348: No Such Thing As Infinite Toilet Paper
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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming 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 around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.
And in no particular order, here we go.
Starting with you, Andy.
My fact is that Sir Roger Penrose, the mathematician who's just won the Nobel Prize, once designed a theoretically infinite geometrical pattern called the Penrose tiles.
He then sued a toilet paper company for stealing it and creating a theoretically infinite toilet paper roll.
Why would you need an infinite toilet?
Well, I suppose everyone else is hoarding toilet paper at the moment, aren't they?
An infinite one would be really fun.
Okay, so basically, Roger Penrose, he's a brilliant, brilliant mathematician.
In the 1970s, he invented this thing called Penrose tiling, which basically combines two different rhomboids that can be repeated ad infinitum.
This pattern never repeats itself.
It's really amazing.
He had just invented them for fun as well.
He does lots of stuff like this for fun.
He's fun as well as being a mathematician.
But a few years later, in fact, more than 20 years later, actually, after he invented it, his wife was in the supermarket and she saw some Kleenex loo paper and it looked just like his.
She thought, I know that pattern.
And she bought some and she took it home.
And the firm, the firm which owned Kleenex, Kimberly Clark, they had come up with toilet paper which copied it.
And he sued.
Wow.
He sued her.
Successfully?
Well, he won't talk about what happened in court.
It was amicably settled outside of court.
Yeah.
And I think the condition was you can't say, Roger Pemrose, that they gave you 20 million quid or whatever, whatever the tapestry was.
If he asked for like one pence every time they used his pattern, and this is a pattern that never ever repeats infinitely, then you could just get all the money in the world.
The reason it's useful for a toilet paper to have this pattern is you want your toilet paper to be quilted, right?
And so it's going to have a pattern going throughout it where you have some bits that have got indentation and some places that don't.
So let's imagine you have just
diamond that goes throughout the entire roll.
So your diamond keeps coming up every now and then, and you have it on the whole roll.
Once you wrap it around a toilet paper holder, then the diamonds in some places are going to be on top of each other.
And so it's going to get thicker in those places and it's going to be thinner in other places, which makes it less efficient to package.
Now, if you have a pattern which never repeats, then it means that you're never going to have those kind of indentations that kind of go over each other.
So it makes it better for a type of toilet paper if you want quilted toilet paper.
Oh, wow.
It's basically the perfect toilet paper he invented, but he didn't
see it that way.
Well, that's the thing with mathematics, isn't it?
Like, you just study maths for the sake of it because it's beautiful and because the numbers do amazing things.
And you never know what the applications are going to be.
You never know if it's going to be maybe, you know, infinite amounts of energy for the entire world or just a quite nice bit of toilet paper.
Yeah.
Because he's denying the world the best version of toilet paper that we could possibly have.
He pretty much is.
This was quite a big case at the time.
I mean, big.
Big for 1997.
But like marketing week
for 1997.
Yeah.
No, sorry.
Were court cases famously usually very small in 1997?
I just couldn't think of much else.
I couldn't think of much else that happened in 1997.
Tony Blair came in in 1997.
That's true.
Big.
That's true.
But I remember not really being on the front page of the newspapers because it was all about this toilet paper case.
Yeah.
The Hong Kong handover barely got it mentioned, didn't it?
Okay, all right, look, we can all name something that happened in 1997.
Well done, everybody.
But
when it happened, there's a publication called Marketing Week, which writes all about this.
And they wrote this excoriating editorial.
They said, and it was about quilted toilet paper, they said, the decline of our island kingdom dates almost precisely from our ceasing to use robust lavatory paper, shiny on one side and dull on the other, and favoring scented absorbent toilet tissue.
A nation that dabs rather than stoically abrades its bottom has become a feat and can never be at peace with itself
wow do you think that um do you think the bottoms are now a bit bigger than they used to be because they're not slowly eroded away by toilet paper 100 i do think that yeah
but we don't did it say did it say toilet paper had turned fragrant because we don't do that anymore It did say scented absorbent toilet tissue.
Yeah, you see, when was that written?
97.
97.
There you go.
So So those days are gone.
I think the author of that would be proud of where we've got to because it was a thing in the sort of 70s, 80s, 90s.
Slightly fragrant toilet paper, often a really disgusting pastel colour.
And we have reverted a bit to non-smelling lu-roll in pure white.
So I think we're working our way back to the splintery twigs of the past in our defence.
These tiles that Penrose discovered, according to our all-of-or-good friend Will Bowen.
So Will Bowen, who's one of the QILs, he studied mathematics at Oxford, and his teacher was Penrose.
As in Penrose, he was the head of maths when Will was at university.
Oh, my goodness.
And he says that Penrose broke his arm and that he was in hospital because it's quite a bad break.
And it was while he was kind of lay in hospital convalescing that he realized that these kind of tiles might exist.
And he came up with his.
Oh, I thought, sorry, Penrose broke his own arm, not Will's.
I thought that was a, they had a big barber on.
He was a He was a tough professor, but he was, you know, he broke it in an infinite number of places.
Sorry, go on.
Penrose is lying in hospital.
Yeah, he's lying in hospital, and he just has this kind of idea that, whoa, what if, what if you can have tessellating patterns, so you can put squares all after each other and they'll, they'll go together and there'll be no gaps in between.
You can do the same with triangles, you can do the same with lots of different shapes.
But what he thought was, what if you could make things tessellate, but they never repeated?
And he came up with this idea of using these kind of pentagon things.
But while he was in hospital, so it's kind of cool.
And it's that the pattern is that it does, it tessellates perfectly with these two different shapes.
Yeah.
But it never, so there are no gaps.
And also you only use two shapes and they all, they repeat forever.
Yeah, usually they're shapes known as kites and darts.
Because that's kind of what they look like.
And you'll just keep putting one next to the other, next to the other, next to the other with no gaps.
But no matter how many millions and millions of miles you go, you'll never have a repeating pattern.
And that was a revolution in actual floor tiling.
He's basically an interior designer, isn't he?
A glorified interior designer.
Actually, at the Mathematical Institute of Oxford, one of the bits of paving is made of Penrose tiles.
So really, that makes sense.
He did, so he wasn't the first person, I don't think, to come up with the idea of trying to have a never-repeating pattern of tiling.
But people were doing this in the 1960s.
And so people thought that in the end, a pattern of shapes that you're trying to fit together without any gaps, as in tiled together, the shapes will always end up eventually repeating themselves.
And then a bunch of mathematicians discovered that there's a specific set of 20,426 different shapes.
that if you combine all of them, eventually they won't repeat.
So they were like, okay, as long as you've just got over 20,000 different shapes, stick them all together, you'll never have the pattern repeating.
And all Penrose did was took that figure down to two.
And I don't know if he went down one by one, eradicating one shape after the other.
But yeah, guys have tried this kites and darts thing.
It's amazing that the mathematicians were doing this kind of thing, right?
It's a really easy to understand concept, just finding new shapes that fit next to each other.
Obviously, quite complicated mathematics, but you always think that mathematicians are just working with all sorts of numbers and symbols and stuff, not shapes like that.
That's why I was like, yeah.
Have you guys ever heard of Marjorie Rice?
No.
Marjorie Rice.
So there's a guy called Martin Gardner who you might have heard of, and he did like a lot of columns.
He was like a popular mathematician.
And he wrote once in one of his columns that only certain types of pentagons can perfectly tile on a flat surface.
And they were all known.
So there's only a few different types of pentagons that can tessellate and we know what they all are.
And this lady called Marjorie Rice, she only had a high school education.
She's in America.
And she thought, I bet there's some more.
And so she started cutting things out, like cutting out these pentagons and trying to find different pentagons that would fit in this way.
And she worked on it all the way through her free time.
This was during the 1970s.
All the time she had free, she would just try and come up with new ways of working out pentagons that would be able to tessellate.
And when her husband and her children came home, she would hide them because she was so embarrassed that this is what she was doing.
And she came up with her own notation, her own mathematics that would describe these things.
And eventually, she sent the results to Gardner and said, Look, I found all these new pentagons which will tessellate.
And he's like, Holy shit, this is like, this is like new maths, and you've only got high school education.
And he sent it on to some experts, and they saw her notation and they were like, Oh, this just looks like gibberish.
But the more they looked at it, the more they realized that this was a new type of mathematics that would tell you these new kind of pentagons that will tessellate.
And she's discovered more than 50 pentagons that tessellate.
Wow, Jesus.
What do we do with that kind of information?
Tiling.
Absolutely.
You tile floor.
But it's literally just for tiling.
It's yeah, cool.
No, it's really.
There's other stuff.
There's really loads of things.
Like, for instance, the Penrose ones, they later discovered that you can now have crystals which have this same non-repeating pattern.
And those crystals have amazing properties.
Like they're amazing superconductors.
You can use them to put on like non-stick pans and stuff like that.
So there's always loads of amazing things that come out of these things, which you never think they're going to come, but because it's a new, beautiful kind of maths, there's always something useful.
Those crystals, they are so cool.
So I think, okay, I'm probably going to get this wrong because it's quite complicated, but there was a crystallographer called Alan Mackay who said that if you put atoms at the corners of the Penrose tiles and then you bounce X-rays off those, right?
The resulting reflections form the shape of a perfect crystal.
Right.
Okay.
I think I understand that just about.
But that material was discovered and called a quasi-crystal.
So Penrose had basically invented a new, like inventing a new species of animal or plant, and then that's discovered in the real world.
Exactly.
It's like you're, um, it's like you're an author and you just make up a new animal and then they go around the corner and it's just there.
It's so weird.
It's completely mad.
But I think this whole fitting shapes together thing might be the back door into maths.
If anyone's looking for an easy way to a Nobel Prize in maths, because there's this woman who doesn't even have an education.
Even we understand fitting shapes together.
Penruse came up with the basis of his idea when he was nine, he says.
And you can like, what can you do when you're nine?
He said that he was having a chat with his dad and he asked, can you fit regular hexagons together to make a sphere?
As you do, the standard kind of question you ask when you're nine years old.
And his dad said.
His dad said, no, you can't fit regular hexagons together until they make a sphere.
You have to include some pentagons.
And he said, that was the moment.
He thought that was a huge surprise to me.
And that's the moment I realized I had to go into the business of fitting shapes together.
And this is another one of those weird true things.
And that's the easiest way to picture this is thinking of a football, right?
You know, footballs are designed with little hexagonal shapes all over them.
But the only way you can make a football a sphere is by having at least 12 pentagons hidden in there somewhere.
So if you look at a football, each pentagon has hexagons, five hexagons around it, isn't it?
Yeah, that's a special kind of hatred of Matt Parker, isn't it?
The mathematician.
Yes.
Our friend Matt Parker.
Yeah.
Whenever he sees a picture of a football on like a signpost or something, if there's no penticons on there, he gets furious.
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah.
Just on that, we should say that it may not be a complete backdoor to a Nobel Prize because Penrose's Nobel Prize is for his work on black holes,
where he used maths to prove that the formation of black holes is an inevitable consequence of Einstein's general theory of relativity.
So you can't just cut out some shapes and then expect them with a novel.
You have to prove that black holes can exist.
We can't just design a lurule and hope for the best.
So Roger Penrose is 89 years old and he has just won this Nobel Prize.
And for someone who's so incredibly clever, he was a bit thick about understanding that there was an award on the way.
He got a message from his PA saying that someone, a strange person had called up and asked for his number.
And he says later on, that's when he should have, you know, smelt a fish is his words.
He should have seen someone who's coming.
Then someone called him up from Sweden and asked him to go on hold on the phone.
So he waited and waited, but then he got bored.
So he hung up.
So the Nobel Committee had to recall him in order to give him his award.
But yeah, just didn't spot it coming.
So funny.
Wow.
Wow.
Well, did you guys see the video of the people who won the Nobel Prize for Economics this year?
No.
No.
No, it's the greatest thing to come out of 2020, which I know is not a difficult competition for God.
The Nobel Prize.
Like 1997.
Whoa, what a
The Nobel Prize for Economics went to these two people, Robert Wilson and Paul Milgram, who sort of redesigned auctions, which is apparently this revolutionary thing.
And anyway, usually what happens with the Nobels is they're decided in Sweden, and a lot of the winners are in America.
And so they call up Americans in the middle of the night.
And there's often stories of them being woken up in the middle of the night.
So they called up these guys and they called Wilson, got through to him.
Well, at first, they couldn't get through because he switched his phone off, thinking it was a nobody.
And so they they called his wife and his wife woke up Wilson, said, Hey, it's the Nobel Committee.
I reckon I know what it's about.
So Wilson's answer was like, Thanks very much.
And then the Nobel Committee said, Hey, I don't suppose you know your, you know, your partner from 30 years ago when you came up with this idea, Paul Milgram.
We can't get through to him.
Do you have any idea how we could?
And Wilson said, well, actually, we live opposite each other.
She wanted me to go knock on his door.
And so there's CCTV footage from the the door cam of paul milgram's camera of this guy and he's in his 80s wilson this guy banging on his door like ringing on the doorbell and he's like paul paul you yep and that's sort of like really bad connection and he's just woken up in the middle of the night it's like what yeah you've won the nobel prize yeah can you answer your phone and it's just the most bizarre footage i'm so annoyed by the way you told that story because when you said he was banging on the door i was just about to jump in with did he have no bell But then you went or ringing the doorbell.
Oh no!
Damn it completely screwed you over.
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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anne.
My fact this week is that Washington State's Department of Agriculture recently lost track of a single hornet they were trying to follow.
Specifically, the Asian giant hornet, also known as the murder hornet, which has been hanging out in Japan and China for a very long time, but arrived in America in October this year and caused absolute panic because, you know, it's an invasive species and also really hurts if you get stung by it and it destroys bee species.
So the State Department said, we've got to catch one and we've got to catch one that's going to lead us back to the hive, to the nest.
And so they came up with all these ideas of getting it.
So they caught one hornet, I think, and attempted to super glue or double-sided sticky tape a tracking device to it but that didn't work and eventually they trapped one by strapping a bit of dental floss around its stomach and attaching a tracking device to that like a belt and then chasing it
trying to chase it down but they lost it disappeared because they fly and they're fast and they're hard to chase wow well they used they used bluetooth that was one way they lost it originally yeah in an early experiment the radio trans the transmitter they had attached to it was a bluetooth one and it only works over a few hundred feet so if it gets out of your range, then you're stuffed.
Yeah.
The chief entomologist did also say it actually does fly a lot faster than we realized we could run.
And so yeah, it was based on having to keep up with this bit of signal.
You need a Judas insect, they call it, to lead you back to the hive.
This is what they say it is.
So to get your hornet in the first place, you leave out some orange juice and some rice wine, which they love because it's so sugary.
And then you can trap it.
And that's what it's called, the Judas insect.
It's interesting because they come over from, is it Japan or China or somewhere?
From Japan, isn't it?
Japan.
Is that why they like rice wine?
Like, because they're used to it in Japan.
I do not know whether it's Japan's specific food.
I don't know whether the taste of the insects are the same.
It's a good thing.
I like it.
I like the theory.
So the big problem with these hornets, right, is that the bees and so on in America don't know how to deal with them at all because they've not had them as part of their life.
And the name murder hornet is applied not because they're dangerous to humans, they are dangerous to humans, but really it's applied properly because of how dangerous they are to the bees.
They can go into their nests and basically just decimate within minutes.
They just rip heads off, arms off, everything off, and it's a bloodbath in there.
They can kill 40 European bees in a minute.
Like these are absolutely insane.
That's insane.
People do call them murder hornets, but entomologists are furious about that.
They do not like you calling these murder hornets because it's just bad PR.
They're just hornets.
They're just animals.
They're doing, you know, they're doing what hornets do.
And okay, in America, they are an invasive species.
And in Canada, but in Japan, they use them to work against pests.
As in, if bees, if pests come into their fields, they can use these hornets to get rid of them.
What kind of pests are you getting rid of, though?
Well, I can only imagine it's lots of bees because that seems to be what they do.
But no, it isn't.
I think hornets, these hornets, they eat all insects.
So
they do like the tasty tasty North American bees quite a lot.
But if there are any other insects there, then they'll eat those as well.
So the other name you can call them, I think in America, they're quite often called giant Asian hornets.
But there is an entomologist called Akito Kawahara who says that really you shouldn't call them that either because Asian can have meanings like Asian flu and stuff like that.
So you're kind of taking a bad thing and you're giving it that epithet.
So you shouldn't really do that.
So really just giant hornets or large hornets that's what he says just call them big hot big old hornets
in japan they get called giant sparrow hornets which is pretty terrifying um but i think there's a weird thing because the murder hornet thing is in japan they're not called murder hornets or rather the word that gets applied to them just kind of means killer hornets and that's because in the japanese language the word for kill and murder are the same i think so they don't so the the much more pejorative version is the one that's made its way into
English,
the much more evocative name.
Killer Hornet's obviously also not a great name to have.
But they kill up to 50 people every year, like humans in Japan, especially.
And they have this sting, which if you're wearing a normal beekeeping suit, it's still strong enough to go through this beekeeping suit and it can kill you.
So one of the world experts always wears a hazmat suit instead.
Well, I got, I was really excited to realize that we, after I found this fact, I was just looking through podcast emails to see if anyone's ever mentioned hornets.
And we very recently got contacted by this guy called Conrad Berube,
who is the guy who took out the first hornet nest in North America when it arrived last year.
So it came to Canada.
It was in British Columbia.
And so he's this expert and he published this.
paper on it.
And one of the things he said is that when he's chasing them around, he wears a Kevlar vest and he wore two pairs of trousers.
He wears braces that are built to ward against chainsaw injury and then he wears his beekeeping gear.
He still got stung quite a bit and he said that it was extremely painful, but he's a beekeeper so he suspects that for normal people who aren't used to being stung, it'd be real agony.
But isn't that cool?
A podcast fan is the guy who took out the first nest in North America.
He also said incidentally
that he would never use the M phrase.
He doesn't like to use the M phrase, the murder hornet phrase.
You've got to be very politically correct with these hornets, it turns out.
I know.
That guy, did he hoover them up?
Because they have vacuum cleaners that they use for insect special ones.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
Did the vacuum.
I think this might have been him.
Because was this August 2019 that they arrived in North America?
He said that the hornets were so big that they wouldn't fit in the nozzle of his vacuum cleaner.
That is terrifying.
That was in the Vancouver area, I think, that first one last year.
And they found the first one in the United States this year, which was in Washington.
And again, they used the vacuum cleaner to suck that one away.
And it was done by an entomologist called Chris Looney.
Nice.
I hope he lived up to his name and just went in wearing boxer shorts,
bare-chested.
So Looney said, because we've been talking about how people are very scared of getting the sting and how it can penetrate.
He's not so much scared of the sting.
What he's more petrified about is the squirty venom that they're able to shoot at you.
And that's another thing that you need to worry about.
So they shoot venom out at you, and that can really burn badly.
It can give nerve damage to the eye.
And so for him, that's the more intimidating thing than the sting itself that he's looking out for.
I have to say, it feels like entomologists who keep saying, no, they're just large hornets are fighting a slightly losing battle here.
Do you know how you trap them if you've got them in your home?
I think I would move house.
Good luck in the estate agency stage, mate.
Good luck with the viewings.
Under a bowl?
Well, you can use a bowl, but the thing you need to put in the bowl is prawns.
They love prawns, especially during breeding season when they're going for a slightly more protein-y mix in their diet.
Oh, really?
Wait, but they surely, I know they're big, but they're not big enough or good enough at swimming to be hunting prawns in the wild, are they?
I think they very rarely take down full prawns in the wild, but they do eat meat, don't they?
They're meat eaters.
A prawn is basically an insect of the sea, isn't it?
So maybe, you know, it has a similar taste to insects.
Yeah.
I have eaten insects, but I've never eaten prawns, prawns so i don't really know what prods taste like but see that is the reverse of most people's experience of life yes it's true i've eaten prawns but i don't think i've eaten insects i swallowed a fly once on my bike but it wasn't the same how did you get rid of that fly
no we can't go down this road we don't have the time
um in japan where they are not talked of as pejoratively one of the reasons could be that the bees in japan have evolved to deal with them much better haven't they so they have this amazing way of killing them them, which the European bees have not figured out.
So what Japanese honeybees do is they, if they see an Asian giant hornet coming towards them, instead of going out to attack it, which is what the European bees do when they get decimated, they retreat back into their hive.
The hornet comes in, and then a massive crowd of them, so hundreds of bees, swarm it and then they vibrate around it, giving this sort of giant hug.
And they vibrate and vibrate and vibrate so that it raises the temperature so much that the hornet dies.
And it has to be quite specific because a hornet dies, I think, at about 47.2 degrees C and the bees will die if it gets about one or two degrees hotter than that.
Oh, really?
They've got to be real thermostats in that situation.
Because that's what our theme tune's about, isn't it, Dan?
That's right.
If anyone wants to find the full version of our theme tune called Wasps,
that is the story in the lyrics about how that happens.
Of course.
Is it like a metaphor or something for lyrics, Dan?
I've realised, I've heard those lyrics obviously hundreds of times, but I've never really thought.
Yeah, it's the idea.
I mean, Ash Gardner, who wrote it, will know better, but the way I always interpret it is that you need all of your friend bees to kill the hornet.
You all need to come together and hold on to each other in order to get past this terrible foe.
And in the same way, humans, when we come together, we can achieve anything.
Is that it?
That's what I always thought of it.
That's really nice.
It's time we get together, show what we can do.
You hold on to me, and I'll hold on to you.
And then we'll kill this hornet.
Yeah.
Down with the murder hornets.
Japan has an annual wasp festival.
This is cool.
It's called the Kushihara Hebo Matsuri.
So Kushihara is the village, and Hebo means wasp.
And you have to bring a wasp nest to the festival.
So the price is for the heaviest wasp nest, but it's obviously quite hard to bring a wasp nest.
So this is how you do it you have to attach a bit of white paper to a tiny sliver of fish right and the wasp wasps love meat they will that will swoop in and it'll grab the bit of fish and it flies off but you can see the paper because you've attached the paper to a fish so you follow this little bit of paper flying through the air that takes you back to the nest and then you have to carefully dig it out feed the wasps raw meat to grow them so that they build a big strong nest and then you eventually bring out this whole nest box and you you bring it to the festival.
Oh, Christ.
I think we should just say, for people at home, don't go near a wasp's nest because they are dangerous, aren't they?
Wasp's nests.
You can get really badly stung.
Yeah, but if you really want to go to this festival, I mean, who's headlining the Japanese festival?
Could be wasps.
It's just more giant wasp nests.
Exactly.
I was going to say, even bigger warning: do not go to the wasp festival.
Certainly, don't get the train there on the day that all the competitors are heading there as well.
In answer to your question, who's headlining the wasp festival?
I think it's Sting.
In the medieval times,
a peasant who lived near the French village of Cambrai dreamed that he got a divine revelation from a swarm of bees entering his anus.
That is putting a positive spin on what for most people would be quite a negative experience.
A swarm of bees went to his anus.
Did he enter himself into that big wasp competition?
To clarify,
to clarify for a second, I think he dreamed that a swarm of bees went into his anus
and that the bees in the dream had given him a divine revelation about the evil clergy.
I don't think.
But so, oh, okay.
So they spoke to him from within his ants.
Yes.
Inside the dream, they spoke to him by flying into his bossom, and they told him a divine revelation.
Okay.
Okay.
It's not how you'd assume that God would communicate with you, is it?
But he does, he works in mysterious ways.
Very mysterious.
I think they had to coin that phrase just for this specific revelation.
Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is James.
Okay, my fact this week is that two years after the release of the first James Bond movie, an actual British spy called James Bond was discovered in Poland.
Incredible.
So good.
Amazing.
Who would have thought it?
Was it a response to the films?
Was it them saying we're going to name all our spies James Bond?
Oh, like Spartacus or something.
That would have been exactly.
There's a suggestion of that.
Now, the thing is, this was in the Cold War, and we are learning more stuff.
Like, it gets declassified, but it's still kind of sketchy what people knew and what people were doing and all that kind of thing.
So, we're kind of piecing things together.
But they found this file that the Polish Security Service put together during the Cold War about this guy called James Albert Bond.
And he went to Poland and ostentatiously started flirting with women and hanging around nuclear power plants and stuff like that.
I don't know exactly what he did, but he was acting very, very obviously like a spy.
And there's a suggestion that the British might have sent him over and deliberately given him that name so that the Polish had to use their resources investigating him while perhaps some other covert stuff was happening we don't know that we don't know whether he was just on holiday in Poland and just happened to be there and everyone's just kind of put one and one together and got three.
His wife seems to think that there might have been something going on.
He's unfortunately not with us anymore, so we can't ask him.
So
who knows?
So many, so many James Bonds out there.
So there was a census.
There was a survey done by a website, so census website, which found 7,672 James Bonds in history with all sorts of jobs.
They were mostly dull,
you know, clerks and things.
There were some orchid growers, though.
It was fun.
And in the 1920 census, there was someone who was called Goldfinger.
Goldie Finger.
Goldie Finger.
Goldie Finger.
Yeah, that's G-O-L-D-E, Gold.
Yeah.
Do we know what that person did?
Were they a villain?
As a profession?
I don't think so.
I don't know their profession.
There's a Wikipedia page, obviously, if you put James Bond in and you go for the Bond that's not the character, you get a few notable Bonds.
And so there's a few.
There's a Speedway Racer.
There is a naval officer.
And there's a few other.
What's interesting is most of them...
at some point in the article it says their nickname was 007 and i think every single one of them the same nickname poor thing to their lives if they were after the movies But obviously, the most notable one is the
bird watcher, the ornithologist, James Bond, who the character was named after.
Yes, indeed.
Who they met, I think, didn't they, in the end?
And
actually, the James Bond, the bird watcher, said he loved being James Bond because apparently it helped him get through passport control, which does make me think that passport control in the 60s or whatever was quite a lot more lax.
If he was just saying, my name's James Bond.
Do you think he gave them the passport and they saw the name and he just tapped to the side of his nose and went, better let me in, guys?
Yeah.
And all the security went, God, this must be a thing that they forgot to tell me about.
I'll let him through.
Ian Fleming once wrote to the other James Bond's wife and said that, you know, apologising that he'd stolen.
the husband's name and he said perhaps one day your husband will discover a particularly horrible species of bird which he would like to christen in an insulting fashion by calling it ian fleming
very nice There's a theory that, a very new theory, that actually it wasn't based on James Bond, the ornithologist, that was just a cover by Ian Fleming to protect the person it was based on.
And this is because a new thing came to light in 2018.
A guy called Stephen Phillips from Swansea was looking into his grandfather's records, and his grandfather's called James Bond.
And there were documents that had just been declassified that showed that his grandfather was an SOE, a special operations executive agent in World War II.
And he just signed the Official Secrets Act just before D-Day.
So he was clearly involved in that in some way.
And so this guy, Stephen Phillips' grandson, reckons it's likely Ian Fleming would have met him because they were both hanging out in the spy world around that time.
And then thought, James Bond, great name.
I'd better not say I was inspired by this spy because I don't want to spill the beans.
So I'll find another James Bond to claim it was based on instead.
So that's the theory.
And the real James Bond ended up working as a lollipop man in Swansea.
So
that's the obvious version of James.
It's been such an exciting crossing, a Pelican crossing to cross that.
Can you imagine?
Gunfire, car chases.
The lollipop was actually a bazooka that he would have given in his feeding car.
There's a guy called James Bond in Walsall, a council worker in Walsall.
He used to be called David Fern.
And much like that guy who changed his name to Isle of Spam the other week.
I don't know if you remember him.
David Fern from Walsall has changed his name to James Bond, but as a middle name, he's included all the Bond film titles.
This was in the newspapers in 2006.
So if he's ever stopped and they say, what's your name?
He would say, the name's Bond.
James Dr.
No from Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, you only have lived twice on Her Majesty's Secret Service, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Die another day, Casino Royale, Bond.
Does he have to change his name again by depot every time a new film is released?
I think that's why they haven't released the new one yet because he hasn't gotten that one
wow
you really choose a path of embracing it or really hating it don't you there was there's actually a documentary did you guys see this a documentary called the other fellow made by this cloak called matthew bowyer which is about other people with the name james bond who went around the world interviewing them and the vast majority basically find it incredibly annoying There was one guy who said the most annoying thing is that at least four times a week, people come up to him and sing the Bond Bond theme tune but easily half the time they attempt to do that they sing the Mission Impossible theme tune instead
brilliant there was one there was a Canadian lawyer who was quite nice he was called James Bond and he always hated it because of all the jokes and stuff and then eventually he got married the year before they made the documentary and the guy he married said look there's no way I'm not calling you James Bond so he always went by Jim Jim Bond he said there's no way I'm not calling you James Bond and so now he embraces it and he calls his husband Moneypenny and always orders vodka martini shaken, not stirred.
And I think that's the way to go.
So Sean Connery, obviously very sadly, passed away recently.
Nice little James Bond connection from his earlier life is that Connery used to deliver milk.
He was a milkman.
And he used to deliver milk to Fetti's school in the UK.
And that is where the fictional James Bond went to.
That's insane.
Yeah.
He was a model for fictional James Bond.
He would have been doing it because when was Connery born?
1930.
He might have been doing it at the time when Bond was at that school.
He might have been delivering it to his fictional self without knowing it.
He has a sort of a billion jobs, didn't he?
Yeah,
it kind of implied that he couldn't stick at anything in a way.
But one of the jobs that I like is the fact that he worked as a life drawing model because it means that we have an almost entirely naked picture of Sean Connery in his very early days available.
And bizarrely, he worked as a life drawing drawing model and the quite famous arts promoter and artist Richard DeMarco drew him.
So you can see Sean Connery and he's wearing this sort of brown willy sack, like a tiny, what do you call like a posing?
Like a posing pouch.
A posing pouch.
Yeah.
I mean call it a willy sack if you like.
It's a willy sack.
Are you sure it's a willy sack and not just he's got very, very weird genitals?
I couldn't say 100%.
I didn't zoom in closely enough.
It's worth taking a look.
Yeah, that sounds like the artists in the class just got prudish when they got down there.
That will do.
Yeah, just a brown blur.
He was supposed to be Gandalf,
wasn't he?
But he was offered 15% of the box office receipts, which would have given him $450 million.
And he turned it down because he didn't understand the script.
And then they interviewed him later and he said, I've read the book.
I read the script.
I saw the movie.
I still don't understand it.
50%.
Instead, he made the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as his last film.
What a different film to go out on.
That was his last film, really.
Yeah, he retired after that because, I mean, it is a bit of a honker.
He was a member of the SNP.
a sort of card-carrying member.
And the membership number they gave him, Davolo Serbin.
Amazing, as if that wasn't used already.
Do they not even have seven members?
They had to kick an extremely long-serving, loyal person out
in order to give it to you.
You know, um, Margaret Thatcher was offered the passport 007, wasn't she?
We might have said that before, but she said no, that's silly, and they gave it to someone incredibly boring instead.
It was someone like some random lollipop man in Wales.
Was it Jeff?
I mean, that would make your day.
Was it Jeff Hoon, did you say?
It was someone.
Who's the MP who said Jeff?
M-H-O-O-N?
That's right.
He spent some time in his life sleeping in a coffin.
Oh, wow.
Is that because he worked, didn't he work as a funeral director or a grave digger or something?
No, not nearly that senior.
He worked as a coffin polisher.
You've given him seven promotions.
I think he worked as a coffin polisher because he was friends with this guy that he did bodybuilding with,
universe mr scotland archie brennan and he said archie brennan suggested he get into coffin polishing to earn some extra money and there was an interview with someone who is his old workmate in the warehouse where they where they polished the coffins and made them and it's this guy called tommy walk who said he noticed that sean young sean wasn't going home at night he was sleeping in the coffins so he was just having a bit of a bit of a rough time at that period of his life.
I think I'd be a bit worried about Mr.
Universe or Mr.
Scotland polishing the coffins because he'd be so strong he'd go right the way through it
I love that you just corrected me about giving a promotion to Sean Connery in that company and then immediately gave Mr.
Scotland the Mr.
Universe title.
Exactly.
Well, to Sean Connery, Scotland was the universe Dan, so I think it's what he would have wanted me to say.
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Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.
My My fact this week is in 1970, burglars managed to successfully get past an unpickable door lock and steal American government documents by tacking a note to it a few hours beforehand that read, please don't lock this door tonight.
So this came from a really, really cool book that was published called The Burglary, The Discovery of J.
Edgar Hoover's Secrets by Betty Medziger.
And the book talks about one of the great moments of being able to expose the FBI for some hidden secret operations that they were conducting in America by a group that were known as the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI.
Random group of people who decided to make it their mission to infiltrate the FBI and steal these documents.
But there was a whole scene of these sort of anti-war and anti-government activists that had been operating in the States, going around and breaking into various buildings.
And they broke into the FBI offices, took a thousand classified documents, and they sent it to all the newspapers.
And the Washington Post were the first to sort of publish them and show that there was secret spying that was going on under J.
Edgar Hoover's government and really kind of tore him down a lot.
So, yeah, this unpickable lock was just an earlier mission where they were trying to get some draft papers for the Vietnam War and steal them so that people couldn't be drafted.
And did the people in the offices explain why they had read the note and decided that that was a legit reason to leave the door open?
Because I can't think of a single ordinary circumstance where you would request that people don't lock a door overnight.
Yes.
I would immediately obey the sign.
If there was a sign on the door saying, please don't lock this door, I'd think, oh, well, someone has a good reason.
That is so good to know, and I intend to take advantage of that kind of experience in the future.
Was it that the cleaners, maybe?
The cleaners were coming around after the office was shut, and they would normally lock up, but they thought that someone in the office had left that note.
That might be it.
Yeah.
I don't
know, Sarah.
Well, they couldn't believe it worked, by the way.
They got there and they're like, oh my God.
And they almost toyed with the idea of leaving a thank you note on the door and then they thought no that's that's going too far they might recognize the handwriting i like the idea of um leaving notes burglars leaving notes generally which they do sometimes do they sometimes leave apology notes it seems to be quite a common thing my friend's granny was actually robbed recently and they left an apology note saying sorry for stealing your stuff and there was one there was a really nice story this year in February in North Carolina where someone who worked in a salon came to the salon the next day and it was clear someone had broken in, but couldn't find that anything had been taken.
And then she found a note that said, as I left your salon with all the stuff I'd stolen, and then with the list of all the stuff this person has stolen, I had an epiphany of how hard you work for your business.
And I returned everything I've taken.
Here's everything I've returned.
Please forgive me.
I'm ashamed and disgusted at myself.
And then brought it all back.
See, that I think is better than leaving a note which says, sorry for stealing your stuff, which I have gone ahead and done anyway.
That's baloney.
It feels like the apology is a little bit empty in the first one, doesn't it?
Yeah, it does.
It absolutely does.
I would leave a note saying sorry about the poo, but then not leave the poo and say
the rest of their time there.
Yeah.
Pooh's happened a lot, right?
Apparently, someone did a
scientific paper on not leaving it as a dirty protest, but needing to have a poo while robbing a house.
So there's a paper which I haven't actually read.
I just saw it.
It was called The Scatological Rights of Burglars.
And it showed that in a lot of cases where people were caught, they admitted to having a poo while
you can get, because you're quite stressed, it makes you want to go, but you can get caught by people finding the DNA of your
inside your poo, can't they?
Yes.
So do flush it, is what you're saying.
Or take it home.
To be truly safe.
I was reading about the ham burglar in the news this year, and that was a man who stole some ham.
He was called Domingo Infante.
He was 34 years old in Spain.
And he went into a shop and there was massive legs of Iberico ham.
You know, those massive, like, cured ham legs.
And
he stole, I think, like four or five of them.
But they're really heavy, those things.
I don't know if you've ever picked one up, but they're super heavy.
And so he had to drag them home to his house, leaving a trail of fat all the way
to his front door, which they just followed.
And they knocked on the door.
And he was living with his parents.
And they said, have you got some hams here?
And eventually they had to admit that they did.
Oh, my God.
That is such an example of letting the best be the enemy of the good.
Those hams last for ages, I bet, because they're quite dense, quite densely packed, aren't they?
Yeah, yeah.
If you had one of them, he probably would have been fine.
They're expensive, though.
I think he probably intended to sell them rather than eat them.
I think he, because
each of those is like 100 quid or something, I reckon.
So he was just getting seven of them and then he was going to sell them down the path.
That's a really good point.
Because cheese, obviously, that's why people steal cheese from the supermarket so much is it's a relatively large amount of money in a relatively small box.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you're hungry, I don't think you'd steal a giant Iberico ham.
There are so many easier foodstuffs to thieves than dragging a pig down the street.
In our previous books of the year, we've often found that American police officers like to give their bandits nicknames.
Oh, yeah.
Do you remember that?
Every year, whenever there's something that happens, some crime in America, the cops always name them the something bandit.
So I googled a few of those.
In Chicago this year there was a guy called the Mummy Bandits.
Do you know why they might have called him that?
Did he wrap himself in toilet paper?
Pretty much.
Yeah he wrapped himself in gauze and scarves
so that none of the CCTV cameras would know who he was.
Do you know what they might have done?
Does that something to do with the cartoon?
Powder Puff Girls.
No, it's nothing to do with that.
I think they were the Powerpuff Girls.
They weren't just makeup artists the adventures of makeup artists yeah it's a play on what play on words they're powerful but they're also like powder puffs did what is a powder puff a powder puff is like you know if you're putting makeup on but it's like you kind of puff it onto your face got it
it's like they've got the powder in one half and then a mirror in the other, right?
And then you have a brush and you.
Okay.
All right.
Did they blow the very fine makeup powder towards the CCTV cameras to hide their entry?
Great idea, no.
Is it?
Oh, did they, did they using makeup, did they paint someone else's face on their face?
Great.
It's actually the exact opposite of that.
Oh.
They painted their own face on someone else's face.
It's not the exact opposite of that, but it's something that's
different.
What they did was, this was in Denver, this guy called Hernandez, and he had extremely obvious facial tattoos.
And so he would use the foundation to cover those up so that they wouldn't recognize him.
Brilliant.
Very clever.
There was a guy called, this is quite easy to guess, actually, but there was a guy in Albuquerque called the birthday suit sign bandit.
Do you know?
Did you hear about the sign?
Yeah, birthday suit signed bandit.
So something to do with nudity, right?
He's
birthday.
But then is he wearing a little sign over his penis saying get action here or something?
He's wearing Sean Connery's leathery glove.
No, this was very simply a man caught naked on camera stealing a Biden-Harris campaign sign from a garden in Albuquerque.
Anyway, that's some of those.
Do you know how you'd burgle a house using a tortoise?
Well,
okay.
So very slow getaway.
Yes.
Can you squeeze yourself under the shell, sort of between tortoise and shell?
No, that's not.
That's a good, that's a good method.
This is a gang of thieves in medieval Arabia called the Banu Sassan.
And the fact that they lasted hundreds of years, it's kind of a very loose affiliation rather than a proper gang.
Like they weren't one entity.
But supposedly, they would bring a crowbar, a candle, some stale bread, some beans, an iron spike, a drill, a bag of sand, and a tortoise to your gang.
I think that the drill and the iron steak and stuff are a lot more important than the tortoise in this process.
No, no, no way.
Okay, they do use the spike or the crowbar to get in to access to the property.
Fine.
But then they light the candle, which they've also brought, they stick it onto the tortoise, and they send the tortoise through the hole.
That way, you can see what's in there.
You can see if there's any stuff worth stealing, right?
Then you use the bag of sand, you throw that at the windows, and see if anyone gets up.
And if there's no one up, then you go in, right?
What?
So, if you're in the house and you wake up and you just hear a bit of banging outside, and you kind of go into your front room, and there's a tortoise with a candle on its back, I still think you're going to be a bit suspicious.
Straight back to bed for me.
Darling, it's not a burglar, it's it's just the candle tortoise again.
Also, with a note on his back saying, Please ignore me, I'm just a tortoise with a candle on my back.
Nothing to see here.
Well, I know what you're thinking.
What about the stale bread and the dried beans?
Sorry, that's what I was thinking.
Yeah,
so that's if you get in, so Operation Tortoise has worked, you've seen valuables, you're in the house, but then you can hear someone moving around in a nearby room.
At that point, you noisily chew on the stale bread and the dried beans so that people think it's just a cat eating a mouse.
Oh, right.
That's a really good thing.
Is that a Foley sound effect trick?
Is that how you simulate cows eating a mouse?
Absolutely, yeah.
Stale bread and dried beans.
But we haven't got a cat, you might say.
And then you're in trouble, I guess.
Have you guys heard of George Leslie from America?
Okay, so this is around the late 1800s.
And this is a guy who moved to New York City in 1869.
And he was a trained architect, architect but he decided to go into a life of crime and it is said that the gang that he created off the back of it and the syndicate that he created off the back of it were responsible for nearly 80% of all bank robberies in the US at that time this one guy so what he used to do which was really interesting is he used to break into banks not to rob them but to walk around at night on his own and map them out.
Then he would take his designs because he's an architect.
He would go back to a warehouse that he owned and build the bank in there so that he and his fellow robbers could work out the best way of getting through certain things and certain doors and certain escape routes.
So he would recreate the entire interior of the bank.
Are you saying that he wrote Ocean's 11 about 100 years before Ocean's 11?
Oh, I never saw that movie.
Yeah, that's what they do.
That's incredible.
Yeah, it's extraordinary.
Well, it is incredible, apart from the people who wrote Ocean's 11 probably just heard about this guy and then stole it for their plot, though.
Yes.
I was saying it's more, the original guy is more impressive.
Yes.
Yeah, I actually wasn't saying Oceans 11 is an incredible film.
I think it's decent.
It's certainly better than Oceans 12.
Yeah.
What was he called?
He was called George Leslie.
And these were life-size.
It's not like he did little models.
Of course, you wouldn't use the tiny model.
I mean, imagine
how freaked out your gang is going to be if they get him from the vault and it's huge.
They haven't trained for this.
There was a burglar in 2014 who managed to delay 783 trains as a result of his burglary.
Unbelievable.
So he'd cut open a curry store near Charlton and the police turned up and he panicked and fled.
And then he got onto his motorbike, also stolen, by the way.
So not even an honestly acquired motorbike.
That didn't start.
He ran off and then he climbed up a tree.
But unfortunately, the tree was kind of overhanging.
the railway tracks at Charlton station.
And he decided to stay up there for 17 17 hours despite the police being there.
At that point, the game is over and I think you have to come down from the tree.
Did the police were the police stood under the tree at this time saying you're going to have to come down eventually?
Pretty much, yeah.
Don't you call the fire engine at that point?
Yeah, say we've got we've got a cat burglar stuck up in a tree.
Exactly.
They always find their own way down.
Don't worry.
You don't actually need
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 all be found on our Twitter accounts.
I'm onette Schreiberland.
Andy at Andrew Hunter M.
James at James Harkin.
And Anna.
You can email podcast at qi.com.
Yeah, or you can go to our group account at no such thing or our website, no such thingasoffish.com.
All of our previous episodes are up there, as well as links to bits of merchandise that we've released over the years.
And that's it.
That's all of our facts for this week.
So we'll see you again next week.
Join us again.
Goodbye.
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