No Such Thing As A Fish - 50: No Such Thing As Doing It Dinosaur-Style

Episode Date: February 28, 2015

Episode 50: Live at the Soho Theatre, Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss the history of striptease, Hitler-shaped kettles, how to win a goat, and Anna's favourite table.

Oh, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast, this week coming to you from the Soho Theatre in Central London. My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting here with the three regular elves. It's James Harkin, Andy Murray, and Anna Chazinski. And once again, we've got around the microphone with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. James. Okay. My fact this week is that the 2012 law prohibiting nudity in San Francisco was proposed by a politician called Scott Weiner. Keeping it high, Brown. Yeah. Yeah. Just like I just like funny names, really. That's my favorite thing. It's also it's that nominative determinism thing, isn't it? Yeah.

We've actually met the person who coined nominative determinism. Really? Mr. Determinism. Yeah. No, it's a British guy called John Hoyland. Sadly, he passed away last year. But he used to write for New Sciences and he coined it. And he coined it because he saw on the same day two things when he was out in the shops. The first thing was he saw a book that had come out on the Arctic by Mr. Snowman. And then that very same day, he read a scientific paper on incontinence by J. W. Splat and D. Weedon. Yeah. Weedon and Splat. It's quite a famous paper that actually. Is it? Yeah. Wait, Mr. Snowman. Yeah, Mr. Snowman. Is that a name? Does anyone here know anyone called Snowman? I don't think it's it. How can it be a name? Andy often denies the

existence of people introduced to him if he doesn't agree with their name. So after finding this guy called Scott Weiner, I tried to look for other political names in America, funny ones. And good old BuzzFeed has one. It has a list of the 31 weirdest political names. And I want to give you a few of those. So the former House representative from New Hampshire called Dick Sweatt. Precinct Commitment from Arizona, Frank Schmuck. And this is my favorite one. It's not rude, but Butch Otter, who was the current governor of Idaho. Butch Otter is such a good name. Yeah, I'd vote for Butch Otter. And there's Anthony Weiner, wasn't there? Who was I mean, you know, who'd flash people by text or something a couple of years ago. Oh, yeah, that was right. That was Anthony Weiner. It was. Yeah, I'd

never thought about how technology has sort of made the flashing immunity way more just relaxing, stay at home. Usually it was really hands on, wasn't it? You have to go out the street. Hands on was a whole different cry. What do we think of so sort of the reverse thing, which is popular among celebrities now naming your child after where they were conceived or after something that's significant to them, which goes back longer than I thought. So Brooklyn Beckham, Brooklyn Beckham, yeah, I think. And so in 1863, a boy was born and he was named Lester Railway. He was born at Lester train station. Born, born, born, born. Actually, Roger Kipling is named after the place where his parents either met or conceived him, which is in Staffordshire, I think. Yeah. So one

recently went through all the censuses from 1790 to 1930, finding all the funny names there. And there were some really good ones. Some of the best ones. So parents, Mr and Mrs. Day in 1899 named their son Time of 1899. Yeah, 1899 time of day. I didn't think people had that kind of sense of humor back then. I know. And yeah, so also in the 19th century, they found I'm a hog, I'm a pig, I'm a nut and I'm a hooker. I'll do it. I guess the name I'm a winner of fashion eventually. I'm a snowman would have been good. So okay, so this guy, where is he banned nudity? San Francisco. So was it not banned there? Was that the first time he'd been banned? Yeah, yeah, because it's not banned in old places. It's not banned in the UK, for instance, you're allowed to go around naked as long as you

don't deliberately cause harassment or alarm or distress. Yeah, I found out that that so you can go to, you know, like youth camps in America, summer camps, there's now a youth summer camp, that's a nudist camp, because it was thought that I guess young teenagers didn't have enough opportunity to engage in nudism or whatever. But there's a rule at this summer camp. So I think there are three or four of them in like Florida, Texas, Arizona. There's a rule that on the occasions that you do wear clothing, so occasionally there'll be scenarios where you put on some clothes, it's not allowed to be sexually alluring. One of the first other guys to be arrested for fine for indecent exposure was this was in 1927. And can anyone guess the part of himself he revealed? Okay, his bottom. No, it was

his chest. It was sunbathing, just took his shirt off. And that was it. He was he was fined and arrested. Yeah, and the magistrate said, I'm going to hold, rightly or wrongly, that to expose the upper part of your body is indecent. I think it is highly likely to shock persons of ordinary sensibility. I, in summer in London, I'm actually in a greener. There was speaking of topless, there's a really weird story in 1842, where there was uproar because so this was reported in a Northern newspaper. And it was that women who worked down mines were being photographed topless. And it was all over the newspapers. And it turned out that women were working topless down mines, because it was really, really hot. And I think it turned out was only in one mine. It was a hopwood mine in

Barnsley. But and there was suddenly this big campaign saying women shouldn't be working down nines, because it was seen as indecent that they were apparently being forced to be topless. Wow, that's weird. I was just reading today, actually, in Mongolia, they have a an annual sporting event called the Three Manly Sports. And one of them's wrestling and one of them's throwing something. And the the wrestling one, it's only men. And the way that they find that out is they make sure that they wrestle topless, so that you could tell the difference if there's a woman wrestling, because a very obvious other way of finding it. Not like during a wrestling match, though. Oh, yeah, what about that fact about Princess Anne was the only person not to be gender

tested in the 1987 to some Olympics or other Olympics. Yeah, she could be a man. Nobody knows for sure. We are not saying that Princess Anne is a man. Anna is. We're just saying we can't rule it out. I was so I was looking into nudity, which is extremely hard to do. The distractions available. But I started looking into striptease, because I suddenly thought I don't know the history of stripteasing. Every week. But I'm surprised how far it goes back. I mean, it goes back to like, I think it was the 1700s. And what's really weird is, is that they used to striptease in front of it would be in a court and you would be just having a fun night and then a striptease would start. And I always said that striptease was accompanied by music. I was thinking

the music back then wasn't exactly the same. Yeah, when you got your harpsichord out, there's not really a kind of sexy song to go with the striptease. And then I read that a big thing that actually put stripteasing around the world is more of an art form. There was Gustav Flaubert. Flaubert, he saw an Arab custom that he saw in Egypt, which was this dance. It was the dance of the bee. Oh, is it the one where she takes off her clothes because she thinks she's got a bee inside her clothes? Yeah, again, not very sexy. It seems like stripteasing like slowly introduced the idea of sexuality much later in the day. I think striptease must go back further than that, though. Yeah, it does. If you Google nudity, right, and obviously for this, you have to be quite

careful, but the results that came up for me, you know, the autocomplete options on Google, were nudity in Far Cry 4, which is a computer game, nudity crossword clue, third one is nudity in Dragon Age Inquisition, another computer game, but then I realized these are tailored to me. I don't own either of those games. Until now. You ordered them, presumably. I wanted to see if there was any political parties who were up for nudity, and so I Googled the National Nudity Party, and I found only one hit. It was a Facebook page, and it had one like, National Nudity Party, and it was a guy called Nenad

Filopovich from Serbia. He's the only member of the Facebook National Nudity Party. It's not much of a party, isn't it? I mean, I've held some pretty dead parties in my time, but that was bad. The first ever organized nudist movement was set up by just three people. They were Englishmen living in Bombay in 1890, and they disliked the dress codes of the British Raj, which are very, you know, you had so much, and it was very hot, and so they established a group called the Fellowship of the Naked Trust, and they began to meet together in the nude, and they were the only three members that lasted for just two years, and then they stopped, and I just, I want to know what happened at these, I presume, I presume nothing much happened at these meetings, just three men.

Something happened for it to stop, didn't it? Someone, someone stepped over a boundary there. I was, I was looking into the history of clothing, because I thought, because apparently for the majority of our time on earth, we have been naked. String apparently is what changed everything, the invention of string, because it meant you could harness all, you know, clothing could be harness. So string was really hard to make, so they ended up, so they used hemp. Hemp was the big thing that would, you know, you could put into small strips, you could wear it in larger patches, and the thing about hemp was it was going really well, and everyone was using it, and then suddenly they discovered that you could smoke hemp and get really high, and then they all got naked again.

Yeah, exactly. Stoned off their asses, just, yeah, so hemp, hemp turned into a high as a result of clothing. The other thing is that in the early American times, they used the hemp for their ships as well, and they needed the hemp, and no one really wanted to grow it, they all wanted to grow food because you got more money, but so one of the first, in fact, it was the first ever drug law in America was to make it that you had to grow hemp. Yeah, that's right. I just read, I just read in my notes, I've actually miss-built this when I was writing about nudity, and a surge in nude crises, and I actually meant to write cruises, which there have been a surge in, which is not a crisis, but there have been a surge in nude cruises, and also the first new chartered flight

by a German air comp, German tourist company. Yeah, you know in Germany, so I haven't been to beaches in Germany, so this is just what I've read, but most beaches are named, you'll have signs on the beaches, FKK is one sign, and that points to Freikörperkulfer, which is a free body culture, and that's the naked part, and then you have the one that's called the textile beach, which really does sound like the loser's beach, the knitting beach. Do you know about German agricultural nudist traditions? They're good. Try me. Okay, so lots of different bits of Germany have nudity related customs to encourage the crops and the harvest, so for example, in Seilfeld, women would walk around the flax fields naked on a particular night of the year,

and in the eight, this went until the 19th century, where women in Riedlingen would walk naked and urinate in the flax fields, urging the crops to grow as high as their breasts, and men did the same thing as well, men would walk around the soaps, they would walk naked in the fields chanting, flax, flax, grow as high as the scrotum. So the men's crops weren't growing as high, but they were. All right, we got to move on to our second fact. So time for fact number two. Fact number two is my fact. My fact this week is that Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, got so large that he couldn't fit at his dinner table anymore. Rather than going on an exercise regime, he decided to cut a semi-circle in the table so he could fit his stomach here

and continue eating. It's just wonderful decision making. I think that's an example of why he was such a genius though, right? Absolutely. Yeah, so I mean this is the thing, I'd never heard of Erasmus Darwin, because obviously his grandson Charles really is dominating the column inches, but he was extraordinary. Yeah, Erasmus Darwin was awesome. He was a serious polymath, wasn't he, when he's like the epitome of polymath, and he came up with loads of inventions, really cool inventions, with some of which actually did work. So the steam car, very early person to experiment with steam and create a steam operated vehicle, a wire drawn ferry, a horizontal windmill. I don't know what that's useful for, but whatever. I know how windmills work. There's more. All right, go on.

I will. An artificial bird and a magnetically operated fake spider. Also really cool, like an early joke toy. Oh, that's good. He also invented, he came up with an idea of using hydrogen balloons to increase the amount that could be carried in wheelbarrows. That's a good idea. He sounds really clever, but then I also read that he once tried to cure a five-year-old boy's problem with squinting by fixing a ginormous fake nose to his face, and that was his solution. He was like, this would definitely work. Just walk around. This will be fine. Do it if it worked. Well, no one noticed his squinting anymore. The thing about the balloons, I just remembered actually. Benjamin Franklin, he had a number of other ideas for hydrogen balloons, and one of

them was that he would put his food, attach his food to a hydrogen balloon, and then he would let it go miles into the air to keep it cool, so you wouldn't need a refrigerator, and they would keep the food cool up there. And then when you wanted it, you just shoot it down, the food would come down, you could eat it, and it'd be cold. That is much more convenient than a refrigerator. I'm amazed we're not all doing it. Apparently, he was really attractive to women, though, despite being so corpulent. He sounds like a really charismatic guy. Women fancied him. He was a bit of a female magnet. I think you have 14 children? Yeah. 12 of them legitimate, not. Should have invented the condom. But one of the cool things about him is he

kind of inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. When they were all Mary Shelley, and Byron, and Percy Shelley, they were all staying in Lake Geneva, and they were telling each other ghost stories, and Mary Shelley writes in her diary, she says, Byron and Shelley had a load of conversations to which I was a devout, but nearly silent listener, i.e. they were going on about it. They talked of the experiments of Dr Darwin, who supposedly preserved a piece of Vermicelli in a glass case. What is Vermicelli? It's a worm. But it means little worm. It was a small worm, wasn't it? Well, I think it's pasta. No, no, no. And then he brought the pasta to life. Yeah, he brought the pasta to life. And I've mis-researched. That's not useful for anyone.

That would have made a very thing with it. I think it's still pasta. It would have made a very different Frankenstein. You just have to get him lots of hot water over him, and then he just goes like this. I think it was a worm, but whatever. And he kind of came up with the theory of evolution, for which Charles gets all the credit now. But he came up with lots of early iterations of the theory of evolution. Yeah, he didn't do natural selection, did he? But he thought that everything came from something smaller, something like a very tiny piece of pasta. But he didn't realize, survive on the fittest, he didn't really have that. Just speaking of Charles Darwin, I read a thing about him, which I really thought was

extraordinary about the times. So when he went on the Beagle trip, he wasn't the naturalist on the Beagle trip. And actually, we went to, three of us, I think, went to the Welcome Institute that you can go to in London. And they have this kind of, there's this behind-the-scenes area where they have all these amazing documents that no one sees in the public, one of which is the diaries of the naturalist from the Beagle. And what's amazing about it is the naturalist spent more time just going, who the fuck is this Darwin guy? And it's literally a bitch diary. The whole talking about tortoises and this theory of them, like it was so bitchy, and they've never published it, they really need to. But Darwin almost didn't make it onto the Beagle, because Fitzroy, who was

the captain, didn't like the shape of his nose. He believed in a, what was the theory that was physiognomy, which meant that you could tell someone's personality by their physical traits, and he thought it meant Darwin was arrogant and stubborn. It was just a theory in those days that you could tell if someone's personality by the shape of their face, or you would have people who looked a bit like criminals, or, and actually it's dated back all the way back to Robin's time, so. And also, I mean, remain, we say their eyes are too close together. I mean, it remains today, we do make judgment space on people's characteristics. We don't say that. I do, I do. Never trusted you. This is quite a funny thing about everyone, Darwin's family. So

Darwin married his cousin, which is quite, quite well known. But I like the fact that one of his sons, called George, became an academic, and one of the only academic papers that we know about that existed, that was published, was published in the Journal of the Statistical Society, and it was titled, Marriages Between First Cousins in England and Their Effects. So he was both the author and the subject of that. He wanted Parliament to add, Charles Darwin, this is, wanted Parliament to add a question to the census they did, saying, are you married to your first cousin? Have you noticed anything going wrong? And they wouldn't do it. They wouldn't allow him to add that question to the census.

They said it was too personal. I read a, I read a sentence about Charles Darwin, and I know nothing more about it because I just thought, I don't want to go further than this. The sentence was, Charles Darwin hated religious controversy because it exacerbated his bowel problems. Place hell with mine. Well, Erasmus Darwin, just going back to him, he got in a lot of trouble because he didn't believe in the Judeo-Christianic God. He still believed in God, but just not the, the main one. And he believed them like some kind of distant entity. And he, I think he changed his, because he believed in evolution, he changed his family crest to everything from shells or something like that. He put those words, he put those words on it,

yeah. He was wrong. He was wrong. Well, in the specifics, yes, but in the general thrust, no. He, just going back to his inventions as well, he invented a circulating swing to cure madness. It's a spinning thing. You put a person who's got mental issues back in the day. They have one at bedlam. You would put them in this machine. It would spin them round, make them feel nauseous. They would vomit, lose control of their bladder and bowels. Some bled from the nose and ears. Some had convulsions and many passed out. Then he stopped the machine as suddenly as he could, and this invariably had a calming effect, subduing even the most violent patients. So what? Do you still feel angry? See, he's saying nothing.

Your fact was about tables, right? Yes. I don't know. It feels like a long time ago now. Yeah, okay. So my favorite table, I think, is a table. We've all got one. We've all got one. Welcome to my favorite table. It's my spin-off show. One episode. It was Louis the 16th, and it was in his chateau at Choisy, which I'm guessing is somewhere in France, and it was his table of volant, and it was because he got annoyed at the fact that between courses, the servants would have to come and bring you your food, so they'd have to take away your plates and bring your main course up to your starter, and he thought this was really disruptive. So what he made have him was he cut a huge hole around the dining room table, and he had it lowered into the

servant's quarters between courses, so that the servants down below could stock it up and then raise it back up to their level, which apparently was less disruptive than I think. Was he friends with Benjamin Franklin by any chance? That's a good table. That's a good one to start the series, I think. I think it is, yeah. A few copulent people. Daniel Lambert, he was the fattest man ever when he was alive, weighed 318 kilograms. He was the heaviest man in history, but John Brower, who died in 1983, he weighed over 635 kilograms. So even though this guy was the biggest at the time, we've gone twice as big now. And Lambert was so fat, apparently, that he couldn't sink. He was... Wow. I'm not sure how that works. There's something with that. And he was from

Leicester, and he would float along the river Stour, allowing children to hitch a lift on his belly. Sorry. No. Seriously. It was a more innocent time. It was more innocent. How did you discover that? He was really strong. He once fought a bear in the streets of Leicester. Why was a bear in the streets of Leicester? I don't know, but you've got to be glad that he's there when it happens. He gets out of the water. Get down. Sorry, kids. You've got to find a bear. And then he got so famous, and he exhibited himself in a house in Piccadilly in London, and people would go and pay to chat to him, because apparently he's quite a rack and tear as well. And at the same time as he was exhibiting himself in Piccadilly, down the road on Sackville Street,

there was a fat baby known as Master Wybrance, Mr Lumbert in miniature, and people would go to see this fat baby. What, just while they were there? It's like if they couldn't get a ticket for Lumbert, they'd go and see the... Like the Fringe. It was a Fringe event. Yeah, exactly. Surely they did a double act. Yeah, they should have done, shouldn't they? Do you know, in theory, why humans have put on weight in the last sort of couple of centuries, as well as all the dietary change? Well, yeah. But another theory is that humans all used to weigh less, and this is hundreds and thousands of years ago, because they were constantly exposed to infections and infected with stuff. And when you're infected, when you're fighting an infection,

your body warms up and you burn calories, or more of them. So that's the answer, is to just constantly be ill. Well, people think that, though, obesity might be infectious, and I like this, because it's a good excuse for obesity. But yeah, there's this theory, they've tried it on mice, where they've implanted bacteria from obese humans into mouse guts, and then they took another bunch of mice and implanted bacteria from like normal weight humans into different mouse guts, and the mouse guts with the bacteria from the fat humans got fat, and then, and the mouse got mice with the bacteria from the not fat humans didn't get fat. And then when they put all the mice together, the thin mice were infected with the fat mouse bacteria, and they all got fat. So they

think the fatness might be infectious caused by bacteria in your stomach, which I don't believe, but I would like to. Guys, we've got to move on to our next fact. Time is against us. Okay, time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that Spotify's random function is not random. It used to be random. It used to play any random song, but then human listeners kept inferring order and seeing patterns where there weren't any patterns. So now they've had to change the algorithm so it's structured, but in such a way that human listeners think that it's random. Can I just ask quickly, who are the non human listeners? That's amazing. So we see patterns in the algorithm and it's not there. Yeah. And so they had to create

a fake one. Yeah. So it plays. So if you've got say five different genres of music in a normal completely random pattern occasionally, you get clumps or clusters where it would play two or three jazz songs in the same, in the same, you know, consecutively, and they've had to change it. So it now completely mixes up the genres. So yeah, they've had to abandon or doesn't completely mix up the genres, even spreads the mountains at proper intervals. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Because people don't believe. Yeah. Because people just can't kind of figure out randomness. Humans can't really. Can they if you ask everyone in this room to stand randomly somewhere in the room, then they'll all spread out pretty much equally. Yeah. When actually in real life, there'd be clumps

everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. Don't do that, guys. No. It's the gambler's fallacy, isn't it? It's the thing that makes gamblers think that if there've been 20 reds in a row on a roulette machine that's got the 21st, it's going to be not a red. And it's just not true. I think the first instance, so the first time it was reported and studied was in 1913, when a roulette ball fell on black 26 times in a row. And all gamblers are going, come on, it's not possible. It can't do it again. Yeah, I also think that's not possible. That's amazing, isn't it? One thing they didn't say is that on that roulette wheel, there'd been a mistake with the order. The work experience boy painted them all black. So if you get someone to put a random list of 30 coin flips, say, and I

actually flip the coin 30 times and you do a random number like HT, HT, whatever, you'll be able to tell which is the man made one just by looking at it. And that's because even yeah, because most, if you do 30, you're likely to get about five in a row, which are either heads or tails, but no human would do that. Yeah, it seems implausible. Yeah. So there used to be a machine you could get called an out guessing machine. And they had those in America, I think it was in the 50s. And you would have to choose either left or right, you would say left and the machine would have to guess whether you said left or right. And then you would keep doing it. And eventually it would guess almost every time because humans just go into a pattern. Yeah, it's like paper scissors on

the New York Times, you can play rock, paper, scissors, can't you? And it's the same thing. And the game learns as it plays against you, what your patterns are. So the more you play it, the less likely you are to win it because it becomes better at predicting what you're going to do. Yep. I love counterintuitive. It's terrifying. Yeah. We can beat that at such a simple game. Well, remember how chickens could beat you in knots and crosses? Yeah. Sorry, everyone, not just me. So you would be able to get these machines, they have one at Coney Island in America and they're in other places as well. And basically in knots and crosses, as long as you don't make any mistakes, no one can beat you. It's been solved, the game's been solved. And so they just taught

these chickens to peck into the right places. So if there was a knot there, they taught it to pop across in the next place or whatever, and it became impossible to beat them. So it became impossible to beat chickens at knots and crosses. It's so annoying. I can beat a chicken in so much. Name it, chess, boggle. Could I just quickly mention something about Spotify? Because Spotify is obviously a really, amongst musicians, they hate Spotify because the royalty system that Spotify give is just terrible. And I think it's actually changed now. I think money is getting better with royalty payments with Spotify. But there was this great case, I read about a band that decided to beat the Spotify

system to make money off them. They released an album, this was in March 2014, it was a funk band called Vaultpeck, and they put up an album called Sleepify. And Sleepify was a completely silent album. It was about 10 tracks, first one was called Zed, second was Zed Zed, all silent tracks, and they encouraged people to just stream it on a loop while they were going to sleep so that they would get their numbers of counts. And they ended up raising $20,000 for their tour. And the best bit about it was everyone was like, did Spotify actually pay it out to them? Because Spotify took the album down after a while saying that you're cheating the system here. So they released a statement saying they did in fact pay us. But the statement they released was an audio track on Spotify.

I was going to talk about improbable maths and probability. Does that sound fun? Yes. From the people who brought you my favourite table. So that was my favourite physical table, my favourite mathematical table. Why was I looking? Yeah, because this fact is kind of about things that don't seem like they should be right to the human brain, but they are. So the fact that like if there are 23 people in a room, what's the probability that two people have the same birthday and what is it, 50%. Yeah, which is really unlikely, right? You don't think that's going to be the case. And so the Monty Hall problem is quite a good example of like counterintuitive probability.

So in short, it's basically where probably some of you know it. If you're given three doors and there's stuff behind each door and there's a goat behind two of the doors and behind the third door there's a car, imagine that you want the car, not the goat, which I've always thought was a serious problem with the Monty Hall problem. How do you do it? I've got the car, one and three and I blew it. So the Monty Hall problem presumes that you want the car and it's that you pick a door, am I trying this on Dan? So you've got three doors, you've picked a door, you haven't opened it and then I open one of the doors that you didn't pick and there's a goat behind it and I say there's a goat behind this door, do you want to switch your choice

or do you want the thing that's behind your original choice of door? Okay so the idea is that you switch that height. Exactly, you switch because there's a two-thirds chance that you're going to get that if you switch you'll be right where there's a one-third chance that you'll be right if you don't switch and it feels counterintuitive because it really feels like there must be the same probability that my door will be right as there was at the start of the game. It feels like it should be 50-50 right? Yeah but when this was like popularized this theory by this woman Marilyn Savant who had, I think she had the Guinness World Record for the highest IQ and bizarrely, she had the name Savant in both of her, her mom and her dad's family line as in no

at all, Savant. Yeah isn't that weird? So someone wrote into her column saying can you tell me which is the right door to pick and she wrote the answer saying you should switch your choice because there's a two-thirds chance that you'll be right if you switch your choice and she got something like 10,000 letters from a thousand of which are from PhD students or people with PhD saying you're wrong, you're completely wrong, you're an idiot how dare you say this and she was just inundated with letters saying and it's quite a basic one. She should have given three addresses. Anyway I think sorry I think my whole point was pigeons are better than we are at solving that problem so they tried the Monty Hall problem on pigeons and they got them to like peck a certain

door and then each day that it was done over a month and each day they were told to peck a certain door and they would learn gradually. How do we know whether the pigeons prefer goats or cars? We need to move on to our final fact. Come on very quickly just on seeing patterns where you shouldn't see them. So things like spotting faces which is called pareidolia where you see a face in a cloud or a wall. This goes back centuries and just a couple of examples of this thing pareidolia. In 2012 somebody sold for I think $8,000 a chicken nugget shaped like George Washington and it's a bit like George Washington but only because it preys on the ability to see patterns. Yeah but there's only so much like George Washington that a chicken nugget can get.

It's never going to be a great Commander-in-Chief. The President's very quiet today. Okay this is... We do need to move on so let's... One very last thing. In 2013 a US department store sold out of a kettle after people noticed that it looked like Hitler. It had a handle which is a black handle and it had a little extra bumpy bit and it looked like his hairstyle and it it's uncanny but the company denied knowledge of it and they wrote a public statement saying if we had designed it to look like something we would have gone with a snowman or something fun. All right time to move on to our final fact of the show and that is Chasinski. My fact is that the animal kingdom forgot how to have sex for 40 million years. So justify that claim to Chasinski.

The first known creature to have sex was Microbrachius Dickey which was a nice bit of non-native determinism there and that was 385 million years ago. It was a kind of fish. It was the first thing to copulate internally so before that people were just leaving eggs and sperm around the ocean. We've had this problem quite a few times. People is my catch all term for all creatures. Animals undersea prehistoric fish were leaving eggs and sperm around which were just getting fertilized like that. Microbrachius Dickey did it 385 million years ago and just didn't really catch on. 40 million years animals decided they were going to stick with the whole egg sperm leaving them in the water thing and then 40 million years later they went okay let's try this.

He was right after all. But I've got a theory so the way Dickey did it was it's like bony protrusions on his side so they had sideways sex like one of the paleontologists who discovered it called it like square dancing sex and so the bony protrusions of the male fish locked into the bony holes in the female fish's side. Can I read Anna exactly how they did it? Oh yeah go on please. Okay so the male had a large L shaped sexual order. Nothing wrong with that. Which he had to get into position to dock with the female's genital plates which were very rough like cheese graters. They acted like velcro locking the male organ into position so he could transverse sperm. Very familiar. Very familiar. Anyone you have sex you should say this shag is

brought to you by the letter L. So yeah maybe sideways isn't the way to do it and then they started doing it differently and it got more popular. That's like there's a there's one dinosaur called the centrosaurus and it's a dinosaur that we know how it's made up we know how it looks and the only thing we can't work out is how it had sex. They have no idea because every move that would be a normal dinosaur sex move would end up in castration for the dinosaur. So no matter what position and I imagine they sat there with toys going how about this one oh he's lost his balls again and we still don't know it's a mystery we have no idea how they had sex and it's weird calling it doggy style because that's what they were saying when they predate dogs. Yeah I just

actually think we call it dinosaur style. Okay my favorite thing about sexual positions sorry about this but it is it is funny. The gold swift moth has lots of different positions for having sex but they all involve staying completely still so as to avoid being noticed by bats. Again I can't tell you the number of times a bat has ruined an otherwise lovely evening. Just wait their vision is based on movement. Sorry just on a complete tangent I found out a thing about bats the other day which is that some um Mexican free-tailed bats there's a particular species of them they use their sonar to jam other bats sonar so a bat's going in to bite an insect or to see some prey and another bat from the side will deliver this huge blast of sonar

which completely knocks out the other one's systems the insect gets away and this second one has a bigger chance of getting it. Wow. How cool is that? Anyway sorry. In 2013 we found the fossil of two bugs it's stuck in there and it's the oldest copulating fossil we've ever found it's 168 million years old and they were in the missionary position so the oldest sexual position we have is actually missionary. There was one really recent one um it was two turtles that were fossilized in the in coitus um this was 47 million years ago when they were when they were caught that way and they were having sex near a lake when they were overcome by volcanic gases and they died and then they sunk down sunk down and turned into fossils and one of the researchers said

many animals enter a trance-like state when mating or laying eggs and it's possible these turtles simply did not notice that they were entering poisonous waters before it was too late so what a way to go. I always wondered how that happens how you can get fossils of animals that are in mid biting each other or mid having sex and in the sex one it seems like they might just be in a trance and they don't notice. They're just so into it um another thing that animals have forgotten how to do is stick insects keep forgetting how to fly so stick insects develop wings hundreds of million years ago or hundreds of million years ago and four times they've lost their wings again and have had to re-evolve their wings they keep just like not bothering isn't that weird yeah that's

cool. The closest non-human ancestor of ours was called Australopithecus sediba and according to the skeletons that we have what it looks like is about two million years ago um they evolved how to walk on the ground and then evolved back to go back into the trees again oh wow yeah wait hold on so they came down from the trees they came down and they became like a primate that walked on the on the ground and then they went back into the trees and then lived back up in the trees for another you know hundred thousand years that's like to let the ground I read a Douglas Adams book called Last Chance to See and he talks about the what's the what's the cacopoe in New Zealand cacopoe basically was a bird that flew yeah and then New Zealand lost all of its land predators

so it just came down to the ground and hung out and and it just like spent time on the ground it basically eventually lost the ability to fly yeah but it didn't know that and so they there was a big thing where they were going extinct because cacopoe's kept climbing trees just and just going for a quick fly and they'd jump off and they would just plummet to the ground then they didn't know and they didn't like say to each other maybe we can't do this anymore they just had to do it were they the ones who uh I might be wrong about this but were they the ones who were like quite naive when humans came and they didn't realize that we were just going to kill them like we do with all animals and so they would just walk along and if a human came up to them they wouldn't run away

they just sort of stand there and then people just bonk them on the head and they'd die yeah and then they were also quite curious birds and so the next one would come along going oh what happens to Jeff and he'd walk around and then just walk up to Jeff and then he'd get bonks on the head and then the next one would come and they just died out and the next one was like no fuck that let's fly out of here another thing about it uh then that Douglas Adams said is that they have a mating call which um the male does which is really boomy and bassy and they're just like I don't know if that's him I was like and but so the thing is is that he describes it as like being a subwoofer like a like a real in the back of a car and the problem with that is that that sound doesn't appear

from a location it appears all around you that's the bass kind of just appears everywhere so the female is going where the hell is this guy they can never find the male and so they not they ended up not having a lot of sex because the female is come here where here where here yeah that's not good evolving that's yeah they've evolved very badly um speaking of um a long time ago things coming down from the trees oh yeah Australopithecus um there is a theory that we developed by bedalism to allow men to show off their larger penises because men or everyone listening to this has a very large penis everyone all men all men I've always wondered what that was compared with all other primates um human penises are large so the the erect gorilla penises three

centimeters long the chimpanzee is eight centimeters so there is a theory that I mean it's not a widely subscribed to theory that we develop walking uprights so men could uh show off um just so you know we are we're gonna have to wrap up so okay any last comments I'll have um an odd um animal mating weird thing uh so the green spoon worm do you know about this guy okay when a green spoon worm is born it doesn't have sex it swims around the sea looking for a roving tongue of a female so it's sorry it's an organism right it might be it's not neither male nor female and it swims around looking for the tongue of a female if it doesn't find it he becomes female and then has the tongue thing uh and if he does he becomes male crawls through the female's mouth

into her ovary and becomes a sperm producing machine and he feeds through his skin because his mouth is constantly spewing out sperm I mean I think sperm producing machine is a valid description of the male of most species right I love that when I was like we need to wrap up James is like no not yet we do need to wrap up okay I like so the there's a kind of strider bug or Jesus bug which is one of those ones that runs along water which the women don't really like females females the female people don't really like copulating because they are usually fertilized the first time they copulate and so they only want to do it every couple of months whereas the men want to do it constantly and it's like often attention in the animal kingdom is that men want to have sex lows

to like give you their sperm but women once they're fertilized they don't want to have sex so anyway the men or the male strider bugs as they're sometimes known have developed um these like protrusions on their legs where they can grab a woman's eyeball so he grabs the female's eyeball and like clutches and they're specially designed now the front legs of this strider bug to get around the eyeball pull her to you and then that's like I really caught her eye that's not quite as romantic okay that's it that's all of our facts thanks so much for listening to the show and being here tonight um if you want to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said on this episode you can get us on twitter i'm on at shriverland james at egg shapes andy at andrew hunter m

anna you can email podcast at qi.com and if you want to hear any of our previous episodes you can head to knowsuchthingasafish.com there's about 49 episodes up there we'll be back again and next week with another live episode from soho theater we'll see you then have a good night goodbye well thanks so much guys thanks for coming we're going to be up in the bar now just drinking and hanging out so if you want to do that if you want to let us because this is our first one here and we've got five more let us know if that was shit or if it was fun and what we think what we can do a difference yeah very much we can still cancel the other five but now we better get out of here thank you very much everyone thank you very much thank you very much good night