, and it's called a wetting agent, and it's to make water wetter. Did someone notice that it was going really slowly out of the pipe

and sort of hanging around, and how much faster does it go? Well, they use it in oil as well, and in the Alaskan Pipeline, they put this stuff in, and it reduces pumping costs by up to 50%. Because it pumps up more in a shorter time. You don't want to mix up the oil in the water if you're a firefighter as well. It's terrible. So you can mix oil in water, isn't that the whole point? It's amazing.

So when it's the first time they use this stuff, there were puddles of it around, and the firefighters were complaining that it was slipping on the puddles, because it was so wet. Quick step in one of those puddles of water for stability. So, do you know how long they've been using it? This was, I'm not sure exactly when it came out, when they found it out, but I think it was in the 60s or 70s, and it was a guy called BA Toms, and it's called the Toms Effect, this thing that makes it slippier.

On slippery water, no one knows why ice is slippery, do they? Or no one knows why? Well, the reason ice is slippery is that there's a tiny film of water forms on top of water when it freezes, and scientists don't know why water does that, why there's tiny film of water forms and why it's slippery. And that's just another weird thing about water. And the other weird thing is that it's sticky and slippery ice. Like if you put your tongue and ate your stick to it, but also it's slippery,

and that's just a weird thing to happen. Just on water being wetter, my dad uses scissors that are sharper than most scissors. What are you talking about? I was trying to think when I found out this fact. I was just like, oh, what else is more than what it's meant to be? And my dad, actually, my dad's a hairdresser, and he has a pair of scissors that were forged by samurai in Japan. I'm starting to understand why you believe all this crap about yetis.

Your dad's been spinning you absurd lies since you were a child. So sorry, they were forged in the pit. No, honestly, so they were forged in the fire of some Mardar. There are pair of scissors that were forged by samurai, and they are the sharpest pair of scissors that you can buy in the world, and he's had them for 35 coming up to 40, so it's in between that bracket. One day they'll be given to you. No, but he's consistently, as a hairdresser, you're meant to get your scissors sharpened every few years.

He goes every few years to get them sharpened, and the people at the sharpening place go, we can do nothing for you. These are as sharp as they have ever been, as they ever will be. And they're just samurai scissors. What kind of samurai blacksmith makes scissors, though? Is it someone who's been kicked out of the swords bit of the blacksmith ring? No, but if you're a samurai, you're not going to, like, imagine when they're clipping their nails and stuff.

They probably have samurai's nail clippers. If you're used to that kind of excellence, you're just going to create more products that are going to help you out, right? Yeah, that sounds implausible. I promise you, everyone Google it, samurai scissors exist. I didn't really have to have your scissors sharpened every few years as a hairdresser. That surprises me. Yeah. Oh, well, there's a fact.

That's good. So on fire, the very earliest fire fighting organizations in the USA, they were all volunteer ones, and normally they couldn't do very much because they didn't have much suction through the fire hoses. And so what they would do instead, one of the most important things was called a bed key, and this was to break down a bed frame, a wooden bed frame, because that was often the most valuable thing in a house.

And so they said, well, we can't really do much for the house, but we did at least get your bed frame out, and that was the thing. In those days, it wouldn't have made any sense to ask, what would you save in a fire? Because everyone would have said, my bed frame. Is that because it was made out of iron? No, they were wooden. So important to get out.

If it's iron, you just leave it there. Yeah, because what they used to do when they moved house in the old days in America is they would burn down the old house, and they would take the nails out of the burning gashes because nails were so expensive to make. Just talking about firefighters, the very first firefighting brigade was from ancient Roman times, and it was a guy called Crassus, which James and I always talk about.

We've never said it on this podcast, I love this guy. He basically realized that when fires were happening, you could make a lot of money by setting up a thing to put them out. And so he used to do this thing where he announced he had a 500-person fleet for his first fire brigade, and a fire would start, and they'd all race to it, and as soon as they got there, they wouldn't put the fire out. They'd negotiate how much the guy was willing to pay

for them to put the fire out. And if they didn't reach an agreement, they'd just let it burn, and they'd all just watch it burn to the ground. And then Crassus would buy the house back cheaper. He'd be like, are you doing anything with this plot? Not yet cheaper, yeah. This house has depreciated in value so much since turning into a pile of ash. But yeah, that was the first ever fire brigade.

The first ever fire hose was in ancient Greece, I think, and I think this is another example of inventions which I love, which are inventions which then disappear, people forget about them and don't make them again for ages. So I think this vanished for 1700 years, but fire hose invented in ancient Greece, and it was made out of an ox's intestine, and I think so it was you put water in a bag,

and then you attach a bag to an ox's intestine, and then you jump on the bag. Do you remove the intestine from the ox first? I think it depends what you want to be spraying out. But yeah, conventionally, yes. If you're trying to make yoghurt, however. And yeah, the force at which water kicks was expelled from the ox guts. That's amazing. Wow.

That's so good. It's very cool. I read about a guy who invented a helmet that you would sew. One of the big problems, obviously, when you were going into a fire, was that you would smother yourself with the smoke you'd pass out. So everyone was trying to work out. In 1823, a guy called Charles Dean invented a helmet that had a hose attached to it, so you would go in and you'd have air pushed in through the hose

so you could breathe. No one ended up using it, though, because it was made of metal, and while people were inside, they were suddenly going, and dashing back out in this kettle of mass. But then he transferred the design to a diving helmet, and those were the very first diving helmets that we... Yeah, it's the same guy, so that's what it became.

Good. Thank you. 100 years before that, which was in 1723, the first automatic fire extinguisher was painted in England, and this was a guy called Ambrose Godfrey, and it consisted of a cask of fire extinguishing fluid and a load of gunpowder, and you would set fire to the gunpowder, it would explode, and then the water would go everywhere,

and then it would put it out. Did they used to have fire extinguishing grenades as well? Yeah, they were called Fox Balls, weren't they? Fox. Sorry. They were invented by a German guy called Fuchs, and they were little glass balls with water or a liquid inside, and you would throw them at the fire and it would put them out. It's terrifying.

Oh, thank God, the fire department here, grenade! Have you guys heard of smoke jumpers? I have not. No. These are the coolest people in the world. They jump out of planes to put out fires. They parachute down onto fires and put them out. What? How...

Because I guess from that height, it looks really small, but once you get close... Put it down there. With your pockets. With your pockets. No, they genuinely do this. This happens where there are forest fires, so in places in the USA where you can get fires,

and it's much faster to get there, basically, with... And obviously, it's not for a mass response. You can't have hundreds of people doing it, but these people do exist, and I've read frequently asked questions. I read a little interview with a guy who is a smoke jumper, and they just sound like the hardest people in the world, so isn't it dangerous landing in a fire?

We land close to not in the fire. And then he went on, at least that's the plan. It's not uncommon to land in smoldering areas. So cool. Yeah, they're the most hardcore men in the world. Yeah, the things they take as well, they take backpacks, which have little pumping power supplies on them.

Sometimes they take chainsaws, which I think is to cut trees which are at risk of being close to the fire. I haven't researched that bit enough, but... Sometimes they would have, like, a crocodile of the world. We're going to have to move on to the next fact. Yeah, if you've got something more. Can I just tell people, because we're on water,

that you could go the rest of your life without drinking water again. This is just a big piece of propaganda from water merchants who... Big water, yeah. Big water companies taking over your life. So the whole thing about you have to drink eight cups of water a day. No scientists know where that comes from.

There's no scientific basis for it. You can replace water, if you like, with, like, coffee tea. It's not going to dehydrate you. Yeah, coffee does have water in it, though. Yeah, okay, so when I say water, I mean, you could dilute it with... It doesn't need to be water. I mean, you can have ribena. But coffee tea, don't dehydrate you.

Massively rehydrate you. And drinking eight cups of water a day is too much. You shouldn't drink water unless you feel thirsty. And also, it doesn't help you. If you're an athlete, it doesn't help you drinking more water. So they tested cyclists, and they had some dehydrated cyclists compete against some non-dehydrated cyclists.

Didn't make a difference. Totally fine. I mean, it would make a difference eventually. Yeah, so they didn't dehydrate them to death. Oh, my God, ethics committees these days are a nightmare. So Anna Chazinski says, you do not need to drink water, and yet I'm the dickhead for saying my dad has samurai scissors.

Sure. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Chazinski. Yes, my fact is that plants have their own internet, and it's made of fungus. So not only this, they've got their internet, and they've been using it for miles by hundreds of years, by the way,

and 80% of them are signed up to it. But wait, to the ones which don't have it, are they in urban areas? They have a glance in developing countries, and they have rural places. They have cybercrime online. They have social media. They have online shopping.

I'm just going to go on like this, like I've lost the plot. They've got Myspace, they've got eBay, they've got a lot. They do. They've got Treebay. I hate myself for that. So they have this network of fungus attached there. You know when you pick up a plant,

and you see those little white strands coming off plants roots? That's a kind of fungus, and this system is called mycorrhizae, and it's a way of them communicating with each other, so this fungus will link a whole garden of plants together, or a whole forest of trees together, and if one tree is lacking in nutrients or water, then it will send out a signal,

and then another tree will be able to send it nutrients or water via the fungus. They have news updates. This is my version of news updates. So if they're under attack, let's say for instance, a plant is being attacked by an aphid, then they'll be able to emit signals

via the mycorrhizae network, and other plants around will know that the aphids are coming, and they will put up their defenses. Yeah, but how much defense does a tree have? Because I remember reading a few years ago that when giraffes eat acacia trees, they will give out some kind of signal to the other trees to say,

there are giraffes coming, you're going to get eaten. But how do you stop yourself from being eaten? Basically, it's just a lot of other messages going, well, shit. Now I'm going to get eaten and spend the last hour of my life afraid. No, actually, that's a really interesting question. Thanks for asking.

This is... This is so many ways, so they can pump out chemicals to make themselves less tasty to attacking insects. One really clever thing that some bean plants do is so they are preyed upon by aphids, and when they get preyed upon by aphids,

they send out a perfume, which is delicious to wasps, and wasps come, so they use wasps as their bodyguards, and the wasps come, kill the aphids. So they just call on their bodyguards, what, wasp bodyguards? I think that's so cool. The smell of cut grasses

is partly the grass screaming, apparently. What? The smell of the lovely smell of cut grass is partly the plants screaming. It's partly summoning creatures to stop the predator, because it thinks it's being eaten by other insects, so it cools over it.

Do you know, you can actually... This is so weird, because it does sound like plants have a slight intelligence. It seems so dubious. I was reading this paper, and I saw some plants, they go down. What does that mean? This other one was that

basically, if you play a recording of a caterpillar munching on a leaf next to a certain plant, the plant will respond to it and let off a defense mechanism as well. So it's not even like a real thing going on. It's just listening to a record of this happening.

But how? It doesn't have ears. I think it might be acoustic vibrations, air vibrations, but the same thing is a pipe, which is enclosed in a pipe, which couldn't possibly be emitting any water into the soil. Roots will grow towards it, because it's assumed they can hear the sound of water. Is that normal water?

Sorry, or is it... Is it James' super water? There was a study in 2009 by the Royal Horticultural Society about how quickly plants grow if you talk to them, because obviously, the whole thing Prince Charles did that, then he talked to his plants and stuff.

They found that tomato plants grew up to 2 inches if they were serenaded by a female rather than a male. And the most effective talker came from a lady called Sarah Darwin, who was a great-great-grand daughter of Charles Darwin. No! What? Only me? Are you kidding?

The most effective plant talker in the world is a relative of Charles Darwin. And the things that she... I'll tell you what, it gets better. She read out an excerpt from Darwin's On the Origin of the Species. That happened.

That's so hot. Literally the hottest sentence I've ever heard in my life. That has just got 2 inches bigger. That is amazing. I looked up... It's a while on the fungal network that connects all plants.

I looked up some British fungi names. British fungi include the jelly ear, the bearded tooth, the weeping tooth crust, the slimy earth tongue, the fetid parachute, the brain-fold truffle, and my favourite, the hairy-nuts disco.

But that's the thing. I was looking at this as well, not fungus, but just plants. They all used to have really rude names. Dandelions trying to be known as dandelions were originally called piss-o-bed. Oh, yeah. And they were called piss-o-bed because... In French, they're called piss-on-lee, which is the same. Right.

Of course, they would make QE, right? Yeah, yeah. That was the idea. So everyone was like, well, let's just call it piss-o-bed. But listen to these other names. Mare's fart, naked ladies, open arse, hound's piss, and bum towel.

So insects can talk to each other using a plug as a kind of telephone. Wow. This is too far. This is before they got the internet. They did, um... Yeah. So if you've got an insect that's feeding on the roots,

he doesn't want another insect feeding on the leaves because it could kill their plant too quickly. And so they'll send up a kind of signal to the leaves saying, we don't want anyone eating these leaves. And it's like a no vacancies kind of sign. Yeah, that's really cool. And there was a guy called Clive Baxter.

He was a lie detector expert working for the FBI. And he claimed that if you wired up a plant to a polygraph machine, you'll be able to detect what they're thinking. OK, so here was... This was his experiment. Where were you on the night of the... What have you done with the soil?

So he had a room with two plants in it. Six students took it in turns to enter the room, and then one of them stamped on and killed a plant in front of another plant. OK? OK. And then they had a lineup.

No. Pretty much. When the five innocent students later walked into the room, there was little to no response from the plant. However, when the murderer came in, the plant went wild.

The study has never been able to be replicated. We're going to have to move on to our next facts. Anyone else got anything? I lost it all in a very nuts disco, I'm afraid. OK. It's time for fact number three,

and that is Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact is that in 1710, the boys of Winchester College rioted over insufficient beer rations. I think it was the sixth form, to be fair, but still, this is from a book called The Old Boys, The Decline and Rise of the Public School by a guy called David Turner.

And it's just incredible. There were loads of public school riots in those centuries. So in 1690, the boys at Manchester Grammar disagreed with their teachers about the Christmas holiday timings and responded by locking themselves in with guns and firing warning shots

at anyone who came near the school for a fortnight. For a fortnight. What was their objection? Don't lock yourself in the school if you want more holiday. That's very true. But these things happened in 70 years.

Just at Eaton, there were six full-scale riots. So how much beer did they get, do we know? I don't know. Because actually, in the olden days, people used to drink a lot of beer, didn't they? Because it was safer than drinking water and it would be quite weak beer, but you would still have it nonetheless.

But like kids as well. Kids would just be downing pints going, you don't actually need to drink water, that's the thing, as long as you drink lots and lots of beer. That's a wise lesson. In fact, the first children's picture book that is known to man has instructions for brewing your own beer.

Really? It has instructions for home-brewing beer and making your own wine, among other things. But it's an important life lesson, I think. In the workhouses, men would have two pints of beer a day according to the official diet that they were allowed and children had one pint and women had a pint of beer and a pint of tea.

That was the official rules that they were supposed to have. Is it healthy for kids to drink beer? Yes! LAUGHTER And yet, the bureaucrats in Brussels have decided it isn't. No, we're saying it's not.

But in the olden days, it was better to drink beer which had been brewed than to drink water which hadn't been boiled because it was really bad for you. Women in labour in the 16th century were given groaning beer which was consumed during labour and it was supposed to help you rather than aesthetics, I guess.

There was actually a whole range of groaning foods. This is true. You had groaning pie. It sounds like a straight up Harry Potter. A groaning pie. In the navy, of course, they would have lots of alcohol. The daily ration up until 1740 was half a pint of neat rum

twice a day. That's good, right? The navy were pissed the whole time, weren't they? How do we win any battles? Honestly, they would go drunk into war. That was their big thing. Actually, I did find, speaking of this, the original lyrics of

what should we do with the drunken sailor. You want to hear those? Here are a few. Put him in the hole with an angry weasel. What's that? Stick him in a bag and beat him senseless. There's another one. Put him in the hole with a captain's daughter.

Wow. But actually, a captain's... Isn't that punishing the daughter? Well, the captain's daughter was a nickname for the cat and owl nine tails. Just very quickly, an update from a very old fact that we did on the show. Just going from you saying put them in a bag and beat them.

There was that fact that you said about how you used to get thrown into... Okay, so there was an old punishment in the olden days. It was capsule punishment, I guess. You would be put into a bag with a cockerel, a cat and a snake, right? But in Britain, you couldn't get snakes

very easily, and so they would just make do with a picture of a snake. There were a couple of other little riot... No, there were massive riots. So the 1793 Winchester College riot, which I think we all remember,

but basically the headmaster, what they were called wardens in those days, had ordered the whole school to be punished because of one boy's misdemeanor, and the boys wrote to him saying, that's unfair, you've broken the rules, and he wrote back not answering them satisfactorily,

so they perceived the school again armed with guns, swords and clubs. That's just a common response. The nice thing about it is the whole correspondence between them was in Latin. Really cool. I was looking up stuff about how alcohol might be good for children.

Yep, and we are a small but growing political body. We're standing in five constituencies this election. Quite a few people think that it's actually good for you. Do you guys know about beer in Belgium? The schools in Belgium, there was a big push to introduce beer back into schools.

And they actually tested it out on a school. And they all failed their exams. But they didn't care. So the alcohol had only between 1.5 and 2.5% of alcohol in it. This was set up in one particular school where they wanted to do a test run

to see if it actually worked. And they found that 75% of the students that they surveyed said, oh, we really like it. And unfortunately, no other school was willing to do the test. That shouldn't be the way you judge whether it's a good thing asking the drunk people.

Did you like that? Obviously, they really like it. But the heroin trial at the same school is going great. Good stuff. Did you have some stuff about riots? Yeah. Well, you only need three people to cause a riot in the UK.

And we've got four. You only need two people in Nevada to cause a riot. Which is pretty good. Is there any way we can have a one-person riot? I've never found it anywhere in the world. And I have looked. Just one other thing about beer.

In 1883, there was a competition organised by the Church of England Temperance Society. And they wanted to see how good beer was compared to water. And the game was simple. Two men were cut down as much corn as possible in a field. One was only allowed to drink water and the other was only allowed to drink beer.

And the winner was beer! Mr. Terrell playing for beer cleared just over 20 acres in 12 hours versus Mr. Abbey's 19 acres. So he got an extra acre. And they were going to give the winner a gold medal,

but he collapsed before they could do something. LAUGHTER And so they dragged him into a ward and anointed him with whiskey. LAUGHTER We're going to have to move on, by the way. So this is very, very closely related. I think that your rioters

at public school who were rioting about beer then went on, obviously, to continue to do the same thing. Because a famous riot that happened in Oxford in 1355 was the St. Scholastica Day riot. And this was when this happened in the swindle-stocked haven. And it was when Walter Springe Hoes

and Roger de Chesterfield, who are two university students, surprisingly enough, argued with the Taverner John Croydon about the quality of the beer there, about the quality of the drinks in his pub. They ended up assaulting him. And in the end, 200 students started rioting.

It lasted two days. 63 scholars and 30 locals were left dead. But it ended up being blamed on... Sorry, it's the 14th century. It's too soon, Anna. It's too soon. It's an intake of breath over there. Come on. They're over it now. Walter did Chesterfield's in tonight, actually.

Sorry to the Springe Hoes family. And so the dispute was settled and it turned out that the mayor had been arguing on the side of the townspeople, the non-students, who'd been saying this is unfair, we've been attacked for the quality of the beer we're serving by these posh students. And the mayor was found in the wrong,

and his councillors were found in the wrong, and they had to march bare-headed through the streets to pay the university a fine of one penny for every scholar killed for 470 years. And they did that until 1825 when the mayor decided it was getting ridiculous. And...

The currency was changing so many times anyway, it was very hard to know what to pay. And it stopped. But, yeah, the... The Scholastica Day riot. Can I just say, I think we've done very well so far, have hardly been rude at all in this podcast, because it's been penis, penis, penis up until now, this last five episodes.

There's been no filth whatsoever, this podcast, so far, in all of these first three facts. LAUGHTER Can we move on now? Sure. OK, time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the first man to discover the clitoris...

CHEERING APPLAUSE ..was Colombo. LAUGHTER So, Colombo, not the detective, but I know what a shame. I just love that.

So, this is a guy who suddenly, it was 1559, I believe, he suddenly said, guess what, guys, I found the clitoris, and everyone was like, ah, we knew where it was anyway. But he was the first person to properly say this is where the clitoris is. And he was an amazing physician.

He was working with Michelangelo on a book that was about the anatomy, which Michelangelo was going to illustrate. We don't know what happened. We don't know how it never came out, but that would have been the most seminal book of medical history. Michelangelo said, well, I like drawing the occasional penis,

but this is ridiculous. Seminal seemed like an unfortunate choice of word, didn't it? I looked on Etim online to find out the etymology of clitoris, and they're not really sure. It either comes from the Greek for to shut, or a key,

or the side of a hill, or the tickler. I guess it depends on the woman, presumably. And then they go on and say, the anatomist Matteo Colombo, who you were talking about, professor at Padua, claimed to have discovered it. He called it Amor Veneris,

Velducedo, or whatever, which is the love or sweetness of Venus. But then it says, it had been known earlier to women. So, yeah, I think that's the problem, really. For him, for you to say, he discovered it. He was the first person to proclaim to have discovered it.

Well, yeah, so you say there was another arrival doctor, also male, Gabriel Fallopius, who, when this guy came out with this announcement, said, I've discovered the clitoris, I've written about it in my book,

and they had a proper, so he tried to sue him for plagiarism, I think, for copyrighting the clitoris. There was another doctor as well, he was called Vesalius, and I think he taught Fallopius, so I think the grudge match was originally between Vesalius

and Colombo, and Vesalius said that he described it as a new and useless part, so presumably he was just throwing shade at the clitoris because he was angry not to have discovered it. I think, was he his teacher, or he might have been his student, but once this started coming about,

one of them was dead, and so one of them tried to sue the other, and it was completely useless because the dead person was visiting him. Was Fallopius the guy who invented, not invented? Discovered Fallopian tubes. Fallopius actually built the first woman. Yeah,

16th century. Yeah, he was, so really cool thing about Gabriel Fallopius, he did find and describe the Fallopian tubes, Fallopian after his own name, Fallopius, and tubes after the fact

that they look like tubers, the instrument. Nothing to do with the fact that they're tubes. Really? Yeah, that's a mistranslation, so the Fallopian tubes are supposed to be the Fallopian tubers, and it's because the shape of them is like a brass tuba.

If everyone listening to this starts only calling them Fallopian tubers, we can change the world. How often in conversation, Andy, are you? I'll say once a day for the rest of the year. I'll say Fallopian tubers, if you do. So Fallopius invented the first condom

as well, didn't he? It was covered in salt, and had to be... Like a cocktail or something. I suppose literally like a cocktail in a way. Don't forget to put a bit of salt around the rim. Sorry.

Sorry. It's a line from what I've said at the bottom I watched the other day. Oh, dear. So, his condom was covered in salt, and it had to be tucked under the foreskin, so it was uncomfortable

so much as it was unusable. And it was to kind of stop syphilis rather than through contraception. But also, it was held on by a pink ribbon so that it would appeal to women. No. Let's be honest, guys.

We know she's not going to like the main event. But we can at least doll it up a bit. So, he was doing this because there was a massive rise in STIs, STD syphilis was the big one. This is the sentence that confused me. I didn't actually read any more, I should have,

but it said he tested these condoms for 1,100 men. Now, did he test them? And there were no pregnancies, not one. Now, defy me to say it doesn't work. Just speaking of Philopio, there's a body part so obviously named after him, I was looking at other body parts

that are named after people. And the Pudendal canal is also called the Alcock canal or the Allcock canal because it was discovered by Benjamin Allcock and it's where blood is carried to the genitalia. So Benjamin Allcock discovered the little tube that carries blood to your willies.

That's so good. Because I'm always getting that in conversation. That's good to now know. Again, we were talking about names earlier for plants and this is the same thing. So, Philopian tube. I was looking through just a list of people who discovered a bit of the body

and had it named after them. There's so many bits of the body that I didn't know about and it sounds like the most awesome fantasy novel. If someone was on a trip, imagine, okay, they're passing the pouch of Douglas. They make their way through to the crypt

of Libercum. That's the place on our body, the crypt of Libercum, the sphincter of Oddy, the zonule of Zinn. Wow, the zonule of Zinn sounds like where your dad had his scissors made. I knew you were going to have a look

at some things named after peoples. So, in 2004, there was a group of scientists who discovered a new species of cockroach that they described as dirty, ugly, smelly, and in need of a name. And this cockroach extrudes urine out of its back and deposits it

on his genital region for the female to eat. And they made it so that you could bid to name it after your enemy. Isn't that cool? It's such a good idea. And so, whoever bid the most, I don't know who won, unfortunately, because they haven't said it yet.

Sure you don't, even though when it's released it's Dan Shriver next week. It's going to become perfectly clear. Well, that's such a good idea, isn't it? Naming something horrible and disgusting after your enemies. Because Linnaeus, he named an ugly, insignificant weed

after one of his critics. It's called Sieg's Bechia. Wow, that's great. He was the father of taxonomy, so he came up with the idea of naming things in this Latin system that we use. Yeah, and he was obsessed with... I mean, he was really egotistical.

He thought he was the god's gift to the plant. Yeah, he said, God makes Linnaeus names. Right. So, is this true that he had a garden that he could tell the time of the day by because he knew plants so well that when they opened, he'd be like,

oh, it's three. Yeah, I think it's time of the year as well, maybe. I can tell the time of the year. The thing I really like about this back, though, is that it is that man thing of going, I've discovered the clitoris and everyone's going, no, we knew about it. Like, we women knew about this. And just the way that

medical journals used to talk about the anatomy of a woman back in the day was just so absurd and so... Like, I found one in the British Medical Journal from 1878. They ran a correspondence between people where they were discussing whether menstruating women's touches,

like, so a menstruating woman, if she touched a bit of ham, whether it would ruin the ham. And that was like a serious thing. They're like, maybe they shouldn't be touching ham. Was that a massive problem before that? Were menstruating women constantly touching ham? I guess.

You get this urge. It's impossible to explain, but it's... Honestly, I'm in every butcher in London as soon as... Yeah, they thought... I was thinking some extraordinary things at the time at the time that the clitoris was discovered.

So it was still thought at the time that there was one sex and that a woman was just a less-developed version of a man and that in the womb the fetus hadn't received enough heat, so hadn't been able to spurt its clitoris into a penis in time. And so a clitoris was just a less-developed version of a penis, people thought.

And there was a belief that Galen, who was the ancient doctor, wrote down and he had evidence of and people still believed in the 16th century that women, if they overheated, could spontaneously grow a penis and turn into a man. LAUGHTER

Calm down, Barbara. LAUGHTER You'll get a penis again. And I realized that Galen is really amazing because he believed that they didn't know where sperm came from when he was around and his big idea, which everyone was like, oh, that makes total sense,

is that sperm was in your brain and it traveled through your spinal cord and then it came out. So when you were having sex, you would be like, oh! And then you would... You would let loose. LAUGHTER

Your face there, Dad. Your face. Something we hope we never see again. LAUGHTER So the truth is, of course, the opposite to what Galen thought is that every penis was once a clitoris, right? Oh, what?

And you still have the remnants of it because when a fetus is first developing in the wound, it starts... Your genitalia starts as a clitoris before the male hormones start getting involved and growing your own penis and there's still a... I'm just going to read this out so I don't have to actually say it myself.

Anyway, there's a dark underskin and a thin ridge or seam known as the RAF which runs from scrotum to anus and that's the remnants of your clitoris. So... Oh, that's a... Wow! Or your vagina.

Every day's a school day. Wow. And actually, Dan and Andy, you have a vagina. Thank you. Thank you very much. Nice that you finally noticed. LAUGHTER It's called the vagina masculina and it is the remnant of the time as a fetus

when it was neither male nor female and the body could have grown into either sex at that time and it can be found at the opening of your prostate and it's like a vestigial thing. Well, next time I'm around there... LAUGHTER

I'll check in, Andy, after the show. LAUGHTER Did you like that face you made? LAUGHTER You can see it again. LAUGHTER We're going to have to wrap up, guys. There's a lot of decency reasons.

LAUGHTER OK, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast, we're all on Twitter, so you can get us on there. I'm on at Shriverland James. At Eggshapes. Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M. Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. And if you want to listen to all of our previous episodes, you can go to knowsuchthingasafish.com. Also, this is our last night of our live shows. It's a six-week run. We are going to be doing more shows later in the year. So if you go to qi.com.

You can find out where we're going to be. So it's a mailing list. And post every episode now. I think we're going to send something out. So if you want to subscribe to that, we're on there. If you'd like your haircut and you live in Sydney, Roger... Roger Craig and Caroline Craig Shriver

are in Sydney, Australia. You can get a good deal if you use the code word Samurai. We'll be back again with another episode next week. Thanks so much, guys. See you later. Goodbye.