No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As 4D Surgery

Episode Date: June 24, 2016

Dan, Anna, Andy and Steve Colgan discuss cage-reading, pigeons versus dinosaurs, and the schoolgirl spy from Devon.

Hi everyone, Dan here. Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish. Before we get started, we just want to let you know that we have now completed our run for the first series of our TV show, No Such Thing as the News. If you missed it and you want to see it, head to No Such Thingas The News.com, where we have all of the episodes either on iPlayer for viewers in the UK or on YouTube for everyone who's international. Please watch them. We love making them. Hopefully we'll get to make more. But in the meantime, here's another episode. And you'll notice James is away this week. He's in Transyl So we have in his place another QIEL, Stephen Colgan. Steve's just actually published a book. It's called Why Did the Policeman Cross the Road, How to Solve Problems Before They Arise. It's in book shops now. It's an amazing book. It's all about his time when he was a police officer and all the problems he had to solve as a part of Scotland Yard's problem solving unit. How cool is that sound?

Okay, that's it. On with this week's show. 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. My name is Dan Shriver. I am sitting here with Anna Chisinski, Andy Murray, and Stephen Colgan. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with my fact, my fact this week is that heart surgeons now perform surgery while wearing 3D glasses. 3D glasses, like the ones you get in the cinema.

They're slightly more modern, but they are 3D glasses. Did they get other special effects as well? Like, does someone blow in their faces while they're doing operational? Spray a bit of water. Because then that's a 4D operating experience. That's true, yeah. The reason they do this is because with heart surgery, a lot of the way that they do heart surgery now is via camera going in,

because they can't get into such delicate spots. So they have to watch it on a camera. And so it's really hard to know if you're further than you think you are or if you're not close enough, it's just hard to get perception. So what they realize that they could do is by adding a 3D camera to the thing that goes into the body, you could then wear the 3D glasses, and you would have total immersive and proper experience of a 3D operation.

It's insane. Plus, you look awesome. These aren't the old red and green ones, are they? So they're slightly more modern. I have been to the cinema I'd like to clarify since 2005. We said that, but even the ones in the cinema, they actually can reduce the brightness of the screen by up to 88%. So she would have to light it quite.

Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe that's the modification. But when they used to do it with the 2D normal operations, it would take something like two hours longer or four hours longer because it was so hard. You had to be so careful. And now with these glasses, they can do things at twice a speed. They have the time of what the operation should be.

So it's just, yeah, it's amazing. Well, the whole 3D things are very interesting area anyway because I remember a few years ago hearing Andy Nyman going about this because Andy Nyman, the magician and he's a huge fan of 3D movies. and he was saying that 3D was kind of brought into cinemas as a way of fighting back against new technologies that the cinemas were worried that people stopped going to the cinema so like in the 1950s it was because of the rise of television

in the 19 late 70s and early 80s was because of video coming along and in the modern age it was because of you know computers and the internet and that sort of thing and people go oh my god people aren't going to go to the sin anymore so 3D kept coming back as a gimmick over and over again but now they spent so much money on the infrastructure we can't get rid of it now wow I didn't know that we're kind of stuck with it yeah these people should have

watch more knock-off DVDs and realize most of them the sound is out of sync with the visions and it cuts off halfway through anyway. So cinemas are safe. Safe bet. Well, if you go to the cinema and you hate watching 3D movies, but you happen to be in a 3D movie, you can now buy, and it's been for a while, 2D glasses, that turn a 3D movie back into 2D. No way. Yeah. So this is on, if you go to 2D-5 glasses.com, you can now buy these glasses. And it's basically the guy who invented them, his wife hated going to 3D movies, so he invented it so that she would still come to the movies, but get the 2D experience.

I was looking into it's a bit more and looking at a few medical papers about this, and apparently there's 12% of people who can't see 3D anyway. When they were in the glasses, yeah. Wow. Is that due to visual impairment? Yeah, well, not impairment, it's just that the rods and cones in their eyes can't pick it up very clearly. So these are people with 2020.

Yeah, there's people who otherwise have got good vision. Amazing. The other thing is, the rods and cones in your eyes, they discovered last year your eyes actually do see 3D separately. So your eyes can actually see, each eye can actually see 3D on its own. But when that's combined with parallax, which is where you're seeing it from two slightly different viewpoints

from each eye, that gives you perfect 3D vision. So they don't reckon that the 3D vision that we see in cinemas is actually anywhere near as close to real 3D vision anyway. That's really amazing. Because we obviously just think the only reason we see 3D is because we've got two... Well, that's the parallax thing, isn't it? You see things from two

slightly viewpoints, your brain superimposes them but apparently each one of your eyes can actually detect 3D anywhere on its own. Apparently there are three or four different things that come together to give us 3D vision and a couple of those we've got anyway because even if you shut one eye, you've still got a fairly good idea of how far things are away. It's only when things get close to your eye like you're trying to throw a needle that it all goes completely to pot. Oh wow.

Yeah. So I was distracted because Anna was launching her hand into her own face. I was practicing my one eye 3D vision. And all it's made me think is I'm really short-sighted in my left eye. I was looking into surgical innovations. are things that surgeons are doing now that are improving medicine. And I've been corresponding with a couple of doctors who have told me amazing things.

I just wanted to mention them. They're called Peter Brindley and Martin Bede. Well, no, this isn't about personal ailments or anything, is it? No, it's fine. Although they assured me it will clear up in four to six weeks if I keep putting the ointment on. Okay, get this. There are, to train surgeons,

one thing you can do is simulate smells for them, smells of particular things in an operating room. So there are cookbooks available online where you can cook up the smell of internal organs or cerebral spinal fluid or whatever it might be to train surgeons more effectively for when they actually get in there and are operating. Wow. Yeah, that's cool. Why is identifying a smell? Well, identifying a smell is useful medically.

Is it? To identify a disease. So, yeah, a certain disease is smell. So a lot of people could diagnose by going, oh, okay, you've chat yourself. I was reading, there was a little. an interview, there was an article on Cracks written by a surgeon saying some some secrets of the trade and

he was recounting so he recounted two quite amusing things. One was that at one point a man woke up while he was restarting his heart because they'd have to give him I think a dose of adrenaline to get his heart going and maybe it was too much the man woke up and this surgeon said when he saw a resident elbow deep in his

organs he gave us the exact look you picture somebody having when they wake up to find a stranger's hands inside their chest. We all know that look. The opposite of a metaphor. He looked at us exactly like we were doing the thing that we were doing. Yeah, I read a few articles about doctors revealing secrets about surgery and stuff. One weird one, I wish I wrote it down.

This is just going from memory, but about how with every surgery, if you're a man, getting surgery, they have to hold and squeeze the penis just to make sure there's no urine in it. Oh, yes. Dan, I think you've been had. If that's the excuse he gave you Where were you at the time? If you weren't in a hospital He said he was a doctor

My mum's never going to consent to another general anaesthetic Now she knows this, that's outrageous Yeah, I don't know how they get it out of the ladies actually Yeah We'd probably have a doctor to pick him up and shake him a bit And then put him back down I did read some stuff about I mean you talked about keyhole surgery earlier

Yeah There have been a number of scientific papers People looking at whether people playing video games gives them skills that will make them better surgeons in the future. And there's one particular paper I was looking at, which was called The Impact of Video Games on Training Surgeons in the 21st Century, which was kind of looking at all the existing papers that had been written on it and bringing all the data together.

And apparently, they found that current video game players made 32% fewer errors when they were involved in doing surgical work and performed 24% faster. Really? So it could well be all that time spent in your bedroom. It could mean you're going to be a really good kid. whole surgeon one day. You're not allowed to be stoned when you perform surgery though, so that's what puts them off.

The robot thing is cool. So there are surgeons who now perform operations routinely from like 400 kilometres away from their patients, aren't there? There's this guy called... Mr. Tickle. Yeah, no, there's this guy called Mechran Anvari who does almost all of his operations,

you know, on different continents, and he just does it by you put this sort of console on your head. It looks like one of those things that... You know, when women get their hair perm, in hairdressers. It's like one of those and then you just control that and you're remotely controlling. Like a VR headset. So there was one, so I think the most used one is the Da Vinci surgical system and that's used in about 200,000 operations worldwide and it's a virtual reality thing. So you stick your head

in a console and you can be in a different room but your voice will blast into the patient's room while you're on the surgery so you can tell the nurses what to do. Blast it. This is the voice of the surgeon. doctor said, I've heard one surgeon get carried away while doing this and shout, I'm Conan the fucking barbarian. Okay, it is time to move on to fact number two, and that is Steve. Okay, my fact is that one day we may all be drinking pigeon milk. First of all, I should say that pigeon milk isn't milk like we get from cows because birds

can't lactate. It's actually produced in the birds crop, a little space between the throat and the stomach where birds will store food, sometimes to soften it up before swallowing, but sometimes if they're looking after young, they can keep food in there to regurgitate to the young later. And there are some species of bird, pigeons are one of them, that actually can make a kind of secretion in that crop to feed the young birds.

And they generally do it when the birds are first hatched. It's a bit like, you know, in humans you get colostrum, you get the stuff that mother first produces when babies are born. Yeah. And it allows the baby to put on weight very quickly, and it also feeds their immune system. Well, this stuff does the same job. And they reckon it's part of the reason that pigeons are able to survive so well in cities.

So is this why we're going to be drinking it? We need to survive in cities. What they're saying is that they might be able to switch on some parts of the DNA in pigeon milk and put it into other animals milk that we do drink, which means that milk won't taste any different, but it'll actually boost our immune systems. Oh, okay. So they sort of secrete it, don't they pigeons from their crop? It's like curd, if you like.

Yeah. It's like cottage cheese. texture, isn't it? That's a pretty thick secretion. Yeah. Weird. It's because their crop is sort of lined with these cells which are full of fat, and those are the cells which extrude this milk.

Okay, right. Yeah. So I was looking into birds which produce milk. You've got pigeons where both sexes can do it. You've got flamingos where both sexes can do it. And you've got penguins, emperor penguins, only the males produce milk. Oh, wow. A feminist society.

Basically, yeah. But I was looking into the flamingo milk Because I thought that sounds like a cool thing And it turns out flamingo milk also pink Oh yes, I was so hoping you're going to say that So there's a load of studies done Especially at Exeter University by a guy called Paul Rose Everything is pink

Okay, so we all know flamingo's pink But the milk is pink The inside of a flamingo's egg is pink The egg yolk of a flamingo egg is pink Their skin is pink When they get to breeding season They decide how they're going to have sex they're all hanging around together and one of them goes deep pink he sort of flushes

and if if all the other birds start to go pink they all start breeding So going pink is a way of saying I'm ready to mate with you Yeah and presumably it just depends how attractive the flaminga that's gone pink is Yeah because either all of them do it or only one or two of them do it and then they feel embarrassed Okay So the reason they're pink is that they eat the algae and the little shrimp things which are pink So this is a whole species that goes around thinking it's a colour that it's not And it's just because they've got a wild

weird diet. Yeah. Yeah. So one day, they'll just have a new food taste or that bacterial dye out, and then they'll go back to their normal colour and be like, what? Yeah. Why aren't we eating flamingo eggs with pink yolk every day? Because it's harder to store flamingos than it is to store chickens, because you just need

slightly taller... Taller coops. ...building, don't you? That's it. You can just drill a hole in the top for the head to poke out. You get in trouble for that. Oh, well, one shop. It was either, I can't remember, maybe it was M&S.

They sold recently double yolk eggs. Oh, yeah, yeah. Because about one egg in a thousand has two yolks out. I've never had. How did they find out without opening it? I think they can scan them. Wow. And detect two yolks.

That's very good. You say wow, as if that's the most advanced technology you've ever heard, Dan. They can just use an expert camera to see inside an egg. No, I just thought it's a lot of effort, isn't it, to buy the scanning machine, to buy the eggs. Absolutely. To throw away the other eggs. I don't think that... Thousands.

9999 eggs were smashed. Useless. Useless. I've had an egg throw the rest away. Back to pigeons very quickly. There's a theory that pigeons killed a lot of Tyrannosaurus rexes. The only issue with the pigeon is it needed to die

in order to kill the T-Rex. And that was to be eaten by the T-Rex. A paleontologist called Dr. Steve Salisbury, University of Queens, land has been looking into it. And he says that basically they have evidence of avian infectious disease and dinosaurs. And they noticed it in the back of their jaws, these little holes in the back of their jaws, which could only have got there by eating something. And so pigeons could carry this disease, but they were immune to it. And so the T-Rexes were eating pigeons, which is an amazing image.

I mean, I didn't know how far back pigeons went, but the disease would then carry through to their jaw. And that would be a bacterial infection that just destroyed them. That was very cool. Everything killed the dinosaurs, didn't it? I'm amazed that they survived so long. Apparently it's like an earthquake, a great global event. They all drowned, a Martian invasion. Smoking.

It's true. Have you ever seen? I mean, people always say, you know, you never see baby pigeons. Well, there is a good reason for that because they stay in the nest a lot longer. They don't fledge early like a lot of other birds. They stay in there for ages, say, and feed me. But if you ever see one in a nest, it looks remarkably like a dodo. It's got this huge build that comes out with a world.

Well, dodoes are their closest known relations. What? Dodoes were pigeons. Dodo's a pigeon. I've learned so much in this section. They can fly, they do backwards somersaults pigeons and no one knows why. Is this in the air or on a branch? In the air. So there's a pigeon called a Birmingham roller, which is called that because it does this rolling.

And yeah, we don't know why, but it seems like they might just do it because they like it. And one of the reasons we think they might like it is because before they do the somersault when they're in the air, apparently they engage in arching, frequent arching and wing clapping. They just start clapping their wings together in excitement at the fact that they're about to do an awesome trick. So they pre-applaud their efforts. Get it going, guys. Get the applause going. They're big cocky, isn't it?

They're like the Covent Garden Street Performers of the Bird World. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Chazinski. My fact this week is that books used to be stacked with the spines facing inwards. That's amazing. It's so ridiculous. It's so weird. It's just so weird. that this is more widely known.

So the reason this happened, which is really interesting, and I learned this when I discovered a book called The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petrosky. He found out that they did this because books were incredibly precious back in medieval times. Almost always the last thing you would do to a book after you'd bound it is send it to a jeweller and a goldsmith to get it all decorated. They had lots of really precious diamonds and jewels on them. Book jazzled. Book jazzled.

Exactly. So they were really precious. And so then they were always chained, or they were usually. chain to the shelves where they were stored. And they'd usually be in monasteries. It was many kind of monks who had books. And obviously it's easier to chain a book to a bookshelf or a cupboard if you're doing it via the spine,

because you can just put the chain through the spine. And so that's how they attach them. See, I kind of assumed it was something to do with fading or something like that because I've got some quite old books at home. And the spine is much more faded than the actual front and back papers are. Oh, really? Because the spines were sort of the least desirable part. They were almost something you should hide like the hinge of a door.

Yeah, it's sort of philosophically. Michael Petroski says that shoving books with her spines inwards must have seemed as natural and appropriate a thing to do as to put the winding machinery of a clock toward the wall or behind a door. Cool, but still a nightmare trying to find a book in a library. Yeah. You can imagine it, just walking in there, just phased with all the pages. Okay, there is a library in Dublin called Marsh's Library. Yeah. It's a really early public library.

And they don't have chained books, because chained books is obviously to keep them safe just in case people want to nick them or anything. So they don't have chain books, but they do have cain books. but they do have cages which you have to sit in if you want to read certain books. What? Wow. And they're really nice cages. I mean, they're not what you're picturing. But they are sections of the library little alcoes with grills across them,

and you get sort of shut in there with the really precious books. So you're like a zoo animal. People can observe what a human reading looks like. Cage reading. It's the next extreme sport. I was looking into libraries generally when I was researching this topic. because old libraries are really fascinating, the systems that they used to run by.

And I was reading about, and this is from the Independent, about how the New York Public Library has unearthed this huge file of questions submitted to them by members of the public. So before the internet, before Google,

where would you get your information if you needed it immediately? You would go to your library and you would submit a question and have them answer it for you, and the librarian would go off and look for it and either call you back or just next time you're in,

give you the answer. And they published some of their face, favorite questions. So they include, why do the 18th century English paintings have so many squirrels in them? And how did they tame them so they wouldn't bite the painter? So that was from 1976 and they have it on a little card that they've kept. 176 as far as that. Yeah. From 1956, what kind of apple did Eve eat? And then this, telephone call mid-afternoon, New Year's Day, 1967. I have two questions. The first is a sort of an etiquette one. I went to a New Year's Eve party and unexpectedly stayed over. I don't really know the hosts. Ought I to send a thank you note? Second,

when you meet a fellow and you know he's worth $27 million because that's what they told me, 27 million, and you know his nationality, how do you find out his name? You can see why she was desperate to track that guy down again. Yeah, I'd start with a thank you note actually and I'd say by the way the man wearing the gold suit from last night what was his name so 1976 you're saying wow as far as then people still sending in questions the library the new york public library have said that they still get 1700 questions a month to tay so they are the original google right librarians are the original google yeah and now it's kind of exactly the same situation as black cabs and uber i think isn't it so now presumably librarians just can say google it

and they're putting these old school knowledgeable ones out of business. Just like the way that cabbies now will say, just Uber it. So this is a thing. So you were talking about old libraries, Dan. So in very early monasteries and libraries and places where books are extremely precious, right, some places have a system where the librarian has a key, right? And all the books are kept in trunks. You know, these great big trunks.

But there are also two other locks and there are two other keys. And you have to have all three people present, all three librarians. for someone to borrow a book. Wow. What? Is that a crown jewels? They're so valuable. And then there's a ritual of book return as well.

So I'm quoting here, the librarian shall read a statement as to the manner in which brethren have had books during the past year, as a monastery. As each brother hears his name pronounced, he is to give back the book which have been entrusted to him for reading.

And he whose conscience accuses him of not having read the book through which he had received is to fall on his face, confess his fault, and entreat forgiveness. And I think that's ripe for return to libraries. Absolutely. It's more powerful than a fine, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did find out what the biggest fine whatever was for a library. Oh, yeah. It's surprisingly modest, actually. It was $345 and $14. What? It was a lot, isn't it? But it was a two cents a day for a poetry book, Days and Deeds,

which was booked out of the Kennewy Public Library in Illinois in 1955. And they found it in her house. 47 years later. But 47 years, it only accrued, $345, which in current money is about $203. That's good to know. So surprisingly, most. Do you know someone who was responsible for a cool bit of book innovation, as in the way we see books, it was Lewis Carroll.

Really? Yeah. So in 1876, he wrote to his publisher saying, guys, could you please put the name of the book on the outside, on the dust jacket? Really? Yeah. So dust jacket, this is a really interesting thing. You used to not have dust jackets on books at all

And then you developed really nice bindings like Anna says And you would then have a dust jacket To protect against the dust but it was plain And you'd just throw it away Once you'd open the book It was just unnecessary packaging And then they started having transparent dust jackets So you could see a bit of the spine

But and then eventually people started drawing on the dust jackets And they started in about the 1830s And in 1876 Louis Carroll had to ask his publishers though Can you put the name of the book on the spine of the dust jacket. So it was still not widespread even then, I think. Oh, wow.

Yeah. People often say that he invented putting the name of the book on the spine. I don't know if that's true. People often say. This is a good idea on 19th century figures and books. So Humphrey Davy, who's an extremely famous chemist we've talked about before, who discovered a bunch of metals, famous metals, and who is important in electricity and battery making.

He never wanted to waste time by being. tempted to read the same book again. So every time he finished a book, he destroyed it. He mutilated it. What? He would never be tempted to go back and reread it. Did he do it as he read? Every page did he tear off? I'm never reading this again.

And then he gets to, wait, who was that character? That's amazing. Okay, it is time for a final fact of the show. And that is Andy. My fact is that in May, an internal memo by the Egyptian government on how to crush the press was accidentally sent out to the press. It's so pleasing. So Egypt is very repressive government and

they're constantly arresting journalists and things like that. And they in May sent out memos to journalists from the ministry's official email account about how to counter this news media campaign, which is saying, by the way, the government keep arresting journalists. And they were saying, oh, well, we can stop all coverage related to this. We can undermine the credibility of the Journalist Union and we can monitor news websites around the clock with more staff. And it was basically this whole series of measures designed to shut down the press. And then they put it out as a press release basically. Oh my God.

That's fantastic. Yeah. And I got this from a report in The Economist about press freedom and loads and loads of it not happening, as it were, all over the world. So lots of people being arrested. There was someone in Thailand who was prosecuted recently for being sarcastic about the king's dog. Wow. Yeah. Really?

Yeah. It's quite hard to prove. sarcasm. It's one of that, because you can always just say I was being genuine. Or you can say, oh yeah, I was being really genuine. I think you will still get locked up, unfortunately. It's worth the try. My favorite thing that's happened recently in terms of freedom of expression and people getting oppressed for, for instance, satirizing leaders is your favorite oppression story. I'm really big into those. Yeah. No, that's not true. No, my favorite thing that's happened along these lines was in December 2015 in Turkey when a Turkish guy was on trial and he'd been accused of

insulting the president, Erdogan, because he compared him to Gollum from Lord of the Rings. And the trial had to be adjourned because it turned out that the judge on trial hadn't read Lord of the Rings. And so it was impossible to assertion whether or not this was an insult. And in the end, they had to call in five experts to deduce whether or not comparing the president to Gollum was an insulting thing to do and to decide whether or not. or not Gollum was an evil character or a good character. I can't believe they needed five as well. What did they just show in the film?

No, because they needed the experts to interpret it. So they had two academics, two psychologists, and a movie slash television expert. Mark Commode. Eventually Peter Jackson got involved. He released, I think he released a statement or he tweeted saying that actually it shouldn't have been seen as insulting because Smeagel, in fact, which is who was depicted in the satire.

was a very good character, a lovable and honest guy who should never be confused with Gollum. So he got his awe in. Did that swing it in favour of the defendant? I think it was concluded at the end of the trial that it's not insulting to compare someone to Gollum. Oh, good. Well, we can say that President Erdogan is exactly like Gollum thing, can we? No, we can't do that because in Germany, for example, a poet wrote a poem about saying that President Edigan has sex with goats and has been arrested and I think is awaiting charges now.

Because there are laws against insulting foreign heads of state. It's a huge thing across Europe as well. So in Iceland, I think you can get up to six years in prison. I mean, something insane like that. Really? For insulting not your own head of state, but a foreign head of state. Yeah, that is mad. Well, they have to call in people to decide whether it's offensive

to say someone has sex with goats. I don't know. Yeah, they need five. There was quite a big international incident of an insult that was done recently between the president of Argentina and Pope Francis. and basically the president of Argentina made a huge charitable donation towards a cause that Pope Francis had set up and been talking about. The amount that this guy gave was 16,666,000 pesos, which is roughly just under $1.2 million American dollars, but it contained the number 666 in it.

And the Pope was convinced that that was a deliberate move by him to sort of insult him and sort of undermine him. So he rejected the charitable donation. What? It contained the number. So it was like... 16,000, 666,000. There's 666 right there. I think we've done on QI, isn't it? That it's not 666, it's 616.

Although it is just about possible that the Pope isn't an avid QI fan. He's going to feel like a fool when he gets that claxon. Because he's watching the show. I'm quite fond of gaffs with politicians. It was a great one in 2013 when the Australian opposition leader Tony Abbott was criticising the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd and said no one, however smart, however well educated, however experienced, is the suppository of all wisdom.

I quite like that one. Do you know that George Bush Sr. when he was president, threw up on the Japanese Prime Minister. He did have an intestinal flu at the time, or so he claimed. But what was really funny is that it actually became a phrase for vomiting in Japanese. It's called to do a bush, or Bushu Zuru means to do a bush. It needs to throw up, which is great. It's great.

I love you to say that. had an intestinal problem, or so he claimed. So the suggestion is he might have just managed to bring voluntary vomit out of his mouth. To insults the Japanese premiere. Is that the, is that what we're saying? Finger down the throat. Excuse me. Do you see one as well recently?

This was quite a big gaff. The Queen's honours list this year, a lot of amazing people on it. And they included, by accident, two serving soldiers from the SAS. They release their names. They're still active, and it's the first time ever that that's happened. Wow. Yeah. And so they had to immediately delete it.

And the newspapers have been quite good. They've not published their names, but they were on there. Oh, wow. Yeah. And we're here to reveal that. James Harker. Mark Camo. That was a bit like in 2003, there was a schoolgirl in Devon called Claire MacDonald. She was 15.

And she suddenly started getting emails from the Pentagon. And she got about 11 emails a week that were full of state secrets. They came from the Ministry of Defence. They came from the Pentagon. They detailed various things like communications problems on British warships, New Zealand's defence strategy. One of them actually had details for how to avoid leaks from the Secret Service Department, tips on how to avoid leaking information.

And it turned out that there was a Navy commander who was supposed to distribute it to an email list and made a typo. And she was getting all these emails. She replied to them saying, I really don't think this is meant for me. I'm a schoolgirl from Devon. He had no response. She just kept on receiving them. That's the code word this week.

Schoolgirl from Devon. Yes, we're all schoolgirls from Devon. Okay, that's it. That's 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 all be found on Twitter. I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. Steve. At Stephen Colgan. Chazinski. You can email podcast at QI.com. Yep.

Or you can go to our group Twitter account, which is at QI podcast. and also go to No Such Thing as a Fish.com where we have all of our previous episodes. And also, why not go to No Such Thing as the News.com, which has all of our previous TV episodes. We will be back again next week with another episode. Do go out and buy Steve's new book, Why the Policeman Cross the Road. And we will see you again for another episode next Friday. Goodbye.