No Such Thing As A Fish - 103: No Such Thing As A Boa Constructor
Episode Date: March 4, 2016Live from City Varieties in Leeds, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss glass delusion, useful sphincters, and six foot tall otters. ...
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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this
week coming to you live from Leeds.
My name is Dan Schreiber and please welcome to the stage it's Anna Czizinski, James Harkin
and Andy Murray.
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 fact number one and that is my fact.
My fact this week is that Tchaikovsky used to hold his head when conducting because
he was afraid it would fall off.
So this is apparently he was he used to get so nervous when he was going on stage and
there was so much going on in his head that he genuinely thought no this is definitely
going to fly off halfway through the game so he would sit there or stand there rather
and have his hand just resting.
Yeah I thought that it wasn't true and I went on the internet and a few people said that
they thought it wasn't true but then I found one of his best friends actually said that
he did do this so.
Although at least you trust Dan too far when you first told this to me last week and he
told me where you'd read it.
It wasn't a book of fiction wasn't it?
It was in a movie called Still Crazy which stars Bill Nighy and Billy Conley and he
said that.
But yeah so it turns out a lot of people do say that it might not be true and they only
say it because Tchaikovsky is one of those guys where people love to build myths around
him for some reason and create stories about him and that was one possibly but as James
says we found a source.
Well he was a massive star wasn't he?
He was one of those classical musicians in the 19th century that was the equivalent of
what's a famous band?
Justin Bieber of his day.
The Justin Bieber of his day.
Yeah when he went to America to do a few performances in New York people used to cut out pictures
of his face in newspapers and send them to him and say please sign this which is really
creepy but whatever.
God for a guy who thinks his head's going to fall off as well to get out of it.
Yeah you were right that was harsh.
He was a troubled person but I think the clues were there.
So when he was first going to America he was writing this diary of questions he had to
ask when he got there to make sure that you know he didn't screw up or die and there were
three questions and it was is it safe to drink the water?
Fair question.
Where can I do my laundry?
Fair question.
What sort of hats do people wear?
Oh wow but that's interesting because his death is to do with a glass of water isn't
it?
Yeah supposedly yeah.
He supposedly died of cholera didn't he?
Yeah.
That's what they think although maybe he committed suicide.
Yeah they're not sure.
Or it might be that he so I think because he was really paranoid about drinking about
clean water as evidence by his to-do list when he got to America and really paranoid
about cleanness of water his whole life and then he suddenly drunk a glass of tap water
in the middle of a cholera outbreak so people think maybe he did that on purpose.
There was one other time when he supposedly tried to commit suicide by walking into the
Moscow River and trying to catch pneumonia that way.
Yeah.
It's unusual isn't it?
Evelyn Moore tried to kill himself by swimming out to sea but then he got stung by a jellyfish.
Really?
He didn't like that one bit so I think he thought dying's probably even worse than this so he
swam back.
That was before he wrote anything as well we wouldn't have any Evelyn Moore.
I started reading something about Tchaikovsky which is that he always had this kind of
slightly uneasy relationship with the sound of the violin because as a child he had had
this nightmare that he was being rubbed against a block of, you know, Rosen, the stuff that
they...
Oh really?
Yeah.
Then I realised this was a humour piece from the New Yorker.
This was not true.
The other stuff about Tchaikovsky is so crazy that you would think...
It does kind of sound like it could be true doesn't it?
It did.
He once went to Berlin Zoo and saw a boa constructor being fed a large rat.
A boa constructor.
A boa constructor.
Those boas don't make themselves.
A boa constrictor.
Yes.
A boa constrictor being fed a large rat and he screamed, ran away, started shaking all
over and he had to be in bed for a week.
What?
Yeah.
Pathetic.
So this thing about his head falling off is kind of an example of what they call glass
delusion isn't it?
Yeah.
This is a popular delusion for about 300 years.
Glass had become like this massive material that everyone was using and it was just that
it was almost a standard mental issue of the day that people had that they thought they
were made of glass and they were going to shatter if they fell over or whatever.
And then it got replaced by cement delusion a bit later.
Really?
Yeah, it did.
Cement delusion was a real thing.
But when was cement invented?
Well the Romans made cement.
They made a kind of cement that we don't really know exactly what it was anymore but the real
kind of proper like time that cement was really popular was the 19th century and that's when
cement delusion came in.
And actually it always seems to be that people get deluded by whatever is the main kind of
technology of the day.
Right.
So people think that the internet's out to get them or whatever and there's one that
last year was the first ever known case of climate change delusion.
Wow.
And it was where a guy wouldn't drink any water because he felt guilty about taking it from
the earth.
Oh.
Yeah.
Well maybe if we all had that attitude we wouldn't be in the pickle we're in.
King Charles VI of France.
Charles the Mad.
Wasn't he?
Well he was known either as Charles the Mad or Charles the Well-beloved which suggests
the PR people found out about the first thing.
But he thought he was made of glass and he would keep pieces of iron in his pockets because
he thought that would protect him if anything bumped into him or if he accidentally bumped
into a doorway when he was going through it so he would be defended against it.
Yeah.
I think it was real.
There is a thing where your limbs can randomly fall off though.
What?
What?
What?
It's auto amputation which is when a limb decides to amputate itself and the most...
When a limb decides to amputate itself.
That's a very Dan sentence and it sounds weird coming from Anna.
The most common form makes it sound less dramatic.
The most common form is dactylosis spontaneous which is when your toes spontaneously fall
off and they don't know why this happens but it's like a ring of tough tissue forms around
the base of your little toe and weirdly when it happens it usually happens on both little
toes at once and it starts squeezing and squeezing your little toe and eventually your little
toe falls off and they don't know the cause of it and so eventually it's hanging by something
called a pedicle and then it just drops off and we don't know why it happens.
It's more common in the tropics but that's the only clue we have.
Oh my God.
Does anyone else have that thing where you read about a disease and then you automatically
get it?
I am so sure my little toe is going to fall off now.
I found out a thing about worry and fear so the Pintupi people of Australia who are an
aboriginal people in Australia supposedly they have 15 different words for fear and this
crops up a lot and they're all specific kinds of fear so I'm going to pronounce this, don't
write in but nii nii wara ringu.
Even I'm writing in.
You try saying it, nii nii wara ringu I think is a sudden fear that leads one to stand
up to see what caused it.
That's cool.
Yeah, that's really cool.
I thought you were going to read the other kind of 45 or whatever that's the only one
I've found completely proof of.
We should move on to our next fact soon.
Anyone got anything before we do?
One last thing which is it's not really related, it's about classical music but I found it
through looking for things about Tchaikovsky which is that shockwaves from the front of
trombones move faster than the speed of sound.
Whoa.
Really?
I'm going to miss it.
Bullshit.
No.
Well, I refer you to bbc.co.uk.
They've measured, it sort of builds up in the tube of the trombone and it leaves the front
of the trombone at about 1% faster than the speed of sound, these pressure waves and so
if you're sitting in front of the trombones, if you're in an orchestra, it can be a nightmare
and sometimes people have a predictor's creed.
I don't think anyone's that close to a trombone, you know that's going to be a worry and a
gig.
If you're in an orchestra.
Oh sorry, the person sitting in front of the trombone.
I thought you meant the audience was like, oh these are great seats.
So people in the orchestra wear protective clothes to stop themselves from getting battered
by the shockwaves.
No, but some musicians who are sitting directly in front of the trombonists have protective
screens between them and the trombonists.
Now that feels so passive aggressive that motion, if I were the trombonist and I sat
down and I realized someone's put a big screen up in front of me.
Alright, let's move on.
Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is James Harkin.
Okay, my fact this week is that asthmatic otters can be taught to use inhalers.
So there is an asthmatic otter in Seattle Aquarium.
He seemed to have contracted asthma after the wild fires got near to him when they had
bad fires in Washington state.
He was called Mishka, this otter, and they used food to train Mishka to kind of go up
to this little inhaler thing and he would press it with his nose and then get a little
bit of asthma medicine.
It is the most adorable fact of all time.
It really is.
I quite like the whole thing of offering food to get them to heal themselves through a bit
of medication.
There is another otter that I read about called Eddie, Eddie the otter, and Eddie had problems
with his, he basically was developing arthritis in his elbows and so they needed to get him
to sort of exercise all the joints constantly.
And so what they did was they set up a basketball ring and they had, they rewarded him in fish
every time he got a shot in.
So they give him a basketball and I swear to God, this is what this says, Eddie was slam
dunking into the ring.
He was loving it.
I mean, he's now got a contract, doesn't he, with the NBA?
The thing of otters that could be six foot tall are giant otters in Brazil, in the Amazon.
There are otters that are up to six feet long and they're called giant otters.
So there are only 5,000 left and in captivity they have killed people, people who fall into
their cages.
Killed by an otter.
Yeah, but a huge otter.
They're really powerful looking things.
They're also really, they can be really vicious though, so they can attack.
Outside of killing people, they can also.
That is the tip of the iceberg.
No, the otter family, the war, they're part of the weasel family and I was watching a
David Attenborough clip the other day and there was a weasel that was about three inches
long and it killed, now it doesn't sound that impressive as a rabbit, but it was ten times
its size.
It was the biggest rabbit I've ever seen, ten times the size of it and they wrap themselves
around the necks of their prey and then they just squeeze them and then they bite them
in the back of the neck and they're done and they can take prey ten times the size of
them.
Wow.
Yeah, so they're not so cute.
So I read a book called Otter by Daniel Allen and if you want otter facts, it is such a
good book.
So otters used to be sacred to the Zoroastrian people who lived in Persia, so modern day
Iran.
There were 18 possible penalties for killing an otter in ancient Persia with the Zoroastrians,
which included you would have to then go and kill 10,000 frogs, 10,000 snakes, 10,000 worms,
10,000 corpse flies, whatever they are and whoever did it, he would also have to carry
10,000 loads of cleansed wood to a sacred fire and he would lose all his wealth, his
property, his land and he would have to give up his daughter to godly men.
Wow.
Yeah.
In Japanese folklore otters can shape shift and so the stories that they kind of live in
motes around castles and they could turn into a beautiful woman, invite a man over and then
eat and kill him.
I thought you were going to say people are waking up, being caught next to an otter.
I swear to god she was a beautiful woman last night.
And also they can shape shift and fool people into engaging in sumo against a rock or a
tree stump.
When St. Cuthbert, he was a 7th century saint and when he walked into the sea one night
to pray and when he walked out, two otters approached him and warmed his feet ceremonially
by rubbing themselves on him and breathing on his feet.
They were probably just trying to dry off I imagine and his feet happened to be there.
I'm sure he's interpreted it as an affectionate move but when they come out of the water they
have to rub themselves on a lot of stuff and this must be the most annoying thing.
Coastal otters who live in the sea, every time they are in the sea and they come out of the
sea, they have to then go and have a shower in fresh water somewhere because if they keep
the salt on their fur for any amount of time, then it ruins the waterproofing of their fur.
So they live in the sea but every time they get out of the sea they have to find some
fresh water immediately and wash the salt out.
How annoying is that?
Yeah, do you guys know the surface area of an otter?
I mean, roughly, yeah.
So what would you say?
About one square meter.
Oh no, no, including the hairs.
Yeah, the surface area.
Yeah, if you take total surface area including the hairs.
And I know that they have 70,000 hairs per centimetre squared so a quick bit of calculation.
Let's say there are about 10 tennis cots.
A million carparks per letter.
Half the size of whales.
About the size of a hockey rink.
I want to say like the size of a shoe or something.
So they've got more hairs on them than any animal in the animal kingdom.
So if you had to go total surface area, the size of a hockey rink, which is pretty amazing.
I read that the sea otters have the densest because they spend the whole lives basically in the sea.
They mate and they eat and they sleep and they feed.
They spend almost all the time floating on the backs and they have up to 165,000 hairs per square
centimetre. That's the densest you get.
But I think that's more than a human has hairs on their head.
One thing that's interesting about sea otters is they use tools.
So they can get stones and they can crack open shells to get the food inside.
But there are people whose job it is to be an otter archaeologist
and they want to go and find the tools that the otters use so they can see kind of how they've
evolved. So a normal archaeologist would go and find old human tools.
But there are people looking for old otter tools.
That's cool, isn't it? That's really cool.
But the problem is that a stone, like after they've broken the thing,
they just kind of drop it to the bottom of the ocean and it just looks like a stone then.
Yeah, there's not like now they have spanners and seed drills and stuff and we need to look
at where they start it. We're not going, wow, we all have to start somewhere.
Also, how does a single archaeologist able to come back?
So what they do now is because they can't really work out which stones are used by otters and
which aren't, they get like... They just get some stones and say probably these.
No, what they do is they get like old ancient otter skeletons and they look at the teeth and
they see whether they've used, like, if they had to use their teeth to open the shells and
they'll be cracked. And if they didn't have to use their teeth, then they won't be cracked.
And so you can tell when they started using tools.
Wow. That's amazing.
They also have, they smell and we think they smell in quite an incredible way because they
can't technically smell underwater. The water stops the smell particles from being able to
get to their nose. So what it's thought that they do, what we've seen them doing is
they blow a snot bubble out of their nose while they're underwater and then they blow it out
towards what they think is some prey and then they immediately suck it back in again.
So they get the scent of the prey into the air and the snot bubble and they suck it back in
and they can smell it. No way. That's incredible.
That's apparently what they're doing and that's how they smell if it's prey they want to eat or
if it's just a bit of rock. That's so cool. We should move on to our next fact very soon.
Anyone got anything before we do? Some stuff about asthma very quickly.
Yeah, sure. So Thomas Penny who is an English entomologist thought that if you took crushed
wood lice that would cure asthma. Something that actually can cure asthma is roller coasters.
Or he can't cure it but he can leave the symptoms.
It can make you forget about it for three minutes.
Yeah, this is a it's an ignoble study actually and they check people's kind of breathing
not breathing. Not on a roller coaster, James.
The bars are down. Well, three minutes, that's about right.
So they check their breathing ability before and after and just before they because of the
stress of going on the roller coaster, it got a bit worse. But then afterwards somehow the
pleasurable stress seems to have kind of relieved the symptoms of asthma quite a lot.
Really? It's quite good. Good tip. Just on difficulty breathing,
otter mothers teach their kids to swim by doing what all of our parents did when we learned to
swim, which is just like forcibly ducking them underwater in order to make it. So baby otters
are born not being able to swim and that you can watch videos of mothers training otters
and they drag them from the rocks into the water and then they pull them along behind them and
they let go of them like when you're riding a bike for the first time and they sort of start
sinking a bit and so their mother has to go up and get them. And then to get them used to
being underwater for long periods of time, they just like duck these baby otters underwater
and hold them there. You've had some very difficult experiences growing up.
My dad was an otter.
Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is Chazinsky.
Yeah, my fact this week is that your appendix can be turned into a sphincter, if you like.
No one's forcing you. I think you're gonna have to explain.
Yeah, so I just think this is incredibly cool. I guess what medicine and surgery can do. So
appendixes can be really useful now. It can be repurposed for other reasons inside your body.
So for instance, if you need bladder replacement surgery, then the surgeons go in and they take
a part of your intestine to make a little bladder out of it and then they take your appendix and
they reform it into tissue that builds a sphincter muscle that can contract and means that you're
not going to be incontinent, which I think is incredible. You take your appendix that's sitting
there relatively uselessly, controversial claim, and you turn it into something really useful that
stops you wetting yourself all the time. I think that's amazing. And it happens a lot in surgery.
You can use appendix appendices for various things. You can turn them into other things.
You can also turn them into the ureter. If you've got a problem with your ureter,
you can replace that by reshaping an appendix. If you are hosting a child's birthday party,
but you've run out of balloons, an appendix will make a poor but accessible substance.
Which you should say that because the Aztecs used the bowels of animals to make balloons,
or they blew into them. And then they kind of tied them and I don't think they did shapes out of
them. But that is true actually. I think that is true. And I read in one place that apparently
when they ran out of cats or dogs, what did they use? They used humans because they had
loads of human sacrifices and loads of dead humans, and they would use the insides of humans
to make balloons. I have read that. Happy birthday, son. Here's your grandparents' organs.
So you, Dan, have millions of sphincters. And so does everybody else. Millions are strong.
You have such a point out that the sphincter I'm talking about is not the sphincter that you're
imagining. Go on, because we do have a lot of sphincters. Yes, so we've all got an A-list sphincter,
as it were. But there are millions of them throughout your body. So you have sphincters all
the way through your digestive system. A sphincter is just a ring of muscle which can expand or
contract to allow anything through it. So you also have them in your blood vessels. All your veins
and capillaries have tiny, tiny, tiny sphincters which widen or constrict depending on where needs
blood in the body. Is it millions? I thought it was like 60. Well, I looked into it a lot. I haven't
got enough. They've counted a load of ones. So they've counted the one that goes from your esophagus
to the stomach or from the stomach to the small intestine. But they haven't counted the ones in
the blood vessels. In your capillaries? Okay. Some of them are so tiny. So I'm not sure that there
can be a proper audit. But you've done your best. Yeah. So I say millions. Maybe it's thousands,
I don't know. So the word sphincter comes from an old word sphengain, which means to squeeze.
And another word that comes from that is sphynx, as in the big kind of animal in Egypt. Yeah,
that's the country. So the official plural of the word sphynx is sphinges. So that's one for you
all to use. Sphincters are blowholes, whales blowholes, sphincters. Any kind of muscle that
kind of contracts. An elephant's trunks. Your eyes. Your eyes. In your pupils, the muscles which
allow your pupils to expand or contract their sphincters. And you have two in your anus.
You have an internal one, which is involuntary and an external one, which is voluntary.
In most cases.
Also koalas, koala pouches are like kangaroo pouches, but they're upside down, which feels like a
design floor. So when they're raising their young, they're in this upside down pouch, which if they
didn't have the sphincter, which acts kind of like an elastic band or like a drawstring
to keep the baby in there, the baby would just drop out of their pouch. So they clench their
sphincter and then they've the baby stays in there. So the appendix, should we talk about that?
Yeah, why not? Yeah. So lots of theories. We didn't know about it until 1522, because in the ancient
world, the doctor Galen, who was just the the doctor and his stuff was the only really anatomical
stuff we knew about until the 16th century, he only dissected monkeys and monkeys don't have
an appendix or appendices. Do they not? Yeah. So that's why we didn't know it existed.
Yeah. Although what happened when it burst? Presumably people would get appendicitis.
Yeah, people got it, but they just didn't know what it was. No, exactly. That's really cool.
Dissection was really a big no, no, if you as long as you want an Aztec, I suppose.
There's a thing I read today about when Australian explorers go to the Arctic,
they have to have their appendix taken out. So it turns out that that's not necessarily
true. They do encourage it. But there is Werner Herzog made a documentary about the people who
live out there and the ones who choose to stay out when it goes into the real inaccessible months.
And they have to make the decision if they're going to stay out there. The appendix needs to
be taken out as do wisdom teeth. That's that's the thing that that's the only way that they
can stay out there. It wasn't the who had appendicitis when he was in the Antarctic.
Leonid Rogozov, I was going to say is Russian. Yeah. Yeah. So this is 1961. And it was a Russian
trip to the South Pole and this guy Leonid Rogozov got appendicitis. He happened to be a surgeon,
which was useful. And he said, look, I think I'm going to have to take out my own appendix.
And he wrote what I find incredible is he's in total agony. And the night before he did the
operation, he was writing his diary and he wrote, it hurts like the devil. I have to think through
the only possible way out to operate on myself. Anyway, he took his appendix out and he had
three assistants, one to hold the lamp, one to hold the mirror so that he could see inside
himself. And then a third person in case one of those two fainted. I want to be that guy.
He said though, he so the mirror wasn't actually that helpful. It turned out so he ended up doing
it by feeling around. Oh, that's right, because it was all back to front, wasn't he? He had the
mirror there, but he kept going one way, but like shaving the wrong side of your face or something.
Which I think was harder than he imagined. So he thought it's probably easy if I just feel.
And then he ended up tearing a bit of his gut at one point and he had to sew that up mid-operation.
And what he said afterwards when he was talking, when he was interviewed about it, he said,
I felt so sorry for my surgical assistants. They stood there in their surgical whites,
whiter than the white themselves. Paul then. The Dazz doorstep challenge was actually
around that day. Oh, do you know what? So this is sort of this fact was sort of about repurposing
body parts for different things. And if you have a tummy tuck, they use the fat for breast implants.
Even if you don't ask for it on the floor. Waste not, what not.
Okay, time for our final fact of the show. And that is Andrew Hunter Murray.
My fact is that the founder of Crufts designed special train carriages for celebrity dogs.
So in the 19th century, Crufts was founded in the, I think, 1891. But before, there were
loads of dog shows before Crufts. And before these train carriages were invented, what they
would just do, they would put the dogs that were going to the dog show in special boxes,
which were then strapped to the underside of the carriage. Yeah. So they would arrive,
not in good nick, not really ready for a dog show. So he designed these special deluxe train
carriages for dogs. And they had a row of kennels inside, and they had zinc flooring, and they had
water troughs, and they had drainage, and they had two seats for attendance. So like tapping crew.
It's zinc flooring the height of luxury.
It's a high dream. I don't know, maybe for dogs or maybe it's not seen as cleaner or maybe it was
then. The guy from Crufts, Charles Cruft, he was actually, was he kind of a showman or a dog
biscuit manufacturer or something? He was a dog biscuit manufacturer. In London, there was a very
famous building, I think it was the first ever dog biscuit factory ever, and it was called Sprats.
And that's where Charles Cruft worked. He started there, and he was working on the biscuits,
and he was so good. He had ideas about marketing, and he turned it into the first sort of major
brand of biscuits. They put logos on it and so on, so people knew about it. Yeah. There's a rumor
that Charles Cruft never owned a dog in his life. Yeah, I've read it. He sort of put it about during
his life that he never owned a dog, and his wife said, yeah, because we couldn't show favoritism
for one breed or another. And then in his posthumous memoirs, it turned out he had a St Bernard. Yeah,
he had a massive St Bernard, didn't he? Yeah, sounds very rude.
Quite hard to hide that, the dog. I'm surprised he kept a secret.
So, Cruft was a genius at making money, basically. I'm putting on these big shows,
I'm putting on even bigger shows, and just really exploiting his audience and his market.
So, I read that this was what he did in the early days of Crufts. I'm quoting here.
He introduced a system where competitors would pay to enter their dogs
and make additional payments if they wished to take the dogs away each night of the competition,
and then pay again if they wanted to take them away early on the final day.
So, basically, it's not free to enter or leave.
God, did many people run out of money and just have to leave their dog there forever?
Is there a huge lost property office of dead dogs that are 75 years old?
I just think that's an inspired system. It also applies here tonight, guys.
Cruft also found, Charles Cruft, the guy who founded it, also founded a cat show,
did you know that? But quoting from, I think, his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Entry, it failed to live up to commercial expectations. It doesn't feel like cats would
like to be shown, does it? Oh, I read a thing about cat shows, and there was a lady who was
giving advice for this. There is a cat show called the Supreme Cat Show, which is such a good name,
and she enters cats for it all the time. And she said, the main grooming things are brushing
the coat through with a comb, making sure the underarms and the bikini area are combed.
Oh, my God. And washing the cat's face.
It's pretty weird, yeah. So the prizes in Cruft are really small as well. Do you know the maximum
prize, cash prize, that you get? No. It's £100. So it's really a token thing. You also get a big
silver cut, but you're not allowed to melt it or anything. A lot of royalty have won Crufts,
haven't they? A lot of royalties. Do they come in disguise? Queen Victoria entered as a shih tzu,
and won many years running because everyone was too afraid to say, that's the queen.
Yeah, and so you can make money from endorsements and from, you know, pimping the dog out for
stud or whatever, I don't know what it's called, but they have sex with other dogs and then you
get better dogs. But do you know what the prize was in the first modern dog show, which was in
1859 in Newcastle? No. The prizes were all guns. It was a really rural farming-based competition.
It was a cattle show, and they said, why don't we add a dog element to this cattle show? And so
the prizes were all guns. Do you know if you get a train in the UK that you don't have to pay for
your first two dogs to come on for your third one you do? Yeah, so you get two dogs free, and then
your third one you go to start paying. Really? Yeah, and every additional dog you bring on.
But I read also that if any other customer objects to its presence on the train, you are
obliged to move it to another area, according to Bylaw 16 of the... Oh yeah, try saying that when
the pimple's good at sticking your leg. I object to this according to Bylaw 16. And I just have a
cool train, if you want to hear it. I have a cool train. What are you, sex? So the Shynan Zeppelin
in 1931 was a German train, and they wanted to make a superfast train, and what they wanted to do
was put a huge propeller on the back of the train, and it would go super, super fast down the tracks.
It's a brilliant idea, but it never went past the prototype stage because they found out that
the propellers would kill people who stood too close to the tracks. I've read there's a new idea
of most complaints that come about the way that trains function. One complaint is the fact that
too much time is lost when they stop at a station and people are getting on and off. The other one
is about internet access. So one of the plans for a new train that they've been designing is to
design a train that never stops but still picks up passengers. It's incredible. So it just goes
high speed, it's just high speeding along, and then what they do is everyone boards another train,
and the other train chases the train that's going to the place, docks onto it, everyone casually
walks over, docks off it, and goes back to the station. That's one proposed idea for a new train.
That sounds about as sensible as James's massive, slicey fan.
Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for being here. If you'd like to
get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast,
you can find us on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, James at Egg Shapes,
Andy at Andrew Hunter M, and Chazinsky. You can email a podcast at qi.com. Or you can go to our
group account, which is at qipodcast. And also go to our website. We've got no such thing as a
fish.com. That's where you go. And we have all of our previous episodes up there. Thank you so
much for listening at home. Thank you all for being here at Leeds. That was awesome. Thank you
so much. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye!