No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As An Elephant On A Chessboard

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

James, Anna, Andrew and special guest Tim Harford discuss vital vitamins, stinging schemes, and the practice of pyrography.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi, everybody. Just before we start this week's show, we wanted to let you know we have a very exciting guest on. It's none other than the undercover economist himself. Tim Harford. Tim Harford is a brilliant writer, thinker. He makes books. He makes radio shows. He makes books. He's a bookmaker. He turns trees into paper. He's bound a million books. It's so amazing. If you've heard of messy or 50 things that made the modern economy or the undercover economist, all of these books, they're by him. They are. And he's got a podcast called Cautionary Tales. which I would massively recommend. I've just been listening to a bunch of them. They are brilliant and true life stories which teach you things about how humans behave.

I've been listening to one about the mummy's curse. There's an excellent one on Hansel and Gretel, which is really amazing, and they often have a little twist at the end and really well told. So check out that podcast, but first of all, listen to this one. On with the show.

On with the show. And welcome to another episode of No Such Things. the weekly podcast coming to you this week from four top secret underground undisclosed locations. My name is Anna Tosinski and I am sitting here today with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and our very special guest, Tim Harford. And once again, we've gathered around our microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, Tim. My fact is that in 1939, the young doctor at Boston City Hospital went on a scurvy-producing diet to see what would happen. In May 1940, his fellow doctors staged an intervention after his skin started to bleed from his follicles and an old post-operative scar reopened. Wow.

Lovely. Because people sort of knew what happened when you got scurvy at that point, right? Why was he doing this? They did. So he survived, by the way. So I read the medical paper that he and a colleague wrote after this experiment. So the puzzle was, I mean, people had been suffering from scurvy and worrying about scurvy for hundreds of years and kind of discovering cures and then forgetting cures. It's all very fascinating. But by the 1930s, they'd figured out that scurvy's caused by not having enough vitamin C. But the puzzle was, if you deprive people of vitamin C,

it very quickly leaves the body. So after a week or so, you've got no vitamin C. but then everything's fine. And people don't actually develop any symptoms for weeks, for even months. And so this guy, his name was John Crandon and his colleagues, were just trying to figure out, well, how long can you go and what happens and what order do these terrible symptoms appear in? And he said, well, no one else is going to do it, so I'm going to do it. And so he did. And yeah, he was absolutely fine for two or three months. And then I read the description of what happened. He started on October the 19th, 1939. His scurvy producing diet was, actually, it sounds okay. It's eggs, cheese, bread, butter, chocolate and coffee. Gets a bit boring after months,

but it's fine for a while. Because genuinely, that is my diet. You can add some red wine in there, and then that's basically it. After we finish this, you're really going to start wanting some orange juice to add to that, James, I think. So he says, he says, after about four and a half months, hyperkaryotic papuels had developed on the buttocks. Now, that doesn't sound good at all. I was going to Google hyperkeratotic buttock patpules, and then I decided I wasn't going to do that. Don't worry, Tim.

I've been eating nothing but chocolate and bread for the last six months. I can tell you exactly what they are. Oh, please don't. The listener, James has just taken his trousers down and shown us his buttocks, and it is disgusting. It's really, I'm not going to be able to take that image out of my mind, now. And then after five months, he started, yeah, just started bleeding around the hair follicles on his legs. He got incredibly tired. He used to run on a treadmill, and by the end of this, he could do

50 metres on a treadmill. It took him 16 seconds to do 50 meters, which is not very fast, and then that was too much. He was quite a young man, and at six months, they made a surgical incision basically just to see whether it would heal, and it didn't. And I think they probably shouldn't have been surprised at that because he had a scar from a 15-year-old appendectomy that was reopening by this point. And then they said, all right, you've done enough. You've done enough. And they started giving him intravenous vitamin C and he was fine. That's so scientific. It's so scientific to say, well, your old scar has reopened, but just in case we're going to have to make another scar and see if that also fails to hear. Like that's so impressive, the scientific method, I think.

Is it? I think so. I find that one of the most kind of morbid things about scurvy is the whole wound's reopening. It takes you back in time, but in just a way that you really don't want to go back in time, the idea that these ancient and bone breaks re-break, don't they? Because I think you start making collagen, which basically holds your body together. And so, I don't know, the idea of all these ancient wounds you'd completely forgotten about reopening is pretty fine. All your exes ring up and break up with you all over again. another unknown symptom.

It's really mad that it's two or three months that you're fine for, because I guess that explains why in the age of sale, sailors got scurvy because it was just long enough to get really, really, really far away from the nearest lemon. As in if you've got it within a day of not having any vitamin C, then everyone would immediately come back to port and say, well, we die at sea, so we're not going to go. It's quite cool. It's almost like a lemon detector, isn't it?

You can tell how far away you are from a lemon. just by how much blood is coming out of your paws. You can only tell to within three months away. I mean, it's not that accurate. There are easier ways to detect lemons. And actually, it's... Are there? It's difficult.

The reason I got interested in this is because I discovered that Scott of the Antarctic suffered from Scurvy. It's controversial as to whether his final mission was affected by Scurvy, but certainly earlier missions were, and some of the people he went to, tried to get to the South Pole with were affected by Scurvy. And I thought, hang on a minute. He's a British Navy captain. And didn't the British Navy figure all this out in 1747? James Lind famously did this, the first ever randomized controlled trial, people say, and discovered

that you could prevent scurvy with lemons. And then they started calling British sailors lime is, because they used to have lime juice. And so what happened? How could the British Navy forget this? And it is partly because it's not a very good lemon detector. It turns out there's vitamin C in almost everything. You have to work quite hard. I mean, James is doing this hard work. You have to work quite hard to completely deprive yourself of vitamin C. So people get confused, so basically the signals get very mixed. And what Andy was saying about these sea voyages, another reason the British Navy started getting confused is because they switched to steamships. And so they were still taking a remedy for scurvy that turns out wasn't working. But because they were all on steamships,

steamships travel quite quickly. They have to refuel. Every time you refuel, you take on fresh food. And so they were sticking to this cure for scurvy they thought was working. It wasn't working. It didn't matter because there wasn't time for anybody to develop scurvy. And then suddenly these Arctic and Antarctic explorers all started coming down with scurvy and everybody got monumentally confused at that point. So the lemons and limes don't really work that well. Is that what we're saying? So there's two things. One is that limes, although they're more acidic, have less vitamin C in. So they still work. They used to be using Sicilian lemons, and they're really juicy and got loads of vitamin C.

And then they switched for geopolitical reasons to West Indian Limes. And that they're less effective. But the other thing is vitamin C is, it's destroyed really easily. It's destroyed by contact with copper. And a lot of these ships had copper vessels. It's destroyed by contact with sunlight. It's destroyed by heat. And so you had this sort of old lime juice that was going a bit rancid.

And there wasn't any vitamin C in it anymore, but people were still taking. it. And so then when they started taking lime juice on Arctic expeditions and it didn't work, they lost faith and they started. And at the same time, there's germ theory being developed. And they started going, oh, maybe Scurvy's nothing to do with lemons and limes at all. Maybe it's to do with some kind of germ that we can't see, which, of course, was completely up the wrong tree. It's just crazy when you read about the history of Scurvy, how early on they suggested that citrus was a cure and how many hundreds of years they skirt around it, skirts around it, And so just like, yeah, I think it is, and then go, actually, maybe not.

It's so frustrating because it's so easy to sort out once you definitely know. But I found, you know, Scott, one of the people on his expeditions who got Scurvy was Shackleton, which I didn't know that they did an expedition together. Yeah, and there was a bit of bad blood. They didn't like each other. It was quite a rivalry. Indeed, there seems to be a bit of a conspiracy theory that maybe Shackleton wasn't that ill, and Scott sort of kicked him off the expedition because he wasn't really getting a lot.

along with him. Shackleton was like the fun, spontaneous one, wasn't he? And Scott was a bit more of the serious bore. So Scott said, oh, you're definitely, you're far too well, you've definitely got scurvy. And Shackleton was like, well, I haven't even got any hyper-kinetic papules. The point where Shackleton pulled down his pants

to display his buttons. And that's when he got chucked off the expedition. Guinea pigs get scurvy. Did they? Yeah. Because they... Does that mean if I eat guinea pig, then I would not get any vitamin C. I think if you eat a healthy guinea pig, you'll be fine.

Because I know James said as well as the dart you... I have eaten a guinea pig. I'll just... But you occasionally have guinea pig mints on your bread and with your coffee. No, because they can't make their own vitamin C. And we can't do that either. And we're all... There's this weird club of crap animals, including humans, which can't make their own vitamin C.

So it's fruit, bats, guinea pigs, some of the apes, and humans are the ones that can't do it. Every other animal doesn't get scurvy because they can just generate vitamin C, I guess, from internally somehow they're generating it. Yeah. Well, like we generate, you know, we basically, what a vitamin is, is the things that we need from our diet because we can't generate them and everything else we can generate. And I suppose these animals can. But maybe we should form that club with those guys, like a really sad rejects club. Like what are those people? What's that club called of men who've decided that they've abandoned women because women hate them? In cells. This could be the new incels. Yes, fruit bats, guinea pigs? I'm just a bit worried the guinea pigs won't let me in because I've just admitted that I won't cite some guinea pig. It turned out to be really important. So people were being confused, as Anna says, just getting confused about scurvy and what causes it and how to cure it for centuries. And they keep sort of figuring it out and then not figuring it out and getting confused and forgetting.

And then finally, in 1907, these two Norwegian scientists, Hulst and Frulik, figure out that guinea pigs also get skisks. which is this absolute breakthrough moment. And then once you can do that. How can you tell that a guinea pig has scurby? Is it because it can only run 50 metres on its little bowl? That must be it. That and the papules. I think it's those two things.

Once they figured that out, it was easy to clear up this massive confusion about whether scurvy was caused by some kind of toxin or some kind of bacteria or whether it was a deficiency. And they figured it all out. And then they turned around and they told Fritz, Ruff Nansen is a great Norwegian polar explorer and a mentor to both Robert Scott and Rold Amundsen. And Nansen said, yeah, no, I don't believe any of that. You can't learn anything

from guinea pigs. Trust me, it's fresh seal meat you need. And so he basically told them to bugger off. And both Amundsen and Scott then went to the Antarctica year later and Scott's whole crew probably got scurvy. If there was ever a lesson to listen to the scientists, people, it really is the history of scurvy. It's wild. how much people ignored them. So the reason that this is all puzzling is because the story that randomised controlled trials nerds tell is that in 1747, this guy James Lynde, who was a surgeon on the HMS Salis Salisbury, figured it all out. That's the story they tell. And he did sort of run a controlled

trial. He gave two, he had a whole bunch of sailors who had scurvy. He gave two of them a quarter of cider a day, which sounds quite nice, but it's not going to work. He gave two of them 75 drops a day of sulfuric acid. He gave two of them vinegar, gave two of them a paste of garlic, mustard, horse radish, and aromatic plant extracts, which sounds like it might be nice. But none of that worked, but he gave the last two, two oranges and a lemon each day for six days. And at that point, they made a complete recovery. Unfortunately, that was the ship's entire stock of lemons. So it was unfortunate for everybody else. But the weird thing is that even James Lind, I mean, you would have thought, okay, brilliant, you ran a randomised trial, you figured it all out,

perfect, but then he published this book all about how to cure scurvy, which had this write-up of this trial, but had loads of other stuff about, oh, like, maybe it's excess sweating, or maybe it's to do with ventilation or this or that. The whole, who can say, I mean, it was bizarre, what the conclusion he came to. And in the end, he said, anyway, my cure for scurvy is lemon juice that's been boiled into a syrup preserved under olive oil. And it turns out that doesn't work, because if you boil lemon juice into a syrup, you destroyed all the Ritamin C.

So he runs this randomized trial. He doesn't understand what he's done. And then the conclusion he draws is this completely ineffective remedy. And there you go. That's science, 1747 style. I just can't believe that one of the groups was given sulfuric acid, which feels like, you know, you could literally give the other group American cheese and white bread, and they're going to do better than the group you gave sulfuric acid to, shall.

Yes. Throatless Jimmy, we call him. I really like the old theory about how to cure scurvy, which was to bury yourself in soil. That was such a good idea. It really does make sense because you were getting scurvy when you were away from earth, right? You were on the water, you were thousands of miles from a lemon. You're going to get sick. And so what was obviously the thing that you were missing?

You were missing dry land. And so they used to just bury people up to their neck. in soil and think that this would make them better. So funny. It's such a good idea. What they would do is they would take boxes of earth with them on the voyages. And if someone got sick, they would bury them on the ship in the earth. There was one captain called Thomas Melville who found that it actually worked and it

made people feel better. But he was feeding people vegetables while they were in the earth all the time. Oh, no. Probably the earth thing, though. It's so good because it means you can also, as well as getting vegetables, you can disguise your ship as a small island. And so you can sneak up on other ships undetected because they just see a load of soil. Well, they see a load of soil, don't they? You know. Clever. Get a donkey, a little windmill.

Palm tree, maybe. I'm just thinking my idea of like, my idea of desert islands is more like palm trees and hammocks, not donkeys and windmills. A donkey and a windmill. And that famous cartoon trope of someone on a desert island. How can you tell them on a desert island? There's a donkey and a windmill. Yeah, it's a classic. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that there are more people alive today who have been world

chess champion than there are people skillful enough to carve a knight for use in a world championship chess match. Amazing. What are the numbers? What are we talking about? Well, the numbers are 10 who can do the night. This is according to a video which I saw, which was posted by Business Insider,

called Why Championship Chessets Are So Expensive. As part of that, they said there are only 10 people alive who can make the little horses that you use in chess. And so I thought, I wonder how that compares with people who have won the World Championship. And I went on to Wikipedia and looked at the list of the people who are still alive. And there's more than 10.

as a dozen, I think. How good do these things have to be? I mean, because I would have thought it's quite easy to carve a night. Most professional whittlers, I know, which is a lot, could probably do a passable chess night. What's so special about these ones?

Well, you take all of the whittlers. Some of them can do it. Some of them can. And you go down and down and down. And eventually you get the 10. Yeah, you've got it, Andy. You can see what I'm going there. No, they're made.

These nights are made in a place. place called Amritsar, which is in India. A very specific factory makes them. They only make 250 per year. One night to kind of whittle it down takes two hours and it takes five to six years to learn how to make this night. All the other pieces take about four to five months to make. And so if you were to buy a very, very high-end chess set, the knights are worth approximately 50% of the entire set. The value comes from just the night. That's what this...

It's so funny. It's about $500 for one of these sets. I think I read the same piece, James. It says this, that the blocks of wood that they use for the pieces were once large trunks dried for three to six months, cut down and shaped to the necessary size, which does make it sound like they're using one large tree trunk. Knocked down a giant.

Redwood for one pawn. They are really beautiful. To watch them being carved on the lathe, and it's a little bit like watching pottery, it's that kind of beautiful sort of hypnotic view of this thing taking shape. But I have to say, it's all

nonsense, isn't it? Because I saw this short film, and at one point they say, oh yeah, it helps these grandmasters to not make any mistakes. That's just nonsense. Grandmasters, they can play blindfold. I mean, you literally don't actually need the chess board or the chess pieces. They can play blindfold.

What is this? I don't know what you're talking about. The video, I've drunk the Kool-Aid, and I believe this. They say that because if you don't make the chess pieces properly and the king isn't the tallest piece, then you might accidentally move one of the other pawns maybe thinking it's the king maybe. Or if they're not weighted correctly, they might fall over and you accidentally kind of resign your, Oh, okay, okay, it's bologues. No, no, it's true.

No, the thing about chess players is that they're very stupid people. James, that falling over thing, I read that too, is that if you accidentally knock your piece over and then you press, you know, because they're playing timed against each other in some matches. So you knock a piece over, and then you press the timer to move it onto your opponent's turn, and then you pick your piece back up. You can be disqualified from the whole match, because you're technically eating into your opponent's time there.

And that has happened recently. It was a game in 2016, whereas Grandmaster, very good chess player, lost because he dropped his queen and then did that. Really? And we're claiming that these 10 people

who can make the knights are the only people who can make a knight that can successfully stand up. If you can't feel the bridle on the knight is positioned correctly, it'll completely throw off your game. That's why Casparov lost against Deep Blue. There's a slight discrepancy in the reins.

I want to see the chess grandmasters rant when he, like sort of a tennis player with the broken racket. when he seizes a knight waving at the umpire. What the hell is this shit? I would love to see these artisans, these craftspeople from Amritsar. I would love to see them wrestle with classic Prussian war game chess crossovers because there are some amazing kind of chess mutations from a few hundred years ago

that I think would pose a real challenge. So any of you have heard of Grossus Conigspiel, which is a 1664 chess variant? Well, I mean, you can play with a number of players. There's a six-player variant. The board looks a bit like a snowflake. But the eight-player variant, I think, would give these... Everyone gets very sensitive in that game, don't they? Yeah. No one wins. It's just a tie at the end, regardless. So the eight-player variant has 240 pieces. It has pieces including the king, the marshal, the colonel, the captain, the chancellor, the herald, the chaplain, the knight, the courier, the agitiral. bodyguards, halberdiers, and there are private soldiers, and 240 pieces in total. But that is nothing. The Duke of Rutland's chess variant has the concubine, which is a Rook Knight mix. And even that pales into insignificance compared to the game that was developed by Johann Christian Ludwig Helvig.

He was alive in the late 1700s, early 1800s. He was a successful academic. He taught maths to Gauss, the most brilliant mathematician of all time. Actually, in fairness, he sort of said to Gauss, to be honest, you don't need to bother turning up to the lectures because he seemed to have it all sorted. He collected so many insects that formed the heart of the University of Berlin's museum of entomology. And his chess variant, which is called Kriegsspiel, which means war game. It includes the elephant, which is a rook knight combo, the jumping bishop, which is a bishop knight, the jumping queen, not to be confused with the dancing queen of Aberfame, that's a knight queen. It contains 40 pawns, four rooks, four bishops, 30 knights.

Work on that one in Amarita, six queens, five jumping queens, eight jumping bishops, and seven elephants. And the borders up to 2,000 squares. And what moves does the partridge in the per tree make? That's the hardest to carve, actually, the partridge. That is absolutely amazing. Do you think he invented this amazingly complicated chess game because his main job was teaching girls how to do maths? And he's like, I have so much spare time now. I might as well collect every single insect in the world.

It must take forever a game. I think it does. I mean, I suppose it's before TV, wasn't it? But it feels like there's no need to make chess more complicated. It's already quite challenging for most people. So there was this movement to make chess more like actual war. Because chess is quite stylised, really. I mean, you're not going to learn that much about military tactics from playing chess.

So in, I mean, this is a Prussian thing. They're trying to teach their young officers how to make decisions on the battlefield. And so there's this tendency towards more and more complex versions of chess. And in the end, they kind of went to these war games or role-playing games. But you've got different pieces. You've got different terrains. And they're trying to train people how to make military decisions. It's good.

I think it's really good because I do think that, you know, war game exercises are, like, they are good up to a point. but there are never enough concubines. It's not realistic without the concubines. Or elephants. It's the elephants and concubines that really make a war. I thought Chancellor was a weird one as well. What does he do?

Like he just does some photo option and then takes 20% of all your money. Well, the thing is, about chess, didn't used to be military at all. So, and I don't think it should be. It used to be sexy. This was back. And actually, the person who ruined it,

and turned it into a military game initially was the queen, sadly. So we've talked before about how the queen was introduced at various moments in history in various different countries from about like 1,400 onwards, 1,300 onwards. But instead of a queen before that, you had the vizier, as in the royal, as in Jafar. And the vizier couldn't move as broadly and widely as the queen. It was much more limited. And it made chess a much slower game. And so I was reading that back in medieval times, it was completely gentle,

equal game. Women and men played an equal amount. And it was more a thing you'd have and play throughout a day or at a swaray over drinks and chats. And it became really associated with romance and sex. And because there were lots of stories of people falling in love over a game of chess, you know, opponents would fall in love. In 1400, there was a famous book at the time called The Edifying Book of Erotic Chess, which sort of talked about... That does sound edifying. Yeah. Is that why we call it porn? It is, yeah, that's correct. That's why they're all naked if you look closely at the pawns.

But yeah, then the Queen came on board and it became very martial and competitive and serious, and it was thought to be unsuitable for women. Do you know the rules, the ten rules of whittling? Have you memorized those, everyone? I've only got the first four, sorry. You know, 40% is just about a pass. This is according to Master Carver, Chris Lubcoman, who actually, has the Guinness World Record for what he describes as the smallest rooster in the world on his

YouTube channel. What's another word for rooster? I just can't think of any. Because I'm pretty sure I have that record. I wondered why I had to be over 18 to access that video. It's not the smallest rooster. It's not even a thing. It's a smallest wooden carved thing in the world, according to Guinness. It's a tiny little rooster, an eighth of an inch tall. Anyway, he's an amazing whittler. His 10 rules is rule number one is actually make sure your knife is sharp. Rule number two, any guesses? Don't run with scissors.

You're actually close. Your knife must be really sharp. It's rule number two. What? Is this fight club? Could I just check out the other eight rules also to do with sharp knives? I'm so glad that you've saved me having to read

all of the other rules. They're all different ways of saying. Before starting to carve check, to see if your knife is sharp. If your knife is really sharp, it'll cut much better. Rule number 10 is refer back to rules 1 to 9, which are indeed different ways of saying, have a sharp knife. Very good. So, Wittler's out there.

Take note. Modern board games often have these little carved wooden pieces. They're quite simple. They look a little bit like if you carved the sign for the gents toilets, the little man, if you carved those into wood and painted them different colours, that's what they look like. Does anybody know what they're called? there was a term of art for these things. Wait, for modern chess pieces?

A little man. Well, modern board game pieces, not chess pieces, just board games in general. I didn't even know what they were, but no, go on. They're called meples, which is a sort of shortening of my people. And so the, so meples is a board game thing. And they're, you know, they're cafes based on meeples and meeples clubs and so on. But I think this. They're like tiny, tiny cafes that meepels attend?

Yeah, but this one, I'm speaking to you from Oxford. and there's a cafe about two minutes walk away from me called Thirsty Meeple's. You can go, you can have your hot chocolate or a cup of coffee, and you can play board games surrounded by my, by meples. But I reckon this whole kind of chess piece carving thing. It's basically a conspiracy by Big Meeple. Because there is... Wait, hang on, Tim, Tim, Tim, Big meeples are just people, aren't they?

You could be right. No, you're absolutely right. You've caught me there. Anyway, it's a conspiracy. I'll figure out who's behind it sooner or later. Because there's a problem with a lot of games that if you're trying to make money selling the game, the game's actually quite cheap. And you know, we buy a game like chess. It just cost a few pounds and then you can just play forever. So how do you make money? And so there's this increased focus on getting very, very fancy pieces, very expensive pieces. So these guys in Amaritz are, this is an example of this. But I think the most striking example is games workshop. So Games Workshop is this company that I remember from the 1980s when I was a young nerd, used to sell Dungeons and Dragons and used to sell all kinds of games. And then they basically got taken over by a division of the inside the company called Citadel Minitures, which just made Toy Soldiers and miniature figures. And these miniature figures were so profitable that during lockdown, Games Workshop had a higher profit margin than Google. And Henry Cavill, the actor who plays Superman, described these little miniature figures.

as plastic crack. So all the money is in the pieces, the money is not in the games. That's true. I mean, I used to collect those pieces, and there were some which was simply unaffordable for me

with my 14-year-old's budget. Really? I used to have, I used to collect them a little bit, not much, but I was always really scared that I was going to die of lead poisoning because there was lead in them.

And I don't know, someone had once told me that you could die of lead poisoning, and these pieces had lead in them, and I was just, I was convinced that I was going to die. No, I think of eating them? No, but I was like,

because I was painting them and stuff and I didn't want to lick my fingers and stuff. And you're close and you're huffing away, you know, huffing away over a little. Paints used to be water-based. Well, the paints still are water-based. So you'd sort of paint and then you'd kind of lick your paintbrush

to get a fine point on the paintbrush. And the paint is non-toxic, but you're painting these lead figures. So they probably were very dangerous. But anyway, they're all made of plastic crack now, as Henry Cavill puts it. You're all a bunch of crackheads. It's the least cool kind of being a,

crackhead. And being a crackhead isn't cool. I want to emphasize, but this is even less cool. It's so annoying when people tell you that. Just like you were saying, James, with the lead and the paint and the danger thing. I always remember my friend Christopher when I was about, I don't know, 18, telling me that if I kept drawing on my hand, I'd die. Yeah. Because the ink would get into my bloodstream somehow. And I just wanted to say, a big old fuck you to Christopher. I've been writing notes on my hand since then, and I'm as fit as a fiddle. I don't know. I think that explains something about that.

It could be a John Crandon thing. It could be just a matter of time. You're fine, you're fine, you're fine, and then suddenly, hostiles and you drop dead. Here's one thing on people who carve wood for a living. Oh, yeah. You guys, I'm sure, have heard of grindling gibbons. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Who hasn't. Just for anyone who's... It's a horrible thing you do to great apes, isn't it? It's actually been outlawed in most places. It's such a weird name. You're right. I think he was Dutch.

Basically, he's the most famous wood carver in history. And I know that he's quite an obscure figure now. But in the late 17th, early 18th centuries, he was catnip. All over the UK, because he worked in England mostly, there are these incredible wood carvings. I've seen some of them. And they're amazing. As in he could do the fuzz on a peach but carved in wood, you know?

Wow. Really? He's called the Michelangelo of Wood by some people, by some people. Yeah, why is mum? He lives with. Anyway, one of his crowning, he was extremely famous. It's not fair. Why would somebody who Whittles be regarded as less admirable than someone like Michelangelo who works in stone?

It doesn't make sense. Exactly, exactly. Get this. Could Michelangelo do this? I bet he couldn't. In 1690, he made a wooden cravat. I have a wooden bowtie. It's completely different.

Is it? You really deflated Andy there. The bow tie is designed to be stiff. Any chump can make a bowtie out of wood. There's two cross bits of wood nail out of fine. The cravat, the most flowing of all items are clothing. I quite like how you just accepted that I have a wooden bowtie. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Sorry, there's a much better point. What? I just went to the place in Portugal. where all the cork trees are and they sell a lot of merch and one of them is a bow tie and I thought it'd be really cool

but I've never found the outfit to go with it I must have been weird, so weird You need the full wooden suit to go with it, don't you really? Well James, tell you what, if you stand next to a donkey and you put on your wooden bowtie and you make it rotate Anna will think you're a desert island

Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is my fact. My fact this week is that in Ecuador, cleaners are people who rub you down with stinging nettles. And it's not as... People pay for this service? Yeah, I think people pay maybe even more than cleaners in the UK. Not even more than cleaners in the UK.

It's the highest paid bracket in the country. It's not possible, Anna. It's a travesty. And your spin-off podcast, our cleaners paid too much. I wish you all best. But these are limpidore. in Ecuador and they are spiritual cleaners. But Olympia Dorez just means a cleaner,

like it's just the word for a cleaner. But these are people who sort of cleanse your aura. And it's a deep-rooted tradition in traditional cultures, particularly up in the mountains. A lot of people have this service. And you're rubbed up and down with stinging nettles and it removes all your bad energy and bad luck. And it hurts quite a lot.

And that just shows that it's working, apparently. Is it like cleaners in the UK where they sort of do an initial site visit of your aura and they say, well, this aura probably is going to need about a couple of hours a week, I'd say, maybe two visits actually, because it's prone to become disgusting quite fast. Yeah.

Is it like cleaners in the UK where when they whip you with nettles, they sometimes miss the corners? Yeah, it's like that. And you're too embarrassed to say anything about it because you don't want to make a fuss. So I just whip my own carnas. Anyone else got any complaints about their cleaners?

This very first world problems, little interaction we're having now. No, okay. So I think with these guys, they're professionals, the best ones, they don't miss any spots. And in fact, they have an extra service where if you're actually ill and you go to, again, Olympia, a service, then they have a diagnostic tour first where you get rubbed with an egg and a dead. black guinea pig. And that... Did it die of scurvy?

Yeah. What? Egg and a dead black kidney pig? Yeah. And somehow that diagnoses the problem. Then you sort of inspect the... The egg is weird. Obviously the guinea pig.

So this nettle stuff might have... Could it have helped? Like, nettles, are they good for you or not? I don't... Not in this way. It's just a... It's a traditional herbal treatment. Very popular.

But it is still used quite widely. So even in hospitals in the big cities in Ecuador, apparently, doctors will let these limpia dores work alongside them. And, you know, so the doctors will give the conventional treatment and then will accept that the patient will also ask for a rub down with the nettles. I think it is good for you. I think a bit little bit. Yeah, I read something that if you rub nettles onto an arthritic thumb, the nettles will sting you, but you may get some relief from the arthritis. There are quite a lot of claims, yeah. is that, I don't know how much has been scientifically proven, but that's not to say it doesn't work.

There was a person who died of nettle stings. I've found one. This was a tree nettle in New Zealand called Ertica Ferrox. Ertica is like the family of nettles. And apparently there was a lightly clad hunter who died five hours after walking through a dense patch of nettles. We don't really know what happened to him. Apart from that, I guess it could be anaphylaxis. You can get that through nettles. But yeah. And apparently this nettle in New Zealand, according to Maori folklore, one of their kind of gods coupé, kind of used them to hinder pursuers when he stole their wives. So he would steal their wives.

He would run away and he would throw down nettles so that people couldn't follow him. No, I'm feeling more guilty about something I did at primary school. I've actually never confessed this to anybody, but just between the four of us. So a friend of mine, I've got very vague memories of this, but a friend of mine and I decided that for some reason we were going to set a nettle trap, which I now realized could have been fatal. And this nettle trap involved, we got some nettles and we just put them somewhere on the playground where somebody might find them. And then I think my friend said, oh, they only sting you on the edge. I don't know if that's true or not. And we thought, but maybe people won't,

I don't know why we thought this is a good idea, but we thought maybe people won't pick up the nettles and they won't be stung. So we then let her, we wrote a little note that said, please touch these leaves. And then my friend is like, but they only sting on the edge. So then we added, please touch these leaves on the edge. I don't know if there were any fatalities, but I'm burdened by guilt. What a genius ruse. You're a master criminal. I assume the entire school fell for it.

Yeah, there's just no trick there, is there really? It's like, you're not trying to disguise them as anything or anything like that. It's like literally straight on the nose. Please injure yourself with our trap. Put hand in mousetrap. I love that. I'm sure in the course of your research you guys came across the world nettle eating championships

No Oh it sounds really crazy Well they happen in Dorset Very near Bridport which And we've mentioned before on the podcast Has the world's only thatched brewery But we don't There's no time to rake over that old wound

So It's basically It happened at a pub called the bottle in until 2019 But the pub's been closed lots on and off but it is happening this year. It's moving to a farm nearby. And the competition is... Closed because of nettle-based fatalities,

shut down by health and safety at this point. So the farm is taking the rains this year, which is great. The measure is by length. That's how you measure whether you're successful at eating nettles or not, is how long in feet you can eat. As in literally how many feet of nathes you can eat. So it's the length of stalks that is. is that remains after you've stripped all the little nettle leaves off it and eat.

Or do you work your way down like the side of a road and just eats as many nettles? I understand it's the stork because I understand it was originally two farmers got into an argument about who had the biggest nettles. And they said, if you can grow a longer nettle than I've got growing on my farm, I'll eat it. And so I think the idea is you strip the leaves off and then it's the stalk that remains, is your measure of nettles. It's really painful. I think that argument was about more than,

I think that was about the length of the farmer's roosters. I mean, when I encountered this, I thought, oh yeah, competitive nettle eating. It's crazy, but it's like, you know, the competitive chili eating or the competitive hot dog eating or so on. So it's like, oh, how many can you eat in one minute or how many can you eat in three minutes? But no, it's how many can you eat in an hour?

You've got to spend an hour eating nettles. It's too long. It doesn't count if you don't keep the Nettles down. And there was one guy a few years ago who was way ahead. And at 57 minutes, he went to just threw up in the pub car park and he was disqualified. Can you imagine? It's the winner, the all-time record winner, is called Philip Thorn. Oh, good.

Now, Nettles don't have thorns, admittedly, but it's close enough. It's close. It's closer. His record, 104 feet. So impressive. Which is long. Do you know what I find most amazing about that? that is what it says about the human capacity to improve. Because about 10 years before he got the record, which was in 2018, the winner of the same competition ate 48 feet of nettles.

Now, in just a decade, Phil Thorne has more than doubled that. How have humans got so much better at nettle eating in the space for 10 years? That's like if in 10 years time we can do the 100 meters in four and a half seconds, isn't it? Exactly. Yeah. Well, get Phil Thorne in the 100 meters. There's some nettles at the end at the finish line. You're not allowed to cook them, I guess, right? You just have to eat them raw. Yeah, they're raw, freshly picked.

Your tongue goes black from all the iron in them. It's painful, apparently, almost immediately. Within 20 seconds, it's very painful. And you then only got another 3,580 seconds to get through. Sounds horrific. I don't know how people do it. And you're not allowed to bring your own nettles. You're not allowed to bring any substances that might numb your mouth.

Although I'm sure some people have been tempted to try and smear vaseline on, I don't know. Because I just thought of a trick, but then I only thought of the trick after you told me the thing you're not allowed to do. So that's not going to work. But I think, from memory in Hawaii, I think the nettles don't have stings on them. I think. You turn up wearing your lay with your sun hat on in your tropical shirt.

Wherever you come from, just exeter, you know. I think I've a feeling. Or smuggling some broccoli or something and say, oh, no, it's definitely nettles. I think that they might have evolved to have no sting because they don't have any animals that eat them or something. Oh, really? So they don't need to repel? That's amazing.

What you can do at the Natal Eating Championships is drink. You can either drink water or you can drink beer. I don't know if it has to be beer source from a Thatch brewery or not. I guess it's going to be cider now that it's a cider farm. Cider is allowed. It makes sense. Because... I think that would help.

Go on. So, in fact, as we're talking about incredible moments in the history of nettle eating, in 2019, the women's winner, Lindy Rogers. I don't know why the competition is divided by sex. I have no idea. But there's a men's and a women's championship. The women's winner, Lindy Rogers, had an incredible Fosbury flop moment because she dipped her nettles inside her. Inside her or inside. Sorry. I mean, first of all, that's disgusting.

Second of all, I feel like it would hurt just as much. in apple cider. Oh, sorry, yeah. Exactly. And so that's a method that apparently helps to take a bit of the sting out of it. That feels like a loophole. They've got to close that one. That shouldn't be a loophole.

You know, it's all loopholes. It's all loopholes from here on in. Yeah. Wow. So in the war, in the First World War, the Germans were encouraged to collect nettles. Can you guess why, maybe? Ammunition shortage is really biting We're just going to have to thrash the British with our nettle bundles

We're they coming to steal everybody's wives And then throw the nettles down to foil the pursuers Very good Just setting a nettle trap in the playground Taking literally a leaf out of Tim's book Bitter touch and see here No it was to make uniforms So you can take the stalks off nettles

and you can make like kind of material with it. The month at University in Leicester have got a thing called the Sting Project and they've been trying to find things that you can do with nettles and one of their team, a designer called Alex Deer, has invented underwear that's made from nettles.

They made a pink camisole top and pants made from nettles and according to Alex Deer, they said it is quite a hairy fibre so you probably wouldn't want all of your underwear made of it. but we are trying to make a point of what is possible with this plant. Wow. Doctors.

You want to dip them inside it, wouldn't you? Or have sex with someone who wears dock leaf pants, maybe. Oh, James, come on. You know that's a myth. Don't propagate it for the kids. Some myths are nice, Anna. Some myths are nice, Anna. It's good.

It takes your mind off the stinging agony looking for a dock leaf. So I maintain there's a placebo effect. I go to the dock leaf eating championships, and I've got to say, My record is pretty strong. Have you guys heard of the Hornet ordeal? This is the El Gaeo people in Kenya do this. This was an article by a guy called F.B. Wellborn,

who underwent the initiation, he was Kenyan. And what it is is that boys are forced to crawl through tunnels made of stinging nettles. And then once you get out of the tunnel of stinging nettles, then you have the nettles rubbed on your genitals. and then you have live hornets dropped on your back. And the reason that they do all this is that the nettles are there to prepare you for the hornets. So like the pain is to prepare you for the hornet pain,

and then the hornet pain is there to prepare you for the circumcision that comes straight afterwards. Wow. I think the world nettle eating championship should go for this. So after me in the nettles, then the hornets. And then that would explain why there's a separate category for men and women. How was the circumcision contest judged? Is that by length? How's that working? I haven't worked out all the details yet.

Wow, that sounds really horrible, James. Yeah, no, it is. What does the circumcision prepare you for? Life, has another. Oh, boy. It gets worse. Dealing with a bloody council. All right, it is time for our final fact, and that is Andy's fact.

My fact this week is that the people of the remote island of St Kilda used to yell if they saw themselves in a visiting tourist's mirror. They actually had plenty of mirrors. They just wanted to keep the tourists coming. So this is about the remote, very remote island of St Kilda. And it features in a new book called Shadowlands by Matthew Green, which is about various forgotten, fascinating places. And St Kilda had people on it for about a thousand years. they lived there until 1930. The Arnold was evacuated in 1930.

In the 19th century, they started getting visitors by ship, Victorian tourists. Not very many because it's so far away. But they played up to it massively. And they would do this thing. They would, you know, they would scream or pretend to be incredibly surprised if someone showed them a mirror. They would look behind the mirror saying, there's no one behind. What's going on? I mean, they were literally, they were clean shaven.

They had mirrors. They had shaved that morning. I read this was in an article by Neil McKenzie, who, who was the person who was kind of in charge. He was like the reverend who kind of went there and he's kind of in charge of anything and helped the islanders for quite a long time. And he said they would pick up pieces of coal

and affect surprise at not being able to eat them. And when they came in front of a locking glass, they would start and express great surprise at not being able to find the person who appeared behind it. It's so fun. It's hilarious. They really work out. Sometimes they would go on board a yacht,

a visiting tourist yacht, and they pretended that they thought all the brass on it was gold. And they said, you've got all this gold. You must be the richest man in the world. They knew about brass. You know, they were hamming it up. Did it work? Were there tourists flocking to St. Kilda to see these people be amazed at their own reflection?

Because it's hard to get to. I don't know if I'd take a holiday. It didn't become a major tourist economy, which is why the island economy fell apart. The place was evacuated in 1930. But they were doing their best to keep some money coming in. Apparently, according to McKenzie, they would all the time when they were doing this,

they'd be talking to each other in Gallic and they'd be saying, if we seem to be paying great attention and make them believe we are simple, they will be sure before they go away to give us something even better. So they would just do this and they thought if they kind of make them think we're stupid,

then eventually we'll get some really awesome booty from them. Yeah. Smart guys. Yeah. So I'm trying to work out what they were, what they were pretending to be. And so is it that they're pretending that they thought they were vampires? and was surprised to realize that they weren't actually vampires.

With the mirror? They were surprised, oh, I thought I didn't leave a reflection in a mirror because I was a vampire. I didn't realize I'm human after all. That would surprise you. That's what it was. And that's actually why the island broke down. Everyone was scared off. One of my favourite short poems is by John Hedley.

And it has the title, A Vampire considers buying a new mirror. And the poem is simply on reflection, no. Brilliant. Very nice. That's really good, isn't it? It's also a good one to be able to memorize. Back myself to remember that. For the school, like the citation competition.

Yeah. Yeah. I was trying to look it up. I saw it about 25 years ago and I was trying to look it up somewhere and I can't find it on the internet. And then I thought, you know, I can actually remember that joke. That's fine. It's held fascination for people for hundreds of years, hasn't it? St Kilda.

People have been visiting it. And it is, it's over 100 miles off the... coast of Scotland. And it's a rocky ride to get there. And it's quite unclear when people have lived there and when they haven't. But there was definitely a society established by the 16th century wasn't there. That's when we know that there was a community of people who were living there successfully. So it's not like it's been populated forever. And then people have traveled there ever since. There was the first proper account of the islanders was written in 1698 called A Late Voyage to St. Kilda, which I still don't know what he meant by late. I don't know. I don't know.

know if he meant to go 10 years earlier. He died about five years earlier. Anyway, this is a writer called Martin Martin. Brilliant. I read his book. It's fascinating. One of the things he says they're extremely good climbers. And so they live by hunting the birds, mostly the island birds. So they'll climb up and then they'll catch the birds. And he described a particularly very high rock called the thumb, which was as high as a tall steeple. And he said that the only way that you could get to the top of the thumb is by at one point you swing your entire body sort of up onto a ledge by holding onto a protruding bit of rock, which is only big enough to accommodate your thumb. Oh my God.

So you've got to get your whole body balancing on your thumb as you propel it up onto the next bit of rock. Quite impressive. And then the person who swung his way up there onto the thumb gets, drops a rope down and hoist the others up. And then that person gets an extra four foul at the end of the day for his achievement. That's in the birds, right? Because that's what, the people of St. Kilda have mostly lived off birds and stuff.

Yes. Birds and poo, of course. So it's left ambiguous. Why wouldn't they just leave the rope up? It takes a lot of the fun out of it, isn't it? It is such a fascinating place. And it was unbelievably in hospitable. And it's amazing that people managed to scratch out of living there at all.

So sometimes it would just rain for three weeks without stopping. Not once. It would just rain for three weeks on end. I mean, in fairness, in Bolton or even in Manchester. I think I've, I think I could survive that. All right, all right. There was once a storm that was so fierce that everyone on the island was left death for a week. It's just like, I read that.

That's just not true. It can't be true, can it. It's not true. I think it can. It was so windy, the island of sheep would sometimes just be blown over the cliffs. That is true. Yeah, that is understandable. But everyone on the island going deaf for a week, that doesn't make, that can't be true.

It's just not a thing. mentioned the amazing way that they used to communicate with the mainland for St. Kilden's in the 19th century, which was via mailboats. They didn't have a postal service until the early 20th century, and so they would just get a letter, write it, pop it on a homemade mail boat, like a hollowed out bit of wood, with a little tin placed inside into which they'd put their letter, and then they'd burn onto the service of this tiny boat, the words, please open, and they'd inflate a sheep's bladder, attach it to the boat, send it off, and hope that it got to land somewhere. And according to one report I read, two thirds of messages reached their destination.

As in they'd reach a destination, either the coast of Scotland or Scandinavia sometimes. And then those people would open the message and find the actual address inside and post it on. It's roughly the same strike rate as the Royal Mail at the moment. So that's really cool. Pyrography it's called when you burn words onto. bits of wood. It's kind of a subsection of whittling. I don't know if you came across it

in your whittling research. It used to be a very male-dominated area. And then in the turn of the 20th century, there's a Melbourne architect called Alfred Smart, who invented a new way of pyrography, pyrugraphising a new type of pyrography. And the way that he did that, he had a pencil with like some fuel attached to it.

And so you could use and you could change the amount of fuel that came in and out so you could start doing shading and stuff like that and do amazing patterns. And then it became a kind of a relatively not very common, but a relatively common hobby for women in the start of the 20th century. And I was reading about someone called Joe Schwartz, who's a woodburner, and she is the first person to ever teach woodburning in Antarctica. I mean, it's right down on the list of, survivability skills, isn't it? Especially in a continent with no trees. But, you know, she's got a record, so.

That's good. Imagine being the second person. Imagine going to Antarctica going, I'm going to teach them woodburning. What is they? Oh, God, I'm not even the first one to do this. You arrive. You see the Schwartz panel being hung up over the tent nightmare. Can I tell you one quick thing about the evacuation of Sir Kilda?

Yes, please. Because life got harder and harder, and a lot of able-bodied young men went to the mainland. and as it was largely a subsistence economy, so like hunting birds and farming sheep, that was a big problem for the island's survival. In fact, they got close to starving on several occasions. And so in 1930, they contacted the mainland and said, look, we're going to tap out.

This is horrible. We don't like it. We're all deaf. And the government said, yeah, of course, we'll bring you over. By that point, two thirds of the population shared the same two surnames, as in the diversity of families had really been, you know, whittled down over the years. And at the end of it, in 1930, they ceremonially closed down the post office.

I think is amazing. They held one final church service and they drowned their dogs off the pier. Oh, my God. I don't know why. I don't know why. Oh, no. They must have been told. That took such a horrible turn at the end of that sentence.

Really? Sorry. They must have been. Guys, there's room on the boat for the dogs. But then when they got to the mainland, the government arranged for most of the men to be given jobs in the Forestry Commission, but unfortunately, most of them had never seen a tree because there are no trees on Sir Kilda. We're just chopping everything down, weren't they? They'd chopped down lamp post, tulips. Well, presumably they were going to get jobs at the RSPCA, and that was hurriedly rearranged. All right, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much,

everybody for listening. Thanks so much, Tim, for coming on. If you want to get in touch with any of us. You can find these guys on Twitter, I believe. James, you're on... That's James Harkin. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. And Tim, have you fallen prey to the scourge that is Twitter? I'm Tim Harford on Twitter, but I don't really pay any attention. People should just listen to the Cautionary Tales podcast instead and not tweet me. Great. So if you want to be completely ignored, then tweets at Tim Harford, but do definitely

go and listen to his Cautionary Tales podcast. It is brilliant. And if you want to know anything more about this podcast, no such thing as a fish, go to no such thing as a fish.com, where you'll find all of our previous episodes and any other interesting news about us. Okay, that's all for this week. We will see you again next week with another episode. Goodbye.