558: No Such Thing As A Boomerang Shaped Spaceship

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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 Adelaide.

My name is Dan Schreiber and sitting here with Anna Tashinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin.

And once again we have gathered round 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 James.

Okay, my fact this week is that during World War I, Australia invented a hand grenade that was shaped like a boomerang.

Now.

Now.

Now.

Can I ask the obvious question?

Yeah.

Did it come back?

Well, it depends how you threw it.

It depends how good you were at throwing it.

I think mainly it was to get people who are around the corner, or let's say there was a high wall, you could throw it.

and then run and then it would come and hit the people behind the wall.

Right.

I should say it was never used.

Oh,

really?

But it was invented.

This one that's on the screen that we can see, it's in the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

So it was that one that went but didn't come back, if it's in New Zealand.

Were we at war with New Zealand in World War I?

I imagine it was used as a test.

So it was tried out, and this is in 1915.

And one of the people who was there at the tryout was a guy called Colonel Dengar.

And when they did the first trial, he said, that'll astonish the Turks.

What's amazing is the one that we have on the screen here, if you were describing it, it's a leather item.

And it's got embossed on it in the leather, an emu and a kangaroo.

In case you didn't know what nation

it's got the words, some worries across the top.

But the amazing thing is, this one that we've got here is not the only one.

There's an online forum called Great War Forum, and they found out about this as well, and they went to look for other ones, and they found loads of other ones.

So there was one invented in the UK, which had a hinge in its middle, so sometimes you could make it come back, and sometimes you could make it fly straight.

And that one had knife-like edges, so that if you threw it at the enemy, they couldn't catch it and throw it back because it would cut them.

There was one that was

unsporting, so just to say.

There was one that was in Melbourne that was shown to the Army Intentions Board, and it was a professional boomerang thrower who threw it to show them.

And he managed to land it on a piece of paper 140 yards away.

What?

This boomerang.

Because I think boomerangs are just really good for throwing, aren't they?

For that kind of accuracy?

Sorry.

Well, he was a pro.

What can I say?

It also doesn't say how big the piece of paper was.

Or how many goes he had.

Yes.

It was actually A6.

But one of the reasons that it didn't happen is because it is difficult to throw a boomerang.

And even if you know how to do it, two soldiers are always going to throw it slightly differently.

So it's like, it's a very different thing to regulate.

I can't get past this guy who landed a boomerang on a piece of paper 120.

I imagine it was a...

Total fluke.

It landed and he turned to the troops and went, see, easy peasy.

And then went back home and said to his wife, you will not believe what happened.

He was, I've just remembered, I found his name on my notes.

He was called Frank Donnellin, and he was a famous boomerang thrower in the 1950s.

That was for World War II that he was.

Right.

Oh, okay.

When you think grenade, I imagine a lot of people think of the sort of pomegranate-shaped thing with the lumps all over it.

It's green, it's got the handle, it's got the pin, it's got all of that.

That is basically all thanks to one man called William Mills, who invented the first grenade, which became classic.

And he was knighted as a, because it was a very successful invention, it was rolled out everywhere.

He was knighted.

His coat of arms in 1922, when he was knighted, had four hand grenades on it.

It's a very weird, it's very weird saying something that modern on a coat of arms.

But it was so necessary because before then, it was all cans on a stick, was the basic shape of a grenade.

It was a can stick.

And often they would bounce off the edge of the trench, and it was just really ungainly, they were really hard to use.

And they weren't built for, they weren't built like something that people had practiced throwing, like a ball or whatever it might be.

They are named after pomegranates.

That's why they have a similar name for them.

So the Russian for grenade is granata, and the Russian for pomegranate is grenat.

And that was a problem for one Russian-speaking man in a Portuguese bar in 2023 who wanted to ask for pomegranate juice and found himself handcuffed and surrounded by armed police.

I just want to know at what point the people in that restaurant thought we fucks up here.

A, why is he asking us for a grenade?

Is that what you would do?

That's the opposite of a threat, isn't it?

Exactly.

And B, he's He's sitting there saying, what's going on?

The police are on their way.

He's pointing at the pomegranate juice.

Surely.

I am addicted to silly grenade.

Silly things that have happened.

It's either always someone finding a grenade and thinking, well, this looks like a rock.

So there was someone recently on the Isle of Wight in the UK who brought back a lovely old fossil from the beach

and caused the entire resort to be evacuated because it was an old hand grenade.

I think my favourite one of these, it's in 2016.

And stupidly, I didn't ride down the country.

I I think it was in India, but it might have been in Germany, so just fudge that.

Potato potatoes, right?

It was a policeman who took a grenade to

a courtroom during a trial as a piece of evidence.

And he was trying to demonstrate how the grenade was detonated.

And what he was trying to show was that, contrary to the defendant's assertion that it was a very complicated thing to set off, it was actually incredibly simple to use.

He assured the court that it had been safely disarmed before accidentally detonating it,

like knocking the judge off his chair.

Is that all that happened?

Pretty much, yeah.

It's like his wig fell off or something.

Fortunately, it wasn't.

It wasn't.

Yeah, yeah, it wasn't bad.

Was the country cartoon world?

There was a guy in China who he was in his small village and the police went round with leaflets talking about unclaimed grenades that were still out in the wild.

And he freaked out because he suddenly realized the thing that was in the picture was what he had been using to crack nuts, like waltz waltz and stuff, but not just recently, for 25 years.

Wow.

It was his nutcracker.

And

he freaked out and they took it away and they don't know, well, they didn't know, at least at the time of this reporting, whether it had been, you know,

disarmed or not.

As long as you don't crack your nuts in a fire, then you're safe, aren't you?

That's the thing.

Just try not to light them.

China, of course, being the place that invented grenades way before the rest of us, like all of that kind of war stuff.

But they had the earliest version from at least least the 12th century, and they were called thunder crash bombs.

And they were very cool, but also they were thrown mostly at sea from these paddle boats where everyone would have a thunder crash bomb in their hands, and you paddled the boat like a pedalo.

So you had little treadmills instead of oars, and they'd all be treadmilling along.

So cool.

Imagine a war when everyone's in like a swan-shaped pedal.

That would be so cool.

I don't know which aquatic animal they were shaped like, actually, but it could have been.

If the Aussies had had a boomerang shaped grenade the american went also towards their stereotype and had a nfl football a gridiron ball shaped grenade that they trialled in the 1970s and it largely was a gridiron ball that they just hollowed out and put the explosives in no they needed something that looked not like a grenade so if they were in trouble the enemy would see oh they've just got a bunch of nfl footballs around them um and they would pick it up and be able to throw it and they thought because most american soldiers probably played NFL, they'd have a great understanding of the ball.

Well, some of them would have been wide receivers.

Yes.

So some of them would have been trained to catch the ball.

Yes.

Which I think could be a problem.

Yeah, I think that was a problem because the result was, as they say in quotes, unpredictable.

And so it was never properly used.

But that was a good thing.

The British made some that were shaped like cricket balls.

Right.

Which is a sport that we play.

I don't know if you guys in Australia know that.

So even if we lost the war, we'd at least have the moral victory.

This is sledging, isn't it?

Yeah.

That was self-sledging, really.

You know, grenadiers, grenadiers,

they obviously started as people who threw grenades in the 17th century, and they pretty much

stopped throwing grenades by the Napoleonic wars.

So grenadiers were only throwing grenades for about 100 years, but they've kept referring to people in the army who were super elite because you had to be the strongest.

You had to have amazing upper body strength to throw those grenades but you also famously had in britain the tall mitre hats it looks a bit like the pope's hat in my head well yeah the mitre is a name for a bishop's hat indeed it looks much like that but do you know why they had the tall hats

deflection of grenades so people aimed for the top of their head and they knocked the hat off that's very clever yeah but no um it was because

they wanted to blend in in a group of bishops maybe

there's a conclave happening and they just tied them there All grenades were thrown from the Vatican, yes.

No, it was because all other soldiers' hats at the time had rims.

But if you have to light a grenade, you're holding your rifle, and then suddenly you have to sling it over your shoulder in order to light the grenade with your match.

And when they were slinging it over their shoulder, it kept getting caught on the brim of their hats and knocking their hats off.

So they were given special dispensation to have hats without a brim.

I don't know why they then had to be super tall.

You're making it sound like a dunce's cap, basically.

Yeah,

yeah.

You know, bayonets are invented by grenade throwers as well.

Just because we were saying that.

Just because you had a grenade in one hand and you had your gun in the other hand, but what if the enemy get close to you, you want a knife as well?

But they couldn't hold the knife because they didn't have enough hands, so they attached it to the end of their gun.

As soon as you said that, I thought, three-armed soldiers.

And that's how we got the three-armed soldier.

There's quite a famous boomerang that I think is in Adelaide at the moment.

It certainly was for a while, which is there's a space museum here, isn't there, there?

In Adelaide,

is that yes?

Yeah, and there's a boomerang that went up into space.

That one's not there, that's in the South Australian Museum because I saw it this morning.

Oh, you saw it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, wow.

And so, yeah, it went to space.

And I don't know if it's the exact one, but they showed that if you throw a boomerang in space, it still comes back to you.

It's a message.

Oh, so it wasn't thrown.

Sorry, it was an incredibly strong boomerang thrower who hurled it all the way up.

He comes back home, honey.

You're not going to believe what else I did.

Get your your telescope out now.

So that

proved that a boomerang still works in space.

And James, you studied physics, right?

Yeah, but don't ask me how that works, because it doesn't feel like it should.

Yeah, because I'm curious if you, okay, so one of the big problems with space travel is having enough fuel to get you back right.

And often we need to swing around planets and use their yeah, you're saying we should build our spaceships to look like boomerangs.

Shaped like a boomerang, chuck them out into space, surely they return back to sender.

But But

I mean, look, I mean, like, yes, obviously that would work, yeah, yeah.

But

we need to move on in the same guard.

Can I tell you one more DAFT invention?

Yeah, a military invention.

This was the BE-9 plane.

Again, early, early, early days of flight, like First World War or pre.

So, right, you're in your plane, it's all two-man planes at that, you know, one pilot and one gunner.

Gunner traditionally sits behind the pilot, like shoots the gun behind, right?

You want to fire forward, though, but the problem is you would shoot the propeller.

how do you solve it

um this is good like back up to the enemy so you can shoot that way fly backwards like yeah reverse yep good

um no no didn't they not i thought they shot between the blades they eventually they eventually worked out how to do that this was their previous solution what if we just put the gunner in front of the propeller

so this plane was built and it flew you've got a normal plane pilot propeller on the front of the plane and then in front of him is this mad box with the gunner sitting.

That's the one.

With his gun sitting out the front of it.

Unfortunately, they cannot communicate at all.

They just can't talk to each other because the propeller's in the middle going,

right?

So they're just sort of stuck not talking about the business.

He doesn't need to.

All that gunner's saying is.

And then it's a problem if he shits himself for the guy behind.

We are going to move on now to fact number two, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that the number four is two squared, the number eight is two cubed, and the number two hundred and fifty-six is two zenzi zenzi zenzikt.

Yeah, but you didn't know that?

Bet you thought at first my fact was gonna be the number four is two squared, and you got worried.

But yeah, zenzi zenzi zenziking is a thing.

It's a great word.

It is.

It's not a common word.

So this

was a word that was invented by a mathematician, a Welsh mathematician called Robert Record in 1557 in a book, The Whetstone of Wit.

And he got annoyed because, you know, we didn't have any way of saying to the power eight that was easy.

We've all struggled with that.

So he said.

Did he say when we would need it?

Like outside of deep math?

Yeah, I don't think he imagined in the shop you'd ask for, can I have three Zenzi Zenzi Zenzik's potatoes, please?

No.

But in deep math.

And so he said, well, Zenzik was the German for squared at the time.

So for the power four, something to the power four, he said, let's say Zenzi Zenzik, which is the square of squares.

The power six, well, that's obviously the square of a cube.

So it's Zenzi cubic.

And then to the power eight, Zenzi Zenzizenzict.

And if you really want to know, the power 16 is Zenzi Zenzi Zenzi Zenzizenzigt.

And I find that very useful to know.

The power 16, he didn't write that down, did he?

It was someone else came along and went, oh, we could just add another Zenzi.

Oh, really?

He is an amazing guy, this Robert Record guy.

But I've never heard of him before.

I mean, why would you have done?

He was a 16th century mathematician, but he was also a doctor, and he wrote math textbooks.

And get this, he invented the equals sign.

Oh,

yeah, I feel that deserved more.

You know what we mean, right?

You know, the equals sign.

Wait, what did they?

Lovely, thank you.

Imagine if I just put that in.

And I was I was like, wow, the people of Adelaide really love the equal sign.

So what did we do before?

Like, what were math testing?

You used to write is equal to.

Yeah, but in Latin,

you had to write i qualis, which is the Latin for is equal to.

And so in his book, he says, to avoid the tedious repetition of these words, I will set, as I do often, work use, a pair of parallels.

Because no two other things can be equal.

Two parallel lines is the most equal thing that you can get in the world, according to Robert Ricard.

That's so cool.

Well, he did loads loads of stuff.

Like he brought linear, the words linear, denominate, binomial, equation.

He came up with the definitions for square, compound, rational number, irrational number in English.

He was the first to do all those things.

And we don't really know about him because no one gives a shit about any of those words.

Is that?

No, no.

I would say, like, to me, he's quite famous, someone who studied maths, but just.

Because I'd never heard of him.

And maybe if you're a doctor as well, because he also wrote loads of medical textbooks, including one called The Urinal of Physic.

The urinal.

The urinal of physic, and like physic as in physician, and it's about what doctors can learn from their patients' urine.

Yeah?

So this was a

did you read it?

No.

Oh, you did?

I didn't actually read it.

But I've just had some

issues lately, so I wondered if they could shed any light.

And

he gives tips for collecting urine samples.

And one of the things that confused me was he said, when you're, as a patient, collecting your sample to give to the doctor, make sure you don't just give the watery bit and throw away the dregs, because a lot of people do that.

And the dregs are an important part of the urine

what are the dregs dregs

sorry does everyone else's we have dregs in the bottom if you if you had a bladder stone you might have dregs right maybe they were very common back in the day um he said urine comes in three varieties thick thin and mean red white and rose

mean was a mean

yeah weirdly mean is just the one in between thick and thin I suppose it's like the mean, the average.

Or the average.

Yeah.

And it also has three levels, the ground, brackets, the sediment, the swim, and the cloud.

Okay.

So it's quite nice, isn't it?

I see that.

Because it does have a little cloud, doesn't it?

Above it?

Well.

Bubbles.

It's like foam.

A bit of foam, yeah.

Foam?

Yours doesn't foam?

Damn.

Get yourself to your urinal physician immediately.

Yeah.

It should have about an inch of foam on the top of it.

It might do.

It might be underneath all the dregs that I have floating on top.

If you pour it slower, you don't get that amazing fight.

So, yeah, you have to pour it at the right speed.

You have to tip the toilet at an angle.

Did you guys know that four used to be five?

So it went.

One, two, three, five, four?

Sort of.

If you were reading it, that's what you think it would be.

Right.

Because

Arabic numerals first came to Europe in the 10th century.

And if you look, it's really cool if you look at charts of how they've all progressed, the numbers one to ten, what they looked like.

But basically, one, two, three, six, seven, eight, and nine throughout the years are vaguely recognizable as how we would write them today.

But then, four

was drawn like this weird, curly B-shaped thing, and five was just written as we'd write four.

That was about 300 years that five was just written as four, and then eventually they sort of swapped around.

So, if you do go back in time about 500 years, and someone writes down to you

that they have five children, I know this is unlikely.

It's useful.

Well I'm trying to share some useful math tips.

I thought that was interesting.

Dan was wondering before what use Senzi Zenzi Senzik could have, like two to the power of eight.

Zenzi Zenzi Zenzi Zenzik, the two to the power 16, that is 65,536.

That is a very useful number to remember because that is the maximum number of characters you can use for one message in WhatsApp.

Really?

Really?

It's so high you've never reached it.

Did you test it?

Did you just keep riding until you got it?

Why do you think I sent you all those messages yesterday, Marty?

How many characters?

65,536.

Because they don't ever characterize, that's not words.

Not characters.

Yeah, but that's still worth it.

Effectively, to a WhatsApp user, it's infinity because no one's ever going to reach it, right?

I don't know.

I leave some pretty long messages you guys have already noticed.

I reckon I'm coming.

I think I'm scraping the ceiling of that.

It'll be like Twitter eventually.

They'll be pressurized to double it.

Two to the power of 24, which is 16,777,216, is the number of unique colors you can see on most computer monitors.

And two to the power of 32, which is just over 4 trillion, is the total number of possible IP addresses under the original number of IP addresses.

It is useful.

And 2 to the power of 136,279,841 minus 1

is the largest known prime number which was found just a couple of weeks ago, I think.

Or maybe last week, or I'm not sure.

And how did they find it?

Well there was a guy called Luke Durant

and he sort of borrowed a load of computers from around the world in 17 different countries and got them all running this computer program together to look for prime numbers.

It's never just like this guy was counting and then he thought he's like waiting a minute.

He just reached the limit of the WhatsApp.

Did you guys see that mass news actually yesterday, which was,

you know, that old adage that if you left left enough monkeys with enough typewriters, they'd eventually type out the works of Shakespeare.

Oh, yeah.

Did you see that mathematicians have just worked out that they wouldn't?

They worked out that if you've got all the monkeys that we have and all the monkey-like things.

Yeah, but it's all the, yeah, but that's all the monkeys.

There aren't that many monkeys.

Isn't it infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters?

Or is it like however many monkeys we have access to?

Yeah, it's not a lot of fun.

Because that's such a boring calculation.

It's quite interesting to know how many monkeys.

These guys said until the end of the universe, as many monkeys as there will be,

and said that it it almost is a one in a million chance it would happen so you're right with infinite yeah okay what would they come up with because that's more interesting in a way they said chaucer probably

um have you guys heard of the semiotic alliance oh no this is kind of cool i was reading about um you know alex bellos the mathematician yeah he wrote a book about his adventures in math basically and he wrote about meeting this guy called greg rowland who works at the semiotic alliance and he basically provides consultancy for companies on what number they should have in their product name.

So he says KFC, 11 herbs and spices, is perfect.

Oh.

Like 10 herbs and spices would be too dull and too round.

And 12 is too spicy.

It's much too spicy.

11?

Perfect.

Levi 501?

501?

Bit more than...

Levi 500 is a bit mechanistic, isn't it?

It's a bit dull.

And did he come up with these or are these just examples of...

He has consulted for various companies.

I don't know if he says which he's come up with and which he hasn't.

But he says WD 40, that's good.

That's a reliable number.

But that was actually his 40th attempt at making WD, whatever that is.

What a displacement, 40th attempt.

That's what it says.

But was it really, or did he just talk to you?

He came up with a reliable number.

It was actually his 39th, and he thought, fuck it, let's keep it over.

Oh, shit.

Why, Andy?

Why did he say 40 doesn't need...

Well, it's solid, isn't it?

It's reliable.

Oh, right, okay.

No, so you want a good product in your home.

WD37, fussy.

WD40.

I see, because you're not looking for something interesting and creative.

you're looking for something reliable and boring.

Yeah, exactly.

Nice.

Okay.

So I think there's a lot in this.

Okay.

Yeah.

I don't know about a lot, but there's something.

Hey, can I ask a quick question to the crowd?

We mentioned this on a show ages ago, and I got

a lot of people writing in saying that this is not true.

But supposedly, a measurement, a unit of measurement, often in Australia, if it's really tight, like if something like whisks past your ear, like it's that close, you describe that unit of distance as a bee's dick.

Yeah,

you would say that you missed it by a bee's dick, mate.

Oh, great, because we said this on the show, and I had a bunch of Aussies riding in, saying, Never heard that, that's bullshit.

I can imagine every other city in Australia going, Yeah, but it's those guys in Adelaide, isn't it?

They've got very badly endowed bees in Adelaide, we know that

it is time for fact number

and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 has been translated into over 30 languages under the same title, except in Denmark, where it was published as 233 Celsius.

And yeah, so it was, as I say, it was published in over 30 different languages, and every single one had either a direct translation into the language or just used outright the title Fahrenheit 451.

That's cool.

Except for Dennis.

So do we know why the Danes did it?

Because I thought it might have been because Celsius was Danish, but he was Swedish, wasn't he?

The guy who came up with the Celsius chart.

Oh, and does Celsius?

Celsius.

Was it just because they thought our people will understand that better, maybe?

There's not an amazing amount of literature on what happened, and there's not many books as well.

So when you go online, there's a few copies that you can see photos of, and collectors desperately try to get it.

They all got burned.

That was a sad thing.

Ironically, I think Ray Bradbury, from the little i could find did not like that this had this new title and so they did effectively he didn't like any changes did he i think that was it like every now and then his book would get changed very slightly in america or something like that and he hated it yes he hated the internet he didn't want it published in e-book form and he resisted he resisted for a long time i think that's totally fair enough given that the entire point of fahrenheit 451 is that screens are really really bad and totally ruin human society i can empathize with him saying, please don't turn my book into a money.

It's so amazing because when you read it, like, because I reread it on The Plane Over because I read it when I was younger, and the bit where they kind of explain the whole plot, they might as well be saying, TikTok is shit.

Do you know what I mean?

It's basically, it's like, oh, no one reads long things.

Everyone wants shorter and shorter media, and no one's got a good attention span, and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a very good book.

Oh, yeah.

It's a brilliant book.

I mean, it's great.

Obviously, it's a classic.

It's quite good.

Yeah.

It's great.

He wrote it.

I love this on a coin-operated typewriter.

Yeah.

It's so cool.

He wrote it in his local library at UCLA in California and he carried a little bag of loose change and if you put in 10 cents it would give you half an hour.

So it cost him $9.80 to write.

That is quite good.

As a writer yourself Andy, I don't know if you get writer's block, but do you think it would help you to churn out those words?

I think it probably would.

Yeah.

I'll try anything at this point.

But interestingly, churning out the words words was a thing that he had a philosophy about.

So he had eventually his own typewriter at home.

He left the library.

And above his typewriter, he would have the words, don't think.

And it was a reminder for him to feel the stories as opposed to sit mulling on them and getting stuck into

writer's block effectively.

That was his philosophy.

And it certainly was what happened, wasn't it?

I mean, I think three of us might have read it on the flight.

But in the version that I read, he writes an introduction and he talks about the process.

And he said, I didn't write the book, It Wrote Me.

And he said the main character was the person who was speaking through me.

It wasn't me speaking at all.

And it's amazing him describing the process.

For a guy who is famous for his words, it wrote me.

Look, he's not a great writer.

It wrote me.

No, it didn't, buddy.

But he made a lot of weird claims.

So that's quite mystical.

A lot of authors do say that.

They say sometimes an idea is downloaded into their head and they are merely a vessel for whatever came to them.

They channeled it.

That's just because they plagiarized it from somewhere else, isn't it?

Oh, no, it just the came from heaven.

I know it's quite similar to this.

But

he also made odd claims.

Like, he claims his memory was so good, he remembers the moment of birth.

And he would always tell this at dinner parties.

He would say, I remember being born.

I remember coming out and being like, hey, he just, he has...

Full recollection.

And people would say, no, you need to see a psychologist for it.

And he would, and he would tell them.

And they couldn't dissuade him.

He was saying, I remember.

I remember being circumcised.

Man, that was painful when I was six days old or whatever it was.

Like, he had, yeah, he had total recall of his life, according to him.

Yeah.

Wow.

He had good recall, probably, according to him again.

He said, while he was in the library, he literally just tipped books down off the shelves, powered through them, and remembered quotes.

And in fact, in Fahrenheit 451, there's a bit without giving away the ending, which assumes that once people have read a book, they can retain all of the words in it and then re-quote them at will, which

people used to be able to do that, I'm sure.

As in verbal recall of what you'd seen was fantastic before mass literacy.

So in Shakespearean times, you would remember a lot more of a speech from a play you'd seen.

So you would be able to go home from this show tonight and just do like big bits of the show all over again.

Lucky, lucky.

Fahrenheit 451, by the way, which used to be called Fahrenheit 541, when 4 and 5 used to be different numbers.

Of course,

yeah.

Well, the good thing about 451 is that it's one more.

Like it's Fahrenheit 450, very bad title.

Very boring, workmanlike.

He He did decide on the title because it sounded good, though, so I'd like to know what Alex Bellos had to say because it was called The Fireman at first, and his publisher said, give it a better title.

And so he called the local fire department, as you do, and said, what temperature does paper burn at?

And they said it's 451 Fahrenheit.

And so he thought, that's a cool number.

But I wonder what number would have made him think, nah.

Apparently it doesn't burn at that.

Yeah, I've heard that.

It depends on the type of paper and stuff.

Right, I see.

And it's off the top of his head, this poor fireman, and he's got fires to be putting out.

Isn't that the first thing that comes to him?

Do you guys want a little quiz of original titles for books under which they should have been published?

Oh, yeah.

Sure do, Andy.

Okay.

Let's say that's the jet lag talking.

We're going to do it anyway.

Les Dante de la Mer.

Oh, Les Mais.

No.

That's good.

Les Dante.

Moby Dick.

De la Mer.

The teeth of the sea.

Moby Dick's very good.

Jaws.

Jaws.

Wait, sorry, that was the original title in the English language.

No, it was published in French.

Sorry.

Wasn't the one I heard someone say they were going to call it What's That Gnoshing on My Leg?

That was his dad's suggestion?

His dad or his father-in-law said that's a good title when he was struggling for it.

Chocolate for breakfast.

This is quite gettable, I think.

Breakfast.

No.

Chocolate for breakfast.

Yeah.

Who's a sort of stereotypically messy, crazy chocolate?

That's Charlie and the chocolate.

No.

Chocolate for breakfast.

Like, who's a classic, like, crazy protagonist who's always getting in scrapes?

Borat?

Yeah.

Yeah, Borat, the novel.

The novelisation of Borat.

And the novel came first, interestingly.

Everything that happens in the film, I prefer the novel, actually.

Yeah, I think it's more true to the character.

Does me the stage show?

Yeah, the stage show is very good.

Is it Joss William?

It's Bridget Jones's diary.

Ah.

Sort of, you know, like a messy, messy character.

Okay, here's one.

Twilight.

Oh, well, Fifty Shades of Grey was based on Twilight.

A Dracula.

So good.

No, it was William Faulkner's The Sound of the Fury.

No.

That was called Twilight.

But Twilight was originally called Fawkes.

But I couldn't find a novel that was originally called Fawkes and changed to whatever the third one would be to complete it.

My favourite, just a super quick one on translations, the Mexican title for the movie Greece is Vaselina.

So

temperatures,

Fahrenheit, Celsius.

Sir Isaac Newton had his own version,

and it was a temperature scale that only went from zero to 12.

And zero was the freezing point of water, and 12 was his body temperature on the middle of the month of July.

Okay.

And then he, like, he realized that this wasn't enough because you need to go higher than that, right?

So then he added higher numbers.

So

we already had numbers higher than 12.

It's not like he had to.

He was like, yeah, but he needed to define what they were as the temperature, didn't he?

So, like, 14 was the greatest heat of a bath, which one can endure for some time when his hand is dipped in and is kept in constant movement.

Oh, that does help.

Now that I'm picturing how I check a bath, that does.

Well, you're not meant to test it with your hand anyway.

You shouldn't be putting your hand in your hand.

What do you test it with your hand?

Elbow to elbow.

Which doesn't work, by the way, as any parent will tell you.

Yeah.

Thermometers used to be upside down.

And this was Celsius himself made his own thermometer upside down, idiot.

It which doesn't make any sense in our minds, right?

The boiling point of water was naught degrees and the freezing point was 100.

And what we call today is a Celsius scale because someone flipped it shortly afterwards.

Linnaeus, in fact.

It was, but it was, yeah, I think two people suggested flipping it and he was one.

But I thought the reason that he did it upside down was quite interesting and I didn't know.

And it was because he was also very involved in measuring the brightness of stars and he came up with a much more accurate way to measure the brightness of stars.

And I didn't realize that we do that upside down.

So a star's magnitude is inversely proportional to how bright it is.

So the brightest stars have the lowest magnitude.

And that's literally just because Ptolemy, you know, a thousand years earlier had said that should be the case.

And so everyone copied him.

And so Celsius was saying, okay, well, if stars, you know, the brighter they are, the lower they are, then we'll do the same with everything else.

I like that.

I think it's fine.

I think as long as we're not using Fahrenheit, it's fine.

I think Fahrenheit is such a stupid...

It's so stupid.

No, but it's only only

America that is using Fahrenheit in any big way.

I think it's like a couple of other countries that use Fahrenheit.

I think Micronesia is still on Fahrenheit, to be sure.

But it's really bad.

And America has tried to change.

The French adopted Celsius, partly because of the French Revolution.

Everything has to be sort of metricised and made rational and all of this.

And America, they actually passed a law, the Metric Conversion Act, in 1975, which was beginning the process of metrification.

It was going to be great.

America was going to be sensible.

And no one wanted to do it.

And Ronald Reagan dismantled the board in 1982.

Well they made it voluntary didn't they?

Which is the one thing you're not supposed to do with the law.

You can't say don't commit murder if you don't want to.

And that's basically what they said.

They were like change to Celsius if you want to but don't if you don't and so everyone was like well I'm not gonna then.

Were they around at the same time Celsius and Fahrenheit?

Yes they are.

So on the year that Celsius was born which was 1701 Fahrenheit's parents died after eating poisonous mushrooms.

I so did not expect that to be the answer to my question, Justin.

I think they might have been there or thereabouts, basically.

Right.

I'm going to have to move us on, guys.

Can I just quickly?

I feel like we haven't covered enough the kind of guy Ray Bradby was.

Oh, yeah, okay.

I didn't massively warm Tim, so I want to quickly tell you one thing about him, which is very representative.

He was quite egotistical, which is clear when you read him.

He kind of thinks everyone's an idiot who is going to become brain dead from TV, except a few academics who've gone to Cambridge, is one way of reading the book.

And he he said he was really unhappy a lot of times in his teens because he didn't fit in a lot of the time.

And he said, you pay a certain penalty for going your own way.

You're not as popular with girls as you should be.

I used to take my short stories to girls' homes and read them.

And they didn't want to hear about it.

They just wanted me to pour at them.

How pathetic is that?

And I just think a man who thinks the world is the problem when he takes his short stories to a party and reads them to a girl who doesn't like it is the problem.

Yeah, but at the same time, when he died, he wanted his ashes to be sent to Mars in a soup can.

So sounds like a fun guy to me.

Okay.

We need to head into our final fact.

And that is Andy.

My fact is that when young ants are sick, their mothers immediately eat them and recycle them into more ants.

There's no like, oh, we'll just go sleep it off.

It's really like, right, this happens now.

And it's because if an infection spreads through a hive, it can be really dangerous and you know there aren't many protections against it.

And scientists tested this out by giving an ant queen a small fungal pathogen and they would eat sort of lots and lots and lots of infected larvae.

So that, sorry, the larvae have been infected and the ant queens just ate them, as well as 6% of control larvae which were not infected at all, which are just sort of collateral i was going to ask what a sick ant is like but it's fungus is it like yeah exactly if they just have a bit of this on them and but and like as soon as the queen ant finds a sick larvae she just starts chomping and the queen ants which did this and ate them then gave they produced lots more eggs and therefore

the controls

yeah yeah so it is it sounds sort of crazy and frankly unkind

but these the recycled ants have got better immune systems as well so actually you eat them and then they come back and they're super ants, kind of.

So why not keep eating and eating and eating and regurgitating and regurgitating?

I'd spend my whole life as a mother eating, remaking, remaking, remaking, and then you'll make Superman.

Is this like what we're doing with astronauts with them drinking their own urine and recycling?

It's exactly like that.

Yeah, it's like a recycling.

So that's the future.

Eat the infected astronauts in your boomerang spaceship and we will be into the stars.

Yeah.

It's amazing with ants how primed they are to be aware of disease and it makes obviously perfect sense because they live in gigantic colonies where the moment someone gets sick you've got to know about it and you've got to deal with it.

But I mean queen ants also will eat their best friend.

So I actually didn't realize this about ant colonies but about a fifth of them are founded by a pair of queens, not just one.

So there'll be two best pals who get together and say let's form a colony together.

If one of them dies, which sadly sometimes they do, the other one quickly chops them up into pieces and buries all the pieces in different places.

And that's to make sure that whatever infection it was cannot spread through the colony.

But a tough job with your best friend.

Yeah, I thought you said they ate them.

Yeah, I thought so too.

Sorry, they put them in their mouth to chop them into pieces and then they bury them.

I don't know why they don't eat them actually.

Maybe they don't taste very nice when they're not.

Well, because they might be infected with something, if possible.

No, but the queen ants have protections.

They have a special anti-venom gland which they begin to massage

if they detect any

sort of illness.

They just start massaging their glands.

That's so amazing.

They do it before and after, yeah.

They're just there massaging this gland.

They call it, I think it's a positive PR kind of spin on it.

They call it hygienic cannibalism.

So it's

still got the word cannibalism in it.

Yeah, I think if you really want to go positive PR, get rid of the word cannibalism.

But it's more appealing, isn't it, when you say, oh, it's hygienic cannibalism.

Yeah, it sounds like you're saying it's vegan.

It's not vegan.

But and queens are all single mums, by and large.

So they have a tough, tough old gig.

And they've got to Why not the queen?

They can do what they want.

They go very hungry to raise their workers.

They will eat any old crap, though.

Ants, won't they?

Will they?

Yeah, yeah.

In 1904, there was a problem with ants in New Orleans, right?

It was a hospital, and they were completely overpowered with ants.

There was millions and millions and millions of them.

And so a group of entomologists went over there to see what they could do.

A guy called Edward Titus was in charge.

And he found that they were eating human sputum.

Basically, there were a lot of tuberculosis patients and so the ants would march, march, march, march, pick up someone's phlegm and then march, march, march back to the um to the nest and eat it.

I feel like I've lost the audience.

Yeah.

The ants are going nuts for this though.

One thing that they'll do is they will not go to work.

They'll take the day off if they're sick.

right

because your mum's waiting yeah at the office yeah but isn't that amazing they'll they'll take sick days.

So they will wait outside the nest if they feel they've got a cold and they just let it pass so that they don't spread it, get killed, and then hygienically or non-hygienically dealt with.

Do we know how many malingering ants there are in the world?

Maybe 20% of them aren't actually sick, but just don't really like the job.

No, we do.

There are studies on this.

A study found in 2015 that 40% of all ants are doing nothing all day.

They're not hardworking.

They're very, very lazy.

But it's not the same ants all the time, right?

No, but this is the weird thing.

The theory is actually they're in reserve, right?

They're not needed at the moment.

But if one of their colleagues gets ill or, you know, is eaten by the queen.

That's what I said when I was unemployed for six months.

I'm in reserve.

But the idea is basically they're living pantries.

I mean, some of them might just be lazy.

That is another theory that's currently doing the grounds.

But a scientist called Dr.

Daniel Charbonneau worked this out, but he put dots of paint on particular ants, right?

He worked out which ones were the hardest working working in the colony, and then he removed the hard-working ones.

So, you know, this should have presented a work problem for the colony.

Actually, if you remove the hard-working ones, others step up and they fill their place.

And so the same amount of work gets done.

So the lazy ones are just hard-working ones waiting.

They're smart.

They're hard-working ones who know that someone else is going to do the shit.

Yeah, exactly.

Good on them.

They're very good at looking after their injured as well as their sick.

I think this is absolutely incredible about ants.

They're often in big battles.

It's usually ants against against termites, so they'll attack termite colonies.

And if an ant gets injured, it will get carried off the battlefield by its friends, because it's not useful in battle anymore.

It will get evacuated back to the nest if it has an injury which is salvageable, where their lives can be saved.

Their injuries are licked clean, and they're left to rest until they recover.

And amazingly, they've quite recently discovered that they do amputation.

And not only this, but

putations.

Ant putations.

I'll tell you what, by the time I edit that, that will be such such a tight word.

It's going to take so much editing.

I almost want to make you say it again.

But I'll leave you to suffer.

Yes, they do ant putations.

How did you say that so well?

And they know which amputations are most likely to be survivable.

So scientists were really confused about the fact that ants only amputated injured ants' legs above the knee.

So if they were injured in the thigh area, if they were injured below the knee, they would not amputate.

So, obviously, scientists being what they are, took a bunch of ants and they amputated their legs below the knee.

And lo and behold, they were like, oh, look, they all die.

Or they only had a 20% survival rate.

I guess the other ants know this.

But yes, because if you amputate below the knee, apparently the

infection spreads more easily because of the way the blood's pumping around.

And they knew this.

I think you do get wound care in the form of licking if your lower leg is injured.

Oh, but you still get wound care.

Yeah.

You don't get abandoned.

Yeah, yeah.

That's good.

But also, what's interesting is when they were doing this study, they were trying to work out if it was empathy that was bringing them back.

They discovered that it's not, because if an ant was passing an injured ant, not in battle, on the way to the battle, they would just be like, okay, so there was nothing that made them want to care about it.

So what it largely was is that they need their army numbers up.

And so bring them back.

They can recover in a few days and they're back out again, back into the war zone.

Oh, interesting.

A lot of the battles around Tonant, aren't they?

At the moment, you have lots of these big,

colonies.

There was a group, a couple of groups in Southern California, the Very Large Colony and the Lake Hodges Colony, and they were in a battle for six months, and it was over a line that was just a few centimeters wide, but it was several kilometers long.

And 15 million ants died.

in a six-month period, which is equivalent to most of the highest estimates of the number of people who died in World War I.

Really?

In the human wars.

But there there are 20 quadrillion ants on Earth.

We almost got to find out what life was like as an ant because there was this amazing game that was pitched a few years ago called Ant Simulator and it was a it was a Kickstarter or one of those crowdfunding campaigns where they raised a bunch of money for it and unfortunately

they realized that would be incredibly boring.

Well no I mean I think it got its funding really quickly.

Everyone thought it was an amazing idea.

They couldn't do it because his two other business partners took the money and according to reports spent it all on booze and strippers and and so he had to write to everyone saying I'm sorry it's the money's gone on a debauch like hangover movie style weekend and he just saw a huge wallet being carried slowly past his office away from him can I say something about

we've talked a lot about ant walk a bit about ant peace yes please do ants can make yogurt

isn't that nice is that an inherently peaceful product yogurt I think it's about as peaceful as it gets.

Yeah?

Is it?

Do you do it out?

You mean

to make them make yogurt?

If you drop live ants in milk, you get yogurt, actually.

That's got quite violent again quite quickly.

No, you're right, you're right, you're right.

But this is a traditional method around the world of making, like Turkey and Albania and Bulgaria.

This is how you make yogurt.

It's a recognized method.

As few as four ants

in a pitcher of milk.

What happens?

They release

formic acid and that makes it acidify and then coagulate.

Right.

And you end up with yogurt.

So, I mean, can this sometimes happen accidentally?

I mean, I'll leave an open bottle of milk in the fridge sometimes, and would it be that I've got fromage fray at the end of the day?

If you've got ants in your fridge, it could happen.

I think some people, when this study came out, some people suggested that that might have been where yogurt came from.

Like, accidentally, some ants fell into some milk once and they went, oh, let's do this properly, but I don't realise.

I do buy that.

Do you?

Well, you leave your milk out, don't you?

And then you get your ants at full.

I can see how it would happen, unlike most inventions which happen by mistake.

We're going to have to wrap up, guys.

What's the fastest you can spin any part of your body?

Like move it in a move it in an arc, let's say like a baseball player moves their arm in an arc.

I mean,

there is a very naughty thing called the helicopter, which...

Oh, yeah.

You reckon you can do that quicker than a baseball player can spin their arm or something like that.

Yeah, I think the thing I'm using is smaller, so I think

it can make the turns quicker.

It can go as fast as a bee's dick.

I'll tell you what the fastest thing you can do, and it's this.

So when you click your fingers, the rotational speed is 20 times faster than the blink of an eye.

It's the fastest thing.

Dracula ants can do a similar thing by moving their thorax.

They kind of they make a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure, and then release it.

They snap their body.

They snap their body, and they can do it a thousand times quicker than you can click your finger.

Okay.

And they do it to stun centipedes.

Wow.

So centipedes coming along, they go, and the centipede goes, what the fuck was that?

By the time they've done that, they bug it off.

It's like, it's as if you could like go into a field and click your fingers and the cow would fall over.

I thought you...

The dream.

The dream.

Is that what you mean, though?

It's not, it's not.

They literally stunned stun them into like...

Yeah, yeah, yeah, stun them.

I thought you meant they're like, oh, well, what was that?

That was fabulous.

That was absolutely.

I'm stunned.

I'm stunned.

But it's not.

So every aunt is Darren Brown, basically, going, look at the fire, look at the buyers, look at the fire.

You're under.

And that's it.

That is it.

That is all of our facts.

We can't thank you enough, Adelaide, for having us.

This is our first bit of the Down Under tour, and it's been awesome.

Thank you for having us.

We will be back again,

and we will also be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye!