289: No Such Thing As A Horse Called Brian

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, James.

Okay, my fact this week is that using too much red lipstick can make your urine turn red.

That's weird.

So it gets into your

kidneys somehow.

Yeah, I remember.

How do you wear lipstick?

I must have worn it wrong.

You're not wearing it on the outside, are you?

I screwed it up.

You put it on your tongue, don't you?

So, I found this on the website of improbable research our friends uh they who also make the ignobel prizes and this was a case for 28 year old woman who turned up at a nephrology clinic with a five-day history of passing red coloured urine but she didn't have any other symptoms she had no pain she didn't have chills like she didn't have anything else that could have caused this like blood in your urine for instance and the doctor said that the only noticeable feature was her bright red lipstick which i think sounds a bit harsh actually

um i'm sure she had lots of other great features but anyway they tested all the other things like her liver function and her blood count and everything like that and they found out that she would apply her lipstick 20 to 25 times a day and they worked out that it was the lipstick that was causing the urine to turn red and it kind of makes sense because like lots of things can make your urine turn colors like lots of food yeah so if she's accidentally ingesting this stuff then it could happen.

So that's an abnormal number of times to reapply lipstick over the course of a day.

It's certainly more than I've ever done.

Yeah.

Wow.

It's weird because just the idea that it's, let's say, beetroot,

not known to colour your urine, I don't think, so much as the back passage when you go to the toilet.

Oh, it does.

Yeah.

What?

I would say more commonly is known to colour your urine.

Yeah, it is.

Although it was so, so discreet the way you said back passage.

And also, it doesn't colour your back passage, although it might do.

No,

it's more colouring the thing that comes out of your back passage.

It's a bit of a stain on me.

How have you been eating it?

You've been having the beetroot suppositories again.

Yeah, exactly.

I've been smuggling.

Do you get that then?

Yeah, I do.

Yeah, I've stopped eating beetroot off the back of that.

I found it too scary to look down and see a blood bath in my toilet.

But you are quite special, so it's only like maximum 14% of people who get any kind of colouration from beetroot.

So it's quite lucky to have it.

How killed you?

And what percent is through the anus?

We should say, in case people start to panic at home, it does also come in the poo.

It comes out both sides.

Oh, okay, cool.

But it's, yeah, and it's called beturia, the condition.

And it's harmless, but if you suddenly start doing it and you've never done it before, so if suddenly you eat beetroot, you wee red or you poo red and it hasn't happened before, then you should get it checked out because it might be an iron deficiency.

Because the reason that most of us don't have red wee when we eat beetroot is because the iron reacts with the red pigment, which is called betylane.

So, any iron in our stomachs reacts with that.

And so, that creates a different compound, which isn't red.

And so, you might be iron deficient if you're not.

It's interesting because you, I know, Anna, and also Andy, don't like beetroot.

Hate it.

I never eat it, and I love it.

So, if I ever have iron deficiency, I'm going to be one of the first to know about it.

You are one of the first people on earth.

We could be a need.

We might be.

Yeah, exactly, but you would never know, right?

Yeah.

Maybe this is why I faint 15 times a day.

And it's only some lipsticks, I think, that can do it.

And it just happened that this lady was doing it, because apparently most of them dissolve in fats.

And so once, even if you apply certain lipsticks lots of times a day, you might be alright.

We won't turn red, but this will.

When we go on tour, we ask people to send their own facts.

And one of the most common ones that I get is that if you want to choose the perfect shade of nude lipstick, as in that looks natural, then you should get the colour that is the same colour as your nipples.

Oh, this is an unbelievably common fact that I get.

It's so weird that it's one of the few that I get like five or six times every tour.

That's so.

It's because you keep wearing lipstick that really clashes with the rest of your face.

And because I do the tour topless.

Why?

He's got green nipples.

And this apparently is kind of half-true.

So

it came from, most people got it from a show called the doctors on nbc they famously mentioned this and they say that it generally does work but then washington university medical center when asked about this did point out that your nipple color does change throughout your life so it's kind of an average works but if your nipples have changed color recently then maybe yeah well they go grey don't they as you age

yeah and you should wear grey lipstick too

so wait should you take an average of your lifetime nipple colour and always use that lipstick?

Or should you have your lipstick vary in accordance with your nipple colour?

I think you should go into the lipstick shop,

get the colour of your nipples,

and then...

if it doesn't look right.

I've tried that, but whenever I expose myself in lipstick shops, I get removed from the building.

What you need is a top that only exposes your nipples, so you can subtly compare the lipstick colour to the nipple colour.

I don't know how subtle that kind of top is going to be.

I've just got to think, just as we were talking about beetroot before, because beetroot was actually a substitute for lipstick during the war, during the Second World War.

Yeah, so there was a big push that the English government did, which they had a slogan for, which was beauty is duty.

And

this was a thing because Hitler supposedly really disapproved of makeup.

So the British government wanted to make it a proud thing in the country.

And they released, there were certain lipsticks that were released during World War II that were called like regimental red or lips in uniform.

But this was before rationing became, you know, and the materials were sort of depleting.

and so they stopped doing it.

But as a result, women still wanted to sort of keep up the appearance of makeup.

So, beetroot juice was done in place of lipstick and mascara and so on, and boot polish was used as well.

But yeah, it was interesting, you know, beetroot juice.

Yeah, no, you know why Hitler didn't like lipstick?

No, it's because he's vegetarian.

He said that lipstick was evil because it was made from animal fat rescued from sewage.

Ah, so wait a minute, but it is kind of made with animal products, a lot of makeup, right?

Yes, it is, much less than used to be, but yes.

But the red in lipstick for centuries has come from these bugs, cochineal insects.

I think now they often make plant-based, but yes.

But in Hitler's time, they didn't use cochineal or?

I think maybe sometimes they did.

Not necessarily rescued from sewage, though.

They would have done, definitely.

But it's had this weird history lipstick where it's just gone in and out of fashion and popularity, and it's been condemned and then praised and then condemned and then praised.

And so just before the Elizabethan period, it was basically evil.

So, Catholic priests would say that a woman wearing lipstick was essentially the spawn of Satan.

You'd have to go to confession and confess that you'd worn lipstick.

And

it was thought as being deceitful.

So, you were deceiving men into falling in love with you.

And you could, it was grounds for annulment, for instance, in a lot of places in Pennsylvania, I think, and in Britain for a time, it was grounds for annulment.

It was grounds for annulment.

If you married a woman who had worn lipstick at some point while seducing you,

that's false advertising.

It's false advertising.

I imagine there were a few, but they were mostly loopholes, as in they were looking for an annulment.

Yeah.

It wasn't any man who got home, woke up next to his wife the next morning, went, oh my god, what are they?

Yeah.

Wait a minute, your nipples and lips are completely different colours.

So in Egypt, prostitutes had to wear lipstick.

And the reason being that that if they didn't, they would be punished because it implied that they were deceitfully posing as ladies.

God, you just can't.

It's a rough beat being a woman wearing lipstick or not wearing lipstick, isn't it?

Yeah.

Even you get your marriage cancelled or you get mistaken for a prostitute.

But then in other times, then you're really popular.

Like Queen Elizabeth loved it and so it became popular then.

So I think it's important if you're a woman time traveling to know exactly what time period you've been dropped in.

So whether you wear the lipstick.

Also important to be a queen rather than a prostitute.

Yes,

generally speaking, easier life.

If you did, if you were a prostitute wearing lipstick in ancient Egypt or ancient Greece, then you made it out of quite weird stuff.

But actually, one reason why being a prostitute might have been better than a queen is that you couldn't afford the good stuff, which was actually often the materials that really damaged you and poisoned you.

Like lead and stuff.

Exactly.

But you, so you made substitutes, so they'd make it from sheep sweat, which was very popular, apparently.

I don't even know how you harvest that.

And human saliva and crocodile excrement in ancient Greece.

I have the thing about crocodile excrement that I don't think it's actually crocodile excrement.

No, you think it's a metaphor, don't you?

I think it's a metaphor for Egyptian style.

I knew that you thought that for contraceptives, but do you think it's the same for this?

Yeah, I might be wrong, though.

I mean, it seems likelier, doesn't it?

They're going around French kissing a crocodile pat.

What's sheep sweat a metaphor for?

I'll tell you something.

I don't know.

How do you get sheep sweat?

Do you ring them out?

How do you get it?

Yeah, I don't know.

And that wouldn't be red, though, I imagine.

I think the earth would be red, but the sheep sweat was just going to make your lips taste a bit salty.

Sweat.

Don't hippo sweat red or purple?

They do.

They were very popular around there.

You don't want to get up and harvest hippo sweat, do you, just for a bit of lipstick?

No, but you could, I suppose, if you lived with a bunch of sisters, maybe you'd have a room where you kept the hippo and you just ran and snogged it quickly and then ran

snogging the hippo.

It's the quickest way to get the lipstick on.

yeah no it's hippo sweat yeah no you're not kissing it in the mouth you're just wearing sweat or you're just kissing the hippo's side yeah right

um queen elizabeth was wearing an inch of lipstick when she died apparently no she wasn't come on yeah an inch

do you know how big an inch is it's ridiculous i'm just reporting what people reported at the time it's like those trout pouts that you get these days when you put botox in your lips and that kind of makes them stick out about half an inch she looked like one of those botox gone wrong she was lipstick gone wrong it can't be true anna it can't can't be true.

I think an inch is probably an exaggeration from the time.

You know, people are seeing a bit blurry when someone's died.

You would say the only way is the Earl of Essex.

Because he was one of her favourites.

And of course, that's a big lip look that's popular on that TV show.

Of course.

Of course.

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

My fact is that some maggots can jump 40 times their own length, but only in August.

I know.

It's true.

So we've just missed it.

If you want to see it, you've got to wait another year.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

So

this is a specific species of maggot or fly, because maggots are the larvae of fly.

It's called Asphondylia, and they're only a third third of a centimetre long, but they've been observed jumping up to 12 centimetres, which is really impressive.

Yeah.

It's the equivalent of a human jumping 200 feet.

Yeah.

Although, we always say this, don't we?

It's not the exact equivalent because it's much easier for small things to jump these distances than big things.

It's the equivalent of a miniaturized human jumping 12 centimetres.

And what's the same with the size of a maggot?

It's very impressive.

And are they practicing for when they fly?

Is that

the idea?

Yes, they are.

Yeah.

No, it's actually an escape plan.

So they're hatched out onto these plants and then they need to make a swift exit because they're very

easy prey when they're just sitting around on these plants.

So they need to jump quite far.

They're born in galls, you know, the larvae are laid in plants.

The mothers lay the eggs in plants and these create swellings called galls and they hatch out of them.

So then they need to escape.

And the cool thing is,

they have no legs and yet they jump.

Yeah, how are they doing that?

What?

Like a slinky.

Is it sort of like the suppressed spring?

Yeah, yeah, basically, yeah.

Cool.

They sort of improvise a leg.

I've seen your improvising, Mandy.

And very good as it is, you don't suddenly sprout a leg.

No, you're right.

We don't do whole limb work.

Well, that's why he's recently been replaced with a maggot.

It looks fantastic, isn't he?

They sort of fold themselves up.

So, you know, how octopuses sometimes make artificial elbows?

Right.

You know, they just fold their limb at a certain point.

So they do that and they build up a load of pressure leaning against that slightly folded leg and then they sort of flick, they release and they flick themselves into the air.

But they also have on either end these kind of little hairs that when they touch each other, so when they bend forward, it's like touching your toes.

They kind of, it's like an adhesive, so it holds on really strong.

And as they push all this liquid down into their bottom, the tension gets greater and greater, but they're still hanging on.

And when that snaps, they just fling into the air.

Yeah.

Nice.

Do you have a very relatable octopus-based analogy to help me understand that better?

No.

Who knows the octopus-elbow thing?

I've never heard we've talked about that.

We probably have, but it's pretty arcane, isn't it?

People are going to remember all those things.

Yeah, you're right.

So a related factor is that octopuses sometimes improvise elbows, which is pretty cool.

Like, if you're chatting to me in a pub, you could say that because you know that I'm going to know that.

Do not improvise your own limbs at home.

Yeah, that's incredible.

We've missed the big one here, though.

Why just August?

What's going on that it's

one month of the year?

Is it because the football season's just started and they're getting really excited?

Yeah.

Do you know?

I don't think we do know exactly why it is.

It may be because they hatch in August.

Yes, and then after August, they've turned into flies.

Yeah, and they don't need to do this jumping trick anymore.

Okay.

I think that's a bit unfair.

I'm genuinely not sure.

I did have a look at the paper and it wasn't actually very clear why this happens.

Okay, okay.

Okay.

And apparently this study came after the group had a load of these goal um maggots in a in a petri dish and then they came to look at them and there were only two left because they were jumping all around the office and they thought, oh, I'm gonna have to probably study this.

That's so funny.

Um yeah, maggots are really cool.

No, actually they can get really hot.

Go on.

Uh because when they eat they um increase their temperature because of all the digestive juices and they're kind of wriggling around and stuff like that and there's usually a load of them in one little place and they're all wriggling and and they're all getting hotter and hotter and hotter and sometimes it can get so hot that they start to die.

Oh that doesn't have a funny jokey facty ending at all.

Serious God.

But they do, I think they can sometimes recognise that this is starting to happen.

Like, you know, the guy next to them has just died.

Just like this is getting too hot.

So what they'll do is they'll, as a group, just retreat to a cooler place.

Well, actually, it's like the ones that are in, it's a bit like, you know, groups of penguins.

Again, this is the kind of thing that me and Adam are going to know in our conversation, but most people want.

So, like, the ones on the outsides move to the inside, and the ones to the inside move to the outside to kind of keep the temperature.

Do they do that?

Yeah.

Imagine being in a restaurant and people are just going so crazy about the food, they start dying.

That is an exciting but also stressful restaurant opening, isn't it?

I think it's more like being in a mosh pit and getting so hot, people die, which maybe they would.

Yeah.

But the thing that's like the penguins is also how they manage to eat so fast.

So, maggots are useful for things like clearing up garbage.

You can use maggots for clearing up our trash and stuff because they can consume stuff at an amazing rate for their size.

They can't carry it away quite as quickly as the bin men.

They're working up to it.

And your neighbors really hate you by the way Anna.

Pouring bags and bags of maggots over your bins every week.

It's got to stop.

They're very efficient.

We've got to give them work.

So they do this and they are less efficient than the bin men, but the reason they are still efficient is that, for instance, if you've got a lump of food, then there'll be, let's say, 100 maggots, and they'll form a little mountain that climbs up the mound.

And the maggots can eat solidly for about five minutes and then they get a bit tired and they need a break.

And so there'll be maggots pushing them further and further up the mound of food because there are maggots queuing behind them.

And then once they get to the top of the mound, then they've had enough food and they tumble off the top and back to the back of the queue.

And the next maggot is up there eating it.

Do you see what I mean?

So it's like a cycle.

It's like going up the escalator on the tube.

Yeah.

And you have to eat one doughnut every time time you go three feet up yeah but then you get to the top and you're full of doughnuts and then you go down the dunny.

You throw yourself down the dough.

Look, this analogy did start to fall away.

So

the other thing, they can, so this thing of mounding themselves up,

I read an article saying that they can be mischievous sometimes, MAGAs.

And that's a bit of a stretch, but if you keep them in a glass enclosure without food and without a lid, they will organise themselves into a prison break break because they will all get together in a corner and they will push up and up and up.

They will pile up until the ones at the top can escape.

Cool.

So, if you keep maggots, if you're a scientist, you sometimes have to have a moat around them to stop them escaping.

Wow.

Isn't that crazy?

Yeah, that's awesome.

Wait, how do they decide who the poor kind of Bruce Willis and Armageddon guy is who stays behind and gets out as a legacy?

I don't know.

But I think most of them stay behind, don't they?

Yeah, really.

It's only a few of

souls make it out.

Yeah.

Gosh.

I guess the most intelligent ones get to go out to die.

No, no, it won't.

It'd be the strongest ones.

But

they've got to find a way of busting the rest out.

So who do you free?

Of course, probably a group of maybe five or six.

You'd have one quite strong one.

One really smart one, one sexy one.

Yeah.

Well, just to keep the others entertained.

Speaking of sexy, they can breathe through their bottoms.

Cool.

Cool.

Breathe.

Breathe.

Yeah, not breathe.

Oh, yeah, I was good.

They breathe through their bottoms, and that's another way that they eat really quickly because they can just continuously eat, like you say, until they get tired because they're breathing out their bum, so they don't need to breathe out their mouths.

That's great, that's amazing, so cool.

But it means they can't poo as quickly as we can because they need to break constantly during pooing in order to breathe.

But no, they tend to

then switch back to mouth breathing while they're having a poo.

Yeah, what they can't do is eat a hot dog and have a poo at the same time, which we can do that, yes.

So that's why we are a higher being than maggots.

Yeah, I mean, again, I'm not coming to any of your restaurant openings, but

that's the big pitch.

You'll notice your seats are also toilets and go.

So they do love rotting meat, and that was the cause of this massive misinformation campaign about maggots that went on until about 200 years ago, which is the spontaneous generation thing, which I don't think we've talked about before.

But so everyone used to think that maggots were spontaneously generated out of dead flesh because you'd have a rotting carcass and then maggots would suddenly appear and flies would come out of that.

And that's just how people thought life happened.

Kind of makes sense when you think of it.

If you didn't know, you know.

There's absolutely no reason you wouldn't think it if you didn't know what we know now.

And it was finally proven in 1668 by this guy called Francesco Reddy that flies come from maggots and flies aren't just spontaneously produced from carcasses.

And he did that by putting sort of rotting meat in jars and some of the jars he'd cover up and some he wouldn't.

And he'd be like, look, life isn't in the jars that I covered up.

But he had to, because he was around about the time of Galileo and lots of other scientists who were getting in trouble with the church.

So every time he found something out like this, he had to go through the Bible and find a bit of Bible passage that supported it.

So he'd find the Bible passage that said, all life comes from life.

So it's okay.

God's on my side.

Don't worry about it.

Wow.

I mean, it sounds like he...

would have been quite low on the church's Inquisition list after Galileo.

Galileo is saying some pretty punchy things about the relationship between the earth and the sun.

This is just a guy with meat jars.

I don't know, Andy.

It was a huge deal, it really is.

Suggesting that life couldn't come out of nothing, questioning where life came from, was a massive deal.

Because where did Jesus?

Not Jesus, where did God come from?

Jesus wasn't a maggot.

But how did God make life?

If we're saying life always comes from life and you need the original thing, how did God make it in one day?

Okay, okay, let's get him in for some

inquisitioning.

He was a big man.

But

his ideas that he debunked, the debunked ideas dated back to Anaximander of Miletus.

And he thought something really cool.

So he was 7th century BC.

He was the first person who posited this idea of spontaneous generation of life.

And he thought how it happened was he looked at fetuses of children and he thought they look kind of fishy.

And so what he thought was that he thought that if water warmed up with the sun, then it sort of created a fish.

So there'd be this reaction which created a living fish.

And then some fish gestated and gave birth to other fish.

And then others that decided to gestate for longer would eventually create a human.

And so he said fish would crawl up onto the bank when they were really far into their pregnancy, give birth to an adult human, and then that adult human would go away and have more kids.

He's kind of right in a way.

He's just missing out millions and millions of years of evolution.

Like, he's kind of right that you end up with a human and you start with a fish.

Yeah.

You're right.

Yeah.

He just sped it up a lot.

It was fast forward.

It was Darwin in fast forward.

Amazing.

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

My fact this week is that humans may have developed motion sickness to stop us falling out of trees.

And read the rest of it.

I've got just a theory, but an interesting one from what you said, Round.

Whenever I pitch that,

it gets a flat out no, and here we are.

Just an idea.

Just a crazy idea.

Well, this is an idea from scientists, not from some crazy Yeti fanatic in Arkansas.

I'm sorry.

She doesn't mean that, Mike.

The theory is about how we and other great apes lived up trees, as many of them are.

Great apes, I guess, aren't we?

We're the greatest of all the apes.

All right, Donald Trump, let's calm down.

And basically, if we ever lived up trees millions of years ago, hundreds of thousands of years ago, then it was quite bad for us to want to climb really, really high up onto the really wobbly branches because that made it more likely that it would snap and you'd fall off and die and that's why we developed motion sickness and the fact is that chimps and things that still do live in trees do avoid going on those wobbly branches and lots of other animals do have motion sickness so it does seem to be like a risk aversion thing because if you don't the thing about falling out of a tree I guess is it's quite hard to learn from your mistakes gradually and evolve that gradually because once you've fallen out, you're either really severely injured or you're dead.

And they looked into this.

I was reading a book about this and it talks about the actual frequency that elicits motion sickness the amount of wobble the pace of the wobble and it is about the same frequency as the trees that people would have been in would have swayed at

so wow I've also read that it's about the same frequency as is generated by wind generated waves so there's another theory that it's from under the water because fish also get motion sickness yeah and if you get wind blowing waves it makes you feel a bit woozy you get to a certain point where actually it's quite dangerous and so you get away from those areas.

Same thing, fish have the aversion because then you get disoriented if you're being swept around by the waves.

Fish get seasick.

Fish get seasick.

That's well humans get land sick.

Yes.

If you go on a boat for too long and then you walk off the boat for a while, you feel really woozy.

It's a French thing called mal de des barcmont, which is like male de mer is seasickness and mal de barcment is illness from deb disembarking.

Yeah, I mean you also can call call it just call it land sickness.

I mean that's what the French do call it I suppose but yeah no there's a French podcast right now saying it is called land sickness.

It's so weird to think of all the ancestors of ours as in the you know ape-like ancestors of ours who didn't have motion sickness who then died as a result because they were climbing they didn't know not to climb a wobbly tree.

Yeah.

And as a result they died out because they're in many ways the superior beings.

Because they could climb so much higher.

They They don't get seasick.

Yeah.

Or tree sickness.

Exactly.

And just on the sea thing as well, just because it's a fact, the word nausea comes from the same word as nautical or something like that because it's to do with the sea because it's to do with seasickness originally.

Okay.

Yeah, naus, ancient Greek.

Well, just on seasickness as well, I was reading that Nelson suffered severe seasickness his entire life.

From age 12 onwards to his death, the guy was constantly vomiting on boats.

Why do you not become a tree surgeon?

Exactly.

Well, he said he did.

He wrote letters about it, didn't he?

And he'd sign off in his letters to his lovers.

He'd sign off your affectionate seasick Nelson.

And he said, I am ill every time it blows hard.

Maybe this means something else that he was writing to his lovers.

We're on clear.

He said, nothing but my love of the profession keeps me at sea for more than an hour.

So if you really love what you do, it doesn't matter if you vomit throughout.

Do you know another great nautical hero who had seasickness?

Who?

Jacques Cousteau.

Well, Captain Ahab.

Entirely possible, but it's the last Captain Birdseye.

Okay, he was really seasick.

The fish finger guy.

The fish finger guy.

Was he an actual captain that one?

Or was he like just an actor?

He was an actor for TV adverts.

It's very sad.

But well, this was the big pitch when they unveiled him to the public.

He's called Mitch Commons.

He was a South African.

And he really looked the part, you know, great big bushy beard and properly looked like Captain Birdseye.

But then he got very recently replaced by a man called Riccardo Acerbi, an Italian, who is basically a model.

He's really, really, like, he's too good looking to be Captain Bird's Eye.

Seriously?

Yeah.

How bizarre.

And he's quite young as well.

And the whole thing just stinks.

Does he have a big grey beard?

Does he have a beard?

He's got a beard.

Is it like a big white beard?

It's more like an iron grey, hunky moddly beard.

If you want to get off with this guy, you just give him a call, Andy.

Yeah, if you want a bird's eye view.

That's better than fish finger.

The thing is that a lot of people get motion sickness now because we drive in cars,

which we didn't evolve to do.

And people use VR stuff, like headsets and stuff.

And that's a real problem with people getting motion sickness.

Apparently, there are some VR games where 100% of users get motion sickness.

Like literally everyone.

And usually, for most games, it's between 40 and 70% of people get it.

So it's like a really common thing, motion sickness.

And yet, admirably, like Horatio Lord Nelson, they're so passionate about the pursuit that they will make this.

Exactly.

My wife plays them all the time.

It's almost as if being in a virtual reality is preferable to being married to me.

She's throwing up constantly.

Does she write you letters?

Yes, but then she puts the VR set up, sure.

Does she write you letters from inside the game saying you're affectionate, seasick Polina?

Have you heard of the SS Bessemer?

This is a very cool anti-seasickness innovation from the Victorian times.

It was a steamer ship across the English Channel for passengers and it was experimental.

It was a guy called Henry Bessemer who invented it and the idea was it had a room inside it which would be suspended using incredibly elaborate counterweights and counterbalances and all sorts of mechanics to keep it exactly in position while the ship moved up and down the waves and left waves.

Really cool.

Yeah.

So he built a model of it at his house, huge model, which could, you know, the thing would move around and the room would stay the same.

And it got a lot of investment.

And on its first trial, it couldn't quite sail properly, I think partly due to this stuff inside it.

And it smashed into the pier at Calais.

It was slightly fixed, and then on its final trial,

he said, oh, we haven't had enough time to fix it properly.

So it had only one public voyage and it crashed into the Calais Pier again.

Did it have a massive magnet in it or something?

It was a disaster.

I wonder if that's the same Bessemer as did the Bessemer process for smelting aluminium or whatever it is.

Was that a profound cock-up as well?

Sounds like he doesn't know what he's doing.

He designed something that's not a boat, clearly, if it's just constantly crashing.

I don't know, was there nobody steering it?

It had people steering it.

You can't say it's not a boat just because it crashes.

You can't say the Titanic is not a boat.

Not a boat.

Just a rock, as far as I'm concerned.

We should talk about what's actually going on.

So it's just the difference.

It's the difference of information between what your eyes are seeing.

When you're on a ship, this is.

So your eyes are seeing, let's say, a stable room because you're in a ship room and you're moving with the ship, so it's all the same to you.

But your body, your inner ear, can tell that you're moving around.

And actually, that's the case in all these things, right?

So if you're in a car, it's the same.

You're reading a book, which is still, but actually, everything else is moving around you.

Yeah.

But there's a third thing as well.

So apart from your eyes and your inner ear, there's a third bit of your body which is also sending you conflicting information.

Guess what it is?

Yeah, okay.

What are you saying?

Your eyes, your ear, and

that little boxing bag at the back of your mouth.

The uvula.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, you can imagine that would work.

If it's tilting over, yeah,

okay.

no, great guess, great guess.

Is it somewhere, is it sort of in your crotch somewhere?

Oh, it's close.

You're so close.

Is it in your bottom?

If you're sitting down, it's in your bottom.

And this is a thing.

Wait a minute, what is outside of my bottom when I'm standing up, but inside my bottom when you're standing up?

Your feet.

If you're standing up, you can tell this through your feet.

And if you're sitting down, it's through your bottom.

Got it.

And it's a sense called proprioception.

And it's where...

if you're swaying,

there's more pressure on one side of your feet and then on the other.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah.

And your body senses this, and that is another thing that can give you motion sickness.

Or if you're sitting down, it's on your bottom.

And it's like when you're on a tube train, you know, you can feel the acceleration really strongly on one side as it takes off.

That's really cool.

Other things that get seasickness

are, I mean, loads of stuff does, really.

So, dogs, people, anyone who's had a dog will know that they get motion sick because it's bloody irritating in a car.

Mice, amphibians, fish, we've said.

Frogs get it quite badly.

So they tested this by, they often test it by putting them in parabolic conditions, so simulating weightlessness, by sort of spinning or spinning them round to simulate this sort of concentric movement.

And so I was reading a study about whether frogs get motion sick, and they said the way we find out is we put them in these containers and then we subject them to parabolic flight and then we open the containers and the presence of vomitus in their containers after flight will be used to indicate if they get motion sick.

My wife, we've brought her up before today, but she's going on one of these parabolic flights next year.

Why?

Is she?

Yeah, yeah.

So I wonder if she'll vomit.

Yeah.

Well, do you know how she can tell?

It's by the presence of vomitus in the

just vomit US.

It's Latin for vomit.

I mean, why do they need to still say vomitus?

It's bizarre.

I looked this up because I thought they must have made that up.

Yep, it's just vomitus, the definition, is the stuff that comes out of your mouth when you vomit.

It's vomit.

Wow.

But anyway, it turns out they are different to us in how they seasick themselves.

Are we talking about frogs?

frogs yes because they don't throw up at the time they throw up afterwards which is actually quite considerate so they will wait until the car's stopped or they won't do it on the roller coaster but it usually happens between a few minutes and 24 hours afterwards almost like a hangover vomit right yeah yes I was reading that the guys who built the Golden Gate Bridge the builders supposedly were put on a special diet by the leader of the the construction works a guy called strauss i can't find any detail though about what that diet was but the idea was the diet was for motion sickness.

It was for dizziness because people were very scared when they were building this bridge.

You know, you had to climb very high.

And so supposedly there was a diet to stop that.

But a really cool extra thing about that was what they ended up doing was they built a giant net under the bridge.

It cost $130,000 and it was like a circus trapeze net.

And the idea was the dizziness would have been a huge factor in the construction pace that was going on.

And by building this little netting, it meant that people could go and work harder with the knowledge that they would probably survive if they fell off.

And 19 people did fall off.

Oh, my God.

Did they all live?

Yeah, yeah.

And they became what was known as part of the Halfway to Hell Club.

Yeah.

When was that built, did you say?

It was 1936.

Okay, so they probably wouldn't have had any effective...

actual medicines at that time to deal with seasickness because they were the drugs weren't invented until the 50s and the drugs just switch off the information coming from the inner ear that we today um so the victorian cures involved sucking lemons, which did absolutely no good.

No, it just did not help.

There were loads of cures which didn't do any good, actually.

Opium, I think, did some good, but

opium is good for everything.

Something that removes you mentally from any kind of reality is probably going to stop you being aware of your sea sickness.

But if you're the captain of the ship, unfortunately,

that's why it crashed.

There are some special glasses you can buy that have been made by Citroën, their car company.

They're called C-Truan.

Very C-tran.

C-Truan.

Nice.

See-through, C-Truin.

Yeah, see true.

I don't think they thought of the C-Tru'em.

C-Truan.

But yeah, they have this blue liquid inside them and it gives you an artificial horizon.

Because a lot of it is being able to see the horizon, isn't it?

Being able to see that moving at the same way as you're feeling it's moving.

So whichever way you move, it makes a horizon look like it's in that direction.

Apparently, they do work.

After about 10 to 12 minutes, your motion sickness will just disappear.

That's really clever.

But what is the point in them?

Because the only time that you're not looking at the horizon, the reason you get travel sick is when you're reading or something, and

therefore you're not looking outside, you're not seeing the world go by.

But if you're wearing these weird horizon glasses, can you read a book with them?

I guess that's what I want to know.

Can you read a book?

Can you read a book?

I think

I think so.

The main reason they've invented them, actually, is because when we have self-driving cars, people won't be driving and looking at the road.

They'll be playing video games or they'll be reading books or whatever.

So you need to come up with a new way of dealing with that because otherwise, whenever you open any self-driving car, it'll be full of vomiters.

Imagine just every time you got to any destination, you just open the door and a sea of vomiters comes out.

Oh, the future is terrible.

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

My fact this week is to honor the U.S.

Supreme Court Judge Antonin Scalia, Virginia's George Mason University School of Law renamed itself Antonin Scalia School of Law, then immediately renamed itself again after it was pointed out that the acronym would be asshole.

That's wrong.

Fair enough.

Yeah.

So asshole.

Asshole.

Asshole.

I said asshole, didn't I?

Yeah.

I went too far on that one.

Asshole.

So this was, I think, the way it worked out is they sort of announced this, let's say, on a Thursday, and by Tuesday, there was so much public ridicule online that the school's dean made an announcement that it was going to be renamed off the back of it.

And they named it because they just gotten a massive donation from a few people, right?

They got a $30 million donation.

10 million of it came from the Charles Koch Foundation.

Really?

So they could have called it the Charles Koch School of Law, which would have been much better.

It's now the Antonin Scalia Law School, but that's still ASLS, which looks in an uncharitable light like assholes.

Or ASLUS is what I see when I see that.

Oh, yes.

Okay, so more stuff on acronyms.

Yeah.

Does anyone know what the acronym or what the word spam stands for?

You know, the

food stuff

rather than the spammy.

I would think it's something.

Is it something ham?

Okay, what would it be?

Spurious ham.

Spurious ham, that's it.

Well, most people would tell you that it stands for spiced ham.

That's what everyone thought it used to mean.

But then, according to spam the company, they now tell us that it stands for sizzle pork and mmm.

Which I imagine might be a back formation.

Are they saying sizzle, pork?

Actually, they're saying sizzle full stop, pork full stop, and full stop.

Mmm, full stop.

I also say mmm to that, but in a more skeptical way, I think, than they would have wanted.

He always comes with a question mark at the end every time.

Wow,

that's a terrible back formation.

Yeah, it's so clunky.

So there's a difference between an acronym and an initialism.

I think it's very important that we nail down.

Oh, okay.

So an acronym is...

Well,

all of these things are acronyms, but some people say, it's not really hard and fast, that initialisms are things where it's just strings of letters.

So the FBI is an initialism.

YMCA.

YMCA.

They call it MKA.

And that's the difference, right?

If it became a word.

Exactly.

So if people started saying, I'm going to the unca,

or scuba.

Scuba is initials, but it's also become a word in its own right.

So that's.

It's contained underwater breathing equipment.

Apparatus.

That would be scub.

Scoob.

Arguably more fun, yeah.

And also, you get the very exciting marriage of the two, don't you?

This is where the two come together.

It's a bit frowned upon in the communities of initialisms with acronyms.

It's like Romeo and Juliet, but you've got CD-ROM, of course.

Okay.

You've got JPEG.

And that's it, actually.

They're the only two, Romeo and Juliet, to be initially used.

So, okay, what's the deal with a JPEG then?

So, a JPEG is J is just joints, Joint Photographic Experts Group.

Oh, so

part of it, you're just saying the letter, and part of it you're saying a word.

Exactly.

Wow, holy wow, God, that is more amazement than that deserves.

Wow, I just didn't know what it was.

You couldn't say Japeg, though, could you?

You couldn't say Japeg.

You couldn't say Kudrom.

Kudrom.

Kudrom.

You could, but we just don't.

In fact, we rarely refer to CD-ROMs.

Speak for yourself.

I've got a few things on just name changes.

So

one of the things, I guess, that comes up a lot in newspapers is that Peter

and the Animal Rights Group, they constantly want places to change their name if there's something that's associated with them.

For example,

we did on the podcast that they wanted to change great fry up to great vegan fry up.

That's right.

Yeah, exactly.

So there's a town that they wanted to have changed.

It's a village called Wool.

It's an English village.

They wanted it to be changed to vegan wool.

That was their big pitch.

Did they?

No, they didn't.

In fact, I can't find a single instance where people got a letter from Peter saying change your name and they went absolutely.

I've not found that yet.

There's a place called Leatherhead, which they wanted to be changed to Pleatherhead, which Pleatherhead is an imitation synthetic leather alternative.

So that was quite nice.

There was the Chicken Dinner Road, which is a road they wanted to call chicken road.

So it happens all the time, but my favorite one is Sausage Street.

So Sausage Street, this is a town which is in France.

Sorry, there's a town in France called Sausage Street.

Sorry, sorry.

There's a street in a town in France.

It's called Rue de la Souci,

which is Sausage Street.

So they wrote a letter to them

saying, can you change it from Sausage Street?

And they obviously refused.

The town mayor say, absolutely not.

But someone from the town also pointed out that the change would be completely out of place because it is not named after the sausage itself, but rather the sausage street is off the back of a woman who they called the sausage called Suzanne Tessio.

And she lived in the area.

Do we know why they called her the sausage?

Yeah, we need to ask.

Because when she walked, she stooped over like a sausage bending.

And that was like a maggot about to jump.

Yes, exactly.

So the street supposedly is named after Susan the Sausage Tessio.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

That is so funny.

So if you have a name of a company and you're not sure if it's going to be okay or if it's going to be a bit of another asshole debacle,

then asshole, sorry, then you just need to try and register it because the government will tell you if it's too rude.

So you have the company's house and it's the government body which registers company names and every year they release their list of names that they said no to.

So this year they banned 87 company names that they refused to register.

And some of them I didn't get.

So first of all, there was Purple Helmet Bikes.

Right.

Which

is so I sort of can't

guess.

We did a podcast the other week about what we called people from West Bromwich Albion and Purple Helmet is a synonym for that.

Ah, yeah.

Okay.

Oh, that is it's a convoluted way of explaining it.

No, but that's a great way of getting listeners to go to the previous episode.

And in that episode we referenced the one before and it's a constant change.

So there's Purple Helmet Bikes.

There's also company names that weren't allowed.

Fanny's Kebabs wasn't allowed.

Okay.

Soddit Systems, which I just like.

I like the idea of hiring someone to fix your computer when they call Soddit Systems.

Then just rocking up and go, ah, Soddit, getting you on.

Royal Nuts, Anus Beauty.

Anus Beauty.

Anus Beauty.

Who thought that would get?

It's not exactly a crappy bit of wordplay like Purple Helmet Bikes, is it?

It does what it says on the tin.

Puts a bit of redness down down there.

Sit on a beep shoot for three hours is their first line of advice.

Oh my god.

Knickers, knockers, knockers.

Don't know what they do, but I'd like to know.

Because the problem is we don't find out what they do because these companies don't get registered.

Don't they make underwear door knockers and they kill horses?

It was three best friends with three very different talents.

In 2015, lots of people called Brian protested after Thames Valley Police announced that they were going to change the name of one of their police horses from Brian to, they said, a godlike name such as Hercules.

So this was if the horse passed its tests to be a good police horse, basically, and to be a qualified police horse.

And various people called Brian kicked up a fuss.

So Brian Lewis from Ascot said, I think it's outrageous.

Brian is a good name for a horse.

It's not godlike, though, is it?

It's very famously, he's not the son of God.

He's a very naughty wife.

Yes, that's such a good point.

There was another guy called Brian Paulson from Bracknell who said there is no way they should be changing the name.

Every horse should be called Brian.

Such an extreme alternative.

What a world.

What a world.

Horse racing.

Oh, Brian's coming up the back of Brian up the front.

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 we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy, at Andrew Hunderer, James, at James Harkin, and Shazinski.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

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

We've got everything up there from upcoming tour dates to all of our previous episodes.

You can also download a really fun behind-the-scenes documentary of us on tour called Behind the Gills,

and there's plenty more to find there as well.

Okay, that's it.

We'll see you again next week.

Goodbye.

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