339: No Such Thing As A Penguin in a Nightclub

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Hi, everyone.

Welcome to this week's No Such Thing as a Fish, where myself, Anna, and Andy are joined by none other than Tom Scott.

Now, most of you will probably know who Tom Scott is, but for those of you who don't, he is a YouTuber who makes unbelievably interesting videos about the most incredible things from all around the world.

His videos are right up our street.

I know they'll be right up yours as well.

So, you should definitely check out his channel, which is youtube.com/slash Tom Scott scott go

and actually if you're looking for videos you can always go to our channel which i don't think we've mentioned very much which you can find at qi.com slash qitv and that has a whole load of clips from fish um dan and i recently did a video for the ignobel prizes which you can see on there there's all sorts you should definitely check that out okay on with the podcast

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four top secret locations around the United Kingdom.

My name is Anna Tushinski and I'm sitting here today with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin and very special guest, YouTuber Tom Scott.

And we are here to discuss our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

So in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, Tom.

I wanted to make a YouTube video about how interesting strobe lighting is, but the likelihood was it would give one of my viewers an epileptic fit.

So I've come on your podcast to talk about it instead.

Fair enough.

So happy to serve.

Can you give anyone an audio epileptic fit?

I guess what I'm saying.

Not to my knowledge, but

there's definitely a thing about lights and strobe lights.

So I was trying to work out how to demonstrate this without demonstrating it and without giving instructions because statistically one of my viewers was going to find out that they have photosensitive epilepsy the hard way and I just couldn't figure out a way to tell it.

So one of the really cool things about this is that it goes back a long, long way.

There's a story that Nostradamus once received visions by closing his eyes and staring at the sun and waving his spread hand in front of his face.

So he was getting flashes of the sun against his closed eyes at the right frequency.

That's probably rubbish, but that's the oldest reference I could find.

That feels like a

not very cool chemical way of inducing hallucinations as well.

That feels like kids sort of rolling up non-drugs and smoking them and trying to get high off that.

Like banana peels.

So what did he report seeing, Nostradamus, when he flashed his hand in front of his face?

The first reference I can find is sort of early 19th century, and they got called stroboscopic hallucinations.

And basically you close your eyes, you flash a strobe light.

So this could be something as simple as you've got your eyes closed looking out the window of your 19th century buggy as it goes along the road and you pass some railings and that sort of flashing light, dark, light, dark, light, dark against your eyelids is enough to induce this.

Everyone sort of sees grids and fractal patterns and sort of weird 3D abstract shapes.

So have you presumably done it and seen that?

Because I was researching this yesterday and had a relatively severe hangover and I couldn't bring myself to attempt to do any of this because I was afraid I would vomit.

But how intense is it really?

So it depends on how intense the flashing is, which is kind of an obvious thing to say.

But the sort of basic version where you just get a strobe app on your phone and you point it at your eyes.

After about 10, 15 seconds, you'll start to see some sort of floating patterns.

Might be like you're rushing down a tunnel, might be like you're sort of traveling sideways, might just be some flashing grids, things like that.

Tends to be red and blue, it appears.

The first time I ever got to experience this was a device invented by a hacker called Mitch Altman.

Now, I don't know if you've heard of any of his stuff before.

Have you heard of the TV Begone?

No.

No.

It's a little pocket-sized device, fits on your keychain.

And he invented it sort of early 2000s, I think.

And it sends every remote controls off code, one after the other.

So if you're in a bar and you want to turn off that TV in the corner,

you just sort of point that and wait.

There was a group of people called the White Dot organization or something, and they thought that no one should ever watch TV in pubs because it's anti-social.

And so they went around to all the pubs and they deliberately turned off all the TVs.

And it was while I was working in the pub industry, and we were furious.

It was on the front page.

Yeah, it was on the front page of all the industry newspapers and stuff.

It was a big story.

Did they come into your pub and you know, have someone someone press a button and switch the TVs off?

Was it just the threat of them?

I reckon they probably didn't do any of this stuff and it was probably like

a big story in the local newspapers, which never actually happened.

But

it was definitely something that we told our landlords to keep an eye open for.

Really?

Because these things do work, don't they?

And I kind of can't believe that they're sold.

You can get one of the TV begons for about 30 quid and apparently still sort of works.

I think technology is moving beyond it, but then it catches up.

I don't know if you've tried it, Tom, but I really want to own it.

I actually owned one once because I like Mitch Altman, I want to support his stuff.

And I couldn't, I think I only ever used it a couple of times because it turns out that actually having this thing on your keychain is kind of annoying and it's quite a big thing.

He actually built two versions.

Once smartphones came along, he built a super-powered one that looks like a smartphone and works from a huge distance.

And you can find footage of someone taking that to a trade show and just irritating every single technology booth.

And it's just, like,

it's not nice.

Like, that's something, that's just someone trolling.

Does it work on

traffic lights?

No, sadly.

But someone definitely invented that as well.

That definitely exists.

I've been hearing about something.

I think it's actively illegal.

Oh, yeah.

It's a brave person, I think, who enters a pub on the evening of the Champions League final at ATV Begone.

I think I wouldn't be willing to risk it, but it is pretty incredible.

And he designed the,

did Mitch Altman also design the glasses you were talking about or the brain yes?

I got to try one of Mitch Altman's brain machines, which are just

they're kind of glasses, or at least the one I tried with just like paper glasses, the kind of thing you get for watching an eclipse or something like that, but with an LED in front of each eye.

So you just close your eyes and it would flash the LEDs at roughly the right strobe frequency, about 12 hertz.

He claimed they were at brainwave frequencies and they sort of matched you sort of 15 minute session over time but adapted your brainwaves to do some I'm not convinced of that section of it.

But yeah, like I saw a huge amount of patterns.

It was really interesting to see.

Wow.

And then the bit above that, the most intense version of this that I've ever seen is an artwork called Z by Kurt Henschlager, which I saw in Liverpool once.

And it was a room filled so thick with theatrical smoke that you literally, if you stretched your hand out in front of your face, you couldn't see your hand.

I have never been in fog that is thicker than that.

And then just super powerful strobe lights going at 12 hertz in a pattern.

I got told later that they were just pure white strobe lights.

I thought they were red and blue and all sorts of colours.

You saw all sorts of enormous patterns swirling around you.

It felt, I don't know, like in some sort of, you're in some sort of Star Trek transporter beam because there are just fractal patterns swirling around your hand.

It is absolutely astonishing.

But yeah, if you look up news articles about it, there are all sorts of things about, yeah, they decided to close it, gave 2% of the people who went into it an epileptic fit.

It induced epileptic fits in people who had never had photosensitive epilepsy before.

It was genuinely dangerous.

It was also one of the most incredible visual experiences I've ever had,

but I can see why it didn't tour as much as it perhaps should have.

I mean, it sounds extremely unpleasant, I have to say.

I don't think I'd want to subject myself to that, even without photosensitive photosensive epilepsy.

I've got a question.

Do you ever, in these experiences, get beyond seeing kind of fractal patterns and you start seeing, you know, dogs with nine legs or whatever?

Does it ever get

crazy?

So, while I was researching this, I found that this was part of the beat generation, where Alan Ginsburg tried a thing called the Dream Machine, which was a bulb and a record turntable with sort of slattered paper around it.

So you just started the turntable going and it was calibrated to kind of hit your eyes at the right frequency, which is the brain machine just built for an entire room.

And I think that was that inspired by someone, was it a guy called Geisen, who was going on a car along a tree-lined street and had the light flashing?

So if you do want the cheap way, you can drive along a street of plain trees, I suppose, in the sun and lean out the window and close your eyes.

But

I mean, you might want to do that as the passenger, but yes.

But actually,

that dream machine, when Guysin made it, he thought that it was going to replace the television set in every single home, which I've got to say, if there's no dogs with nine legs and if it's just like fractal patterns, I don't know.

I know there's some crap on TV at the moment, but I think you could do that because the visuals of TV shows, often they're not very interesting, actually.

Often it's just panels.

Let's say question time.

If you had the audio of question time and you still got the content, but you were able to see magical fractal patterns throughout.

I don't think people would not do that.

No, that should be an option.

You should be able to press the red button to get fractal patterns over Fiona Bruce.

Yeah, I got a quote from Ginsburg while I was researching this.

It creates optical fields as religious and mandalic as hallucinogenic drugs.

Although, didn't he also say that a combination of that and drugs was really best?

Right, that's the thing.

Like, all this does is create an optical illusion.

It creates weird fractal patterns.

I cannot find any sort of research as to why.

It seems to just be a failure state for the vision system of the brain that we never dealt with, you know, 12 hertz strobe lights in nature.

So brain just faults trying to do it.

Do you know what the most common hallucination is in the world?

I think.

This is my theory.

Is it like a mirage maybe?

Or is that really a hallucination?

It's not common.

Yeah, I think we're not.

No, that's external.

No, I would say that's not a hallucination because your eyes are accurately reporting the white skin.

Yeah, that's fair.

Is it the dog with nine legs?

Yeah, it's the dog with nine legs.

Always nine.

Five billion people have seen it.

So I think it's the phantom phone ringing thing.

So it's when you are hallucinating or phone ringing.

So phantom vibration syndrome.

I looked it up a bit.

It has a load of other names, more fun names.

It gets called Ringziety.

The faux salaam, like faux as in false in French, faux salaam.

Wait a minute, wait a minute.

The word false means faux anyway.

So why do you need to include the word faux?

That's a really good point.

Yeah, I can't.

It seems clever enough.

But isn't it faux salam?

Because faux sounds a bit more like phone.

Foam salaam, it must be that, Andy.

It's, I mean, I've copied it down directly from the internet and it's just faux in pressure.

But I know.

I think we've invented a new name for it, the phone salaam.

But it started off the earliest reference I found, although I didn't look exhaustively, but it was referred to in Dilbert, the comic Dilbert, in 1996.

But back then, it was called Phantom Pager Syndrome because people thought their pages were going off.

And

yeah.

So the only, apparently the only way to solve it would be to move your phone to a much more sensitive part of your body.

Like if you keep it in your mouth, you'll always know whether it's ringing or not.

Do you think, Andy, they ever had?

I mean, that's very funny, but do you think?

We've all got a joke we want to, and we'll all keep it to ourselves.

So, although that does bring new meaning to the word dictaphone.

There we go.

There's the punchline.

Phone to dick.

Dictaphone.

dictaphone.

Um, did you think when you used to have pocket watches and you would keep it near your heart, that kind of thing, and it would tick, do you think if you didn't have your pocket watch, you would have phantom pocket watch syndrome?

I bet you did, yeah, but you can't, can you, can you, you can't feel it ticking against your heart, can you?

Maybe that's your heartbeat you're feeling.

Oh, yeah.

If you, I mean, if it's normally on the outside of a shirt and a waistcoat, I guess, if you're doing it properly, whereas if you're, if you're, if you're going, um, going commando and you're just wearing a pocketlotch, pocket

where are you attaching it?

It's under my foreskin.

The pocketlotch is under my foreskin.

Oh, no.

Oh,

have you got the time?

Yes, but I'm not sure you're going to want to know.

I read that the Roman novelist and orator Apuleius, he said that the spinning of a potter's wheel could sometimes give people seizures.

like almost in the same strobing way.

Really?

Don't know if that's true.

That's what he said.

But if you get a wonky wonky pot, maybe that's why.

People are always kind of claiming that we've managed to hone this technology to become a military weapon, aren't they?

When you research kind of flashing lights and strobe lights being able to have a weird impact on your brain, it's always like the US military is researching how to incapacitate the Russians with a flashing light.

And I can't really find any evidence that these things work, even though they're constantly tried, except last year it was reported that Russia had fitted two warships with this light, which I think flashes and it induces hallucinations and vomiting.

Apparently, it's called the FP42 fill in and it's non-lethal but it releases a strobe-like beam and apparently disrupts eyesight.

Which I would imagine you're just flashing something in someone's eyes.

Yeah, of course it disrupts eyesight.

But according to them, you can become delirious and throw up everywhere.

Probably the fact they've just given you a load of Nubber chuck doesn't help either.

The reason I started down this whole rabbit hole is that I got an email from a startup in Bristol that is trying to use EEG sort of brainwave reading kit and then trying to synchronize the strobes with that to kind of have a greater effect.

They claim to be able to get altered states of consciousness with it.

They claim to be able to get something higher than I'm just seeing some patterns.

I'm skeptical because you can't really test that against placebo all that well.

You can't test it against pretending to flash a light in someone's eyes.

They are in very early studies, but they hope to be able to do something with it.

I'm not sure what that something is, but I wish them the best of luck.

I do find the placebo thing interesting.

It only struck me recently how often you can't use a placebo because of things like that.

You can't do a placebo effect of a flashing light, or I think they have problems with studies into how much exercise impacts health in certain ways because you can't do a placebo exercise.

You can't convince someone that they have been for a run every day for a week if they've been sitting in front of the TV.

Well, they also say you can't do a placebo of a parachute.

You can't give one person a parachute and then give one person no parachute and see which one works.

I think you could do a placebo of exercise though.

Can you?

Definitely.

Yeah.

So if you, let's say you want to see what it's like for someone running five miles.

Yeah.

And then the sort of control group is, you'll have to get them to run one mile, but they'll think it's five miles.

So you would put signposts all around their local park saying, oh, keep going, you've nearly done five miles and so so on.

And then by the time they get back, they'll have only run one mile.

So that's a placebo.

So you have to get all the trees in the park sort of moving towards them so it looks to them like they're you'd have to create smaller trees, maybe.

So they thought they were running past them faster, maybe a revolving small everything, really, small dogs.

But then you've sort of created a cohort of people that think they've got superhuman ability to run.

And then they turn up at the Olympics and they're absolutely shit.

Just on strobe lighting, it's possible that the neuralizer from Men in Black might

exist.

Do you guys remember what that is?

Yeah, it's something last year memory.

Exactly.

You flash a light at some point.

Yeah, but

how would you know?

Well, that's a big question.

It might exist already, and it's just that it's erased our memory of it every time it's been used.

But scientists have now done some experiments, sure, on mice as usual.

But it turns out that if they researchers kind of shocked mice on the foot when they went into a certain room, and then usually what would happen is the mouse would freeze as soon as it enters that room again because it expects to be shocked again.

But they found that when they flashed a light in their eyes at a certain frequency, they'd completely forgotten the shock and they went back into the room.

And so it seems like just by flashing a light in a certain way at people, then they think it interrupts connections between the nerves that are forming your memories.

And so it blanks out your memory.

And it only blanks out about the previous four seconds.

So it's just, it's got to be something that's happened immediately before you flash the light in their eyes that you want them to forget.

So it looks like we might be able to use strobe lighting in the same way they do in that film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Is that why whenever I've been to a nightclub, I could never remember the next morning what happened?

That's exactly why it is.

Yeah, just flash a torch in your face and it'll all come flooding back.

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Okay, it is time for our second fact, and that comes from Andy.

My fact is that from the 1880s until 1927, Paris had an underground clock system which ran on puffs of air.

So this is from an article on ParisianFields.com, brilliant website all about Paris and sort of various weird things that it's gotten it.

So in 1880, Paris installed this series of clocks and they all kept the same time.

So they were public clocks sort of there as a public good.

And each one of them

was connected to an air pump.

And those pumps were led to this wrought iron pipe system and all of that was fed from this power plant in the middle of Paris, this coal-fired plant.

And every minute that system would pump out a pulse of air which would get into the clock and it would activate this small bellows inside the clock and it would move the clock along by one minute.

So that's how the system worked.

Every minute it worked.

literally as regular as clockwork.

And you could subscribe if you liked.

So some hotels signed up and they basically had a kind of subscription service to Time on the basis of this system.

So,

if you got a subscription service, you were agreeing that they would dig a pipe in your floor running from your clock back to this pneumatic system.

Pretty much, that's it.

Yeah,

wow, that is incredible.

Because there was an article in Scientific American that said, okay, well, there will have to be a massive pipe in your house, but maybe you could paint it in the same color as your wallpaper and no one will notice it.

Lovely.

yeah, but yeah, the

Hotel Maurice, they had 148 of them in the building, didn't they?

Yeah,

so you know, would some be a bit behind the other?

Because presumably, you pump a little puff of air out, but it takes longer to get to one on the outskirts of Paris.

Does that mean they're a minute behind?

I don't think it does.

I think they probably adjusted for this because there were these various kinds of holding stations along the way, so it wasn't like one puff had to get either to the first Arrondismo or the 20th.

So that was sort of it was There were a few that were a little bit out of sync.

I think the further away you were from the station, the obviously the slightly further out it was, but there were enough of these stations that it didn't make that much difference.

Yeah.

You say puffs of air.

It was sort of 20 seconds on, 40 seconds off.

So there was a caching system in there that needed a big pump of air for a few seconds.

That would advance the minute hand.

And then the next 40 seconds off would let that sort of calm down again.

So it wasn't sort of precise to the second because nothing back then had to be precise to the second, but it was precise enough yeah and i wonder how often people use the excuse when they were late to meet friends for a cafe that oh i'm i'm actually quite a long way from the air puffs so it takes further to get to me well i read in popular science that it was never allowed to exceed 10 seconds of error so um i think if you're 10 seconds late I don't know.

We all know those people who are always five minutes late, but 10 seconds, I think.

I'm furious.

If anyone's more than nine seconds, I'm absolutely lived.

also in paris 10 seconds late is 10 minutes early isn't it let's be honest very true very chic

um i guess this this kept going all the way through the first world war um you know 1927 is when it lasted until and in fact the first time it broke down was in 1910 and it was because the air plant was flooded there was a huge flood of the river seine and that was the thing they were always worried about uh and the coal-fired plant temporarily uh had to be turned off and reset then and then the clocks all stopped.

And there were thousands all over the city by this point.

It's such an awesome system.

I don't understand why you'd ever decommission it.

And it sounds like it was an enormous hassle to install.

Because it's cheaper for us all to have a Casio on our wrists, I think.

Yeah.

I'm going to invest a pneumatic wristwatch.

I think it.

I'd love to see that.

You basically, whenever you go into a room, you have to attach yourself to the massive pipe.

You could have a second set of bellows in your clocks, which would do a chime.

So you would have one that would attach to the kind of the minute hand and then you would be able to divert it off and it would make a little ding-dong ding dong like that.

That's so cool.

That's nice.

I did read though that there was a time when in France, in French railway stations at least, then clocks were set deliberately five minutes fast so that travellers didn't miss their trains.

I think that was a thing until about 1910 or 11.

I think that's still a thing in Edinburgh, isn't it?

I remember.

Yes.

Is that where the Balmoral clock

has Has always been set three minutes

fast.

It's on the Scotsman Hotel, right?

It's on the Balmoral Hotel, I think.

But yeah, just outside Wayford Station.

Yeah, yeah.

So the people, I think it's three minutes, and the only time that that one runs on time is for New Year.

So I think they run three minutes fast all the time, and then they put it back for Hogman A so they're not ahead of everyone else.

It's a clever trick.

I always have my watches run fast.

There is a really cool website I found, which is a website of stopped clocks.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it was created in 2007 by a guy called Alfie Dennon.

And basically, it's for people to submit stopped clocks near them.

You take a photo of your local public clock.

It's not just that your clock has stopped working in your home.

He doesn't want that.

And it's so people can campaign to get them up and running again.

Unfortunately, no one has posted on it since 2014.

So the website itself

has also stopped.

That's amazing.

I've been ranting about this for years.

In London, I reckon over half of the clocks are stopped.

And I've always thought if I took a sabbatical, I would use it to go around London and take a tally of exactly how many clocks are wrong and how many are right.

And I do think it's more than half.

So Alfie Dennon, you've got to get that website back up and running.

It's a disgrace.

Yeah, that would be a great user disgrace.

I think so.

Well, people used to sell the time, didn't they?

Which is such a weird concept.

So when you, you know, when people wanted to know the time, there were only a few people in town who'd know it.

The astronomer royal would know it.

And so he used to get very annoyed in the 19th century.

It was John Belleville, and I think we've talked about him before, because people would knock on his door and say, hey, mate, I hear you an astronomer.

Can you tell me what the time is?

Yeah, because

it was Ruth Belleville, who I'm sure we must have mentioned, but who

at the same time as France had this amazing kind of system of blowing bits of air through to get the time, we had a lady called Ruth Belleville who was walking around London saying, do you want to know the time?

Do you want to know the time?

And people would

people would pay her to, because she would, at the start of each day, she would go and set her pocket watch with the exact time.

And then she'd go around and sell it to people.

It feels a bit rude, someone approaching you saying, Do you want to know the time?

It feels a bit, do you want to have a good time?

Well, that was the problem.

So in 1908, there was a guy called Mr.

St.

John Wynne

who publicly made some comments about Ruth Belleville, saying that she was using her femininity to gain business.

Oh,

you used the tricks at your disposal.

Well

sort of flirting with people as she offered them the time.

Yeah do you want to have a good time or a long time or a or an accurate time

and um but then what happened was is uh what people didn't didn't realize was is that Wynne was the director of something called the standard time company which sold the time through telegraphs.

And so he wanted people to get the time the accurate time through the telegraph system and stop using people like Ruth Belleville.

So that's why he kind of slandered her with this thing.

It feels like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut to have to deliberately crush this poor woman whose only means of making a living is to go around asking people if they need to know what time it is.

It's so mean.

Yeah, although I do think that she was probably on the way out anyway, technology-wise.

I don't think she'd still exist today, even if he hadn't come along.

I reckon I'd be using my cassock watching the nearest passing lady.

I reckon you could walk around town in London next to all those broken clocks and just say, this one's broken, mate.

Do you want to know the time?

I'm on it.

I should say, yeah, John Bellville wasn't the Astronomer Royal.

Sorry, he was employed by the Astronomer Royal because the Astronomer was getting so annoyed with people asking him the time.

And then Ruth was his descendant.

That's right.

I've always thought that the sort of big synchronization of everything to the second that we've had since smartphones have come along as basically the biggest argument about there being some sort of weird psychic power, like all that stuff you hear about some psychic field connecting people together.

Because basically on the hour, every hour to the second, somewhere in the world, a huge number of people get startled awake by alarms.

Like there's this wave traveling around the world.

Like 7 a.m., 8 a.m., 9 a.m.

Every country, millions of people suddenly get jolted awake at the same time.

Are you guys one of the people who always sets your alarm for a round number or for a non-round number when you wake up in the morning?

Round number.

Yeah.

Round number.

I mean, wait, do you mean a five minute?

Do you mean like seven o'clock or seven?

Well, I would always like to set mine for like 12, not 12, 7.

Let's say it was 7 that I woke up in the daytime.

I would like to set it for 7.37 rather than 7.30 or 7.45.

Yeah, always.

The only time I do that is when I'm convincing myself I'm literally going to have a two-minute nap and I'll set, you know, it'll be 7.30 and I'll say it for 7.32 or something.

I think the idea is that by looking at a time which is slightly weird, it kind of confuses me enough that it wakes me up slightly that I don't kind of, if it's 7.30, I'll just look at it at 7.30 and go straight back to sleep again.

Oh, you'll think, oh, yeah, it's a normal time, 7.30.

And then, yeah.

7.37?

What the hell is this?

I did it from when I was a kid and I had a paper round, so I don't know, like, it's just a hangover, I guess.

If you were getting up at noon for your paper round, James, I can see why it didn't last.

So, just back to the pneumatic system in Paris.

This was actually not Paris's last pneumatic system.

You could send someone pneumatically driven post in Paris.

So, you know, pneumatic tubes, where you put a capsule in, the capsule gets whizzed off to someone.

You could do that until 1984.

Could you?

Which is really late.

That is late, but it kind of still feels to me like the future.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, exactly.

Putting things in pneumatic tubes feels like what it will be like in 300 years, but actually it's done.

It's finished.

You're absolutely right.

I mean, it is very futuristic.

It's sort of the past version of the future.

Well, it is efficient.

It goes pretty fast.

Any more handy?

I mean, there's one final thing, which is just kind of cute, which is that Berlin used to have pneumatic nightclubs.

So you would get shown to a table, and then your table had a phone on it, right?

And you could see an attractive stranger across the club and you could give them a ring.

Because all the tables had big numbers, table numbers lit up above them, right?

And you could give them a ring.

But if you were shy, you could send them a pneumatic tube message and it would sort of whoop whoop up to their table and it would say hey do you fancy a drink that sounds amazing

yeah but all the messages were sent via a sensor a female sensor to make sure you weren't getting too fresh with someone so to make sure you weren't saying something really obscene wait so did they have to install a little female guard inside the tube who stopped it halfway through and read it oh no because you you'd need a post office wouldn't you you'd need a switching system unless you've got like every tube going to every place you need someone in the middle who can look at the notes exactly and route it anyway.

I think you might have given the tube to a waiter who took it to the sensor who then posted it onto the table.

I mean, it sounds like a very complicated system compared with just normal talking, but.

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

Okay, my fact this week is, after a penguin had to be isolated due to health issues, zookeepers in Perth are keeping him entertained by letting him binge-watch pingu.

I thought we've been a bit highbrow up to now, so we should probably talk about pingu for a while.

So this is a penguin called Pierre.

They found him washed up in Australia and they're a little bit worried about

in a psychological sense, you know.

Drugs, gambling, booze, girls, cocaine, krill.

So much, too much krill, krill addiction.

So it's a washed up penguin.

And the thing is about penguins, right, is if you're a penguin, your feathers are really important because you might get too cold.

And also, they're really important for you to swim because they're really water-resistant.

And so most birds, when they molt, they kind of lose a few feathers here and a few feathers there and they grow back.

But penguins don't do that.

They do like an explosive molting.

period where they lose

sorry sorry i i know i know what you mean but let's just all take a moment to appreciate the phrase explosive molting period because there's a

feathers everywhere.

It's messy.

Well,

I think there's an actual word for it, which is.

I think it's called a catastrophic molt, which is almost as entertaining.

Do you know what?

I read about this a few months ago, and I knew it had a really impressive name, but I've just remembered the wrong word.

But anyway, so they have a catastrophic molt.

And so, for a little while, they have no feathers, but then they grow back quite quickly.

But with Pierre, they never really grew back properly.

And so, he's kind of stuck in Perth for a little while.

He can't really go, can't really go anywhere else until his feathers come back.

And so he's stuck in Perth.

He doesn't really have any mates there.

So they wanted to show him videos of penguins, which they did.

They showed him videos of certain of the rock hopper penguins in Edinburgh Zoo.

But they also thought, well, why don't we show him Pingu?

Because Pingu's a penguin, isn't he?

And Danielle Henry, who's looking after Pierre in the zoo, said he probably doesn't even realize that Pingu is a penguin.

He's just responding to the color and the movement, which I suppose is problematic.

James, is this a way of you working in the fact he doesn't even know he's a penguin?

Into the...

That's your main factor.

My next level, my next level of Wittgensteinian philosophy is that penguins don't know they're penguins, but they don't even know Pingu is a penguin.

So yeah.

If Pingu could talk, would we be able to understand him?

Well, Pingu, can Pingu talk?

He goes, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.

Yeah, Pingu can talk and we can understand him.

Yeah, it's bizarre.

So did you guys look into this as well, the sort of language of Pingu?

It's so cool.

Yeah.

Because he's Pingu pingu has only ever been voiced by people with training in clowning and there's an italian is it theater language called grammaro or grammarlot where it's sort of sound it's designed to sound like gibberish and they convert the scripts from english into penguinese as they call it and then they film those there's a lovely interview with oliver postgate about the clangers yeah and it's exactly the same the clangers scripts were written in english and then translated uh i

well i say translated they're just playing on swanny whistles But there is a lovely interview that, here we are.

At the beginning of episode three, when the doors get stuck, Major Clanger says, Sod it, the bloody thing's stuck again.

And the BBC objected and required the script to be changed, even though it's just a Swanny whistle.

So you've got a whistle making the phrase sod it, the doors are stuck.

If you change the script to sod it,

the doors are frothy.

Like, it's going to sound exactly the same, isn't it?

Like, the whistle.

Well, apparently, according to the interview, like, this is many years later, so who knows how much of it changed, how much of it is memory here, but they changed to, oh dear, the silly thing's not working properly.

And I feel like that does have a different kind of intonation to it.

I'm with you.

I think the original version would have got countless complaints.

I think Sodic goes,

whereas O Dear goes,

like that.

That's quite a big difference, though, isn't it?

Yeah.

That was also a wolf whistle.

So my clanger translation is not great.

Yeah, the second one was more offensive, it turned out.

Grammar Lot is really interesting, isn't it?

Because it came from like medieval Italy.

And it was when jesters used to go around to all the different towns of Italy and they would want to do their plays and their comedies.

But all the different people in the different towns didn't speak the same language in those days, or they might have spoken a similar kind of Italian, but each village would be slightly different.

And so you would have to come up.

It's a bit like how Mr.

Bean is so popular all around the world because he doesn't really talk.

So, you would have to get your point across, but in a way where you don't need to say the actual words.

And also, there was quite a lot of censorship.

So, you

want to say the things in a way where you're saying, Oh, you know, the king is an asshole, but you didn't want to say it in so many words.

So, you go

like that.

You just make the noises that everyone would realize that that's what you're saying, but you wouldn't actually say the words.

It works by onomatopoeia, basically, doesn't it?

Yeah, so for instance.

A kind of onomatopoeia where the sound conveys meaning and emotion.

So for instance, in Grammar Lot, if you wanted to say something was big, you would go, boo-woo.

But if it was medium-sized, you would go, woo-hoo.

And if it was really small, you would say, eee-oo.

And so everyone listening knows that what you're talking about is something that's big or something that's small just by the noise that you're making with your with your voice.

It's quite cool.

That's really cool.

And then Pingu became a global brand, isn't it?

So it was

madly popular.

You still get pingu dolls in happy meals in Japan.

Really?

Oh, it's really popular in Japan because they think it sounds like Japanese.

And people in other countries think, oh, yeah, he's sort of speaking our language, which shows how

everyone thinks that he's speaking to them.

I didn't know how they made it, where you, because I thought they would move the clay, because it's claymation, pingu.

I thought they would move the clay and sort of take a different photo at every point, but that you have to have hundreds and hundreds of pingus.

So somewhere there's a box of pingu doing every conceivable activity in the show.

And then if you show pingu walking, you know, you take stationary pingu and you replace him with a pingu who's lifted up one foot, and then you replace him with a pingu's who's lifted up even more.

So you need eight pingus just to show him walking along.

I didn't know that.

Yeah.

And you shoot all of these.

Exactly.

Yeah.

That's one of those things that in hindsight makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, once you've got all of them.

And, you know, you need pingus where he's being squashed into into a ball by an older, angry penguin or whatever.

Like, there are hundreds and hundreds of them, they always need to be in the right order, I suppose, and they can't operate unless they have each other.

Like, there'll be one pingu, but in order to walk anywhere, it needs to find 10 other pingus.

Yeah, it's a great, I think it's a plot waiting to be written.

It's an analogy for how society only works if we all work together in one direction, isn't it?

We're basically all pingu.

James, did you just say one direction?

I hear a link.

I have a link, which is this.

There we go.

Harry Stiles of One Direction has a tattoo of Pingu and Ed Sheeran has a matching one.

God, this is the most pop culture this podcast has ever been.

If only Dan Tribal was here for this.

Who got theirs first?

Because they have a right to be pissed off.

I think Sheeran.

I think they got it at the same time.

I've read this as well.

Same tattoo artist.

And they did it because they got drunk and realised that they were both Pingu fans when they were kids.

And so they thought this is something that brings us together.

Something definitely worth commemorating.

I mean, everyone's a pingu fan when they're a kid.

I never watched pingu.

I don't know.

And what?

Funny, I haven't seen your tattoos, so are you really a pingu fan?

I keep my pingu tattoo where I keep my pocket watch, I'm afraid.

You were saying about when pingu gets smacked on the head and turned into a ball sometimes.

Well, um, some of those got banned, didn't they?

There's uh, there's a pingu fandom page online.

Um, of course, there is, of course, and it's got a brilliant list of all the episodes of Pingu that have been censored from around the world.

So, in the first ever episode of Pingu, I've seen the video of this.

It's quite violent.

Ping,

which I think might be his mother.

I have never seen Pingo either, I have to admit.

But smacks Pingo on the head and just keeps whacking him on the head, like again and again and again, in a really quite violent way.

And that got edited out by the BBC when it was released on VHS because they thought we shall be showing kids.

Basically, they're being shown to very, very young children.

So, you know, it's like basically you start there and then you go to Grand Theft Auto and then who knows what happens after that.

And then you've got terrorism.

So the beat.

That's the interesting thing because he is really naughty.

Pingu is really naughty and there's a there's a version.

I think a pingu after dark DVD would sell like hot cakes.

And actually at the North Pole, it's always dark.

So

oh no, hang on.

Are they from the South Pole?

They're from the South Pole.

There's so many things running in front of us.

Poor Andy, Andy, Ed Sheeran, and Harry Styles gathered at the North Pole and the DBC said,

What's going on?

We fucked this up.

I don't know if anything else on pingu.

I know real penguins.

I've got some stuff on penguins and talking about colours and shapes.

There's some research by Nico Tinbergen, who's a Dutch biologist and ornithologist, on supernormal stimulus.

So, this is the idea that you can build an artificial object with sort of big, obvious obvious features, and the birds will prefer that over their actual mother or the actual eggs that they're meant to lay.

Tim Bergen took oyster catchers, which are kind of wading birds, and they sort of have small, mottled coloured eggs.

And he added in an egg almost as big as the bird itself with high contrast black and white spots.

And the birds preferred...

to incubate that one even though it's clearly not an egg just because it has a bigger stimulus.

I also found several references to say, even when the egg was so big that the bird kept sliding off it.

And that is not in the original study.

I checked that.

I can't find that anywhere.

I think someone just came up with the image of an oyster catcher just constantly sliding off an oversized egg and that is funny.

Well, this should help them documentary makers to film penguins, surely, because they tinker around with making fake ones in order to infiltrate the flocks, don't they?

So I think there are some documentary makers last year or the year before who made a fake penguin and then put a camera on the inside of it.

What is it made out of?

Is it like a child in a tuxedo or

holding a camera on its shoulder?

What is it like a plaster cast or something or?

Oh, no, it's very fluffy.

It's really cute.

It's a baby and it's got a normal penguin's head and then it looks like it's just got a huge fluffy skirt or cloak and then it's on wheels and it wheels along and the penguins much prefer that and get much less stress than if a human's there.

And it causes problems actually.

There was one

who, a researcher, I think, who created a fake penguin, which one of the males started to try and flirt with and to mate with.

And his original mate came over in a jealous rage and attacked it and sort of ruined the fake penguin because, you know, thought this is a threat to my man.

If you're studying penguins and you're a human actually going in with the penguins, that could be a problem because I'm sure you all saw this study this year where researchers are getting high off laughing gas, which is produced by the poo of penguins.

So the penguin poo kind of ferments and then it gives off this, what is laughing gas?

Nitrous oxide, yeah, it gives off nitrous oxide.

And then they can, it says after nosing about in the guano for several hours, one goes completely cuckoo feeling nosing about in the guano.

Yeah.

I think that could be a thing for us to put in our new nightclub, which is mostly fractal patterns induced by see it going along in a buggy past the plain trees.

Then you get to the end of the plain trees and you get a big pile of poo to sniff from you.

Because actually, like nitrous oxide, it's like hippie crack, isn't it?

They call it.

And it's really bad for the environment to make it and stuff.

So like it's really hard for the hippies because they want to have the nitrous oxide hit, but they also don't want to wreck the environment.

But we're not blaming the penguins for generating it, are we?

No, no, no, no.

No, but what I'm saying is like it's quite an ethical way of getting your laughing gas fixed is to have a penguin in the corner of your room just shitting everyone

if you have a penguin on the podium in the nightclubs then everyone could just gather around and get a hit off that yeah and then you send a little message on your pneumatic tube saying meet me by the penguin

this nightclub is going to be fresh it's going to be really good

They do have the same thing as we have, the cocktail party effect, which I find really amazing about penguins.

So, you know, when you go into a crowded room, you're meeting your friend in a bar or something and it's very loud.

Not anymore, no.

Do you remember?

I can dimly recall this, yeah.

You know, when you're going to an illegal rave and

before the police arrive, you're looking for your mate, and if they're speaking at the bar, then you'll recognize their voice and be able to distinguish it from the cacophony of sound all around.

And penguins do this to an incredible extent.

So,

if they're parenting, the parents take turns to go out and hunt and then return to their mate, who will be the one who's sitting on the egg or looking after the offspring.

And when they return, they'll return to a colony of like 10,000 other penguins, and they all have individual calls that they'll be able to recognize.

So they'll be hearing 10,000 calls, but they'll be able to pick out the one call that's meant for them, which is their mate saying, Can you come the fuck here and give me my dinner, please?

And they can track that down, which I think is extraordinary.

That is amazing.

It's incredible.

When you said cocktail party effect, I thought it was the thing where you just have a lot of penguins all together, and then just through coincidence, they all go silent at the same moment

just says something really loud and offensive over the top of everything else

barry's been hugging the fish yeah

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All right, it is time for our final fact of the week, and that is my fact.

And my fact this week is that the person who measured the world's tallest tree did so by climbing to the top of it and dropping a tape measure down.

How smart.

How else would you do it?

It makes more sense sense than standing at the bottom of it and slowly pushing the tape measure upwards, hoping it doesn't bend.

You know, those, yeah, those mechanical ones where you can keep pushing it up.

And then that was the game you always played as a kid, wasn't it?

To see how far you could get it before it collapsed on itself.

Yeah.

I don't think you ever got it as tall as this tree.

I'm fairly sure that there's the World Tape Measure Championship somewhere, which is entirely about how far you can extend that army.

Oh my God.

So, Anna, when you're taking your year off to do all the clocks of London, this is what I'm going to do to train for this championships.

I say that, or that may just have been something that some friends of mine did once.

It seems like something there must be.

I mean, why wouldn't there?

I think there are Guinness records for...

I don't know if there's a record for the longest tape measure.

It feels like we're missing the main point of this, which is that there's a massive tree signal.

There's a tree.

Sorry, there's a tree.

Yeah.

I think it's mostly about the tape measures, which I should specify probably is, it's not one of your...

you know, day-to-day tape measures.

I think he just dropped some tape from the top once he got there, and then they would have measured that.

But this is is this amazing guy called Steve Sillett who is an ecologist and he's been really into tall trees since the 80s and he's the first person who ever ended up in a redwood tree canopy.

So I think it was like 1987, he was 19 and he saw a redwood tree, a giant redwood, looked at it and then ran at it and scaled it and went up about, you know, almost 300 feet and thought, well, I love this.

I'm going to do this for a living.

And he's sort of, he's one of our leading botanists and he identified this tree the tree is called hyperion it's a coast redwood in California and it's 116 meters tall which is sort of significantly higher than the statue of liberty and he yeah some hikers came across it and thought that looks like a big tree let's tell someone about it you can't just like put a helicopter above all the trees and just say oh that's the tallest one can you because the undulations in the land they might be growing the bottom might be lower right yeah

well there I think measuring trees is difficult, although there are other ways to do it, like easy ways to do it.

But this guy happens to love climbing them, so they called this guy, and that's the most accurate way of doing it.

You get it, you know, to the nearest centimeter.

Actually, hang on, hang on.

How do you define the top of a tree?

Because if he's dropped the tape measure down, he can't be perched on top of the highest leaf.

That's a

really good point.

Maybe

he's got two tape measures.

One he goes, he pushes up

using the Harkin method.

Exactly, exactly.

And then the other one he drops it.

He has to add the two together.

So it's an extra line on the spreadsheet at the end.

I think he might give the tape measure to a passing bird and ask it to just, or maybe a little ant or something and ask it to scale those last few leaves.

An ant.

Yeah, well, you need something very light, don't we?

And maybe then the ant gives it to an even smaller ant that just does a little bit at the top.

Exactly.

Isn't he afraid of heights, this guy, Steve said?

He does have a fear of heights, yeah.

I mean, he's picked the worst job.

I'm sceptical about whether feeling nervous when you've scaled 300 over 300 foot redwood and looking down and feeling nervous is a fear of heights or just kind of a rational human response to being in a dangerous situation but he he does claim it's a fear of heights yeah

so i have a theory that this isn't the tallest tree in the world oh

my theory is that the largest tree in the world is a fig tree in south africa and that's because i'm counting the root to tip so i'm including the roots and there is a fig tree above the Echo Caves in Limpopo, which is only about 10 meters above the ground, but its roots reach 120 meters underground.

So from the bottom of the roots to the top, I reckon it's longer because redwood roots are all quite shallow and quite wide.

They don't go particularly deep like most roots don't go that deep, but this one, they go super deep.

I don't think it's a theory so much as a trick, a language trick.

Yeah, fair enough.

I know, I think that tree's got a claim.

It can shout that to all the surrounding trees towering above it if it makes it feel better.

I think that's okay.

I think, again, there's like some kind of story that we can all relate to about being small, but underneath being really...

Anyway, so

yeah, these caves in Limpopo, basically the figs do have long roots anyway, but they were searching for water and they went all the way down because in this cave, there's like a big water system.

And we only found out about the roots because people went into this cave and saw the roots and thought, where the hell do they come from?

Because we're so far underground, and then they worked out that it was this tree.

That's really cool.

That's amazing.

I mean, that must be deeper than lots of underground lines.

Yeah,

yeah, for sure.

Yeah, yeah, it's extraordinarily deep, given that most, I think most tree roots don't even go more than one meter below the ground.

120 meters, it's gone insane.

It could be just wrong, of course, because

the tallest tree that was ever measured, okay, ever, this was a eucalyptus in Australia.

It had fallen down and they measured it and it was 133 meters high, which would be higher than Hyperion.

But most people now think that they just didn't measure it correctly because they've never found any other eucalyptuses that were nearly that tall.

And it was in 1871 when maybe tape measures weren't quite as good as they are today.

Yeah.

But yeah.

That is obviously the easiest way to measure a tree is to cut it down and do it long ways, but not recommended.

I don't think we've ever mentioned Donald Curry on this podcast.

Who is he?

Do you remember him?

He was a tree researcher in the 60s, and he was taking samples from a really old tree called Prometheus, and two of his drill bits broke inside the tree.

He was trying to remove a little core, see how old it was.

And he asked for permit.

He said, well, this is really annoying because I need to know how old this tree is.

And he asked for permission from the U.S.

Forest Service to cut it down.

And they granted permission.

So he chopped down the tree and it turned out to be almost 5,000 years old.

And it was the oldest tree that had ever been discovered.

And he chopped it down.

And

he later switched to studying lakes.

Which he promptly drilled into and drained.

I just need to drain this lake to find out how old it is.

I'm sorry.

Just to say, you can't, just in case you want to go and find Typeria in the world's tallest tree, you can't.

So don't try.

They keep the location of these trees top secret now so people don't go and accidentally sort of kill them with love.

I think is how I think it might have been Steve Sillett who said it like that.

You know, you go, you hug it, you trample on its roots, you tighten it, kind of etch your name into it and stuff.

Exactly.

Because you love it so much.

Yeah.

He also thinks that its growth might have been stunted.

So it could have got even higher, but there's a woodpecker that lives right at the top.

I think right at the top.

And it looks like it's just damaged the tip.

No.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

So that's so frustrating.

Something else, or someone else who was measured by dangling a tape measure, is the world's tallest ever woman.

Okay, so I kind of heard about the world's tallest man quite a lot, who was Wadlow, something like that, William Wadlow or something.

Robert Wadlow.

Robert Wadlow, that's right.

But I'd never really read about the tallest woman.

And she's got a name that's really easy for QI fans to remember.

Can you guess what that would be?

Stephen Fry.

No.

Sandy Toxbrigger.

Sandy is right.

And surname?

Brian?

No, Alan.

Sandy Allen.

so she was the tallest ever woman and she um worked at an oil company and her co-workers realized that she was really tall it's kind of sad because she had a pituitary issue um but her co-workers realized that she was really tall and so they climbed up on a load of chairs and desks and then dangled a tape measure from the top of her head to the bottom and then took a photo of it and sent it to Guinness and Guinness used that to say, yes, this is the tallest lady that's ever lived.

And then she became really famous.

She was in a film with Donald Sutherland, uh, and she would go around initially, kind of doing you know, Ripley's Believe It or Not shows, but then eventually she went round going to different like schools and churches and stuff like that, not for money, um, just to do talks about how if you're different, it doesn't really matter, and you know, you can make the most of what you are and stuff like that.

And she had her own phone number that people could ring, which was 1-888-BIG Sandy, and they would play her little um speech that she did always did about how being tall is no problem.

And then

was she married to Tom Cruise for a while?

I feel like she was.

Yeah, it certainly looked that way, but it wasn't.

But yeah, and then eventually, like, she did get sick and ended up in a home.

And in the home that she was in, which was in Shelbyville, Indiana, she was there at the same time as Edna Parker, who was the world's oldest living human at the time.

So you could go to this retirement home place and see the world's tallest woman and the world's oldest person at the same time if you wanted.

But she's really cool.

Like this lady, honestly, I'd never heard about her.

She's super cool.

God, I wonder what the tension was like between those two.

I bet there were sort of two clans, like the Jets and the Sharks, in that old people's home.

I think that would be a great,

that's a great setting for a crime scenario.

Like they're crime solvers.

You know, one of them's old and one of them's tall.

Oh, yeah, commission that it's serious.

Every single crime is related to a high concealed clue or something that happened in 1912.

This reminds me of something that happened in the Stockholm Olympics.

Oh, but our book about the Stockholm Olympics is on the top shelf.

It's okay.

I can.

Yeah.

This is going to be like the nightclub.

This is going to be fresh.

Yep.

Yep.

I got the Chris to eat your heart up.

I read a survey of tape measure ownership in the UK and 77% of 18 to 24 year olds own a tape measure and 100%

of the over 65s owns a tape measure.

100%.

Wow.

That's a lot.

I want to know what proportion of that 100% of people actually would be able to locate the tape measure if you asked them to.

50 max.

I am in my 30s and had to buy a tape measure last year for a thing and now I own a tape measure.

It feels like at some point there is going to be a drawer in your house, and it's going to have a tape measure.

You never, because people don't get rid of them, why would you?

No, why would you ever get rid of a tape measure?

It's not big enough to kind of have to throw out because you're moving, it just sits in the box of stuff.

You know who would own a tape measure?

The world's oldest woman.

You know who she'd measure with there?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think we're there.

We're there.

Yeah.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts for this week.

If you want to get in touch with any of us, you can contact these guys on Twitter.

So James is on.

At James Harkin.

Andy's on.

At Andrew Hunter M.

Tom.

At Tom Scott.

And you can email me on podcast at QI.com or you can go to no suchuchthingsafish.com where you have all of our previous episodes and various other fun stuff, including a link where you'll be able to stream the live show that we're going to be doing in a couple of weeks.

So you can go to no suchuchthingsafish.com for all the details about that.

But for now, that's all from us.

We'll be back again next week with another four facts.

See you then.

Goodbye.

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