379: No Such Thing As A Ping Pong Ballbag

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Toshinsky, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round 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's my fact.

My fact this week is that firefighters use ping-pong balls to put out wildfires.

Wow.

Do they fire the ping-pong balls from enormous ping-pong bats?

You're thinking here, perhaps, that the ping-pong balls are also enormous, are you, Andy?

Oh, yeah.

Or are you thinking that the wind from waving the bat might put out the fire?

Well, I was thinking of one massive one per wildfire, and you just load it up with water, and then you drop it on.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, are they filled with water?

They're not.

And I should just clarify for the listener, Andy is wrong as well.

That is not how they do it.

What this is, in fact, is these are little ping-pong balls.

They call them ping-pong balls.

I couldn't officially find if they were, you know, taken from a ping-pong ball bag, but they look exactly the same.

And they are carrying...

What's the ping pong ball bag?

You were laughing at ball bag, James.

I saw it.

I wasn't.

I was laughing at the idea that someone might have invented a specific bag to carry ping pong balls in.

And that, according to Dan's definition, nothing is a ping pong ball unless it has been taken out of a ping pong ball bag.

You know, you're going to your mates.

He's got a table.

You've got your bat, you've got your balls.

You've got to bring your balls in a bag.

So you've got a ball bag for your ping-pong balls, right?

I wouldn't usually bring my own balls.

No.

I've only ever arrived at the table and they've been there.

I've never.

I would assumed, yeah, that my friend has got his own balls.

And basically, you have to be such a pro that you think bringing your own balls is going to improve your game by that much.

There's different colour balls.

You're allowed to use different colour balls.

If your eyes are better for orange balls, let's say, than the white ball, you don't want him getting an advantage.

But like James says, that does imply you are taking it quite seriously.

It's like bringing your own pool cue to a pub, and then if you lose, you risk looking like the biggest idiot that's ever walked into that room.

I do know, Dan, that a lot of people have blue-green colour blindness.

Do you think a lot of people struggle to see the colour white, but can see the colour orange?

Is that not a thing?

I always thought I had an advantage in ping pong when I brought my orange balls with me.

Only if you're playing in the snow.

Okay, myth dispelled.

Excellent start to the show.

So when I tell you about the actual fact, which is that this is used by wildfire firefighters, and they fly up in helicopters, and the idea is that if there's a massive fire, you want to contain the fire by fighting the fire with fire.

This is a classic thing that firefighters do on the ground.

They have blowtorches.

The idea is that you burn any surrounding wood, brush, whatever it is on the ground, and it means nothing can feed the fire that's trying to escape further out.

So you contain it.

So they worked out that if you put ping pong balls up into a helicopter and you injected it with different chemicals and you effectively created a bomb in the sky by mixing these chemicals live up there, you dropped them down and by the time they hit the ground they burst into flames and put themselves out very quickly so it's a really effective thing so these chemicals are potassium permanganate and glycol and it's basically you put these two chemicals together and they create fire and it's a bit like how rocket engines work.

They have two chemicals and then they go together and they turn into flame.

But potassium permanganate, which is the main one in these ping pong bowls, it's also used to kill fungi on your skin.

So you put it on your skin and it creates oxygen, which kills the fungi or germs.

It's used to treat water, it's used to keep bananas for longer, it's used to age props in movie sets and it's used to purify cocaine.

All those different things this chemical.

Wow, multi-purpose.

Isn't it cool?

That is very cool.

It does mean bananas are extremely flammable presumably.

Or is it is it washed off?

Or like will you get a banana and it's covered in this stuff that if I just hold it the wrong way, it will spontaneously combust?

It's a slightly different thing.

So, it's the oxidization.

So,

bananas create ethylene, which makes them ripen.

And actually, that's why if you put a banana with other fruit, it'll make them all ripen really quickly.

But this potassium permanganate will oxidize the ethylene and remove it, and so it won't ripen quite as quickly.

Okay.

It's really cool in these helicopters, they have a ball machine that all the balls are sitting in, and they already have the potassium permanganate sitting inside it.

And when they're getting ready for release, they head down the ball machine to the end where they're all individually injected with the glycol just before they're dropped.

So it's live bomb making, basically.

Yeah.

Did you guys see the previous method by which they used to do this?

Because there was the helitorch, which is a helicopter with a hose attached to the bottom of it, attached to a 50-gallon drum of fuel.

It feels a bit less precise than using the ping-pong balls, to be honest.

But you do get to be called the burn boss if you are the one flying the helicopter.

So I'm still slightly confused.

You drop the balls, but then they don't ignite.

Do they ignite on impact?

How come they don't just explode the helicopter?

Because the chemical reaction takes about 20 seconds for it to ignite within the ball.

Oh, so you really have to send them out really quickly.

It's like holding a grenade that's been lit.

Exactly.

That's exactly what it is.

It's pulling a pin on a grenade, and then you lob them out of the helicopter.

So they can actually go in flames before they've made impact, but they fly at such a height that the idea is that once they've landed, that's about 20 seconds, and then they can light up on the floor.

Wow.

So cool.

So ping pong balls used to be incredibly flammable anyway.

There was a change in 2014, and they were made of celluloid.

We've talked about celluloid before because it was used in all the old cinemas, and it was why cinemas kept on setting on fire in the 20s.

But same with the ping-pong balls.

And if you go online, it says everywhere that back in the olden days, ping-pong balls used to just explode into flame mid-match because of the heat of the friction.

And everywhere it says this.

And it is possible if you get it hot enough because it is very, very flammable.

And I haven't found a single piece of evidence of a single table tennis match where any ball is exploded into flames.

You'd have to hit it pretty hard.

Yeah, yeah.

I didn't know about this thing they used to have in ping pong, which has now been banned.

Speed glue.

Had you guys heard of this?

Speed glue, no.

No.

Speed glue is a special glue that you you use on your paddle.

You glue the rubber on with a special glue, speed glue, about half an hour before the match begins, and that soaks into the layer of sponge between the rubber and the blade.

And what it does is it makes the racket way more elastic than it normally is because the rubber cells expand in contact with this glue and it stretches out.

So it's like a trampoline for the ping-pong ball every single shot you play.

And it is incredibly effective at making you much, much better at table tennis.

And it's been banned by the Olympics.

2008 was the last time speed glue was allowed and they now have to have official paddle controllers at the Olympics to check if anyone's doped their paddle.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's really interesting.

It's weird because you'd think the opposite if you put glue on your bat.

You'd think it would be like one of those Velcro and ball games you play at the beach where it would just stick to your bat every time.

If you put it on the wrong side.

It's very easy to detect stupid speed glue dopers if they get the side wrong.

Have you guys passed?

There's a place in Holborn.

I remember walking past it once, and I was just looking at the wall, and London is full of blue plaques, which tell you about its history.

And up there on the wall, it says that this is where ping pong was invented and patented in, I believe, 1901.

Yeah, it's where

there's a table tennis club there now, isn't there?

Called Bounce, I think it's on that.

Yeah, so like where it supposedly was invented is still where you go to play it.

But

I just couldn't find anything online to verify that, including Bounce's own website, which seems to have have no interest in this remarkable bit of history that it's got connected to it.

To be fair, to Bounce, it's not a museum.

Its aim isn't to tell you the history of ping pong.

It's really a place you go to play fun games.

You don't go to a

bowling alley and expect the history of bowling, do you?

But if it was the home of bowling, if it was the site of Neolithic bowling, it would be remiss of them not to use that as part of their publicity materials, apart from anything else.

Yeah, you're right.

That's why they should employ us for all of their PR.

This is a global game.

This should be be a mecca of a location.

I saw a book that was called Everything You Know is Pong, and it was claiming that ping pong is the most widespread of all the sports, the most important sport that we have.

I mean, you know, the guy was biased.

He was trying to sell a book on ping pong.

Obviously, he went for that line, but I don't know.

It's, you know, historically an amazing location.

Yeah.

Trust me.

Trust me, okay.

Well, that's why I have a ball bag and you guys don't.

So I was reading about 30s table tennis and there used to be a thing allowed called finger spin, which is basically you could, as it sounds, spin the ball with your finger.

That was allowed.

Was that before the rally started?

Or you couldn't like catch the ball and then spin it, could you?

No, as you were serving, you could spin the ball.

And it basically meant you could have an impossible to return serve and the game became...

pointless and they had to universally ban that in 1937 but then there are other changes as well so for example this is from Britannica.

They report that slow or defensive play used to be hugely popular in the field of ping pong.

And really you're just sitting back waiting for your opponent to make a mistake.

But I'm quoting directly here.

Slow or defensive play at one time was so dominant that at the 1936 World Championships in Prague, an hour was needed to decide a single point.

Imagine being in the audience for that match.

Imagine the neckache of looking one side, then the other, then the other.

Do you know how many hits it was, Andy?

Because a couple of weeks ago we mentioned the longest tennis rally of all time, which was

I don't know how many hits it was, but I think the longest tennis rally was about half an hour, wasn't it?

It was, it was 29 minutes.

Was it?

Yeah, so this is twice as long, and table tennis is a fast sport, so I think this might smash that record.

Sounds like in this case, maybe not.

It may have been only 10 hits, they just put it really, really high.

It just got stuck in the rafters at one stage.

I was like, oh, it'll come down eventually.

Yeah, that was that match where the glue went on the wrong side of the paddles, wasn't it?

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy.

My fact is that it takes eight people to do an ultrasound on a Python.

Which one's that?

Is it Eric Idol?

So this is a story that happened at Chester Zoo in 2012, and it was on an extremely big Python.

So maybe with some smaller Pythons, it'll take fewer people.

Maybe with some especially wriggly ones it'll take more.

But this is a good kind of rule of thumb for how long it takes.

It was a snake called Bali, a Python, reticulated Python, which is, I think, the longest kind in the world.

And Bali at the time was reputed to be the biggest snake in Europe.

So pretty exciting.

Needed a health checkup.

And she was 6.6 meters long.

And as a result, they needed eight handlers to move her because she weighed 90 kilos and has the capacity for aggression,

unsurprisingly.

And there are these great photos of them moving the snake all in a big conger line i guess and

they've got her head in a tube it's very funny it's um to keep the snake calm you just put the head in a big old tube and then that stops it i also saw another one in chester zoo there was another snake called jf and they instead of putting the head in a tube they covered their eyes with someone's hands so one of the in this case it was ten people one of them covered their eyes with the hand eight of them held the snake on the table table, and there was a little hole in the bottom of the table, and the tenth person was hiding under the table with the ultrasound.

Oh, okay.

And they kind of shoved it up the hole so you could see on the inside of the snake.

Do they need to hold the snake down while they're doing it?

It's not just for carrying them.

Yeah, most of the people are there to stop it from wriggling away.

Wow.

Because they're strong, aren't they?

They're basically just muscle.

They are strong.

I would not want that gig holding my hand in front of the eyes of a snake that close with your hand right out next to its mouth is madness.

It would bite you.

No, reticulated pythons, they're not venomous.

It's the person who's going to get squeezed who's in trouble.

But it is maybe worth it because you are obviously the eight coolest people in the zoo.

Oh, okay.

Cool as a snake?

What's that?

So the ultrasound guys.

Oh.

I don't think any of us was with you there anymore.

No, I reckon how many listeners will we have of this episode?

A million people.

I reckon of the million people who listened to this episode, possibly

12 would have got that joke.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Write in if you got the ultrasound joke, because we are confident enough that we won't have a bulging post bag resulting from that guy.

I reckon there was more people with me saying cool as a snake, and that's not even a thing.

So many scientists have done bizarre experiments to try and work out the secrets of snake anatomy because they are very confusing animals.

So, bioconstrictors, which are these squeezers, they're the ones who wrap themselves around their prey.

Scientists wanted to work out how long they squeeze for and why, to work out their behavior in the wild.

And they did this by such a grisly experiment.

They put fake beating hearts into dead rats, but dead rats that were still warm, so that the boa constrictor would think, ooh, prey.

And they measured how long the boa constrictors squeeze for.

So they normally squeeze for 20 minutes, which is quite long,

very long time actually.

But when the scientists shut off the fake hearts after 10 minutes, they stopped squeezing soon after that.

They thought, oh, it's safe.

So that's how we know that boas are measuring the heart rate of their prey as they squeeze.

Interesting.

So they don't kill you by squeezing all the air out of you.

They kill you by giving you a heart attack.

Is that right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I read a really interesting thing about snakes that I didn't know, which is that they effectively wear contact lenses, nature's contact lenses, not prescription.

And we know this because obviously we've studied snakes, but a really interesting thing happens to all snakes as a result of this little cap that sits over their eye.

It's a sort of, they don't have eyelids, so it's a sort of protective cap, translucent.

Most snakes in the wild are brown-eyed, yellow-eyed.

A few are blue-eyed, but at some point all snakes go blue-eyed.

And it's part of the shedding process.

When the snake is shedding its skin, it goes through different phases.

And there's a phase that's known as the blue phase.

And the blue phase is when milky fluid builds up underneath the old skin to allow it to slip off.

And as the eyes are a part of that, the eyes have scales, so these ocular scales that sit there, they fill up with this milky blue.

And suddenly every snake at one point just has these crazy, completely blue eyes.

So if you see a snake with...

completely blue eyes, it's about to shed all of its skin.

That's the stage just before it all comes off.

That's really interesting because

I did the why workshop on Radio 2 with Zoe Ball last week, I think, with Alex Bell, and he was talking about this as well just by coincidence and he said that they like they get these milky eyes but also the skin just starts to feel loose around them so if you can imagine like suddenly all your clothes got 10% bigger or something you just kind of feel like you're in the wrong kind of skin and that's how you know it's time to slither out and you slither out of it Alex was saying it's like if you have a sock on and you wiggle your foot until the sock comes off and you drag your foot backwards out of it i usually just pull them off with with my hands.

I suppose they don't have that luxury.

Well, that's very insensitive to taking a snake because they don't have that option.

Pythons, which this fact was about, they eat giant prey, as we've discussed before, and their metabolisms do extraordinary things to digest it.

But they have a very special way to avoid choking because the danger is that when you're eating something massive, it will just block your windpipe.

So some pythons just blob their trachea out of the corner of their mouth.

They vomit up their windpipe, windpipe, essentially, and it hangs out of the corner of their mouth so that they can eat.

Oh my god.

And they can carry on breathing

because their breath

is outside of their mouth.

Exactly.

Very sensible.

So nothing ever goes down the wrong way, basically, if you can do that.

Yeah.

Yeah, just don't leave it on a peanut that's lying on the floor or something.

Exactly.

Like a worm could crawl up there or something, right?

That's true.

I guess that's one good reason why we have it in our throats.

Nothing else can get there that we haven't put in our mouths.

That's a really good point.

You'd feel like such an idiot python, wouldn't you, if you were halfway through swallowing a deer and you accidentally choked because of a worm crawling into your external windpipe?

That's so cool.

Have you heard of the African egg-eating snake?

I love this one.

Okay, where is that from and what does it eat?

Okay, here we go.

It's from Africa and it eats eggs.

But it eats eggs that are way wider than its head.

And it's unbelievable.

You know how you see snakes with a big lump inside of its prey.

It's so funny because it's perfectly egg-shaped, obviously, the lump inside.

But it has to break the eggs somehow, but it breaks them after it's eaten them.

That's the weird thing.

And it does so because it has lumps on the inside of its spine, and that's what it uses to break the shell.

So it has to smash its food against the inside of its own backbone in order to eat it.

Right.

Hey, I found a really wimpy snake that I totally relate to called the hognose snake.

Have you guys heard of the hognose snake?

Hognose snake is a snake that, when it's threatened, most snakes are badass, aren't they?

They rise and they scare you and they're ready for a fight.

The hognosed snake is terrified and basically when it feels it's under threat from a predator, it fakes its own death in front of the predator.

So it starts just kind of like, oh God, you got me, kind of thing.

It starts rolling on the ground on its back, going upside down, its mouth wide open as if it's sort of choking on poison.

It poos itself.

It lays belly up and it's a kind of like secretion that smells really bad, like poo.

And then it just lays there with its mouth open, dead, and just waits for the predator to walk away because a lot of predators want to eat something that's alive.

And also, it's a bit awkward if someone's just shit themselves in front of you.

You are just going to walk away slightly embarrassed, aren't you?

I mean, yeah, Dan,

after we did the Richard Herring show the other night, we did have an altercation with an extremely angry, extremely drunk man.

And I was wondering where you had got those moves from.

And now I know, because you've been reading about the hog-nosed snake.

and I apologise about the smell of the uber on the way back but it was necessary saved our lives

have you guys heard of Grace Olive Wiley

no okay this is an amazing kind of herpetologist and snake expert from history she was the first person to successfully breed diamondback rattlesnakes in captivity but she started off her love of snakes when she worked at Minneapolis Library and she kept snakes in the library but she liked them so much she didn't like them to be caged up so they just kind of slithered around

in her office and stuff like that.

Basically her colleagues didn't like this at all and forced her to leave the library and then so she went to Brookfield Zoo and decided to work there and she just let them out and go wherever they wanted and at one stage 19 snakes escaped and went off into the entire town and the whole town shut down

and so then she got fired from the zoo.

But then she went to California and she became a snake expert And she was a snake trainer for the jungle book and all the Tarzan movies.

A snake trainer for the jungle book?

Because I've seen both jungle books and neither of them involve training any snakes.

What was she doing?

Training the drawings.

I haven't seen this, I must say, but now that you've said that, I do see she was a snake trainer and reptile consultant.

So perhaps she trained the snakes for some of them and she consulted for the animated ones.

She confirmed they do sing.

And then, unfortunately, in 1948, she was famous at this stage.

There was a photographer who came to take a photo of her, and they took a photo with a flash while she was holding a snake.

The snake got spooked, it bit her, and there was only one vial of the correct anti-venom in the local hospital, and it had been accidentally broken.

And she couldn't be saved, and she died.

Oh, my word.

Oh, no.

Well, I mean, I don't want to sound intensive, but she had it coming.

She thought, she genuinely thought that people shouldn't be afraid of snakes and they can't really hurt you unless they're really, really scared.

And I think that is kind of borne out.

You know, it was only because of this massive flash that she died.

Sort of, although 125,000 people a year are killed by snakes, so let's be a bit afraid of them.

That's so interesting, because the stat, I guess, most of us are told is that no one in Australia, where all of the most venomous snakes in the world are, has died in the last 50 years or whatever.

But of course, there are so many countries that, yeah.

Although, apparently, if we're scared of snakes, we're not actually scared of snakes, we're just scared of triangles.

This is a theory based on some of the latest research.

You have diamond-backed rattlesnakes and stuff like that.

They've got those kind of triangular shapes or zigzag shapes on their bodies quite often.

And you'll get snakes that have triangular heads, you know, like cobras sort of have their heads splaying out.

And there was a study that showed children pictures of like snakes with zigzags on them and then snakes without, and then snakes with triangular heads and snakes with rounded heads and then various other shapes and then they asked the kids are these mean or nice and whenever there was a triangle in it or something triangular they said it was mean and we think that the snakes have actually evolved these triangular shapes on them to match our fear to scare us away because we have an understandable fear of sharp stuff like a tooth or a knife or something that could kill us so we're afraid of sharp things.

So the snakes gradually were like, okay, I'll put sharp looking stuff all over my body.

That's really interesting.

Is that why I shit myself whenever I see a toe blue on?

Yeah, and that's why that tobacco in the office was ruined.

I've tasted that sea fell.

I read a paper about something similar, which was that they wired people up with something to tell how much sweat you're producing and also what your heart rate is.

And they showed them pictures of snakes, but they didn't tell them which ones were venomous and which ones were not venomous.

And people's heart rates and stuff went up when they saw the venomous ones and not when they saw the non-venomous ones so you kind of naturally know and they didn't have any previous knowledge of these snakes they just naturally seemed to know which ones were dangerous but what about the squeezy boys sorry the constrictors as in do you not naturally because if you naturally know which ones are venomous that's very useful unless you're in an area which has lots of constrictor snakes thinking oh no he won't harm you look at it i'm not naturally

generally they don't go for humans do they the constrictors very much not very much but i think it does happen sometimes well not according to the snake expert consultant on the jungle book who advised car to constantly be squeezing

i don't buy this triangle thing by the way why are we not scared of triangles then just in nature why have we why are we scared of things that look like triangles that aren't triangles that's a flaw in the study i guess we so know that if you've drawn a triangle on a piece of paper that it's um not dangerous but maybe we are maybe if you look at a triangle your heart rate goes a little bit higher than if you look at a circle i guess they haven't done the study yet Did you not find that your children, when they had those like blocks that you had to put them in, like the triangular block, they weren't scared of it?

Or were they just confused because you were trying to put it in a square hole?

Yes, I was trying to.

I was going, get back, kids, get back.

They never got to have a turn.

And I put a cup over the triangle blocks and I put a sheet of paper underneath and I throw them in the garden.

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

My fact this week is that one of the hardest gemstones to find is called hiddenite, but that is not why it's called that.

Very pleasing.

Yeah.

It is.

This is something that I'd never heard of.

And I think, unless you're a gemstone fanatic, it's not very well known.

It's a type of spodumene, and I'm sure you know what that is,

which is a mineral which contains lithium, which is often sought after because people look for it for things like like phones, you know, use lithium in phones and things like that.

So it's a type of that and it's the rarest type.

So it's only found, or it's only been found so far in America, where it's first found in North Carolina, just there, and then in Madagascar, Brazil, and maybe Afghanistan and China, but only little, little bits.

And yeah, it's called hidonite.

Why is it called hiddenite then?

Yeah, I thought that might be a follow-up question.

And the reason it's called hiddenite is because it was discovered by a geologist called William Earl Hidden or it was discovered by someone who gave it to him and he said oh that looks weird and so he sent it to some experts who identified it and he was actually there in North Carolina in 1879 looking for platinum and he'd been sent by Thomas Edison who wanted to do some some shit with platinum and he didn't find any but he did find hiddenite and he bought a plot of land still up a mine made a whole bunch of money.

He also found another thing that he called Edisonite

and another one called called Macintoshite.

Is that the waterproof diamond?

Yes, well it was named after a guy called J.B.

McIntosh who he'd worked with.

So he was pretty good at finding new stuff and naming it after his mates.

He was.

It is amazing.

The number of mineral names that are bizarre is enormous because there are so many minerals and they all have to be named after something and a lot of them are named after places.

That's very common, so yukonite or whatever it might be.

There is a mineral called taconite, which I love, which is named after the Taconic Mountains in New York.

But then one that I think we've mentioned on QI, the TV show, is Welshite, or Welshite, which is named after Wilfrid Welsh.

There is actually a place called Taco Knight, which is named after a mine

which contains this Taco Knight mineral.

And I went on to, it's really hard to tell what's there on Google Maps because there's no street view on it for some reason.

But I went to a website called Manta.com, which is a listing service for small businesses.

And apparently there is a restaurant there called Taco Night.

Cool by tacos.

Apparently.

If anyone lives in Taco Night, then do let us know if that's true.

Where every night is Taco Night.

You must have that as the slogan.

That's so good.

I've discovered my favorite mineral in the course of this research, and it is a mineral called olivine.

And olivine is a remarkable mineral.

It makes up to 60 to 80% of Earth's upper mantle.

So it's that we have so so much of it.

And the amazing thing about it is that when it's ground up,

it can absorb its own mass of carbon dioxide.

So there are a lot of scientists out there who are trying to use it.

to help with global warming.

Why are we not using it?

Because it's so useful and we have so much of it.

So there is a group that are called Project Vesta who have this idea where they want to grind it down and basically give us green colored sandy beaches all over the world because we can be soaking up the carbon dioxide there.

And supposedly, wave action coming in on the sand actually speeds up the process because it's not as fast as other things like trees and seaweed and so on for absorbing carbon dioxide.

However, there is so much area of land where we don't have those things.

So, why not chuck this stuff on there to help us do that?

And it also de-acidifies the ocean in the process when the waves are coming in.

So, it's this incredibly useful mineral.

Well, get out your buckets and spades, people.

We can all contribute to the fight against climate change so there's another spodumine which hidonizes spodjumine there's another one which kind of caught my eye called Kuntzite

which was named after George Frederick Kuntz who was the chief jeweller of Tiffany and Co.

and he went around the world collecting minerals and his collection was the beginning of the US Natural History Museum stone collection.

Oh was it?

George Kuntz, yeah.

And there's a few amazing things that he did.

There was a big argument in the mineral world about whether there was any jade in europe so there was some ancient peoples who kind of had loads of jade ornaments but no one could find any jade in europe so what that suggested for archaeologists is maybe there was some weird unknown prehistoric jade trading system that we were getting it in from china or something now

People have been looking for decades and decades for jade, but they've never found any.

And one problem is that that unless you polish it, it just looks like green rock, like greenish rock, so it's really hard to find.

Anyway, Kuntz went to Germany and decided he would have a look.

And on his first day of looking, he found a lump of jade that was 2.5 tons, which was more in that single piece of jade than anyone had found, of all the jade that anyone had found in the whole of history before that day.

It was absolutely amazing.

And he later wrote, like, with complete glee, that he had ruined the career of more than one German scholar by just finding this one bit of jade.

Because there are all these experts in this jade trading that must have happened.

And he was like, nope, I've just proved it's not true.

Wow.

He is talked about with such reverence in the gemstone community, the greatest gem finder ever.

And I ended up reading quite a large tract of one of the books he wrote, which is called Shakespeare and Precious Stones.

And it covers every single reference to a precious stone or gem or crystal in all of Shakespeare's works, plus comments about the context.

So, to the extent of like in

Venus and Adonis, the sonnet, he writes, honey-tongued Shakespeare writes of a ruby-coloured portal.

There you go, you've got a ruby mention.

Richard II evolves fair and crystal sky.

But do you know the other cool thing about him, James?

Do you see who he married?

I didn't see who he married, no.

No, I didn't.

He married a gemstone, someone called Opal.

Oh, wow, that's cool.

Not only that, we've mentioned Opal Cuns before.

No, you mentioned her little.

Yeah.

The aviator.

Yeah, the first female aviator to race against men in the 1920s.

She's this huge proponent of female flying, who we've mentioned.

They were married.

In our Amelia Earhart episode.

Yeah.

I can't believe I didn't notice that.

That is amazing.

I love it.

Yeah.

Power couple.

Amazing.

That's awesome.

But a lot of minerals are named after people.

So there have been 5,493 minerals that have been named named in the world.

Half of them are named after people.

So what's that?

About 2,700, something like that.

2,750.

How many do you think are named after women?

I'm going to say 50.

I'm just going to...

More than half.

Surprise us.

It's all of them.

It's amazing.

It's 112.

Okay.

Named after 96 different women.

So a few people, a few women have got two named after them.

But 112 out of 5,493 is not great, is it?

Okay.

One of the world's largest emeralds ever is called Patricia.

Yeah.

It's not a glamorous enough name for an emerald.

It needs to be called Tallulah.

Well, there are such fabulous, yeah, the biggest emeralds in the world have a very mixed ability field of names.

So there's one called the Duke of Devonshire, there's one called 1492, there's one called the Emerald Unguentarium, which is a nearly 3,000-carat vase carved from a single block of emerald.

And then there's one called Patricia, which does feel like it's the poor cousin.

Do we know if it's named after anyone, or did the person just like the name?

It is named after the daughter of the man who owned the mine in which Patricia was discovered.

Oh, well, that's quite good fathering.

There's a mineral called Armalkolite,

which was discovered on the moon.

Armalkolite.

Do you know where the name came from?

What year are we talking?

Is it post-moon landing?

It was found in 1969.

Apollo 11 year.

Year of the moon landing.

Here we go.

Buzz Aldrin.

Is Arm related to Armstrong?

Arm.

Arm Al.

Oh.

Armstrong and Aldrin.

Arm Al Collins.

Arm Al Collins.

Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins.

Aldrin Collins.

He was named after three people, all men, but named after three people, which is quite cool, isn't it?

Arm Al Collite.

Yeah.

That's really cool.

There is a commission on mineral naming.

That's how Arm Alcoite and all the other minerals will have had their names approved.

There is a commission on new minerals and mineral names

because there are these 5,000 and whoever many James said.

And every year they get about 80 applications for a new mineral and then it tests them and it rejects quite a few of the applicants because they're just they're an existing chemical formula and yeah, a new form of an old mineral and so they're not allowed to be uh named.

But that sounds like a fun committee to sit on, I guess.

Yeah.

How many people are really suggesting names?

I guess it's just the p the people who found them, right?

I think there they get very few applications for names from people who haven't found a new

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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 the world record for crushing watermelons with your thighs is three in 7.5 seconds the new record holder courtney olson teaches an eight week course on how to crush watermelons with your thighs

eight weeks eight weeks

more i imagine a lot of that is the preparatory strength building because if not there's a lot of padding in an eight-week course for a seven second record i suppose like you have to explain the history of the watermelon

um Probably that's the first six weeks.

Get the blue plaque up.

Let's see if we can do it in a little bit less than eight weeks on this podcast.

Okay, so let me paint the picture of what actually happens in these videos.

So she sits on the floor, she's got some watermelons by her side, she puts her legs out in front of her and she crosses her ankles, and then she grabs the watermelon, puts it between her legs, and squeezes until it explodes, and then gets the next one, and then gets the next one.

And there are people with stopwatches, and you can see that it has taken her just seven and a half seconds to do that and she's beaten the previous record which was held by a man called Rohala Doshmanziari.

He was a bodybuilder who did it in 2017 and he did it in 10.88 seconds and the previous record for women was 14.65 seconds by a Ukrainian strongwoman called Olga Liaszchuk.

It's a real Fosbury flop moment for the watermelon crushing sport, isn't it?

Because it's so much faster than the previous women's record and the men's.

It is.

It takes a lot of force to do that.

I think it's about 26 stone worth of force, about 364 pounds of force.

So that is like,

what, three quite light people or two quite heavy people or one very heavy person sitting on it.

So it's pretty bloody impressive that she can do it.

But it's still not quite enough, in case you're wondering, to crush somebody's skull.

So if you do come across her and you cross her, she can't crush your skull with her thighs.

That takes about 520 pounds worth of force.

Wow.

But if you are walking home with your watermelon and you're excited for the dessert it's going to provide for your dinner party she can ruin that so yeah she is a danger

watermelons used to be a lot easier to crush uh with your thighs because they used to be about two inches across really early watermelons were tiny yeah yeah yeah when what period i mean a long time ago well they come from africa and we started cultivating them really early like thousands of years ago yeah we have depictions in tutankarmun's tomb don't we of yeah yeah watermelons

But those are big, though.

That's why I'm that's sorry, that's why I was asking, Andy.

I don't know when they were tiny.

So I think basically there are lots of species of watermelons.

The ones that you get in Africa, mostly grown in the wild now, are quite small.

Not quite as small as Andy said, but pretty small.

But then you would get the domesticated ones as well that were bigger.

They have been around for at least 3,500 years because they found some watermelon leaves in an Egyptian tomb and they took a tiny little bit of one of them from Kew Gardens and checked its genes and it had two special genes one of them that makes them have a red flesh and one of them that gets rid of the kind of bitter taste that these smaller ones in Africa have so that we do know that this one that was in a tomb in 3500 years ago was kind of red and very succulent and not bitter it was actually sweet tasting which is yeah yeah and yeah you're Dan's right is the drawing of the one on an Egyptian tomb It might be the one on King Toots, looks like our standard watermelon stripes and everything, doesn't it?

It's kind of amazing.

The reason we started breeding them so early, apparently, is because they were basically used as water bottles, which makes sense.

They're full of water.

But we think that it was a source of water.

So, for instance, when Livingston went to Africa, then he said that the interior of watermelon supplied the place of water for many months of the year in the interior of Africa, in the middle of Africa, when he was traveling there.

And so they used that instead of water.

And in a similar way, we think that they put them on tombs, maybe, people speculate, because it was like a drink to help you into the afterlife.

Quite a long trek into the afterlife, apparently.

You need some water.

And yeah, there's someone, there's an anthropologist who wrote that they had a unique role as a natural canteen, like a natural carton for fresh water.

So are you putting water in there or you're using the natural waters of the watermelon?

Using the water.

Yeah, don't empty the watermelon out of water and then refill it with water.

It's pointless.

Well, because, especially, there was a study at the University of Naples quite recently that thinks that it's better to hydrate with watermelon juice than it is to hydrate with water.

And that's because they are almost completely water, something like well over 90% water, but the extra bits are like sugars and essential salts, which help you to rehydrate.

And basically, it's a bit more similar to your body's composition than actual water.

And the closer a liquid is to the body's composition, the easier it is for it to get it into your cells

according to this study.

It is the most extraordinary texture.

I was genuinely before this fact was sent in, I had a watermelon about two weeks ago, and when I was biting into it, I just thought there is nothing like this.

There is nothing else that I've ever put my put into my mouth that has this kind of texture.

It's so bizarre.

And I guess it's because it's 92 to 94% water that it's

hell.

I mean, pretty much everything is up there in the 90s.

I mean watermelon just has it in the net.

Yeah, yeah, fruits and veg.

Spinach is 94.

Spinach is more than watermelon.

It's not as juicy.

Don't know where that water's been hidden.

Okay.

But yeah, like aubergine, courgette, they're all up in the 90s, aren't they?

I don't know how why we bother eating any of them.

Okay, well then maybe it's not that, but there's something about watermelon texture which is unit's very alien to the rest of food.

In my opinion.

It's almost like it's like a warm ice cube, but not quite as hard, isn't it?

Yeah,

it's like when you crush ice into tiny bits, and it's almost like a weird

thing.

What are we doing?

We're a podcast of facts people don't know.

We're not a podcast that describes in great detail a fruit that everyone's creating.

I just love that.

It's like, just two weeks ago, I had watermelon.

It's like, literally, I had it about two minutes before we came on the show today.

I have a watermelon controversy.

which is about watermelon knockers.

And these are people who test test the ripeness of their watermelons in shops by tapping or knocking or slapping on them.

That wasn't the first use of the word knockers I was thinking of when you said that.

I've almost had that.

No, this is all staying above the

National Watermelon Promotion Board, which is a very austere and important body devoted to the promotion of watermelons in every form, officially advises against knocking on watermelon to test its ripeness.

They advise instead, obviously, the look, lift, turn method, which is where you look at it, you lift it up, test it if it's heavy.

If it's heavy, that's good, and then you turn and you observe the field spot.

Okay, so this is where the watermelon was sitting on on the ground when it was growing.

And an ideal watermelon, the field spot, should be a soft, buttery yellow.

If it's white,

it's too unripe.

It's not ready yet.

If it's gone crazy canary yellow, then it's overripe.

But a perfectly nice, soft, buttery yellow, you should have a good watermelon on the inside.

Very good to know.

Isn't that great that it lets you know?

I had, so two weeks ago I had a banana and it was...

Was this a fruit salad that you were having, Ken?

Because you had a watermelon that two weeks ago as well.

Very healthy two weeks ago you had.

And I was on the brink of opening it and I stopped because it was a bit too green and I thought, how nice.

The banana has let me know that it's not ready yet.

On the outside, it's telling me no.

And same, I didn't know that watermelons had that, so I will, you know,

it's very, very thoughtful fruit.

Alternatively, you can just sit in the fruit stand and crush it between your thighs until it breaks.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

James at James Harkin.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasafish.com.

Do check it out.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Also, a link to the upcoming tour that we are doing later on in 2021.

Do come along, it's going to be really fun.

Until then, though, we'll see you then next week with another episode.

Goodbye.

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