No Such Thing As A Fish - 6: No Such Thing As One Direction in North Korea

Episode Date: April 11, 2014

Episode 6: This week in the QI Office Andrew Hunter Murray (@andrewhunterm), James Harkin (@eggshaped), Anna Ptaszynski (@nosuchthing), Molly Oldfield (@mollyoldfield) and special guest Ig Nobel Prizes Founder Marc Abrahams (@marcabrahams) gather round a microphone to share their favourite newly discovered facts from the last days. 

We ran it on QI a few years ago, which was, there's no such thing as a fish. You think there's no such thing as a fish? No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish. Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. Once again, we've gathered around a microphone to discuss our favourite facts from the last seven days. My name's Andy Murray, and I'm joined by three other QI elves.

Their names are James Harkin, Molly Oldfield, and on fact-checking duty today, Anna Chazinski. We also have a special guest with us today, whose name is Mark Abrahams. And for those of you who don't know him, Mark is the founder of the Ig Nobel Prizes, which is a series of awards given out every year for pieces of research that first make you laugh and then make you think. So, as an example, this year's probability prize went to a team of scientists for making two related discoveries. First, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up. And second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again. Hello, Mark.

Hello, thank you for inviting me to your elf cast. Thank you. Thank you for coming along. I'm delighted to be visiting your country from my native home of America. The Ig Nobel show is touring the UK at the moment, doesn't it? No, and Denmark and Sweden. Oh my goodness. Okay, so listeners in Denmark and Sweden, look out for that. So, let's kick off with fact number one, which is from you, Mark. Fact number one is that a number of years ago, some plastic surgeons in Belgium, they had a young Belgian man who came to them,

wanting to have surgery performed to make him look more like his idol, the singer Michael Jackson. This is a technique first used on Michael Jackson himself. Exactly. There are lots of interesting questions. Medically, it's very interesting. It's a difficult piece of surgery. And in this medical report, the surgeons proudly describe exactly how they did it and say that they succeeded. Wow. That's amazing. When was this?

This was about 1997. Do they have to do a special thing where the skin got whiter and whiter and whiter as well like Michael Jackson? Well, these were plastic surgeons and when they write a report in a medical journal, they talk about just one specific thing they were doing. Wouldn't it be terrible to get the surgery done and then discover that you can't dance or sing anywhere near as well as Michael Jackson could? Because nobody could for a start. I believe it would and that's where robotics could enter the picture. And moonwalking. I mean, you must be able to perfect moonwalking if you practice it for long enough, don't you think? Yeah, but moonwalking was not the only dance move that Jackson did.

But what amazing main ones come out. He was an amazing dancer. We did on QI that it wasn't invented by Michael Jackson. Oh, yeah. It was invented by Bill Bailey, right? Yeah, it was an old, old guy called Bill Bailey, not our Bill Bailey, the other one. And also by the mannequin bird. Do you remember that video? The red cat mannequin. Yeah, it's brilliant.

It's brilliant. This brilliant bird that has a mating ritual that kind of climbs up a branch and then it slides back down like Michael Jackson. We always see on QI when we're doing our research, Dolly Parton or Charlie Chaplin came third in a Charlie Chaplin or a Dolly Parton lookalike competition. I don't know if any of those is true. Have you ever found any evidence that is true? Chaplin was so famous in his time that if you were going to have a lookalike competition for anyone, it probably would be him. Yeah, but him coming third. Did I make this up with a Hitler lookalike competition? You're thinking of Charlie Chaplin.

Hitler came third in a Charlie Chaplin lookalike competition. I do have a true example. Graham Greene, the author, once entered a competition of writing like Graham Greene and came second. Oh. Which is fantastic. I think it was in the new statesman. Speaking of Hitler and whoever, is it true all the stuff about dictators getting lookalikes for themselves? Dictators lookalikes? I don't know much about them. Well, I know one thing is that there was a guy who looked just like Saddam Hussein and he got kidnapped or attempted a kidnap from some guys in Egypt because they wanted to make a porn movie of him.

No. He got away, but that was his claim. Because he didn't want to be in a porn movie? Some people have no ambition, do they? What's his name? Kim Jong-un? Kim Jong-un. He has made everyone in Korea have the same haircut as him. And there was a story about how if One Direction wanted to perform in Korea, they were going to have to have their haircut like him.

Did you see that on the news? I had it on the radio the other day. One Direction wanted to perform in North Korea. Yeah. Now, I don't know a lot about the touring circuits and stadiums of North Korea, but I think that story's not clear. You think they're not likely to go? Well, I can tell you that I'm pretty sure about this. I think North Korea has the world's largest sports stadium.

I'm sure it has. It's got the world's largest everything and nothing else. The One Direction thing was in April Fools. Loads of reports are coming out saying that he's forcing all men at university in North Korea to have his haircut, Kim Jong-un. But I think they're all coming from South Korea and media network. I would suspect it's not true. But apparently, so it used to be that men were allowed to choose from 10 different prescribed haircuts. Now men have to pick his apparently.

So let's go back to something about surgery. To surgery, yeah. I remember I found this thing last year and I passed it on to you, Mark, which was the gynecomastia in the German Ministry of Defence. German soldiers have been marching, hitting themselves on the chest with their guns to such an extent that their breasts have been growing and they've had to have reduction surgery. That's amazing. It's a paper by Björn Der Kraphol. And within six years, a total of 211 patients underwent surgery in Germany. Wow.

There's quite a lot there. There's a lot, yeah, massively, just banging their gun against the chest. Yeah, it forces the tissue to grow. Oh, wow. Yeah, it didn't happen to everybody, but it happened quite a few times. Talking of boob jobs, there's a real-life Barbie and Ken. Oh, really? And Ken has had over 100 surgeries to look more like Ken, whereas Barbie's only had a boob job and she does the rest with lighting and really good makeup.

And apparently when they met, they had a big fight. Ken got angry with big Barbie because he said, I've spent a fortune and I had 100 surgeries and all you've done is one blame boob job. Totally plastic plastic surgery. I did try to get in touch a few years ago with these surgeons. Dr. Momeritz, Dr. Abeluss and Dr. Grap. I thought that they would be happy to talk with somebody, even the kind of journalist I am, who was interested but not necessarily adoring. They were no longer eager to discuss this. They must have been made fun of a little bit, I guess, by some other people.

Fortunately, even if they're not popular anymore, they have a surefire way of disguising themselves in public. Okay, let's move on to fact number two, which comes from Molly. So last week, a few of us went on an elf expedition to the British Museum and we went to the Viking Exhibition, so I thought I'd talk a little bit about Viking. The largest Viking ship ever found was discovered when they renovated the Viking Ship Museum. Brilliant. Actually, underneath it or? They were basically extending the museum and they dug down into the fjord literally outside the museum and there they found the longest Viking ship ever found and a whole bunch of other ships too. That's so convenient, isn't it? Yeah.

And underneath that, they found another museum which was upside down and it was a mirror. Do you remember that guy who got buried upside down atop his horse? He buried him upside down, he was sat on his horse upside down and the reason he did it is because he believed when the world ended, everyone would get sucked up to heaven. So if he was upside down, he'd be the right way round. Brilliant. Have you found it, Anna? Yes, it was in Surrey, I think. A few miles away, a horse is buried upside down too and the National Trust says you might think this is Major Peter Labelier's horse as in the guy who was buried upside down, but it's actually just a big coincidence.

That is a staggering coincidence. It is old, isn't it? Yes, but if you want to see, you can go to Box Hill and check out the grave. He was buried in 1800. His grave stone says Major Peter Labelier aged 75, eccentric resident of Dawking. Sort of implies he knew what he was doing. It's a good epitaph to have. Yeah.

Vikings, we should get back to Vikings. Yeah, they had these things called hogback stones in the exhibition which were huge stones. They're curved and they are covered with Viking inscriptions and they think what happened was the Vikings saw people here. Christians burying their dead and putting gravestones and so they copied them with their hogback stones and kind of made them Scandi-style with Viking things all over them, decoration all over them. Wow. What was that thing about Viking coins and what inscriptions they had on them? Yeah, the most common written inscription appearing anywhere in Viking Scandinavia was, what do you think? Something about Hrothger, angry face and his sword or something like this.

Similar. It was actually, there is no God but Allah alone. He has no partner. No way. No. How? Pretty weird. Because at the beginning of the Viking Age the Islamic world stretched far and wide from Spain to Central Asia and they used a single coinage throughout the empire and the Vikings obviously bought these coins back with them when they went off on their travels.

They found some of these coins because they've sort of scrubbed out the inscription and put Thor's hammer across the top. Wow. They were probably protesting outside the Viking Embassy all over the Middle East. And there was also some really good Viking graffiti which was like pretty basic. They tended to graffiti ships all over stuff. Nice. Wow. Viking graffiti sounds like it would almost all be good.

They're like the teenagers of European history aren't they? They are. Yeah. And also these skulls which had, they filed down their teeth. Oh yeah. So they were more fearsome. These particular Vikings just maybe were the equivalent then of this young Belgian man who wanted to have surgery to make him look like Michael Jackson. I just want to look like Odin guys.

Lots of people having one eye removed so they'd look like Odin. MC Thor's hammer. Oh gosh. I really like the thing though about finding something in a really convenient place. That's such a great story about the ship underneath the ship museum. Yeah. I like this thing about how they found the new species of bug in the Natural History Museum's garden. Oh yeah.

That was brilliant. Yeah. It was amazing. This bug in the garden, they picked it up, they thought, oh I've never seen that before. They checked against the 28 million specimens they have in the Natural History Museum and it didn't fit any of them. That's fantastic. How long does it take to check against 28 million specimens? Oh my God, that poor work experience boy.

He thought I'm going to have a nice easy week at the Natural History Museum. So Frank, could you just... Yeah, there was a woman who did the same thing in Britain somewhere, checked in her garden and she found like 27 species of wasps. Ichneumon. Yeah, ichneumon wasps, yeah. They're the ones who parasitise eggs, don't they? Yeah. I have a fun fact about them, which is that when Alfred Kinsey, the great sex researcher...

No, it wasn't ichneumon, it was Golbosp, he was an expert on, but he travelled the length and breadth of the USA finding these, categorising them, because he was a maniac collector. He wanted to have the biggest collection of everything in the world, parcel them up, label them and then send them back to the university and a lot of them hatched on the way. And so the people were constantly opening packages of live, crawling wasps. You know, love Alfred. I love that about Alfred Kinsey, that he got into sexology a bit later on in his career and his wife said, I don't see much of Alfred since he got interested in sex.

What about that other thing that they found in York, which was the coprolite, the Viking poo? Do you remember that one? Oh yeah. Did they find that under a Viking museum? A Viking poo museum. No, it was in the Lloyd's bank when they were excavating the cellars there. Maybe that had been deposited with the bank for safekeeping. Quite, yeah. I don't think they let you deposit things like that in the bank.

The discoverer of the poo, Andrew Bones Jones, commented, this is the most exciting piece of experiment I've ever seen. In its own way, it's as valuable as a crown jewels. Andrew Bones Jones, that man with no sense of priority, what's on the line? I was looking up Viking names and I found, because they have the by-names, you know, like Harold Bluetooth. Well, Bluetooth is where we get the Bluetooth from Mola Fons from, isn't it? We get it. It's named after him, I think. Harold Bluetooth?

Yeah. Seriously? Why? I believe going completely off memory here, but it might have been that it was Nokia who did it, and they... The next leading company. Nokia used to make gas masks. In fact, they supplied them to the Finnish Army until about 1995. I was at a comedy show the other night and the host was asking,

so where do you work? And the guy said, oh, I work at Nestle. And then he said, okay, but which bit are you working? And he said, I work in the cat food division of Nestle. And nobody in the audience knew that Nestle had a cat food division. He obviously didn't say the cat food bit at the start because he wants them to think he works in a chocolate company. He says that so that they all think he's Willy Wonka. And when they delve a bit further, it's like, oh, cat food, Willy Wonka, not so good.

Yeah. There's a kind of thing about pet food. Most of the work over the years for the companies that sell a lot of dog food, most of the research work was to come up with a dog food that would produce reliable output from the dog, because that's what matters. Reliable output? People believe solids are nicer than liquid gel. There was a dog poo lottery in Taiwan where to get a ticket for the lottery,

you had to turn up with a bag of dog poo. About 2,000 people turned up. It was a runaway success. The city was clean in a day, and then someone won, I don't know what the prize was, maybe about a thousand pounds. A thousand bags of dog poo. Lovely. Maybe a dog. I really liked that Taiwanese city officials eventually had to say, like release a statement saying,

the city simply cannot afford to keep exchanging dog poo for gold. Seems like strong economic reasoning there. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Andrew Bones Jones would disagree. Of course, he'd exchanged the loyalty bank couple out for the crown jewels, but... So the next fact is for me, and it is this one, the tobacco horn worm uses extremely bad halitosis to prevent predators from eating it. Aww, I love the tobacco horn worm.

So I found this in the Smithsonian magazine, because I was trying to, I was doing lungs research for the alchohol, and I sort of got distracted and started reading about breath and bad breath. And this is an animal which has such bad breath that other predators think it's actively poisonous. They have actually filmed a tobacco horn worm and one of these spiders coming towards it. Somehow researchers disabled this gene so that it couldn't give off the tobacco smell, and the spider just came towards it and went to eat it. I like the thing about animals using different ways for defence,

like the hagfish, remember that guy that we did? They create an inordinate amount of slime, and that's supposed to be a way of getting rid of predators. If you pick up a hagfish, it will slime all over you, and then it basically falls out of your hands, and it's disgusting. The worst thing about it is that there is a danger that the hagfish will suffocate in its own slime. Oh dear. Oh wow.

The Texas horned lizard shoots blood out of its eyes to get rid of predators, and there's a crazy video which we can post up. It can squirt blood five feet, and the blood has got a final tasting chemical in it as well. Yeah, another thing Texans are proud of. And it can release a third of its blood supply doing this, so it's kind of quite an exhausting thing for it to do, so it only does it in extreme measures. So it's actually its blood? Yeah, out of its eyes.

Blood for one animal is almost always food for some other animal, so maybe it's a food source that's distracting everything. Oh it could well be. The predator just goes straight for the blood. Yeah. Turkey vultures do the same thing, which is where they, if they're very full after a meal, and they're approached by a predator, they throw up on the ground saying, okay, well, rather than eating meat, you can just have everything I've just eaten,

and the bird flies away. There's a bird called the Eurasian roller. The chicks vomit over themselves to scare people away. I do that. If you're on the train and you need the seats next to you to be clear, vomit over yourself. Or you could do what the potato beetle does and cover yourself in your own experiment. Wow, it's amazing.

Wow. Yeah. Mark, do you know this, do you know this paper called Farting as a Defense Against Unspeakable Dread? I do. I thought you liked it. The author was given an Ig Nobel Prize. Oh, gosh.

Her name is Mara Sidoli. I never met her, but we corresponded. Oh yeah. Mara Sidoli and she lived in Washington, D.C. She was really pleased to be getting recognition for this paper. This was a case report about a very small boy, maybe four years old. Whenever this boy became very distressed,

he would begin farting. She was a good writer, Mara Sidoli was, Dr. Sidoli, and she describes exactly what this little kid was doing and the effect on the room and how she spent weeks and months talking with him and trying to calm him down so he no longer did this. It was successful. Is it to drive people away?

That's what she felt. It says it, he enveloped himself in a protective cloud of familiarity against the drug. Familiarity? Yeah. I've never heard it called that before. Sorry darling, there's a bit of familiarity in the room. The details of it read in passages like a battle,

a very personal battle between she, the older woman psychiatrist, and he, the child where she would say something and then he would respond with a cloud of fart. But eventually, eventually they came to an understanding. She was like, I'll leave and you can just get home. I was lazing. Do you find that those are the most interesting papers

to you personally? I have many favorites. What makes something pleasing to me is something that I never expected. That's really the quality. One of the ones which really sticks in my head is exiting a building and informal look. Which is about whether people,

given the choice of an open door and a closed one, how many of them gravitate towards the open door? How many stubbornly stay on their path and open the closed door instead? I just thought it was a must piece. He went to the doorway of a large building in New York City and he stayed there for hours simply taking notes. I believe it was a couple years later,

he repeated the experiment to see what had changed. He tended to do this. He got obsessions. He would write reports to amuse himself. He wasn't trying to convince anybody that these things were important. He did this really to relieve his frustrations. If something annoyed him, he saw something in his daily life that annoyed him

that kept happening. At some point he would decide to be amused by it and he would go with a piece of paper and a pen and sit there for several hours and count. Simply count. How many people do this annoying thing and how many don't? I had a few hours free in Ueno Station in Tokyo at the end of last year

and I decided to count how many people were wearing medical masks because in Japan if you have a cold or a cough it's considerable light to wear one of the masks. Especially if you're a hagfish. And the answer was really annoying because it was a perfectly neat number. So it was 110 people out of 1,100 people. You counted 1,100 people?

Wow. I had about a man and a half and I just decided everybody passes a particular point. Professor Trinkus is now in his 80s. He's slowing down. He's publishing at a far slower rate. Well if he wants to success it, I will go and count things anyway. You just could become the new Trinkus.

Okay, let's go back to Bad Breath. I found this is quite weird. The Welsh law and medieval law was quite unusual in that it was not too difficult for wives to divorce their husbands. Usually that's quite a difficult thing in most laws. Usually if you got divorced as a woman you would struggle to get your fair share of whatever was in the marriage, the money and the property and whatever.

But there are a few different reasons that you could get money that you were owed. Neglect, leprosy or Bad Breath. If it's a family where the wife prepares the food she just puts garlic in. Husbands food. They have garlic in those days in Wales because you found out that thing, didn't you?

Yes. I'm in the process of trying to find out exactly when garlic and leeks got to Wales. This is still a little bit of controversy in the QI offices. Okay, I'll get it. Have we covered Bad Breath on the show? We did about how it was mostly invented by Listerine. Because Listerine was originally sold as a surgical antiseptic

and then it was just changed to be marketed as a mouthwash. I think it might have been used to clean floors but in the risk of a lawsuit I'm going to say maybe at that one. Anna, do you have something for us? Listerine was definitely sold as floor cleaner before the 1920s when it realized it was a mouthwash. I think you can say that universities have released publications that say that it was also sold as a cure for gonorrhea

or chapped lips. Neither of these things were very successful. A floor cleaner thing would maybe tie in with the five second rule. The idea that if you drop food on the floor and it's there for less than five seconds it's safe to eat. There was a paper that just came out and it confirmed what an American high school girl had done a decade earlier that we gave an ignoble promise to.

It depends on the floor and the food. If the floor is clean and it's not sticky, probably no problem. If it's sticky food and the floor hasn't been cleaned for a while if there's been coprolites on it or that kind of thing. No Listerine around. And it's custard. You're not going to want to think about it. Let's move to fact number four now, which this week comes from James.

Okay, my fact is you could have fallen asleep up to five times during this podcast and not known about it. How can that be? Okay, I've been reading a book this week by Richard Wiseman. It's just come out. It's called Night School. I'm currently 30% of the way through according to my kindle app. And he was talking about these things called microsleeps. And these are temporary episodes of sleep which may last for a fraction of a second

or up to 30 seconds where you would fail to respond to some arbitrary sensory input. And it's like being asleep for a very short amount of time. And he talks about this experiment. It was a reporter called Ron Claiborne from ABC who stayed awake for 32 hours. They connected him to a device that measured his brain activity and set him driving on a track for two hours. And when they looked at his brain activity according to their study they found that he'd taken more than 20 microsleeps during his drive.

Does this go on all day long? Even in normal times? Or is it only during times of great sleep deprivation? Yeah, it happens mostly with sleep deprivation. There was a program on channel four. I think it was called Shattered several years ago. And it was a reality show where the premise was you have to stay awake for 10 days. And you could be evicted for having a microsleep

but I think the limit they put on there was 10 seconds of being asleep. Do they monitor their brains? But the science of this is really like it's difficult to work out, isn't it Mark? There's lots of science. There are lots of branches of science, lots of fields. And some of them are much iffier than others simply because it's really difficult to measure this stuff reliably. Try to figure out your own sleep, anything about your own patterns of sleep. It's very, very difficult.

If you're going to measure something, what exactly do you measure? You can talk about it and it sounds great but when you actually have to sit down and do it, what exactly are you measuring? Even with these micro things, everything about sleep is like that. So there are a bunch of sleep researchers around the world and they work very hard but it's hard for them to be sure that almost anything that they're telling people really is reliably the story of sleep. At this point it's all good stories with a little bit of data.

But when you get down to something like claiming that, well, people dream 30% of the night, how do you really know? I think people can dream outside REM sleep, which was thought previously to be the benchmark for when you were dreaming and so we don't know that either. All this stuff is real. It's just very, very, the people who do it are trying to measure things that are really difficult to measure. So they're trying to do something really commendable. Yeah, just going back to your thing about Shattered, there was a guy in America

he was a DJ called Trip, I can't remember his first name. And in 1959 he tried to stay awake for eight days, I think it was, and do his radio show and see how it would affect him. And after about four or five days he started seeing mice running around the studio which weren't there. He would see spiders coming out of his shoes and he thought his desk was on fire. Wow. And when a doctor came to look after him, he thought he was an undertaker,

coming to take him away and bury him upside down on a horse. But there was another guy, there was a student called Randy Gardner and this was a few years later in 1964. He tried to set a new world record for staying awake and he did it for a few days, a few days, a few days and by the end he was also hallucinating. He thought he was a black American football player. He was white, but he thought he was a black American football player and when his friends started saying,

no you're not a black American football player, he started calling them racists. That's amazing. The British Department of Transport says that 20% of accidents on motorways are sleep related. Exxon Valvers, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, all of them had people who were quite sleep deprived at the controls. I suspect that's not a coincidence. I have effect to drag it completely down the market.

Impotence can be measured by, it's quite tricky because sometimes it's psychological and sometimes it's physical. So one method of testing is to test whether people get erections as they sleep. And in the 20th century one method of testing this was to seal a perforated strip of postage stamps around the penis at the base and see if the stamped tore during the night. That's a good idea. It's a brilliant idea.

It's low cost science. Yeah. If you're turned on by the queen's face. This is a weird thing. According to, this is a paper called Dreaming and Sexuality. It's quite an old one, 1966 by a guy called Fisher, or a woman called Fisher, I'm not sure. They found that erections happen when you're dreaming,

even in the most mundane of dreams. It doesn't have to be a sexual dream for you to get an erection. Just dreaming about your mom doing the washing up. Or the queen. So yeah, I'm not sure what their methodology was, but that was their findings. Amazing. Mark, you really like, I know you like patents, don't you?

I do. I found this. Not each and every one. No, no, but the amusing ones. I found a patent for inducing sleep from 1885. This was by Fanny Paul. It was pretty simple. It basically, it was a piece of wood or leather.

Put it around your neck. It would stop the blood flow to the brain and it would make you sleep. It said, it thereby reduces the activity of the brain in order that sleep may ensue. Oh, God. And you would just tighten it until you fell asleep. Oh, I'd love to see details of that, James. Yeah, I'll send it on.

Anna, do you have anything on sleep for us? Not a whole lot from that section. You guys covered it all. I can't tell you that in that program, Shattered, that I also remember, and seems like it wouldn't be allowed to be put on now. They all had various amusing hallucinations. One of the runners-up believed to be the prime minister of Australia.

The winner thought she was in a tube station the whole time, but two of them became convinced that their clothes had been stolen, which I think is kind of interesting, that two people had the same delusion and all hallucinations. Okay, that's our podcast done for another week. Thanks very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed it. If you want to get in touch with any of us,

you can do so on Twitter. James is at Egg Shaped. Mark is at Mark Abraham's. Molly is at Molly Oldfield. Anna is on the very brink of joining Twitter, but in the meantime, you can get through to her on at Quickipedia, which is the official QI account,

and I'm at Andrew Hunter M. Also, if you go to our website, which is qi.com slash podcast, we're going to be putting up a whole lot of extra stuff, extra links, articles, videos, all kinds of things, and you'll also be able to see the details of Mark's book, which has just been published, and it's called This Is Improbable 2.

We'll be back next week with another podcast, and until then, bye!