327: No Such Thing As A SCUBA Diver In A Tree

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter-Murray, Anna Taczynski, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Andy.

My fact is that spies can tell what people are saying by looking at the lights in the room they're in.

So this is a new spying technique which has been discovered or I don't know what you do with spying techniques, but it's been found out by researchers from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Weizmann Institute of Science.

And what they've found is that there are lots of different ways of eavesdropping on people.

And this one is called Lamphone.

And what it means is if we're all talking in our rooms, if there's a light bulb, and it has to be a hanging light bulb, so you know, a classic bulb,

your conversation will make tiny, tiny vibrations on the surface, and that will slightly affect the light inside the bulb.

And you can get very cheap equipment, like costs a couple of hundred dollars, and you just observe the light bulb from outside the room, and you can pick up what people are talking about.

Uh, you can decode speeches, yeah.

So, you can, is it's not like Morse, it's not translating into Morse, you can pick up the actual sound.

Well, I think it has to be translated from light bulb language into sound.

It is like so it is light bulb language, yeah, but they can they can even, you can shazam the song that someone is playing in a room.

That's how

it is amazing, isn't it?

And they reckon that um they took a snippet of a speech by Donald Trump and they could understand what he was saying, which is quite impressive because most people can't understand what he's saying monsters on it anyway.

Can we do a light bulb episode of Phish that we just release in light bulb language and people can decode down the line?

Yeah, good idea.

Yeah.

That won't present any technical problems.

It's hard enough doing it on Zoom, Dan.

Is this, do they use lasers for this to reflect?

Because you can't just pin your ear to the window and listen to the vibrations coming off the light bulb or anything, presumably.

Do they bounce, is it lasers they they bounce off it yeah it's invisible lasers so you won't notice a kind of sniper dot on your light bulb so you won't be able to tell you're being spied on what it is actually i believe not a laser i think i think it's just a telescope so you get the light and an electro optical sensor Now that might have a laser in it for all I know, but I think what it is, it takes the light in and it can sense the very, very slight changes in light.

Can I just say why I flubbed that?

It's because there's a separate thing called a laser microphone.

Okay.

This was used.

This is where

you fire a laser at the windows of a room and you can eavesdrop that way.

And this was used in 2013 in a place called Abotabed and it was used to find out that there was an extra person inside a building in Abotabad.

And that extra person who never left the building turned out to be Osama bin Laden.

Wow.

So that's how they found out there was an extra person inside that building who never went outside.

Wow.

And do you know who invented this?

This laser?

No.

It was Leon Theremin, the inventor of the theremin.

That instrument?

Do the noise again, Dan?

You should explain what the theremin is, as well as doing that excellent impersonation.

I think we have mentioned it before.

Yeah, so theremins are, you will have seen them possibly as an instrument that I don't, I actually don't know how they work technically.

They give off electromagnetic waves, don't they?

And your hand can disrupt them and they make a noise.

Yeah, so people use their hand.

If you see them sort of pushing forward and backwards, their hand, it will sort of

make that kind of noise.

It's basically a ghost impression, is what it sounds like.

So, Leon Theremin invented what basically was the precursor to the modern laser microphone that we have today, and it was used by the Soviet Union.

He was given a Stalin Prize for inventing this what was advanced espionage technology.

So,

Theremin found Osama bin Laden.

Wow, that's amazing!

Sort of spooky.

The other thing that Theremin did, really interestingly, was he had invented basically like the technology you have on contactless credit cards.

He put one of those in a giant wooden seal.

And when I say seal, I don't mean the animal.

I mean like

kind of a symbol of the United States.

And then gave it to the US embassy somewhere, I think.

And they had it up in their room.

But what they didn't realize is there was a tiny chip in there and that they could hear what was happening by using this contactless technology I think yep, yeah, you're completely right They didn't have to go up to the seal the Soviets didn't have to go up to the seal and then sort of tap on it get the sound files out but they could sort of fired electromagnetic beams at it didn't they and that activated it just like your oyster card is activated by the ticket stand it was called the thing

The thing?

That's what it was called.

Yeah, the seal was called the thing.

Soviet school children gave it to the US embassy in, or the US ambassador in in 1945, and they managed to get seven years of espionage recording out of it.

Yeah, that's so cool.

How did they make sure the U.S.

ambassador put it in the right room?

It was so big, I think, that I had to go on the wall somewhere.

I don't think they could guarantee the room.

But also, it was completely made of wood.

So they thought this is definitely safe.

There's no way this is a spying tool.

And the really clever thing about those kind of chips that you have in your credit card and in your ice card is they don't need any power, do they?

All the power comes from the thing that's scanning them.

You know, Edward Snowden.

Yeah,

he has a secret device to stop himself being spied on, which is a blanket over his head.

Is that what inspires you?

Because you do that sometimes when we record.

And I thought it was just to embellish the ghost impression that you've been honing.

No, it's just that's just social anxiety.

But Edward Snowden has

he calls it his magic mantle of power.

Oh, my God.

And basically, it's to stop targeted video surveillance.

Because obviously, if you're Edward Snowden, you know, leaking secrets, secrets, there's a chance someone will be trying to span you.

So he just puts a blanket over his head when he types his password in.

I remember reading an article about, was it Glenn Greenwald who interviewed him?

Yeah.

Someone like that.

And they said that whenever they went into his hotel room or his house or whatever, they always made you put your phone in the microwave.

As soon as you walked in, that was what you always had to do.

I think Snowden makes people put it in the refrigerator.

Oh, does he?

Yeah.

How does it work, Andy, though?

If he's put it over his head,

he's not going to be able to see what he's typing, A, but also it's just his eyeballs that are not seeing.

I reckon Edward Snowden could touch type.

But still, what are they recording?

His brain?

All of him is under the blanket.

Oh, he's in a four case.

Oh, no.

Well,

he's got a blanket over his head and his hands, basically.

It's in case there's someone, the camera in the room that would film what he's typing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you've got to assume that he's done the very basic putting masking tape over the camera on his laptop, because if he's missed that shot, he's an absolute nutty.

Actually, you know what they can tell what you're typing by just listening to the sound of your typing on your keyboard so

there are some researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

Actually, it's Doug Tiger and his team.

And they've worked out every time you click a button, it makes a very, very slightly different sound to the other ones.

But you can't really tell which one is which.

But what you can do is you can take all the clicks and then work out the one that comes most often is probably E.

And if there are two letters together, these researchers they realize that it could be TH or it could be ER and it could definitely not be BF because there are no words with BF next to each other.

What the hell?

Of course there are.

What up if you're like me and my BF are both hardcore spots?

Exactly.

If you are Edward Snowden, here's a little tip for him and he's in his little fort and you want to trick the FBI, just keep writing about your BFF.

He's been a major sort of revealer of a lot of the secrets secrets that we've been researching, hasn't he?

So

a lot of stuff came out on the back of his revelations.

So I think, for instance, when The Guardian was doing their investigation and they got hold of a lot of the documents, they were told that they weren't allowed to keep any of the Edward Snowden files in their offices because the government thought that they could be spied on by laser microphones just bouncing off their glasses of water and stuff like that.

So it's not just the windows.

It's if you've got a mug of tea or anything similar to that, they could do that.

And yeah, he's in the wake of his revelations, A lot of countries took action to make sure that the US or the NSA couldn't spy on them too much anymore.

So Germany, for instance, invested in a whole bunch of typewriters, which I don't know if this would have solved the typing issue, but the idea is that if you're writing on a typewriter, there's no digital memory of it anywhere.

You've just got it on a bit of paper in that weird old school font, and then I guess you just post it to somebody.

But it is quite annoying if you need to share a document with 20 other people who don't know what you do.

But yeah, and Russia, I think, spent 10 grand on antique typewriters after that.

Really?

Do any of you guys have a typewriter?

I have one, and they're a pain to use compared with a computer.

They're so annoying.

Like, they just always get stuck.

And whenever you make a mistake, you can't press delete.

James, why are you writing on a typewriter?

That's a big question for me.

Well, you know, I'm married to a Russian.

no I got I got one as a gift and I really liked it and I thought I might try typing on it but it's really a fucking annoyance

it must be so annoying for all these people who work in spy centers coming up with new ways of spying on people that some dorky scientists are just publishing these papers going oh we found out that they must be reading light bulbs like damn it that took me years

I created the technology to read light bulbs and now we're going to look for something else what next yeah because some people do that.

I think there's a company, a data analysis company called Palantir,

which is used by the US Secret Service.

So they must know what they're doing.

And they have designed their windows to have these things that they call acoustic transducers on them, which basically, if you try to use the window vibrations, it just sends out white noise or something.

Maybe it sends out some kind of haha, prank you

message to anyone that's done.

That's brilliant.

If you could hack your window to send other messages, that would be amazing.

But I think, isn't that why governments would use net curtains?

I think that's why, because that supposedly dampened the vibrations or something.

Other governments which use net curtains, because I associate them with suburbia in the 1950s, and you have to have an old lady peering around them to see what the neighbours are doing.

You know, the Sopranos, the great TV series, the mobster TV series.

So it was so realistic.

It was so on point for what would happen in the real life of a mobster that mobsters started thinking there must be someone on the inside who was leaking information to the writers and producers of the show.

And we know that they had those conversations because the FBI were actually wiretapping the mobsters who had that conversation and fed that back to the writers and producers of the Sopranos.

But they used to listen in to conversations of mobsters going, Did you see the Sopranos on Sunday?

How did they know that we do that kind of thing?

Come on, dad, you could have done a better Italian-American accent than that.

come on come on guys we didn't know what to put somebody

something

happening nope he couldn't turns out

dan you sounded like a kiwi you sounded new zealandish which is the opposite of being that's new jersey you're trying to get you did new zealand do you think new zealand is the opposite of being in the sopranos because that probably is quite close a harmless pretty much is yeah yeah you're right um dan you know what you were saying about um what it's annoying that all these secrets come out must be irritating if you're in the secret service.

So I have a suspicion that everything we found out is all just fake news that's subtly put out by the CIA or MI5 to throw us off the scent.

Because it's just so much they release.

Like there's this amazing

buy big lampshade.

Could be them.

That's

a good point.

The lampshade company is trying to make us buy lampshades.

You're absolutely bang on.

Or candle.

James.

Because your 1950s house.

You've got your neck curtains.

You've got your big fringe lampshade the typewriter's out

i am from murder she wrote jessica fletcher or whatever she's called um sorry anna i interrupted um so big lampshade or whoever it is has put out this fake news because this stuff that comes out is amazing so there's a book called spycraft which came out in 2009 and it was written by the head of the office of technical service which is the cia department that's responsible for all of their gadgets so it's written written by this former head of that, and he just revealed this amazing stuff, but it sounds so implausible.

So he said that they used to, when they met business people or politicians or diplomats, they'd hand out gifts and all the gifts would have like devices placed in them.

So a bit like this, uh, these schoolchildren, but so they'd hand out books or lighters or flower pots, apparently.

So but you just think if you wait a minute, if you're gonna give a gift, right, don't give a flower pot, which they might put outside.

You need to give them something that will...

Oh, here's a milk bottle as a gift.

It's like, you've got to give them something that they'll definitely keep in that.

You're so right.

The only noise you get from that is wind and then squirrels and foxes desperately digging through earth.

I saw an amazing video online just while we're on the CIA.

So the CIA has a chief of disguise, which I didn't know.

And the former chief of disguise does this video.

She's called Jonna Mendez.

And it's amazing.

This video is her sitting talking about how you can slip into a disguise very quickly or the elaborate ways that they do it.

And during the video, she slowly goes into different disguises.

So someone who's an old man and it's really incredible.

And she was talking about a lot of the mythology of CIA disguise and what they do, particularly the Mission Impossible movies with wearing the sort of fake head.

And that's not far from the truth of what they did.

And there's this fantastic set of photos when she went to meet George Bush Sr.

to tell him about what they were up to that she sat doing the whole meeting and then near the end rips off her mask and has a different her real head underneath.

Bush didn't notice the entire time.

You can see these photos, highly recommend.

But Bush didn't notice her ripping off her own

face.

No, he saw that bit.

He didn't just carry on with the meeting.

I thought this was late in the presidency where he wasn't really paying attention anymore.

No, he didn't notice, said she had a fake head on during the meeting.

I did not found it suspicious that Mrs.

Doubtfire wanted to have a meeting with him in the first place.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that London Bridge was destroyed by a tornado in 1091.

What?

What?

Like, what?

I can't believe I didn't know this already.

I thought, why are they not teaching it in schools?

Why is it not a great movie?

Yeah, this is...

This is incredible, this fact.

This was one of the first London Bridges.

In fact, probably the first one we 100% definitely know about.

There will have been some before, but we're not quite sure what happened to them.

But it was William the Conqueror.

He came into London in 1066 and one of his first things that he did when his army came in was they built a new bridge over the River Thames and it was just 25 years later that it was completely demolished by a tornado.

And we don't know much about it because obviously people didn't write much down in those days.

But 12th century historian William of Malmesbury says that it was completely wrecked.

There were also churches that were wrecked and there were more than 600 houses that were completely flattened and we now think that it was an what's called an f4 tornado which is the second strongest tornado you can get with winds over 200 miles an hour amazing is is it how did he call it a tornado at the time i've just realized i mean did he call it a mighty wind or uh or something else like that because presumably they didn't have the word then did they it's such a good question they won't have had the word so That's, yeah, you answered your own question.

Actually, what a bad question.

You knew the answer.

You're wasting everyone's time.

I didn't know.

And only two people were killed, apparently, in this tornado.

Good.

That's so weird.

It was no one in any of the 600 or whatever houses that were falling down.

It's so weird.

Everyone's out at work.

It sounds extraordinarily powerful.

So the church of St.

Mary Le Beau had 26 foot high rafters, and apparently they were driven so far into the earth by this tornado that only four feet of them remained above ground.

Which I was thinking, because Mary Le Beau is a very famous church in London for those people who aren't Londoners, because that's if you're born within the sound of the bells of Mary Le Beau, then you are officially a Cockney.

And I'm guessing the bells weren't functioning once it was driven into the ground.

So anyone born in that period couldn't be a Cockney.

That's incredible.

How does that work that it shoved it into the ground?

That's like a giant screwdriver.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm just putting myself in their place.

You know, we don't know what this thing was.

There was a giant spinny screwdriver in the sky and it's drilled some of our big panels into the ground.

Well, that's when they changed traditional church architecture away from the screwdriver design to a less easy to drive into the ground shape.

That just seems, but that's a lot.

That's 20 feet to go into the ground.

London grounds are very swampy.

It's a lot.

Look, they didn't have such good tarmac then.

But the other thing that's interesting is that I think the London Bridge that would have been destroyed by this tornado would have been way bigger than modern London Bridge because the river was so much wider at the time.

That's a good point.

The river used to be about four or five times as wide as it is today.

A lot of it's been reclaimed, so it would have been absolutely enormous.

Yeah, I did read about a potential precursor to this London Bridge, which

is much debated, but a lot of serious journals do think it sides on the fact that it did exist.

And it's off the back of something that we know from Nordic law,

which was there was a period in 1014 when Ethel the Unready had been trying to reclaim England.

Is Ethel the Unready related to Ethelred the Unready?

It was his mob.

Yeah, it was Ethelred.

Ethelred, sorry, I said his name wrong.

Yeah, annoyingly, this fact has so much English history that I have to get to before I can explain the basic thing.

The basic thing is the Danes were in charge of London at that point, and London Bridge was very much a spot where they could arm the whole thing with people, bows and arrows for anyone who was coming down the Thames.

And so there was a Viking called Olaf who tied ropes underneath the bridge and went underneath with the tide and pulled London Bridge down,

forcing all the soldiers to die and perish in the water.

It was over 200 soldiers and helped for reclaiming England for the British as opposed to the Danes.

And a poet called Otar Starve

did a poem, which was London Bridge is broken down, gold is won and bright reown.

There's more to it, but that line, London Bridge is broken down, is thought to have inspired London Bridge is falling down.

What's really interesting is about the London Bridges Falling Down thing, which is a lot of people think that it might be to do with that story.

But then on the other hand, before that, there were other songs throughout the whole of Europe.

So you would have Die Magdeburge Bruck.

the Magdeburg Bridge in Germany, and it was basically exactly the same idea of a bridge that would fall down.

And a lot of nursery rhyme historians think that what happened was this was quite a common kind of European song and then when it came over to Britain they just gave it the name of the capital city's most famous bridge.

My favourite version of the London Bridge was the one that was there during Shakespearean times.

It just sounds like the most fascinating thing to have ever walked across.

It was packed with houses that were up to four stories high.

It had restaurants on it, restaurants that when you went to them, the way you would order your food is you would get fish as a sandwich, right?

And they would open a trapdoor and they would put down a fishing rod.

They would catch the fish live, reel it up and then slap it raw in between bread and give it away.

How laughed that?

So many questions.

First, worst restaurant ever.

If you just get a raw fish.

It's sushi.

Can I say second?

How are you going to guarantee if it's the Thames in the 16th century that you're not going to reel in a turd?

Bingo.

Well,

that was the exciting element of your dining experience.

That's where the phrase comes from.

I'd rather eat a shit sandwich than

visit this restaurant.

And third, as we know, the sandwich in this country hadn't really been invented yet, so it doesn't make any sense.

They would have reeled the fish up and had two bits of bread and gone, God, we don't know how to put that together.

So

where have you read this, Dad?

This is amazing.

I read this in a book by Dr.

Matthew Green, a book called London, A Travel Guide Through Time.

And this was a book that was published by my wife.

And it's the most fascinating chapter because he takes you back to the time.

So he has someone walking across the bridge in Shakespearean times.

It would take you two hours to walk the length of the entire bridge.

It was so congested.

And there was always a bit, apparently, during the day where it came to a standstill because you know how there was a polar bear at Tower

at the

Tower of London.

It was during the hour when he would be taken out to the Thames to be fed that people would stand and just watch.

It would come to a standstill because it was such a mad thing that a polar bear would be fishing for food.

He'd be stealing sandwiches out of the mouths of hungry clientele in the restaurant as well.

He's run off with my, what's it called?

That polar bear wasn't there in Shakespearean times, was he?

I thought he was like 13th century at the latest, wasn't it?

I thought so.

So, but this is the same bridge that I'm talking about.

This is, this is, because it spanned a long time.

In the 14th century, we know how many people were actually living on it because we know the number of rent that was collected from properties.

So there were 198 buildings that were all providing rental revenue from that period.

And this was the bridge.

If you're talking about all the London bridges, of which there have been dozens of iterations, this was the one that lasted, what, 600 years or whatever, or maybe longer even.

But it was because of this that they eventually dismantled that in the 1820s because it was so congested.

It's also because it was the only bridge.

It was literally the only bridge across central London until 1739.

So it feels weird for them to dismantle it and build another one when they could have just built more bridges.

Yeah, true.

I was reading an account of the dismantling, and then they rebuilt it as a wider, more useful bridge.

And the laying, you know, when they lay the first stone of a building or a bridge, and there was this account in the British newspaper archive, it was 1925, and the Lord Mayor was invited to lay the foundation stone.

And I didn't understand the ritual at all.

So basically, he had a gold trowel with which he sort of dug it up, I guess.

And then he dropped coins into a box.

So there's a wooden box.

He drops coins into a box, which contains four little glass pillars seven inches high.

A lid's put on the box, and then the box is covered in cement and installed into a hole in the foundation stone.

And then that's dropped.

So if you went to the bottom of London Bridge now with your scuba gear, and then you cut away into some of the stones, in one of them, there's this little box full of glass pillars and these coins.

Isn't that weird?

Cool.

That's really cool.

I know what happened to the previous foundation stone from the previous bridge.

So was that the Anna?

Was that the 1831 version of London Bridge that you're talking about?

Okay, so the previous one got lots of it got sold off as souvenirs.

So there are bits of various British country houses which are made of old London Bridge, but the stone got turned into a chair, the foundation stone

in the base of a chair.

Where is the chair?

Yeah.

It's in Fish Hall, which is kind of the fishing guild, the fisherman's guild.

And it's right by modern London Bridge now.

And it's just a fancy chair, basically.

That's so sad for that stone.

So it spent its entire existence watching live fish swimming happily around and now it's condemned to this place full of dead, slaughtered fish ready for the table.

Just have a fisherman's bottom on him every now and then.

We can't leave London Bridge alone without talking about what happened to that new 1831 version, which is now in America.

So the idea was that it was sold to an American and he got conned, right?

That's.

Oh, well, people claim that, but he insists he didn't.

And I suspect he didn't.

But yeah, basically, it's so that London Bridge is now in Havasu, which is in Arizona, because this crazy millionaire in it was in 1968, wasn't it, that it was put up for sale.

This millionaire in America bought it.

And there's always been a rumor that he meant to buy Tower Bridge and got the wrong one.

But I think he likes that because it drummed up even more publicity.

for the fact that he was moving London Bridge to the desert, which everyone thought was insane.

It's amazing because they installed it in a dry bit of the desert and then they redirected the nearby stream to go under it.

So there is water going under it now, but the bridge was put there before the water was.

Yeah, it is quite weird to have to build a river in order to satisfy a bridge's needs rather than the other way around.

But the weird thing is that London...

put the bridge on sale in 1968.

It wasn't like some mad Yosemite Sam millionaire turns up and says, I want to buy that bridge.

It was that London was trying to flog it off.

Yeah.

But who did they think was going to buy it?

Probably someone with a river.

So they were probably quite surprised when this guy got it.

They probably, when he came over, they were like, oh, nice.

Yeah.

What river are you going to put it over?

No river.

No river.

Oh, right.

Okay.

It is worth saying, if this guy did make the mistake of Tower Bridge and London Bridge, that possibly a lot of international listeners listening to this episode right now are making the very same mistake.

The almost iconic bridge that you've pictured in your head, that's Tower Bridge.

That's one where it opens up in the middle and it's got the huge, two giant, I don't know what you call them, arches or whatever.

That bridge, the one you're thinking of, London Bridge, very dull.

It's terrible.

It's horrible.

So you can understand.

It's just a road bridge, isn't it?

It's just

a straight old bridge that an unimaginative child might draw.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

I did read an amazing thing which was in 1952.

This is a fact about Tower Bridge, the one that does open up in the middle.

If you've ever seen the movie Speed, where they have to jump the gap of a bridge, that happened on Tower Bridge with a bus driver in 1952.

His name was Albert Gunter, and he was during December, he was driving the number 78 bus, which goes from Shoreditch to Dulwich.

And the person who would usually ring the bell to say that the bridge was going up forgot to ring it and he noticed that the bridge was bending upwards as he was driving towards it and he didn't have enough time to slam on the brakes because that would have been disaster so he hit the accelerator and he jumped he jumped across now Only his side had lifted up and he jumped a six foot drop basically onto the northern side of the bridge.

It's still a lot on a massive bus.

Exactly on a massive bus.

But he, yeah, someone jumped the gap of the bridge.

did they remember to put the sign over the tannois saying this bus is on diversion because that's not part of the planned route yeah he he so he was okay in the end he broke his leg um which was the only major um yeah problems and 12 of the 20 passengers had minor injuries but so 21 people in total all survived this big bridge jump and as a reward he was given 10 pounds which is about 290 pounds in today's money and a day off for his bravery.

Great.

Ah, that's enough time for a broken leg to fully

Okay, so some stuff on tornadoes?

Yeah.

It's really difficult to know when you read articles about tornadoes, what's real and what isn't real, because they happen in the middle of the countryside.

The only people who see it are the people who are there at the time.

And they often seem to come up with some stories that I don't know if they're real or not.

So there's a story from the start of the 20th century, I think it was in Kansas, where there was a man with a baby in his arms and the tornado came and lifted the baby up and deposited it in a tree.

Oh no,

which doesn't sound very true.

But this, apparently in 1976,

this one seems like it might have been true.

It was in Michigan.

There was a tornado and there was a house which was blown by the tornado.

So it went onto its side.

So people had to use a ladder to get into the front door.

Well, apart from the side thing, it's looking pretty good in here.

But then

there are some that are definitely not true.

Like, for instance, in this 1915 one in Kansas, there was a story that an iron jug was blown inside out.

I'm pretty sure that one isn't true.

I read one as well years ago, which was there was a mystery of a scuba diver found in a tree and he was fully, he was fully clothed.

No, Dan, no, I know what you're doing.

What?

Are you doing the famous mental brain teaser where they've been picked up by a they've been scuba diving and they've been picked up by a helicopter that's trying to put out a fire?

Was that a mental brain teaser?

Yeah, that wasn't a real story.

Dan thinks he's just come across an amazing fact website.

Look at all these anecdotes.

Okay, but the room was locked from the inside.

There were no windows.

It was just a puddle of water.

The fish were called Romeo and Juliet.

The doctor is his mother.

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

My fact this week is that this year's Dutch National Headwind Championships was cancelled during the race because it was too windy.

So this is a cycling championship that's been going for the last six years and the idea is that they don't know when it's going to happen.

They look out for storms, and as soon as they hear a massive storm is on the way, they give everyone three days' warning to say, We're going to be doing this race, and they have to go down this one strip of 8.5 kilometers, and you just have to ride against the wind.

And actually, it wasn't the cyclists who pulled out of it, it was the fact that it was the trucks carrying the bikes were being toppled over.

Wow, so they couldn't physically get the bikes to them.

So, my friend Tom Scott, who's a YouTuber, was there and he did a video about this.

And he said that they didn't topple over, I think.

They just it was too dangerous for high-sided vehicles to go across.

So I don't think any

trucks actually went over, but they were just banned from going over.

And what happens is everyone has kind of the same bike, these kind of single-speed, upright bikes.

And you cycle across, and then this big lorry picks up the bikes and takes them all back to the start again so the next lot of people can go down.

And the lorry couldn't come across the bridge because it was banned.

And instead, it would have to go on like a 20-mile route

rather than going that way.

So they just cancelled it halfway through.

There is another way of moving bikes without a truck.

And especially as coming back of the other way, you've got the wind.

So much easier.

It's a good pipe.

This year

they'd gone all out to make it even nicer than in the previous events, and they had storm-resistant seating for the spectators and a special designated vomit zone.

What?

Yeah, it's really funny.

You can see it's these three big bin bags that are sort of hung up, and it has a big placard that says vomit zone and there's little bike handles for you to hold as you're vomiting into the rubbish bin you don't want to be studded down wind of that as well

why do they need a vomit zone does it get quite layery the endurance of doing this race so they say it's it's kind of like if you were going cycling up a hill that was a sort of 10 incline um it feels and you've got no on a terrible bike on a terrible bike and the whole thing is you know this there are winners but everyone is just wanting to finish it it's an endurance thing, and they push themselves to the limit, and it forces them to vomit, enough so that they've set up the vomit station.

They should have vomit zone, surely, at the end of all marathons and all races and everywhere.

It's called the side of the road.

Wasn't it stopped also in 2017 because it wasn't stormy enough?

Was it?

Yeah, I think it was.

It was an absolute...

Because they need a certain level of wind, don't they?

So if it doesn't come, it doesn't come.

And also the wind needs to be in exactly the right direction, so that's why they can only do it three days in advance.

They need to know that the wind is not just going to be there, but it's going to be coming directly over the bridge.

Yes.

And this bridge is an amazing bridge, right?

This is the Usterschelterkrung, and it's a bridge that is basically a storm barrier bridge.

And they're very proud of it there.

They have a little inscription on a stone which says, here the tide is ruled by the wind, the moon, and us.

It's sort of they're so proud of how strong it is, which I saw on a video by your buddy, Tom Scott.

Really worth watching if you're listening to us right now talk about this.

He's on the side of the road, the wind is blowing in his head, and he's seeing people ride past him.

It's fantastic.

Isn't that sort of the beginning of an ancient Greek story about hubris, where you end up getting swept away by the tide because you've tried to control what only God can control?

Yeah, it's King Canute, isn't it?

It's Canute.

I think the Dutch are winning at the moment.

They're nailing it.

You're right.

They're doing really well.

Those Dutch bikes are really hard to cycle fast on.

The ones which don't have a bar at the top from the front to the back.

They force you to cycle in a really sedate way.

Another good race is the Red Bull time-lapse, and they call that the longest one-day road cycling event.

Do you know how many hours it's for?

24.

No!

Freaky.

25.

Because they do it when the clocks go back.

Is that right?

When the clocks go back, yes.

It's quite cool, isn't it?

Yeah.

And it's just a 6.2 kilometre course, and they see how many laps they can do in 25 hours.

Nice.

You could do the shortest one-day cycling event where you just cross the international date line.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's just like, oh, I've been cycling for a day.

Yeah.

And actually, it's just one second.

Yeah, that's great.

Apart from you're probably in the middle of the ocean.

You're dead, but you're smug.

There's a bunch of cycling things that you can do where it's underwater, so underwater cycling.

And it's quite nice the way that they get the bike to stay at the bottom, which is they take all the air out of the bike wheels and they fill it with water.

So when you plunge in, you just sink to the bottom with it and it becomes easier to get it.

How do they deal with the fact that humans are quite buoyant?

They replace all the air in their lungs with water.

Eventually, that's probably not happiness, isn't it?

Yeah, do you have to have weights?

Oh, yeah, weights.

Yeah, weight belts and things like that to keep you down.

Yeah, I didn't see that in the photo that I saw.

Because some of them go quite deep, don't they?

The underwater ones.

There's one, the underwater bike race in North Carolina, which seems to be the home of underwater bike racing, where it's 60 feet underwater.

And the race is across this shipwreck of a German U-boat called the Intra.

And you ride a hundred foot.

Doesn't that's the kind of thing you're going to book a holiday to go and do?

I don't really like cycling or swimming, but I like the sound of that.

That sounds amazing.

I don't like chess or boxing, but I like this thing.

I was looking at slip streams, sort of

air movement and cycling.

Absolutely.

And so slip stream, of course, is when you're...

So you can get in a slip stream, for instance, if you're on a bicycle and you're behind a big vehicle.

I do not recommend you do this, but the vehicle sort of pushes the air out of the way in front of it, so it creates this sort of negative pressure around you.

But the record for how fast someone cycled in a slip stream is held by a woman who's Denise Muller-Koronec, and she went at 184 miles an hour in 2018 behind a race car.

Isn't that incredible?

It is incredible.

So she's pedaling, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you've got to be pedaling.

So you can't, she's in such a high gear that you couldn't possibly start, so they have to get pulled along by the car at first

until they're going at 100 miles an hour and then released, and then you pedal along along behind the car.

Wow.

Should we move on?

Can I just talk about one?

Can I just talk about one other slipstream guy who I love who's

this guy called Charles Minthorne Mile-a-Minute Murphy?

The mile-a-minute was added later.

He was the first person to ride a bicycle a mile in under a minute.

This is in 1899, and he persuaded a train engineer, because trains were the only things that could go fast enough at the time, to build some extra track for him that he could cycle along.

And then, so two miles of track, and then he would get dragged behind it in the slipstream and so he spent he spent 12 years planning this dreaming about it fantasizing about it and uh at first it didn't work because the train couldn't go fast enough so he was there capable of cycling the train couldn't go fast enough eventually they got a bigger better faster train and he ended up going so fast burning rubber was flying up in his face because the track was warping and stuff but uh lots of people were watching and um he it got to the end of the track so he's going faster than the train at one point because he got he fell behind a bit'cause he lifted his hand up to sort of wave at one of his trainers.

I was like, Oh, fuck, I've just lost 50 feet.

So, he caught up with the train going faster than the train.

The bloody guy driving the steam train just cut the steam as soon as he got to the end.

And so, Charles went slow,

flew off his bike at 60 miles an hour and somehow got caught.

There were two people standing in the train, one caught one arm, the other caught the other.

They dragged him in

and they saved him.

That is amazing.

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Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anna.

My fact is that every week, planes drop 15 million flies on the border between Colombia and Panama.

Okay, so we're expected to believe that, but a scuba diver in a tree

is

maybe the scuba divers hurling them out of the plane and he fell out too.

I don't know.

This is this incredible,

not story, true, true fact.

And I read it in an article in The Atlantic by Sarah Zhang, it's a brilliant article, but it's about how it's 14.7 million screw worm adults, so it's the flies of the screw worm, are dropped over this border and it's in order to keep down screw worm populations, weirdly.

And it's been happening for over 50 years and it's because they're a terrible pest.

So they were this awful blight in the US because they destroy livestock for reasons that I have no doubt we'll go into in disgusting detail so they started looking into how to get rid of them it was sort of in the 1950s the US Department of Agriculture started looking into eradicating them and decided to sterilize a bunch of screw worms drop them all over the continent and then those guys would shag as male screw worms they drop those guys would shag the females who only shag once in their life so if you shag a sterilized male that's it you're not having kids and thusly the screw worm blight is ended so the screw worm was screwed by screwing you could say very nice could say that should be their logo and and we should say i don't know if you said this anna but um the reason why it's in panama between colombia and panama is they eradicated these flies from the whole of north america but they still exist in south america and the bit where panama is is obviously very very thin bit of land so if they can make sure that nothing gets past that little bit of land then it means that nothing will come into North America.

So that's why they've flood Panama and Colombia with it, just to kind of create a barrier.

And also to make a big buffer zone, I think, because at first they did try to make it a barrier with Mexico, but because that's just a bit too close, Mexico's right there, they were like, we've got to make this big buffer zone.

It's like the Eastern Bloc in the Cold War.

Can we talk about the worms and how horrific they are?

They lay their eggs in open wounds.

That's what their jam is.

And sometimes they go for mucous membranes if they can't find an open wound, but that's why they're so painful and horrendous.

So you're living in a mucous membrane, are you?

Yes, yeah, but we're saving up and we hope to find an open wound soon.

Yeah, and then they sort of chew their way.

They chew their way really deep as well.

Like they can get two inches down and they're just

awful.

They're awful.

There was a British tourist called Rochelle Harris in 2013 who had a screw fly who went into her ear.

And there was like this weird buzzing and scratching and stuff and she didn't really know what it was.

And eventually they found out that she had these flesh-eating worms living inside her head.

And then they interviewed her afterwards.

I think this might in the Daily Mail.

They interviewed her afterwards, and she said, I'm no longer as squeamish as I once was about bugs.

How can you be after they've been inside your head?

I just think, I think that would make me more squeamish.

I'd be way less likely to lie down in the garden if I've had a load of screw worms in my brain.

It sounds like one stayed in there and is running the show now.

That's such a good idea.

Their name, it literally means flesh eating, which I love.

So their scientific name is the cochleomia hominivorax and hominy is man and vorax like voracious is eating.

So man devouring.

Gosh.

Which is fitting.

Yeah.

The actual discovery of the idea of sterilizing all of these screw worms and dropping them over had been called in the New York Times in 1970 the single most original thought in the 20th century.

That was according to a lot of scientists at the time because it was down to a guy called Edward F.

Kippning.

Sorry, Edward F.

Knipling.

Knipling?

Nippling.

I say it's nippling.

It's usually a silent case, isn't it?

Yeah.

I think it's Knipling.

Either way, we can agree, he does not make exceedingly good case.

Well, let's say nippling.

And he used to, as a child, he used to watch adult screw worms mate and he obsessed over it not in a sexy way he was he was watching a lot of his animals on a farm be devoured by these horrible flesh-eating species and so yeah apparently that was just such an original thought that some scientists claim it's the single most original thought yeah that was

before the internet was invented wasn't it so

um he was really amazing this Edward Nipling he died relatively recently, I think, and I saw a few obituaries of him.

Apparently, he named all of his pets after insects.

Isn't that cool?

But his pets were not insects?

No, he had Siamese cats.

Okay, called Anthonymus and Coolex that were named after a type of cotton boll weevil and a type of mosquito.

Do you know how you get a screw worm out of someone?

Do you lure it out somehow?

You do.

You use a treatment called bacon therapy.

Which sounds like such a much more enjoyable thing than it actually is.

It just involves jamming raw pork into the breathing holes that the worm has, and it either suffocates and pushes its way out, or it finds it yummy and sort of goes towards the bacon.

It is like fishing, though, isn't it?

I think, so I couldn't tell.

It's so weird when they say that you use it to block up the air holes because they're really small.

I mean, that is a tiny ratchet of bacon.

So I think they, yeah, they're attracting them to them.

And once you've got sort of 10 or 11 on your bacon, you reel it in, I suppose, don't you?

If you think it's like fishing, I'm not coming to your restaurant in the middle of London Bridge.

The maggot sandwich, flies off the shelves, they're a kind of blowfly.

And I was wondering why we call blowfies blow flies.

And I think it's because they, so the first reference to flies being associated with the word blow is comes from Shakespeare and around that time.

And it was people would refer to flies blowing you.

So Cleopatra says, lay me stark naked and let flies blow me.

And that rather

she wants wants that to happen rather than being taken prisoner.

It's not as pleasant as you might think.

It's more about

something that's referred to being fly-blown when flies had laid their eggs all over it, basically.

I mean, if you go and see a prostitute and ask her to blow you, then make sure she doesn't come along with a load of maggots.

Tip a pile of maggots on your knee.

You've got to be very careful.

It's possible, is all I'm saying, if she happens to be an entomologist in her spurt time.

A lot of crossover between the two.

So they do actually blow bubbles, blowflies, even though it's not what they're called blowflies.

They're forever blowing bubbles.

And it's to keep them cool.

This was discovered quite recently, and it's blowflies in Brazil.

It's actually latrine blowflies.

So they hang around in toilets.

And they do this really clever thing where when they get hot, they blow brown bubbles out of their mouth.

which I imagine are brown because they're latrine blowflies.

And the brown bubbles, when they're blown they lose lots of heat because heat evaporates off them and then they pop and they suck them back in and then that spits a bit cooler and cools cools the head right down it's really clever that isn't it yeah it's like having bubblegum and then blowing it and then it gets cold on the outside and then you suck it back into your body and get the coolness exactly if your bubble gum was made of other people's feces

Which is not a hubber bubber flavor as far as I know.

I've just got one more thing um I started looking into insect factories off the back of this because there's a factory which grows these screw worms um there's a firm called EntoCycle which is currently hoping to breed millions and millions of soldier flies and then turn them into protein powder so you breed millions of flies which are eating rubbish they're eating old coffee grounds and then and then do they give that to like cattle and stuff so exactly that's the hope and then the hope is that you don't need so much um soya to be grown and that, you know, which needs that takes up land that's used to be the Amazon rainforest.

So yeah, it's a genius idea.

And this firm, Endocycle, is based in London Bridge.

Yeah.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, James, at James Harkin, and Anna, you can email podcast at qi.com.

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

We have all of our previous episodes there and links to a bunch of merchandise.

Also, you'll find the links to our live show that we're going to be doing on the 18th of July, the drive-in show.

Just go to qi.com/slash fish events.

You'll find the link there.

And also, please do donate to that care workers charity by simply going to qi.com/slash donate.

And yeah, we'll be back again next week, guys.

As ever, we hope that you're safe.

We hope you're well.

Thank you so much for listening to us still in this crazy, crazy time.

We'll continue doing it and we'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

Let's be real.

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