No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Donkumentary

Episode Date: October 23, 2015

Dan, Andy, Alex and special guest Dr Karl Kruszelnicki discuss dangerous ticks, millennium bugs and a newly discovered Bastard.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from the Wardolf Astoria Hotel in central London. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with Andy Murray, Alex Bell, and our special guest, Australian scientist, author of great named books like House of Carls, Game of Knowns, 50 Shades of Grey Matter. It's Dr. Karl Khrushelnitsky. Very good pronunciation. Thank you. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Dr. Carl.

Yes, my favorite fact is two people in Sydney every week get bitten by ticks and shortly after become allergic to meat for the rest of their lives. Now, I'm hyping it up a little bit. They're only allergic to non-primate mammals. But if they have beef, for example, several months. after the event, they can then become allergic to meat for the rest of their life and go into the full anaphylactic reaction. None of this

sort of like, I have the vapours, I must lie down, but the full, I can't breathe, my face is swelling. If you don't not give me adrenaline, I will die. Anna, as in wrong, and phlaxis to guard. So your body is going into a wrongly triggered immune reaction. I really like that a lot of them can still eat

chicken and fish, just like most semi-commissage vegetarians. They're like, no, I'm allergic to all meat well, I mean, I'm not allergic to fish or chicken. And it's the worst punishment for an Australian, imagineable, not being able to have a barbecue. Oh, yeah. Having chicken and fish barbecue only.

Yeah. So what happens is that there's a bandicoot, and it's carrying around in its blood, in his body, in its meat, a chemical called alpha-gal. So the alpha-gal goes, this chemical, alpha-galact goes, from the bandicoot into the tick and then into you. We humans do not have it. Here's the weird thing about it.

It's the first known allergen that is the sugar. And the result of that is that two people a week in Sydney will start hoeing into a bit of regular meat and then suddenly start trying to drop dead. Wow. That's right. Has this been going on for a long time and we've just found out? It's not like a new species of super tick.

Well, the tick is only the vector of the carry. Yes. It's carrying, but maybe the tick is now evolving to be able to carry. a larger amounts because I was always wrong about evolution. I went to the Galapagos Islands last month. So I read the book, The Beak of the Finch. It's amazing. It blew my mind.

It's about evolution. Evolution happens really quickly. So when you look at it in a fossil record over hundreds or thousands or millions of years, you're seeing the beginning point and the end point, and you don't see that in between it jumps up and down violently. So yes, your point about the tick evolving could in fact be true. So another thing on parasites and ticks and things like that, tortoises find it very hard to get rid of ticks because of their necks and because of the way they can't stretch around and their shells. So North American wood tortoises, they just walk into ants nests and they just sit in the middle of the ants nest and obviously the ants swarm well over them and they eat all the parasites.

And eventually the tortoise thinks, right, I'm clean enough and walks out the other side. Wow. Yeah, isn't that nice? That's amazing. Yeah. Symbiotic relationships. I read about hunting the way that ticks hunt, which is really nice. The article I read said that they are patient hunters.

And the idea is that what they do is they wait in a spot where they see where something is coming along. They wait for the thing to come up to it and then they just step onto it. So that's their hunting. There's no, they can't leap. They don't chase anything down. They just wait for a tube train then. You just wait at the platform. Exactly.

Yeah. They patiently wait and just step on. They climb up a blade of grass and they cling on with a second. and the third pairs of legs. And their first pair of legs, actually they've got four pairs of legs, haven't they? Because they're arachnids.

But their first pair of legs, they just hold out in front of them, waiting for something to get near enough for them to thing onto. It's called questing. Isn't that nice? Is that a special name for it? That's very good, yeah.

Just on the subject of allergies, odd allergy, because that's an amazing thing to get. You can't eat meat anymore. I read a story about a court in France has given 500 pound a month disability allowance, so equivalent 500 pounds a month.

to a lady who claimed, and they've recognized this as an analogy, that she's allergic to Wi-Fi. Oh, come on. Hypersensitivity, Ruben is a guy. Every five years he comes out with something, and he says, mate, you're lying. Right. Ruben is a guy who gets these people, and he look up electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome on a good friend Wikipedia. Yeah. Ruben, 2010, 2005, and there's one coming out in 2015.

And he's a guy who gets him in a room. and then in a double blind says how do you feel the symptoms now are we switching it on and off and they always fail oh you should get over to there yeah I can't believe they gave that to her you know you can be allergic to egg yolks

and not egg whites different chemicals again proteins that's how specific allergies can get and you can train yourself out of allergies in some cases in some cases you can't and you can then pick up allergies the human immune system is wonderfully fiendish so on the training of

out of allergies thing. I read that you can train yourself out of a, for example, a peanut allergy, and they tried it with a group of children by slowly exposing them to, you know, first very, very small amounts of peanut and then gradually increasing it. But the only thing is, if you then can have, say, five or ten peanuts and experience no ill effect, if you then think, oh, well, that's fine, and you stop eating them, then the tolerance goes away. So you have, perversely, you have to keep eating peanuts, the thing you were allergic to, in order to keep yourself not allergic to it. Wow.

Isn't that strange? Yeah, that's amazing. Wait, so if you're allergic to peanuts, what are you actually allergic to? Because peanut is, I just going to sound really dumb here, but it's not a nut, is it? It's a legume. Yeah, so...

And it's poorly understood exactly as to what's going on, but the current theory relates to the processing method, which in the West involves high temperatures. Okay. Okay, so if you get nicotine, we're just sort of drifting off onto a side thing, the cigarettes, nicotine of its has various properties, not too good, not too bad, mixed, but when you burn it, you create so

many different chemicals. You've heard of that nasty stuff, the dioxins. If you get a backyard compost pile and just some leaves and burn it, you will create some dioxins because you'll have a range of oxygen availability and temperatures that you will create some nasty chemicals. So burning anything creates bad stuff. Pollution is bad in that sense. And so in China, where they do it, the old way, no such thing as peanut allergies. Really? Don't exist. No, so there's something going on still trying to find out, but we'll find out soon.

Wow. We need to move on to our next fact. Can I just check, obviously, I seem to be a magnet for dubious facts. So I just want to check one last allergy. There was a girl called Grace Morley. So she wasn't allergic to apples. She wasn't allergic to birch trees. But if she ate an apple near a birch tree, she had an allergy.

Yeah, you can have pre-triggering. Look up pre-triggering in the magazines in Google search. Look up the word review. Okay. Review and you'll find that could possibly be. My wife is a GP and she had a patient who was allergic to water. Oh, yes, I read about this. Because then you're allergic to your own sweat and stuff.

It's madness. Well, look, all you have to do is be around long enough to love another person very much in a special way, have babies, and then you can die. It's from an evolutionary point of view. Actually, being alive and comfortable doesn't come into it. So what is this allergy? They have rashes on their skin if they wash with water? It's the ions in the water, non-purified water, does something to your skin. So if you have to purify all the water that you drink,

and then pretty much any water that you come into contact with is not, including your tears and your sweat, bring up rashes on your skin, and it's really uncomfortable. And there's another allergy, which is that some people, some women, are allergic to some of the chemicals in sperm's semen. Yes. Imagine.

Imagine. Imagine if you were allergic to both sex and water. You couldn't get clean and you couldn't get dirty. But you could possibly. Time for our second fact. And that is Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact is that the Millennium Bug is going to hit in 2038. That's my fact.

And I'm sticking to it. Explain yourself. Okay. So a lot of computers these days run on 32, bit processes. The processor is the central calculating bit, basically. And they can handle two to the power of 32 different values. And one of the ways they count value is seconds. For some reason, all computers count from the 1st of January 1970, known as the epoch. So they can store about 2 billion positive values, 2 billion 147 billion, 483,647 positive values or seconds in this. And that number of

seconds after the 1st of January 1970. It's 3.14 in the morning and 7 seconds on the 19th of March 2038 and some computers at that point will go a little bit haywire and not be able to keep counting the seconds upwards. Wow. Now, it's not going to be catastrophic. I'm already panicking. You should have said Millennium Bug. Well, there is good news in one sense because

a lot of, I mean, most new computers these days run on 64-bit processes and those are capable of going for another 292 billion years. I don't trust them either. We should be more prepared. So it's just there are, but there will be some 32-bit systems in big things like big transport systems, big embedded computers that are really hard to get at or update. So some of those will have a problem. Right. Yeah. So that is the proper millennium bug. Yeah, well there be in PLCs. Programable logic. controllers. PLCs all over the world, controlling how much water goes into a hotel. The size of

the dollop of cream on your little biscuit, an Australian biscuit called an iced vovo. I don't know if you have such... We have iced gems. I think they might be similar. Similar, similar. PLCs have been designed without security and providing they run, they leave them there. And they're the buggers that are going to cause the problem further down the line. Because you'll have the machines have moved up from 32-bit to 64. And people will be aware of it. Because with the Millennium bug, the Y2K, as opposed to the Y2K 38, basically the world spent about $400 billion fixing, making sure it didn't go bad.

And all he had was things like poker machines or slot machines in Delaware didn't work and radiation counters in Japan didn't work and buses didn't work in Hobart. Little things like that. And according to my mates in the IT industry, they all sweated blood for months and years beforehand, getting ready for it. Because it wasn't as though they just did something the night before. They spent months and months fixing things up so it wouldn't happen.

This one is going to be nasty. We've come across maybe even a variation of it in the Boeing 787. Yes. Oh my God, that was terrifying when that came up in the news. What was this? That they recently issued a statement saying, it may be the case that all of our engines will shut down if you leave them on for more than 248 days

because that number of seconds the computer can't count more of it and it will spontaneously shut down into some sort of fail-safe mode even potentially if they're up in the air and number one who is so irresponsible leaving an engine on for 248 days don't they turn it off and they park? But maybe the clock is still running in the background

because the on-off switch is no longer an on-off switch is just pretend to be asleep while the owner is there But keep on reporting their very thoughts to the mothership. You have no privacy. And in fact, it turns out that 248 days, when you count it in one hundredths of a second, is 10 to the 32, one-hundredths of a second. But they didn't announce that. People work that out.

People think, well, there must be a reason that many days. Yeah, yeah. And also was involved with an Ariane Rocket doing bad things as well. Yeah. Because that had 16-bit architecture, and that only takes you up to 32,000 or so. somethings and the Aryan 5 which was so much better than the Aryan 4 hated the Aryan 4 the Aryan 5 love it it had too much the phrase they used was sideways velocity now I guess they

must be using it in some incredibly small unit like micrometers per hour or something but once it gets over 32,000 you've used up the clock on your maximum number like okay just a bit of a backup for the audience numbers are infinite you're never going to run out so what's this thing about running out of numbers, but the trouble is that computers have limited storage. Think about the odometer on your car. It rolls up to 99,000 kilometres or miles and then goes back to zero again. So that's the whole problem that your clock is suddenly wrong and then you get mismatches. So the Arian 5 had a problem with that as well. This is also like Donkey Kong where if you get such a high score, you can't handle it, it goes to the kill screen.

Really? That's, Pac-Man does that as well. You've got such a high score. No, that's... What do you see? There's an incredible documentary, a documentary. A documentary called King of Kong. Highly recommend watching it.

And that's it. You get to the kill screen it's known as. The numbers can't handle it. And the whole computer sort of explodes within. Well, that Cy guy, the Korean guy, was his style of dancing? Gangum's style. So he nearly killed the YouTube counter because 2 to the 32 divided by a half takes you up to 2.14 billion views

and I saw that they were getting close to the 2.14 billion views out of a world population of only 7 so they then went to 64 bit which is 292 billion or whatever it is, yeah. Wow. Space Invaders is another game that sort of is the way it is because of a bug. So you know the point of Space Invaders

is that you've got to shoot down all the little ships that are coming down to get you and as you shoot more and more down, they come down faster in it. There's a difficulty curve. That wasn't supposed to be the case when they built it. It was just that when you played the game, the machines that it was running on

weren't fast enough, powerful enough. They weren't powerful enough to run the program at full speed. So the program was actually running quite slowly at the beginning. The more ships you shot down, the less data there was to process. So the fast it was able to run. And when the guy who made the game ran it, he realized that was actually a really great difficulty curve

to play the game on. So a couple of things about the Millennium Bug, which I thought you might like to know. in February 1999 hundreds of people made panicked phone calls to Action 2000 which was the British body for dealing with the Millennium Bug after Richard

Madeley TV host on this morning gave people a look at his Millennium cupboard which was full of tinned food and candles and he recommended that people stockpiled 10 weeks worth of food for after the millennium Oh my God

and they got hundreds of calls just because Richard Madeley had done this and the World Health Organisation said that nuclear reactors might be at risk. Well, they've got clocks in them. They've all got clocks, I know, and we'll never know how much was, because a lot of money was spent fixing the problem, and how much was hype. I mean, there was

definitely hype, and I think a lot of people made a stack of money selling... Yeah, but I know a lot of IT people who are honest, and they said they work their little butts off for us. Right, yeah. Right. We should move on to our next fact. I want a very, very quick last thing. Go for it. On the Millennium

bug. This was a Millennium Style bug. So, last year 2014, the US Army sent 14,000 conscription letters out, all to men who had been born in the 1800s, and they sent it to their descendants. So they say, your great-grandfather must report for military service on pain of a fine or imprisonment, if he doesn't. There you go. The youngest of them would have been 117 years old. Okay, time for fact number three, and that is Alex. My fact this week is that Buckminster Fuller's complete diaries take up over 80 meters of shelf space. So the thing

I'll just quickly go through his life because he's a completely mad individual. I think he's quite famous in America. He was this writer, architect, scientist, inventor, general thinker. He did an awful lot for science. He also did an awful lot for science fiction. He was that kind of area, very kind of theoretical.

When he was much younger, he wasn't very good at school, but he did a lot of practical mechanics. He had all sorts of jobs, inventing from age 12. He went to Harvard and got expelled twice. I can't find anyone else has been expelled twice. the first time was for spending all his money on a massive party with a vaudeville troop

he just took all of the money that he could find and spent it all on one big party and the second time was for general irresponsibility and lack of interest so I mean that's pretty impressive so he was mechanic for had lots of random jobs in 1927 his daughter died of polio and he went into a very deep depression

for about a year he was on the brink of suicide he went to the edge of Lake Michigan I think it was and supposedly had an out-of-body experience and came out of it, realizing, okay, I've got to devote the rest of my life to helping to the advance of humanity. So he immediately went into overdrive for the rest of his life

and invented all these weird things, made interesting concepts, went into lecturing and did these incredible lecture circuit tours. Yeah, he wants to just, I mean, because I mean, this is a man who his diary takes up, as we say, 80 metres of shelf space. So he was writing his diary every 15 minutes, wasn't he? So every 15 minutes, adding new stuff to it.

he once gave a 42 hour long video lecture. And it's on YouTube and if you haven't seen it, it's one of his finest moments. So not straight. There was a, I'm sure there must have been a 42 minute long lecture. Yeah, no, no, someone once said, and this lecture by the way was called Everything I Know. But he, some people who had actually, I read an article by someone whose friend was one of his students. And they said that he could go for no break with no notes from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. We're just not stopping.

It's just a lecture of that. And people used to stay that long because it was a marathon of amazing information coming out from the sky. He was very deep. Like he was one of the early people to start thinking about the environment. And he came up with this thing that he called the World Game, which on the face of it is basically how can we make things better for everybody in terms of justice, poverty, education, with the limited resources that we have,

because the Earth is not infinite. And he loved the word dimaxian. What's the origin of it? So I think he used it when he was talking to some friends when he was explaining something. And it's dynamism, maximum, and ion of the three. It's a poor mantra of those three. And it was sort of his brand.

All the inventions, he could have put this name to it. So his diary, he called the DMAXian chronophile, which is a great name. So the thing he's probably most famous coming up with is the GOD6 sphere, which is a structure that is spherical made of triangles. or a polygon shape. And it's this amazingly futuristic piece of architecture, really, that's what it is. I really love that he came up with it,

and then a few years later, it was discovered in nature. And he was really big about taking... He really liked the idea of taking designs from nature because those are going to be the best designs, but he actually found this one, and it was found to be in a type of carbon, which is now called Buckminster Fullerine. Oh, wow.

Do you know the amazing thing about Buckminster Fullerine is that footballs are in the shape of Buckminster Fullerine molecules They're a mix of, what is it, triangles and some hexagons and some pentagons. So the Eden Project is another example of one of those domes. That one's made of hexagons, but obviously you can divide that up his triangles.

And the Eden Project was originally an association football, and they just kept inflating it. They never stopped. Do you know where, so the Eden Project is the whole building is basically a massive inflatable tent. Whenever there's a puncture,

which is quite a lot, they just tape it up. Did you know that? It's just covered in plastic. lasted like a bicycle. Well, because I read that his, he had a house which was made of this, this globe as well. And he had a leak. So they tried to get it fixed.

And as they were fixing it, they burnt the whole place down. Yeah. Fixing it with fire. I have no idea what they did. But maybe that's why they just sellotate things now. He's kind of makes sense. His invention that I like most. So he made this car of which I think there's only one left now that we have called the Dimaxium

vehicle, which, looked like a Zeppelin and it had three wheels and apparently when it came out it was the hit of all cars it could apparently maneuver itself to a 180 on the spot so if you were driving it could literally just go right because it had back wheel steering it had fixed front wheels and a single rotating back wheel that's incredible and no no no no no rearview mirror it had a periscope it just sounds like and i've seen a picture it looks like a comby van it's amazing it's yeah and he He aspired to make it fly later on, but that never came about. But it was so unfair because there was the first prototype of the Damaxian vehicle.

It had been on the road for three months, and it was being shown off at the Chicago World's Fair. And it was involved in a crash, which killed the driver. But it was, and seriously injured a passenger. But it wasn't the fault of that car. It was another car which had caused the accident, but it sort of set the world against it. And I think only two more were built. And as you say, there's only one survival. today. So he deliberately built it not so much as a car, but as something that included car-like

properties. So he thought it would be something that would go on water and in the air. And in fact, it was unstable at high speeds on the highway, simply because that's what you needed for his properties to be a moving vehicle. So he saw it as an intermediate stage and specifically said that it should be driven only by people who were skilled in it. In other words, it's a really unstable vehicle and really scary, and you can kill yourself if you try to drive it like a normal car on highway speeds. It was great. He came up with

insegrity things as well. He's amazing. He made up, I just find he invented everything for himself. He invented his own sleep cycle. He slept. He would spend six hours awake

and 30 minutes asleep. And he spent two years doing that. And he says the only reason he gave it up was because his colleagues couldn't keep up with his schedule because he would have 22 hours in the day when he was working. How did he keep up the diary if he updated it every 15 minutes? I don't know. But I mean, maybe if maybe he just went back because he knew he was sleeping.

Yeah. It would be like 2.02 sleeping. How many years? How many years do you keep the diary going for? 1920 to 1983. Out of half a century. So he started it when he was 25, finished he was died. He included everything he ever wrote, apparently, since he was four years old.

So he obviously kept everything and then put it all together in a diary. Did you hear the story about how he died? Yes. It's kind of like the notebook, the movie The Notebook. He basically, he was, according to some sources, how he died was he was at his wife's bedside and she was in a coma. And so he was visiting her at hospital. they said that he got over-excited by the fact that he felt as if she had squeezed his hand back,

as if he'd had some contact and the over-excitement is kind of what ended him. And they both died, I think it was in the same week. Within hours, right. Yeah, I mean, it's very, yeah. And he had, do you have what he has on his gravestone? Yeah, call me trim tab, which is the trim tab is a little mechanical component in an airplane that makes tiny movements but moves the entire rudder of plane. And that makes, that steers an entire plane.

what he wanted to be. He wanted to be, he really believed that a single person can make a huge difference. So he wanted to be that person that was helping to govern humanity into greater. He popularized the phrase spaceship birth. He was one of the people who was really buying that phrase. He loves the idea that the Earth is a spaceship. We're all the crew. We have limited resources and we need to act as a big team

to kind of keep it running. It's such a good message, isn't it? I've got one last thing on him. He released an LP, a music album. No. Yes, he did. No, so it includes a song which you can see on YouTube, you can see him actually singing on YouTube. So it's the, you know the song Home on the Range. So he sang that, but he rewrote the lyrics to call it, Rome Home to a Dome.

Oh. Hey. Yeah, and that's on YouTube. It was a promotional video for his. Yeah, exactly. My very, very favorite of Buckminster Fuller's inventions, he, when he used stairs, didn't say I'm going upstairs or downstairs. He said, I'm going in stairs or outstairs because you're either going in towards the center of the planet or you're going out away from the center of the planet. That was his thing about spaceship Earth. It just makes you think oh yeah, I am actually moving towards

the center of the earth whereas I thought I was going downstairs. Right. I'm going in stares. He specialised in making up his own words which are somewhat convoluted. It's brilliant compound words like omni self-regenerative, omni well-in-for. He loved Omni. He loved Omni. Everything was Omni. He also claimed to have invented the word debunk.

Yeah. But no one can debunk it because Exactly. We sind it. It's not a person. Okay, time for our final fact of the show. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that Australian scientists have recently named a newly discovered species of fish, blue bastard. That's the name that they've given it.

There is a Latin name that they've given this fish, which is something I cannot pronounce. It's so long. Do you want to have a go? I'll have a go. I think it's called Plectorinchus. Kairulianothus. Yep. So it's the Kairulianothus, which, when you break it down into two separate words, is blue in Latin and bastard. And it's quite nice because that was, apparently it was a local fish in Australia that the fishermen, the local fishermen used to call blue bastard because they weren't quite sure what it was.

They eventually got their hands on it, scientists, and they named it as a species, found out it was a new species. And yeah, and that's... They called it blue because it was blue in color. It started off a yellowish color, and the alder had got the bluer. got and Bartha because it was really hard to catch because it hung around in murky waters where there were either sharks or crocodiles or both and it came into the modern parlance via some fishermen in Weeper photographing it and here's something weird for you weeper is one of the few places in the world where instead of getting two high tides and two low tides a day you only get one that was in my eighth book wow

How come? Because you get the water flooding into the rivers from the high tide, and as it comes back, it exactly counteracts the next tide. The low tide, it fills it out and smiths it out into nothing. Think of a bathtub, and then a large breadboard. Then with a breadboard, it went into the bathtub, it's full of water. You just sort of pat, and then you wait for the wave to go down to the other end and come back, and then depending on when you do the next pat, you can either wipe out the wave

or you can build it up into something that will swish over the edge. So it's a resonance thing. I found that out by talking to the people at the National Tidal Center in Flinders University of South Australia. You found it by dropping a breadboard into a bathtub. I've been finding out about Australian fish because we've got a lot of great Australian. You rather you guys have a lot of great Australian fish. Thank you. The number of fish that you've got, you've got unicorn cod, squirrel fishes, wasp fishes, armored sea robins.

I love the sound of an armored sea robin. Sea bats, wolf herrings, gobble guts, pony fishes. Gobble guts sounds very Aussie. Gobble guts is amazing. I can't remember whether this is Australian or not, but there is a fish called the slippery dick. Just want to... Yeah, I don't think it is an Aussie, but yeah, there is one called the slippery dick.

It secretez lots of mucus. I've just got a couple of things, just because as an Australian, very proud that all these species of fish are being named in a nice Australian fashion. And it was also big news for Australian science, because... the Ignobels, the prizes that make you laugh and make you think, awarded a prize to an Australian scientist. And it was a chemistry professor

called Colin Raston, and he's worked out how to unboil an egg. And so that he won, he won an award for unboiling an egg. Which means that you could unboil it, separate out the yolk, and give it to the people who are allergic to the whites. But is it if your egg's been incorrectly boiled?

You can say, take this back, please. Unboil it and re-boil it for three minutes, not for six. Well, it might be when you're at home and you've eaten too much. And you go, what are we going to do with this boiled egg? Let's unboil it and re-boil it. You can't unboil it once you've eaten it. But what about mad cow disease?

Proteins. Uh-huh. Right. So imagine we have a situation where in the United Kingdom, some people are carrying prions, prions, prions, P-R-I-O-N-S in their blood, which are just proteins that have been misformed. And when they kiss another similar protein, they misform that. Imagine you can reverse the problem.

process. Ah, see, it makes you think and it makes you laugh and learn at the same time, the ignobles. I do love the Ignoe Prize, and I should mention right the beginning that I myself have won an Ignaubor Prize. That's extraordinary. So for those listening who don't know what the Ig Nobel Prizes are, that is the yearly award system given to scientists who first come up with research that in the eyes of the ignobles make you laugh and then make you think. That's right. Laugh and learn. And my groundbreaking research was for belly button fluff and why it's almost always blue. No.

And for that, I got my Ig Nobel Prize, and Harvard showed me so much respect that they flew me all away from Sydney to Harvard at my own expense. They would not insult me by offering me money. That's how much respect to them. That is how highly valued this prize is. And then, for the next month,

I had people wanting to have a section, a share of my $1 million prize, which they thought was wrongly the Nobel Prize, not the Ingle Prize. It was a set of red wind-up chattering teeth on a stick. Right, that was the prize. That was the prize. On a tile written in very bad ticsacolour that faded immediately.

Right. Wow, I didn't realize we had an ignoble prize. I was very exciting. I tried to keep quiet apart from bringing it up into every conversation I possibly can as a very first sentence. So not only is Colin Raston and yourself, Dr. Cole, ignoble winners. There are more. Louries, I prefer to call ourselves. Nick Enfield

He called it Yeah He worked out that Ha It was a universal word Amongst languages Universal word amongst languages Is there a universal meaning

Huh Huh Hey there's an Australian was Called aha Aha It was discovered by a guy called Arnold Menke in 977 And he called it that

Because he went Aha when he found it So where does the actual ha Sorry the additional ha I don't know where the second Ha comes from But it's called, uh-huh, ha. That's when he told someone about it, and they said, ah-ha-ha.

It's also his number plate. Is it? Did he name the fish after his number plate? No, he got the number. He was just very proud. It was a wasp. Sorry, sorry, wasp. Can I mention one more Ig Nobel winner, which was, it was in the mathematics prize for the ignobiles.

And it was some Australian scientists, and they won it for calculating the number of photographs that mathematically will make it highly unlikely that anyone in a group, photo has their eyes closed. Nick, she was my work experience person for a. No, Nick's expensive, yeah. Oh my God, well, I bring this up because it's the subject of photos, and when we were looking into just a few things about you as you were coming on the show, we discovered that you have a claim to the coining of the word selfie. You're a part of its origin story.

Yeah, so way back in 2012, this is in my 34th book, The House of Carls, or maybe, I forget I'm going to name this too many. So a guy called Nigel. hope, hereafter known as Hopi, because we Australians shorten things down, remove all the following syllables and just put a vowel in. So not afternoon, but Arvo and Hopi

posted that he had fallen over and he'd put his teeth through his lower lip and he had a stitch and gee it was itchy and how long would it take to stop itching and then the dialogue flowed backwards and forwards and at 319 in the afternoon, I forget the exact day in 2003 I think it was something September. He then posted, look, okay guys,

I was drunk, I fell over. Here's a selfie. Here's a photo of my face. Sorry, it's out of focus. Here's the exact words. Sorry, it's out of focus, comma. It's a selfie. And that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,

who made that word, the word of the year in 2013. That was the first time ever in the history of the human race that the word was written down in any medium, now known or hereafter, yet to be devised. And guess whose homepage it appeared on? mine. The Dr. Carl Q&A homepage. That's so good.

Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in touch with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on Twitter. I'm on at Schreiberland. Alex.

At Alex Bell underscore. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. Dr. Carl. D-O-C-O-R-K-R-L, the long version. The long version of Dr. Carl. Okay. So you can also go to Dr. Carl's website.

He has so many blogs. They're amazing. We find a lot of the stuff on this show through Dr. Carly's absolute hero of ours. And if you want to hear our other episodes, you can go to No Such Thing as A Fish.com. We've got our backlog of episodes there. We will be back again next week.

Thank you so much for listening. See you then. Goodbye.