516: No Such Thing As Zeno's Harbour

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Hi, everyone.

Before we start the show, we wanted to let you know that there's no downtreber today, I'm afraid.

But in good news, there is our very own QI Elf, Ethan Ruparelia, filling in.

He is brilliant.

He does so much of the stuff behind the scenes on No Such Thing as a Fish.

You may well have heard him on Meet the Elf, our special club fish episodes where you get to meet the QI researchers.

If you haven't heard those, you only have to join Club Fish in order to do so.

So enjoy some of Ethan's work in front of the scenes today.

On with the show.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoban.

My name is Andrew Humter Murray and I'm here with James Harkin, Anna Tzinski and special guest Ethan Rupperlia.

Hi Ethan.

Hi Andy.

And once again we've gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go.

Starting with fact number one and that is Ethan.

My fact this week is that in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics archers competed on top of a rubbish heap.

Lovely.

Yeah.

That's interesting.

And was there a kind of fun whimsical like did they have to aim at a particular can of Coke?

Yeah they had they had them all lined up in a row.

They were the targets, yeah.

Uh, no, so this is not a typical rubbish heap, it's not kind of compost heap in the back garden sort of thing.

This is a whole artificial island made out of rubbish.

Um, so off the coast of Tokyo in Tokyo Bay, there's an island called Yamenoshima, um, which translates to dream island.

And it was created in the 1930s to begin with.

So, around Tokyo, they were dredging up a lot of the bay to provide channels for ships to come through and accidentally formed a sandy island around the area.

So Tokyo saw this and they're like, great, let's turn this into a new resort.

But then there were typhoons and financial problems.

So they closed it down.

And in 1957, Tokyo couldn't really keep up with the amount of waste that they were producing.

They couldn't incinerate all of it.

So instead, they decided to make an artificial island.

plasagna sort of thing so they would alternate layers of construction soil and food waste from households

Nice.

Yum.

And then nowadays it is a beautiful place to be.

But it stinks of old rotting food.

So not anymore.

Not anymore.

Not anymore.

So in the 1950s, when they did have this initial load of landfill, kind of household waste that came along, they didn't do a very good job of making sure it didn't smell horrendous.

There were like loads of flies, there were loads of gases that were setting off spontaneous fires in the area.

Nice.

It sounds like, actually, I would say a more fun Olympics thunderdome to have.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

You're running 400 meters away from the flies.

Maybe the archery just started as target practice for all the flies that were around here.

Oh, yeah.

I did actually see an archer online.

He's an American guy called Byron Ferguson, who people call the world's greatest archer.

This is his mates.

But he is good.

And anyway, I watched a video where he shot an aspirin out of the air.

Stop it.

Yeah, pretty cool.

Really?

How many attempts did that take?

Because you always see these videos online, don't you, of these people doing amazing tricks and you think that's taken you four weeks to do that.

He's shot an aspirin with the air.

More than you're allowed to play in the pen.

He's shot an aspirin out of the air.

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

But then he is the greatest archer in the world.

Right.

Supposedly the greatest archer in history was a guy called Howard Hill.

This is an American guy.

And I now think he might not be the greatest archer in history because his main trick, you know how William Tell shot an apple off someone's head?

His son's head.

His son's head, yeah.

That was the main part of it.

It was the emotional jeopardy.

Yeah, yeah.

But this guy, he did do that, like to show off, but he would also sometimes shoot a prune off someone's head.

Wow.

That's impressive.

It is, but if you put an aspirin on someone's head,

that might be even more impressive.

That's really good.

You know that thing where the previous archer in the competition has got a bullseye, right?

Yeah.

How do you beat them?

You have to split the arrow like Robin Hood.

Exactly.

Okay.

In 2008, a 74-year-old grandmother and archer, whose name was was Tilly Trotter, great name, incredible name, she split an arrow that was already in the target with another arrow, despite the fact that she was blind.

Whoa.

So you get a little bit of assistance with the target, but not genuinely not much.

So you...

It's not someone standing next to the target with a bell.

No, it's not.

It's not done by Qs.

I think some of the people who do it are partially sighted,

but some of them are

some blind doctors are not very sighted at all.

And she would kind of insist on not getting too much help from her husband.

He wouldn't say left or right when she was aiming.

That's amazing.

It's very, very cool.

I think if you and I went to archery, Andy,

and I hit a bullseye and then you hit my arrow, split it in two and also got a bullseye.

I would probably argue that that means I've got two bullseyes now and so I

win the game.

Well that's why we never go down the butts anymore.

The butts.

The butts.

Yeah yeah.

What the butts.

That's the archery butts.

Is that the top?

That's the training ground for archery, isn't it?

I didn't know that.

Pop down the butts.

The butts full of the rubbish heap on the butts.

I believe the butt is the name for the target, and it's what you're aiming towards, because in Othello, he says, here is my journey's end, here is my butt.

Lovely.

Nice.

And he's referring to the journey of an arrow.

And there are these roads, aren't there?

The places that are called things like

butt road or

we covered a road, I can't remember where it is.

Leicestershire, maybe it's called Butthole Lane.

And it's where someone shot an arrow and it went so far into the butt that it made a hole.

I don't know what the hole is.

but it definitely is like this is the old archery ground.

And people get confused and think it's butthole lane for another reason.

We don't need to go into it.

Children.

Children.

The Robin Hood, actually, is called the Robin Hood, all one word.

That move where you slice an arrow up from behind.

And it's not that hard.

Okay.

It's not that hard.

I'll see you down at the butts later.

You can contest your theory, right?

Okay, probably we couldn't do it, but I've been spending some time at archery forums, and it's not unheard of.

I think it seems a little bit like getting a a hat-trick or something.

So people will say, oh, I just was down at the butts and I did a Robin Hood.

How amazing is that?

And people will respond saying, oh, yeah, Robin Hood.

Yeah, nice shooting.

That's pretty cool.

Oh, yeah.

And one of these guys said, actually, a Robin Hood's mostly a hassle because it just breaks your arrow and you have to get a new one.

So a lot of guys use either pinknocks or unibushings instead of arrows.

The unibushing.

The unibushing arrows.

The uni bushing, yeah, that's right.

No, I didn't bother looking at all of those things.

I think we can imagine.

Actually, just on that, on breaking things, the official laws of archery, I was reading them, and there's an etiquette section.

And it says, A good archer does not leave litter.

It says, a good archer does not touch anyone else's equipment without permission.

And if they break another's arrow through their own carelessness, they must pay for it in cash on the spot.

Really?

That's in the official laws of archery.

Did they accept contactless days?

Have you heard of Lottie Dodd?

No, no.

Lottie Dodd.

She is actually quite brilliant.

She was the youngest ever woman to win the Wumboard and singles, 15 years old, which is incredible.

And then she went on to win it another four times.

And then she was like, okay, I'm done.

I'm going to try another sport.

She went on to win the British Ladies Golf Championship in 1904, played twice for England's national field hockey team.

And then the 1908 London Olympics, she competed as an archer, won the silver medal alongside her brother who got the gold and the men's, and they became the first brother-sister duo to win medals at the Olympics together.

Yeah, that was very cool.

And then she went on, she worked as a nurse for the Red Cross in World War I, and then passed away at 88 in Bournemouth listening to Wimbledon commentaries on the radio.

Did she sweet, yeah?

Just going, I could have done that one better.

Have you heard of Target Panic?

It's the, um, is there a thing called the Yips?

Yeah.

Oh, it's a battery yips.

It's basically like Dartitis.

Sowman's Yips.

Yeah.

Spinnies in gymnastics.

I think it's quite similar to that.

Yeah, genuinely.

Spinnies.

Spinnies.

Simone Biles was like, in the past Olympics, there was a whole thing about how she might have the spinnies because she ended up having to not do a lot of the events that she was setting up for.

And dartitis is where a darts player wants to throw the dart but can't let it go.

And they fly towards the dart,

holding on to the dart.

But that is the thing.

No, that's exactly it.

So Archery, it's very, very similar.

Basically, you either lose the bow as soon as you see the target, you kind of premature fire the arrow.

Look, it's very common.

It's a very common problem.

Or you freeze up and you can't release it at all.

There's no way of saying this without making it sound penisy.

Yeah, and it's basically like it's a curse.

And some people get it and they never shoot again.

Yeah.

And it's really, and it's, and you know, lots of, lots of artists get it from time to time and then get over it.

And it might be just in the mind, but there is a theory, it's called focal dystonia.

It's a condition where you have a, right, you have a particular movement you're doing again and again and again, right?

Like firing an arrow or firing a dart.

And the neurons in your brain devoted to that get worn out from overuse.

How weird is that?

Like there are sort of four cells that have been doing all the firing for you.

I don't know how long it takes for the podcasting neurons to wear down.

Oh, how long you got to do it?

Yes.

Do you guys know about the archer's paradox?

Oh, I don't think so.

No.

Is it the same as Zeno's paradox?

It's the tortoise and the arrow.

Not to be confused with Zeno's archer's paradox.

So Zeno's arrow paradox is that movement is impossible

because he says at any one moment that an arrow is traveling, it's not moving because it's a...

It's like if you say we're 10 meters away, then in half the time you'll be five meters away.

No, that's a different one.

Oh, is it?

Yeah.

I thought that was Xeno's one.

That's the torso the hair one.

No, that is a Xeno's paradox.

That's another Zeno's paradox.

He's got a few paradoxes.

He didn't have much on.

He spent his time making up these pointless mindsets.

How's it going, Zeno?

Yeah, pretty good.

Working on a really good new paradox.

But actually, I feel really bad about it.

I'll come down to the pub in a minute.

Well, I'd love to come to the pub, but movement is impossible.

So if you could just bring me a drink, that'd be great.

Guys, what a shame.

Zeno's well coming to the pub again.

Oh, yeah, shit.

What an eyeman.

Anyway, so he has the arrow paradox, which he uses an arrow to prove that motion is impossible.

But that's not what the archer's paradox is.

The archer's paradox is this thing where, so imagine you're shooting a bow and arrow.

If you point it at the target,

and then you let go of it.

Can you describe how the arrow travels?

Forwards quickly through the air.

Like an arc, maybe?

Like you have to aim slightly above so that it isn't parabolic.

Actually, I've worded this so badly it's extraordinary that I write UI scripts.

Basically, they wobble and they have to wobble and there's nothing to stop them wobbling.

And if you imagine that you've got an arrow and it's against the wood of the bow, the curved wood, when you release it, as it rubs against the wood as it's going forward, that wood forces it a bit to the left, if you're shooting a right-handed bow and arrow, forces it a bit to the left, but then that arrow wobbles back round to the right, so it snakes towards the target.

And

it's explicable by some physics.

IQ, Professor Brian Cox.

I'm just waiting for my science podcast to really take off.

It's because arrows can bend, so because they're not pointed straight, they'll bend around, so it bends around the bow.

But whenever an arrow shoots towards the target, the only reason it can hit the target is because it wobbles around and snakes like a snake.

And if it didn't wobble around, it would just go off on a diagonal every single time.

Okay,

it's not as good as Xenos.

Me and Zenos sitting around not being invited to the pub.

I get it.

The oldest arrows ever found, guess how old they are?

What, like 5,000 years?

Yeah.

Older.

Older.

50,000.

That's a crazy increase, Anna.

But yeah, it's about 65,000 years.

Stunning.

They were found, they're often often found in peat bogs.

So the oldest ones found in the UK are actually only 6,000 years old, give or take.

It was found in a peat bog, I think in Scotland, called Rotten Bottom.

Guys, do you know

that the person who was ranked ninth in the Archery World Cup in 2006 and actually went on to live in Japan and broke a bunch of Japanese archery records?

I feel like I'm going to know this.

I just have a hunch that

is Erika Eiffel.

And who is Erica Eiffel?

Descendant of the Gustave Eiffel.

No, but related.

She was in the news in 2007.

She was sort of the first person who brought object sexuality to the headline for the stronghold.

She married the Eiffel Tower.

She married the Eiffel Tower.

Famous for Marrying the Eiffel Tower.

She had a career as a great archer before that.

That's brilliant.

That's incredible.

Apparently, she lost all of her sponsors after admitting to a relationship with her beau.

Wait, wait,

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Okay, it's time for our second fact of the show, and that's my fact.

My fact this week is that the man who invented the electric blanket also invented a device to electrocute squirrels to keep them off his bird feeder.

Oh,

so are we saying he's a good guy from history?

Yeah.

Oh, you don't like squirrels, do you not?

Not much.

He didn't kill the squirrels.

I think it was just a little shock to get them off.

I think it was a one-volt shock, I believe.

But if you can't tell the current, you don't know how harsh it's going to be on the body.

I mean, you did use the word just, because I can feel James getting upset inside.

You did use the word electric.

Yep.

You meant electrify.

I meant zap.

Literally zap.

So this is a guy called George Crowley or Crowley, and he's the one who invented, before you all start writing in, the first modern electric blanket.

There have been a few before that.

They'd been used before for patients in sanatoriums and things like that.

And they were small and very expensive, but not very good.

And George Crowley was alive and working at the time of the Second World War and had worked as an engineer on the idea of electrically heated flying suits for pilots.

Ah, when you say flying suits.

Suits that they would be flying in rather than suits that make you fly.

I said, sorry.

You're like Iron Man.

No, I think his work was secret, but not that secret.

Sorry, yes.

Rather than your kind of Biggles-style sheepskin leather jacket, he was working on how pilots could stay warm because lots of pilots were just open to the air, it turns out.

In early moral panels, it was so, so, so cold.

So they had to wrap up warm.

And he worked on making electric suits for them.

And I think that gave them an idea of how to make an electric blanket.

Yeah, they were freezing in the war, weren't they?

And it was quite risky because your hands, I think, could get stuck to metal equipment, like frozen to metal equipment I'll add dumb and dumber very embarrassing and quite dangerous to the air apparently pilots would have to get dressed at the last minute so as not to get their clothes wet with sweat because you had to put on very very warm clothes if you're going up in a plane but if you put them on too soon then you're going to sweat those because you're boiling and then as soon as you go up in the plane your sweat all freezes and you've got a coatmade device

tough gigs wow yeah um i looked into some of uh crowley's other inventions oh yeah um so that he he works with general electric so there are a lot of patterns that that he kind of put out as part of his job.

There was a golf ball painter.

So if your balls become a bit too dirty,

stop it.

You would tip them into a vending machine and then it would blast like a little jet of air to hold it in the air and then spray paint it.

That's very fun about it.

Just kind of like the hole.

How painting.

Yeah, exactly.

That's pretty cool.

It's very cool.

That's very cool.

It seems unnecessary.

Well, how else the hell is he going to paint the last bit?

Exactly.

Yeah, because if you're holding it, you can hold the ball and the top and the bottom.

How are you going to paint the bit under your fingers?

That's the Achilles story.

Who's heard of Achilles?

There's a golf ball.

yeah it's like the xeno golf ball paradox yeah the golf ball is impossible to paint

um he also did a heater for shaving cream i guess to you know if your shaving cream is just a bit too cold needs to heat up and a ball bouncer which would be to test and kind of the standardize the effectiveness of a ball's bounce after being kept in storage but then he quickly abandoned the idea because he realized you could just do it as easily by hand um

that was like to test tennis balls right to make sure that they all bounce evenly i think so yes that's pretty good.

Because it sounds like you'd be a kid just being like, Should we go out and bounce the ball?

Be like, nah, my ball bounces doing that.

And the squirrel electrifier, Zappa, apparently, according to his son-in-law, David Scott, he abandoned it when he began to feel bad for the squirrels.

Oh, there you go.

So he had a conscience.

Yeah.

Did he feel bad for the birds that were then starving to death?

History doesn't relate.

When he was a child, he invented a device that warned him when his parents were coming into his room.

Brilliant.

Useful in the teenage years.

Yeah.

Don't come in.

I'm electrical just for all the dad.

Oh, dear.

He was six years old when he invented that.

No, he wasn't.

And then at 12 years old, he set up a light sensor near the dining room door so that if his mum passed by with like an armful of dirty dishes, it would open for her.

He wired up the living room curtains to a light switch so when you'd switch the light on at night, the curtains would close.

He basically built like the first smart home he's like way he's like kevin from um

yeah i really thought you you meant kevin from kevin and perigo large and only the masturbating in your room shows that

another attempt to truly shake off the international listener

yeah i suppose so and when he was um in his prime at work he was brought in as a witness in quite a lot of court cases what it would be is people would have a fire in their bedroom and they'd say that their electric blanket had set on fire.

And he would always come in and say, Yeah, it's absolutely impossible that that's happened because his improvement was the thermostat.

That's okay.

When we say modern blankets, the ones before you couldn't really set them, they just got hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter.

But his like had a limit.

It would always turn out that someone was smoking in bed.

Because that always used to be the fear.

I had an electric blanket when I was a kid at some point.

I was desperate for one.

I went to stay at my grandma's house who had one.

And I was like, well, this is the dream.

I wanted a Sony PlayStation when I was a girl.

No, to be fair, the reason I brought this fact to the attention of the table in the first place is I recently slept in a bed for the first time, which had an electric blanket.

A game changer.

I got mine for the first time this winter.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

I don't know how I've ever lived without it.

But I thought they were very much for your granny, basically.

Well, they are.

They're getting above that age.

They're very cool.

They're the new PlayStation.

But there was always the fear of dropping water on it and you'd somehow electrocute yourself.

But I think that is very unlikely.

But I did, when I was checking if that could happen, I did come across a Sun article where the headline was, you've been using your electric blanket all wrong.

Oh, yeah.

It's shoving it up my ass every day.

It's red the sun.

Oh, whoa.

It's always all wrong in those headlines, isn't it?

It's never you've been slightly misusing it or you've been slightly using it.

Yes, there might be something you've occasionally.

So what are you meant to do?

So you meant to turn it off when you get into bed so you don't keep cooking yourself overnight.

Yep, you're meant to do that.

Everyone knows that.

Don't fold it.

Why would you fold it?

It's just on your bed all the time.

So, that is actually a good point.

And that's what I think Crowley actually solved with the thermostats.

So, the thermostats for turning things on and off, but also local hotspots, because if you fold it or bunch it up, you'd get all these heating filaments getting closer and closer to each other.

So, they wouldn't spread out the heat uniformly, and so you would get too hot in certain places.

I don't know.

Hot patches, like a hot patch.

Exactly.

If you, sorry, this question for Ethan, who's a physicist.

If you

had these electrical wires going around you and you folded it round yourself, would you become magnetic?

You've heard the X-Men, James.

Oh, yeah.

Magneto, which turns his powers after it gets tangled up in an electric plan.

You never see what's under that cape of his, do you know?

So you're running a current through it.

It's going to be a relatively low current because it will be high resistivity to give off more heat, but also it's not straight wires going around on a coil.

It's actually like lots of different ones.

So it'd be lots of interference, lots of different magnetic flux cancelling each other out.

So I don't think you'd be net magnetic.

Sorry, James.

Sorry.

What's happened to all my spoons?

Do you want to hear about an electric blanket owner who did use it?

All wrong.

Oh, God.

Please,

this is.

And occasionally, I think that there are risky ones.

Like, if they're very old, you should be really careful around them and all that.

Do be careful around them.

But this happened in 2006, which was a Burmese python called Houdini living in California.

Don't call your python Houdini.

Honestly,

call it like happily caged.

They're always called Houdini, aren't they?

Every animal that escapes.

That's because you've just stumbled upon the reason why.

It's the problem that there's no one super, super famous for not having escaped.

The man in the iron mask.

Just call your python.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The snake of Monte Cristo.

Anyway.

You obviously didn't get very far into Monte Cristo, did you?

You remained in prison.

It was so boring.

I was just in prison for age, so I gave up.

Great.

In 2006, Houdini in California mistook a queen-size electric blanket for a rabbit.

He was halfway through eating.

So his owner had given him a rabbit, right?

To eat.

Right.

And left it in his tank.

But then Houdini, for some reason, was able to access the electric blanket too, unplugged it from the wall, in many ways the most impressive bit of the whole procedure.

And the rabbit was kind of tangled up in the blanket and I guess was white and fluffy.

And Houdini then just ate the entire queen-sized electric blanket.

It just sort of kept going.

Like he'd started, you know, when you start to eat a long, like a bit of packed choice or something, you know, come on, started to finish.

Yeah.

So they had to.

It's so relatable, I think.

I'm not taking relatable from Mr.

Kat Evian over here.

No way.

And the good news is there's a happy ending to the story.

Oh, she can still use the electric blanket.

It was used as like a doorstopper

tracks.

No vets were able to get it out.

It was good news.

Genuinely, the snake made recovery.

The vets made an incision and very, very, very slowly removed the entire electric blanket, which must have been a magic trick for the ages as well.

And she must have gone back to her fellow snakes saying, I had this unbelievably hot rabbit.

James, you mentioned getting too hot with electric blankets.

So I wouldn't have an electric blanket because I like to be cold in bed.

I actually agree, and I went off my electric blanket very fast when I realised that.

But you definitely wouldn't have liked this then.

So the precursor to Crowley's electric blanket was some less good electric costumes.

And in World War One, the French and US military made electric suits, in fact, for pilots, but they weren't that effective.

They'd short out in the middle of a flight, so the pilot would be freezing cold.

Or sometimes the power came from a windmill that was attached to the outside of the plane.

That was amazing.

That was the Dutch Air Force, wasn't it?

Terrible news: all the tulips have gone from the wings where we were growing them.

No, they just get quite hot because if your plane went into a dive, probably not the main thing you're worried about if your plane goes into a dive.

The wind will obviously start going quite a lot faster, and your suit gets incredibly hot.

That's very funny.

Again,

well done, Crowley, for inventing that thermostat.

More dangerous for the little boy who's being used as a fuel camp with his finger in the hole.

Very well, don't stereotype.

I've been working on something about the tail having holes in it already because it's made of E-Dams.

It's not ready to be rolled out.

Okay, it's time for fact number three, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that there's a sea harbour in Uzbekistan that's 150 kilometers from the sea.

How can it be Zeno's harbour.

This is the town of Moinak in Uzbekistan, technically in the autonomous republic of Karakal, Pakistan.

And it used to be on the sea.

It used to be on the Aral Sea.

And the Aral Sea was the world's fourth largest inland sea, so really sort of a lake.

And it's now shriveled to about 10%, less than 10% of its size.

But there is this amazing place, and you might have seen pictures of it, heard of people who've sort of done that disaster tourism thing of going to visit it.

Basically, there's a harbour which still has a bunch of the old boats still in it.

I think it's got 12 or 13 boats that are all rusted and just lingering there.

But it's 150 kilometers to the sea at this point.

So they're just marooned.

And there's a lighthouse.

Yeah.

And the lighthouse.

That's very spooky.

Yeah.

Haunting place.

There's when Geographical Magazine went to visit, apparently there's a local joke that if every tourist, journalist, and scientist who visits brought a bucket of water with them, the entire Aral Sea would be replenished by now.

Pretty good.

So the Aral Sea is a very, it's kind of interesting.

It is an ecological disaster zone, so it's not very cheery to read about, but it is kind of fascinating.

So I didn't really, you hear about the fourth largest lake in the world and you think, well, probably quite big.

It was half the size of England.

It's so big.

Or the size of Scotland, if you don't want to be so Anglo-centric.

Or a third of the size of the United Kingdom, top to bottom.

Brilliant.

Oh, but nothing for the Welsh in here, I see.

They always have the size of Wales, don't they?

They've got the amount of the Amazon being cut down, and they should be happy with that.

No, you never see the size of it.

But anyway, imagine that.

It's so big.

All water, thriving with fish.

And it was just kind of botched.

And it was a very quick botch during the 20th century because it used to be the water was always slightly drained off.

There were a couple of rivers that fed it.

And the water was traditionally controlled by the Mirabs, who were the water masters in the area.

And they ensured that farmers in the area got enough water to irrigate their crops, but not too much, basically.

But then during the Soviet times, because both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan were part of the Soviet Union, and the Aral Sea kind of straddled both, that was all centralized.

And also there was a mega drive to farm cotton in Uzbekistan.

And cotton is a very, very thirsty crop.

And they diverted the rivers so much that this entire sea just started receding disastrously.

And it was so fast, wasn't it?

So it was 1960, essentially, the Soviets launched their big sort of redirecting the main feeder rivers.

And by 1970, then, in fact, I thought this was really interesting because it's a measure of saltiness of water, which I didn't really realize existed.

But by 1970, it was officially brackish.

Oh,

mangroves could live there.

Exactly, mangroves can live there.

I don't think they had time to set up shop.

So the freshwater fish started dying, but it was officially saltwater by 1987, which is another level above.

And it became officially, do you know what the last designation of saltiness is in 1996?

Super saline.

Oh, that's good.

Much more common word.

Oh, really?

Salty.

Yeah, briny.

Oh, briny.

Briny.

Didn't realise.

Brackish saltwater briny.

So only nematodes and microbes can survive.

But also, awfully, it split in two, the aryl sea, so the north and the south aryl.

And the north aryl levels actually stabilized.

The water levels stabilized about 1988, but by then it got quite salty and saltwater species have started to thrive in it.

And then it started sort of getting a bit fresher again, replenishing a little bit.

So all the saltwater species died out.

Oh, no.

One of the problems that they had was basically Moscow kept saying to these stands,

Okay, you've made this much cotton this year.

Next year you need to make 5% more or 10% more.

And they went, all right, yeah, fine.

And so then they would divert some river, and then they say, Okay, well, next year we need 10% more, and they keep doing that, and they keep doing that, and keep doing that.

And in Russia, it's known as the Uzbek Skoyedyla, which is like the Uzbek business.

Because even once the RLC disappeared, they still kept saying, Well, we need another 5% next year.

And the people would be like, Yeah, fine, that'd be all right.

And they just kept saying that they were creating all this cotton, but they weren't making it.

And so they sound like me, they sound like me at work.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've got that covered.

Exactly.

You can imagine.

And 1983, they claimed that 981,000 tons of cotton were being harvested that were not being harvested.

And then when Brezhnev died and Andropov came in, Andropov decided he wanted to do this sort of big anti-corruption drive.

And they picked on because there was corruption happening everywhere, obviously, but they picked on this in particular.

And it was so huge that Sharof Rashidov, who had been in charge of Uzbekistan until then, he'd been buried in some huge place in the middle of Tashkent.

They exhumed his body and buried him in like a normal grave.

That's how much of a bigger deal it was.

What to punish him for the fact that he'd lied about

his cotton.

Isn't that amazing?

And then, when in 1991, when Uzbekistan became its own country and Islam Karimov came in, the first thing he did was just pardon everyone.

So, anyone who'd been in prison about any of this stuff, he said, oh, well, it was just the Soviets being Soviets, so it's not your fault.

Wow.

That was, I mean, you know, a bit of reconciliation with the past.

Probably a good thing with you coming.

I know as I'm Karimov was not a great president.

It depends who you are.

Yeah, it's true.

If you're one of the security apparatus, he's a really great guy.

Yeah.

So the Aral Sea, just quickly, one more thing on that.

This is a really cool thing about it.

And it's a reason that you, James, might want to go there.

Well, I do.

Well, you could be, James, the first person on earth to map the Aral desert as it now is.

You're doing your impression of the watermen again.

Yeah, I don't know what that's about.

Yeah, yeah.

I just sort of like feel very connected to it.

No, there is a theory that this is the last land surface on Earth that is not mapped.

Oh.

Satellites have taken pictures of it from a very long way away, but no one has done on-the-ground cartography because it's new land.

Would I have to train as a cartographer before I do this mapping?

I just do it on a piece of paper.

I mean, what kind of cartographer do you want to be?

Do you want to be a 17th century one?

Well, you just have to say, I'm naming that after my wife.

Well, you said I could do it.

You could do it.

I mean, you could do a very, very amateur-ish.

But I love that theory that this desert

is.

It's so cool.

It's like a new land.

It's the Aralcom Salt Desert, it's known as today, and it's 5 million hectares, which is bigger than Denmark.

Wow.

No idea how it is compared to Wales.

But yeah, that's mega.

Yeah, wow.

OS Maps app wouldn't work there, is what you're saying.

No, and I don't think those Google cars have quite got to the song flat.

Your Uber is 17 days away.

Oh my God.

No, he's 18 days away.

Just one more very quick thing about Moinak, which is the town.

When the Aral Sea first began to really deplete and the Soviet Union still existed around that time, they weren't on the coast, but they had all these factories that were for canning fish.

And so, what the Soviet Union did is that they would transport fish all the way from the Pacific to Moinack so that the townspeople could still work in the factories canning fish, even though they were nowhere near the sea anymore.

Wow.

Isn't that amazing?

That's very cool.

At some point, they must have thought this is not a very sustainable line of work.

I'm sure they did think that.

The Mirabs would have thought.

Sorry.

The Mirabs.

Wow.

Interesting.

And the other thing about Aral Sea is that there's an island there, which in Russia is known as Vozrejdenya, which means rebirth.

And it's where it's mentioned in Call of Duty Black Ops, which I believe is a video game.

Yeah, it is.

Certainly is, Your Honour.

But it was also a place where they had a biological weapons research facility and where a big cloud of smallpox was released in 1971.

Tremendous.

A happy place.

Did they dump the stuff in the water?

Did they dump the smaller?

They didn't dump it.

It just kind of,

there was an explosion, a load of smallpox and then it's landed.

So when I'm making my map and say there's Polina Hill and there's Polina Valley and stuff, I need to watch out for smallpox because it might still be there.

And the big, big problem about that is now that it's not a lake anymore, animals can just wander to this island, which they never would be able to do before.

So it means that if there are any biological things on the island.

we're gonna get mutant animals who can take over the world we're gonna get bears precisely what i'm saying yes yeah or just sort of smallpox deer spreading it all that yeah

that's actually i thought it was um quite interesting reading about that chemical weapons testing area because the area where it happens in fact the capital of karakil pakistan which is the region this is in is called nukas

which feels like a very dangerous almost name to give yourself middle of the cold War when you've got some military stuff going on, doesn't it?

All Nuke Us.

Yeah.

I thought you were saying it sounds a bit like Newcastle.

That's what I feel.

I never realised that Newcastle sounds like Newcastle.

All the Machams are going, all the people from Sunderland are going, yeah, well,

we've had that in our heads for a long time.

Yeah, we wish.

Just one more thing about the RLC, which I thought was very interesting.

I looked in some newspaper archives, sort of for what people had said about it before it got all depressing.

And whenever it's mentioned in the 18th and 19th centuries and early 20th century, it is mentioned as a sea which keeps on disappearing.

So it was very shallow.

Really?

And actually, there are all these articles.

Like, there's a traveller's report from 1910 that says it's so shallow that if a strong wind picks up, it blows the sea away as far as the eye goes.

Annoying.

That's amazing.

Well, the fish are legend.

I guess they get blown away.

I'm sorry, kids.

We've come to a beach where it was a bit windy and the sea's blown away.

What can you do?

That's amazing.

That's so funny.

Yeah, and they kept saying there was an 1890 newspaper article about it saying it's undergoing a process of desiccation that makes it seem like it's going to disappear altogether.

How interesting.

So maybe because it was very shallow, it was susceptible to that.

It was clearly, and it had happened entirely, almost entirely, I think, in the 14th century.

There are documents which show it basically fully dried up.

And they're still finding as it dries up, it recedes and it reveals old sites of medieval settlements that have been there.

That's all.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah.

So maybe 600 years from now, it'll be back.

Fingers crossed.

Fingers crossed.

Yeah, unless we think it was a Soviet or Russian problem.

The Great Salt Lake in America has lost 73% of its water and is unable to sustain a lot of wildlife because local people are using so much of the water around there.

And the Colorado River, which used to reach the Gulf, doesn't reach the Gulf anymore.

It just dries off and it hasn't done since 1988.

What?

A river just sort of ends?

It just dries.

So it's like, it becomes a river, becomes a river, becomes a river.

People in like California, they're using the water so much

that it just dries up.

It's awful.

It's a problem all around the world.

Oh, yeah.

So I was kind of looking at other landlocked countries that kind of had a very strong kind of association with the sea, despite, you know, obviously not being next to it.

And I read into Bolivia, which is landlocked, and they're so obsessed with the sea.

So it goes back to the War of the Pacific, which was in like 1879, 1884.

Bolivia and Peru were up against Chile, and Chile ended up winning and annexed about 149 miles of the coastline and stopped Bolivia being able to access it.

That's a real dickhead bit to annex.

I know, I know.

And Bolivia just haven't forgotten about it 140 years later.

So they made a peace treaty in 1904, which granted Bolivia access to the Pacific Ocean.

But it meant that they still had to go through lots of checks and it was still subject to loads of fares.

They put in an official plea with The Hague in 2013, but it was rejected, that they didn't have to do anything.

But the kind of culture that sprung up around it is really funny.

So on the 23rd of March, every year, Bolivia celebrates the National Day of the Sea.

And that date was chosen because it's the day that one of Bolivia's kind of iconic war heroes from the time, Eduardo Abaroa, was shot down by Chile.

And his reported dying words were, surrender.

Your grandmother should surrender, you fuck.

Wow.

But yeah, they have a navy as well.

They've got 500 troops in their navy.

They have like Totucaca, don't they?

Exactly.

So is that where they do it?

They do a lot of their training around there.

They patrol the area.

They also patrol the Amazonian rivers

in Bolivia.

That's helpful.

Yeah.

And the official motto is: The sea is ours by right.

To take it back is our duty.

Wow.

And

I mean, let it go.

I know, no, no, no.

Get it back.

Get it back.

All right, Elsa.

Cling desperately on.

That's my version of the song.

I was reading,

what was I reading?

I was reading the article about the remeasuring the Amazon

because they want to prove that the Amazon's longer and they're going to travel from the new source that they found, which is in Peru, and they're going to travel down.

Because you were saying about like the navy there.

Do you know what is the most dangerous animal that they might meet?

Is it man?

It is.

Man.

Is it like the remote communities or maybe the indigenous people that haven't been you know what?

There's some of that, but actually it's loggers.

Loggers, yeah.

Oh, I was so primed to like the guys who were doing logging in the Amazon rainforest, but now you've said that they're harmful.

I like them even less.

Yeah.

There's a bit of good news on land lockery.

So half a dozen landlocked countries in Africa are going to get their own coastline before long.

Oh, nice.

This is really interesting.

So Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, the DLC, Malawi, and Zambia, between five and ten million years from now, as

as the Somalian-Nubian tectonic plates move apart from the Arabian plate cracks keep appearing in Ethiopia in 2005 a big crack just appeared in the desert terrifying um so I was reading an article about this on quartz and I just want to read you the last sentences um this also means like as well as getting seaside great news these countries can finally be directly connected to sub-sea internet cables if that technology will not have been bypassed by them assuming that millions of years down the line nation states will still exist in the form that they do now

so i'm actually just on the internet um in uzbekistan um there so there's uh a lot of issues in the modern day um with corruption and cheating and exams you've got about 400 000 students each year competing for about 50 000 university places and so they have loads of different kind of ways of cheating to try and you know get them into uni so they bribe invigilators to turn blind eye to phone use and people use the parachute technique where they're skinny gone gone yeah parachutes are very tightly folded aren't they oh yeah they're very tightly folded so have you folded up and you pull a card

and a huge bit of cloth with all the answers comes out yeah you've sort of written incredibly tiny writing on a very tightly folded bit of silk um i love that it's not i'm afraid um it's basically they just chuck it out the window to somebody below um who then just chucks

the exam paper out the window to correct

to correct the answer and they just chuck it back up um

sorry

yeah yeah um so hang on you're in the you're doing doing your exam.

Yeah.

You have to find a way of going, oh, hello.

Oh, it's out of the window.

And then you also have to find a way of unfolding the paper aeroplane in a way that no one notices.

Yeah, basically, now the telecoms companies, the three major kind of network providers, all very conveniently have technical difficulties that they need to solve for like this five-hour period where everybody's taking exams.

But it's, yeah, it's just mad.

Oh, another way that people would do, they would hide notes in, I quote, Renaissance-style hairstyles.

So they would just get a crib sheet stuffed in there.

If you have a big enough rough, you can just write the answer on your ruff and spin it round to whatever bit of the curriculum they ask about.

There we go.

Very nice.

Very nice.

James, did you ever see those landlocked...

I'm asking James specifically, the landlocked population of sharks in Australia.

Oh, no, I haven't seen it.

Are they on a golf course?

They're on a golf course.

Yeah, I am aware of them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they washed in in the 90s.

That's right.

And for years, they were like the nessie of this golf course course because there was a big lake on the golf course.

It's called the Carbrook Golf Club in Queensland.

How did they wash in?

Well,

exactly.

The area floods every now and again.

It's prone to flooding.

So every several years they might have a really big flood, which sort of connects the sea to the...

Oh, my God.

And bull sharks are very good at living in water of mixed salinity.

So they're

brackish.

Not brainy.

They're at home in the brack.

They have special, fun fact, rectal glands, which allow them to excrete salt.

So they can survive in saltier water or they can survive in less salty water.

Do they do it as like table salt or like moulden flakes?

No salty.

That's the third pot on the table, isn't it?

Shark anus salt.

Yeah, let's see.

It'll catch on.

Yeah, and so

someone went there.

A golfer named Scott Wagstaff said, I'm going to prove that this Aussie Nessie is down here.

He went down there with a camera and some meat.

And he got him.

He got him on film.

And yeah, they haven't been seen since 2015.

And the area did flood again in 2013.

So it's possible they washed out.

That's interesting.

I once went to a restaurant where there were sharks.

Well, it was...

Where was it?

It was Doctor Evil's secret language.

It was like that.

I think it was in Mauritius.

And you were beyond tables.

And the tables were floating on the sea.

There were sharks swimming around.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then the...

Did they have signs like, do not feed the sharks under the table like a dog?

Yeah, yeah.

You weren't allowed to feed them.

But

the waiters would come round.

They would bring some meat and they would throw little bits of meat into the water next to you, and then the sharks would come up and snap, snap, snap, snap.

And then you'd eat the rest of your meal.

That's an incredible restaurant to go to, isn't it?

So

if you were the waiter and someone really annoyed you, could you accidentally spill a tray of meat on them so they'd be devoured by the shark?

The shark would have to be able to jump out.

It would have to be like one of those Mako sharks that can jump out of the water, but I don't think they were those.

So, but aren't you?

Sorry, you're sitting with your waists.

There's water.

No, no, you're on an island.

You're waist deep.

You're on an island.

No, no, no, no,

You're floating.

You're on a floating island where your table is.

The table must have a platform underneath it, right?

Because the tables are floating.

So you're not saying that you're waist deep in water and they're a shark heading around, because that's what I am guessing.

That's what I was guessing.

I mean,

you wouldn't go twice.

You're very cold and you're very tense.

Other than that, huge tip.

Was the food good?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was good.

Did it cost an arm and a leg?

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Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that wombat burrows can be explored by a special robot called a wombot.

Oh, it's so good.

So why are we exploring wombat burrows?

Yes.

It feels like it's none of our business.

Well, you might want to learn stuff about wombats.

None of my business.

With that as scientists, the spirit of the Enlightenment died there.

Does it look?

Is it a fake one bat?

Would a wombat be able to know that it was a wombat?

No, it doesn't look like a wombat.

Okay.

It looks like a small black box with tank wheels.

Okay.

Caterpillar tracks.

Oh, it's tractor.

Nice.

Okay.

And this was something I read on the Improbable website run by our friends at the Ig Nobel Prizes.

And it was made by Scott Carver and Robert Ross and I think an honour student called Elizabeth Brown as well yeah that's right but this was at the University of Tasmania

and this is a really interesting thing right so

I've written to Dr.

Carver and he's given me lots of information and this is incredible so wombat burrows are really difficult to get in because they're quite small they're the size of a wombat one bat's quite big i've seen a wombat in the zoo

they're big but they're smaller than you for instance yeah okay be tough for you to get in yeah yeah but it would be possible for say a 13 or 14 year old boy to get in okay and until

until scott carver and rob ross and elizabeth brown and their friends made this machine the only information we had about wombat burrows was from a schoolboy called peter nicholson who in the 1960s, with a torch and a spade, went into Wombat Burroughs and made observations of the Wombats that he encountered.

So good.

So good.

Literally,

he wrote up his account in the school magazine.

And until the last few years, this was the best information we had about Wombat Burroughs.

I'm so jealous.

That is so cool.

That's a childhood fantasy.

You crawl into a badger set and you find them all drinking tea on the ground.

Amazing.

So I read, there was a documentary by ABC, so the Australian Broadcasting Corporation,

and they kind of interviewed Peter Nicholson.

So he was at Timmertop Boarding School in Victoria and he and a friend stumbled upon the burrows.

He was, I think, nine stone and six feet tall.

So he was, you know, skinny enough that he could shuffle down.

He was chased out by a female, one bat at a time, a wild dog.

Forwards or backwards?

I think you'd probably end up shuffling backwards and out, sort of.

Well, exactly.

That's scary.

If you can't, if you have to...

Also, and if they tilt down, you have to climb backwards and upwards.

Oh, God, you've taken me right back to a very upsetting experience I had in an underground car park in Slovenia where I have to reverse out.

Oh, my God.

Andy, enough about your travel having coats.

Jesus Christ.

All you're ever talking about.

Oh, it was the first time I'd driven for years.

And it was right down, like a very steep ramp down to the barrier, which was then closed

for whatever reason.

And I had completely forgotten how to do a reverse hill start.

And that was the most stressful 20 minutes of that that year.

It was horrible.

And there were sharks swimming after it.

But there was no aggrieved female wombat inside the barrier, which would have made it worse.

They weren't all like horrible wombats, though.

He did become friends with one wombat in particular.

So when he would go down there

and he would go genuinely, he would go down and he would just sit with the wombat for a while.

Sometimes if the wombat would grunt, he'd grunt back just to try and, you know, kind of replicate what he was doing.

The wombat would come over and sniff him and put a paw on him, even followed him out on a cloudy day because they're normally nocturnal, so they would stay inside during the day.

But he came out on one day and they just sat together outside, him and this friendly wombat.

It's incredible.

That is a beautiful story.

It's a kid's booking to me.

But anyway, now we can do it with robots.

So kids get out of the borrowers.

And the wombat is fitted with lasers and it can eliminate any wombat that comes across.

Well, they have to, like, for instance, because of your problem, Andy, they have to have like cameras on the front and the back because so often you have to reverse and you can't turn around.

So, that's one problem that they had.

They tied a rope to it just in case they got completely stuck and they could just drag it out.

So, that's kind of a lo-fi way of dealing with it.

And they found something really important, which is wombats have been getting this parasite.

It's like a scabies kind of thing, and it's been very, very bad for the wombat.

And they found, thanks to their wombot, that mites can survive much longer inside the burrows, which people didn't realize before.

People thought the mites would just die.

But now we know that if your one bat leaves a burrow and then another one bat goes in, which happens quite often, that's a way that this disease can spread from one one bat to another one bat.

That's important.

And that's something we didn't know before.

That's very cool.

James, just quickly, that vision of the one bot with a rope tied around it is kind of like an Australian version of the Theseus and the Minotaur myth, isn't it?

Yeah, that's exactly what I thought of Weirdly when he said that.

One of my favourite facts about Theseus and the Minotaur.

So a ball of string was called C-L-E-W, a clue.

And essentially, that's where our modern word for clue comes from.

Really?

You're following a clue backwards out of a maze.

So it's a lead, essentially.

Yeah.

That's so good.

That is so cool.

Yeah, it's really fun.

But I also know something about wombats, and that is that they are fluorescent under UV light, but so are scabies.

However, the wombats glow blue, but scabies glow green.

So if you were to shine a black light at a back, you could tell if it's got scabies, if it's got little kind of green flecks coming through the window.

Yeah.

If there is a bit of a scabies outbreak in the UK at the moment, apparently,

and if I went to a nightclub,

as I haven't done for 10 years, but if I was to go to a nightclub, would I be able to know that someone talking to me had scabies because they would glow?

There'd be like little green kind of areas where they are on the side.

If you get off clothes and take their clothes off, which often people do in nightclubs

Totally clad, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Easy.

Okay, that's public service.

Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, so thank you to Dr.

Carver for sending me all this information.

If you want to learn more, then you can go to his Twitter, which is at scott underscore s underscore Carver.

And the last question I asked him was: Do you know that there's a US zoo which claims to have had the world's oldest wombat and it was called Carver?

Huh.

Lovely.

Isn't that amazing?

Did you know that?

I said, I just thought you'd be interested in that coincidence.

And he said, cool fact.

That wombat is a southern hairy-nosed wombat, whereas our work has been with bare-nosed wombats.

You must have felt so stupid when you got it.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, my God.

And apparently, to the best of his knowledge, the oldest bare-nosed wombat in captivity is in Japan and is called Wayne.

So that will put me in my place.

Here's a riddle for you all: What animal is the biggest user of a wombat burrow?

Wombat.

Yes!

Thank goodness someone's fallen into my cunningly laid trap.

Australian teenage boys.

That's it.

Okay, so something else uses wombats, burrows.

Is it going to be something of a similar size to a wombat?

Sounds like it's going to be bigger, doesn't it?

Oh, hold on.

No, it's not.

No, no, no, no, no.

I'm not sure it does have it.

I've misunderstood the question.

It was ambiguously worded, and I thought you meant biggest in size.

Oh, you know, like maybe a wallaby sneaks in there.

She's got it.

I don't know how you've done it.

The most frequent user of wombat burrows is.

To be fair, Adda, I did notice you throw a piece of paper out of the window just now.

The black-footed rock wallaby.

But wombats will tolerate other animals in their burrows if there's something like a fire going on above ground.

There was a story that went kind of viral that the wombats were rounding up other animals.

Rounding them up and then sort of assassinating them in the burrows or something.

No, protecting them from the wildfires.

Oh, right.

Sorry.

Right.

And they're amazing thermal buffers.

You know, it can be incredibly hot above ground, even if there's not a fire in there.

It's just obviously it's very, very hot.

Yeah.

Underground?

Level temperatures.

Good to know.

Look out for a wombat burrow.

Last resort.

Good.

Just on robots that mimic animals.

Oh, yeah.

Biomimicry.

Biomimicry.

Apparently, we are soon going to have zoos full of robots instead of animals.

This is the great suggestion.

And they've started making robots that look exactly like certain animals so that when you go to a zoo, rather than keeping, I don't know, a panda captive or a cheetah or something, you just look at a robot.

And they've actually, they've got Del the Dolphin, was one that I discovered.

Do boy.

Also, a buddy the dolphin.

So, Del the Dolphin is designed by one of the creative directors at Disney, in fact, who is now working on this, and the person who made Free Willy, which we talked about recently.

They're more cost-effective because obviously you don't have to feed them, but then you can't really do feeding time, which is part of the fun of the zoo, I suppose.

Well, unless you're feeding them a robot fish, and that would probably be fine.

Yeah, although then that's what's been cost-effective, I suppose, when you've got to generate a hundred robot fish every day.

But yeah, apparently, rather than having animals, we'll just have robots.

I think that sounds great.

Yeah, there is a temple in India which has replaced its elephant with a robo-elephant.

Oh, yeah.

And that's again on grounds of animal stress levels.

Lots of temples in India have live elephants.

So the Irinjadapali Sri Krishna temple now has an 11-foot-tall Robo-Nelli.

Gosh, good.

I don't know what it can do.

I don't know if it can amusingly hoover up a peanut.

You just attach a Roomba to its trunk.

Yeah.

Here's one more thing.

In America, they have a problem with poaching some places.

And one way that they they deal with it is they put lures out to the poachers.

But you don't really want to lure with a real animal.

So they started doing it with robots.

And the idea is you would get a robotic, say, bear,

and the poacher would shoot it.

And then as soon as they did it, you could arrest them for shooting bears.

Brilliant.

Even though they didn't technically shoot a real bear, the intention was there.

The problem is that poachers kind of get used to it.

And so you have to make them more and more and more realistic each time so that they think it's real.

And so, the latest thing they've done, this guy in America called Volslegel, who makes these props, has invented a deer which picks up its tail and poos out brown MMs.

So, the poachers sit there thinking, that animal hasn't pooed for a while.

I think it might be a robot.

And then the MMs come out and they go,

and they shoot it.

And apparently, this guy, Vols Slagel, who made it, has three kids, and they get to eat all of the other coloured MMs

whenever he buys it.

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

So that's cool.

And that's why Van Halen wanted to have no brown MM.

They knew they were needed for the robo.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said, we can all be found on our online accounts.

I'm at Andrew Hunter M.

James?

I'm on TikTok at no such thing as James Harkin, but I haven't ticked any talks.

Okay, so look out for that.

I try to do a new one each time, but I'm kind of running the news.

Ethan,

I'm on Twitter and Instagram at Ethan Ruparelli.

And Anna?

You can get in touch with us as a group by emailing podcast at qi.com or tweeting at no such thing.

That's right.

And if you would like to go to no such thing as a fish.com, there's all sorts of extra stuff there, including a portal to Club Fish, the exclusive members' lounge, where you can kick back, enjoy some bonus content, some ad-free shows, all for a very reasonable price.

And if you do it via Apple Podcast, you can get a free month's trial membership of Club Fish, which we also recommend very highly.

Okay, that's it.

We'll be back again next week with another one of these.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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