252: No Such Thing As The Shark Tooth Fairy

Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

cows.

Uh, you're actually on an Organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious organic food gets its start.

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

Organic Valley's small family farms protect the land and the plants and animals that call it home.

Extraordinary.

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Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

cows.

Uh, you're actually on an Organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious organic food gets its start.

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

Organic Valley's small family farms protect the land and the plants and animals that call it home.

Extraordinary.

Sure is.

Organic Valley, protecting where your food comes from.

Learn more about their delicious dairy at ov.coop.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Czezinski.

My fact this week is that in Amsterdam, the roads are paved with used toilet paper.

Yeah, Dick Whittington is very different there.

And this is a really cool thing, actually.

So the road constructor in the Netherlands called KWS has realized that to make a kind of improved version of tarmac, it can use the cellulose that it gets from recycled toilet paper.

So the toilet paper goes into the sewage system, you flush it into the sewage system, and then they basically put it through kind of a sieve, which gets the poo out.

Oh, that's important, isn't it?

It's a really important stage of this whole process.

It is, you don't want to be driving on poo.

No.

But or walking.

Or walking.

No.

Or crawling on it after a night out in Amsterdam.

No.

None of those things.

So there's no poo in it.

It's just paper and it thickens it apparently so and it makes it better at absorbing water so it improves its like water wicking away from the surface of the road so it makes the roads less slippery and apparently it reduces noise as well.

It's very quiet if you're walking on luro roll.

Great.

That makes sense.

So what's it mixed with?

It's not just the toilet paper that's just laid down.

No, it's with asphalt.

It's the usual.

I found a fact about what else you can make a road out of.

You can make a road out of rubber, which is cool.

So it's like the whole road is made of tires.

If you were walking on that, do you think it'd be easier to walk?

Because you could kind of bounce around.

I think so, yeah.

They have to use tires, by the way, not just rubber, but actual ground-up tires.

Sorry, this is what I mean.

Yellowstone.

Exactly that.

Oh, I didn't know it was in Yellowstone.

Oh, yeah, in Yellowstone, they partnered up with Michelin, I believe it was, and

they've been grinding up the tires.

But then the tires on the cars are basically riding over their dead comrades.

Exactly.

It's a bit depressing, isn't it?

Very Very dark.

Is it the case then that we can just put anything in the roads?

Should we just be putting everything we don't need in the roads?

So far we've got plastic rubber, toilet paper, nuclear waste, nuclear waste.

What are we doing?

Why is there even rubbish?

Every time you chuck a packet out of the car, just say, I'm not littering, I'm tarmacing.

You cigarette butts?

Oh, well, do you know, this is a weird thing.

Lots of roads in London used to be paved with wood.

And that was good, partly because it was quieter under horses' hooves

and also it was less slippery, but it did have downsides because it would soak up horse urine.

And then if a heavy wagon passed over, it would just squirt horse urine.

That is a downside, isn't it?

A place that has some quite exciting roads is Vermont.

So Vermont is covered in invisible roads.

Sorry.

Covered.

Covered.

Covered in non-existent roads.

And it was causing a major problem.

So basically, Vermont is the only state where if a road has ever been built or even planned or, you know, someone suggested that we might put a road here, it goes down legally as a recognised road and it can never be undone.

So mostly a road is discontinued legally after a few years if it's not being used.

So if you look at sort of old maps of Vermont, it's just the whole thing is just roads.

And that means, because roads are public highways, that means that you can have your house.

It's probably on an ancient byway of some sort.

And people could just wander through your house any time of day because they can say, Look at this old map from 1790.

This used to be a road.

And people were getting really annoyed with this.

So I think they've actually had to address it.

There was a law that came out in about 2009 which said, Okay, guys, you've got to stop claiming there's an old road here, so you can walk into this person's drawing room.

And places were told to claim their roads or lose them by 2015, I think.

It's only that one guy who goes, Excuse me, there used to be a road here.

He's got a million maps in bags.

I've got it here somewhere.

Do you know how white lines on roads came about according to the internet?

So I would say it's to make sure that people stay on their side of the road.

It was that, yes.

But they were invented.

Well done.

Ten points.

They were invented in 1911 in Michigan by a guy called Edward Hines.

And this is just the kind of thing that with research is so annoying because the Michigan Department of Transportation and all these books say Edward Hines at the time he was chairman of the County Board of Roads and he came up with the idea of putting white lines in the middle to stop cars just driving in the middle of the road.

He came up with the idea after watching a leaky milk truck make its way down the road.

Now you read that and you're like, that's obviously not true, is it?

He just thought, because the question is

why did he choose white?

Well, because obviously you just choose white on black.

Because if it was like a leaky chocolate milkshake truck, we would have brown lines.

And there's no evidence for it.

I always wonder who comes up with these things first.

Who decides?

Did he not claim?

I thought he had claimed that he saw spilt milk anyway.

There's certainly no evidence online

of him crying over spilt milk.

Let's make a line out of it.

But you say white, being the obvious, but so at the time when they officially recognized that, yes, we want to put this on all the roads in America and white was picked, Oregon said we want to do it in yellow.

And they thought that that was a much better colour.

Someone saw someone pissing on a road.

Yeah, but they eventually did change it to yellow strips in America for the center parting of a road.

Oh, is it yellow in America?

Yeah,

you get yellow lines here and then red lines, which are the really serious ones.

So there are

the serious ones.

I don't drive, so I don't know.

Red lines on a road mean really don't park here.

Yeah, yellows mean you're probably fine.

It's a road, which means like you're not.

It's roads going in and out of big cities where you really do not want anyone ever parking there.

Technically, on a yellow lines, you can park there for like 10 minutes if you're loading or unloading.

Is that so?

Yeah.

Someone swatted up for their theory test, didn't they?

I can see you failing and go, well, technically, but

luckily I am allowed to drive through this man's front room.

Who wants to take the QIF on his next driving exam?

Jesus.

Something I've always found really amazing about road surfaces is a fact about bitumen, which I remember finding this out in the N-series when I was researching the Nabataeans, who were this amazing Middle Eastern civilization.

But basically, the reason they were the like the richest civilization from about 500 BC to 200 BC

in Arabia and they got rich by selling tarmac.

And the way they got tarmac was they were near the Dead Sea.

And this weird thing happened when when there was an earth tremor of some sort, huge amounts of bitumen would just suddenly bubble up to the surface of the Dead Sea.

So these massive islands of bitumen just appeared and they would sit there like the size of houses.

And then the Nabataeans would just row or swim out to them, climb onto them, and hack the bitumen off, and then go and sell it.

And they sell it to the Egyptians who used it in embalming, and they became super rich.

And I just find that whole thing like islands of tarmac suddenly floated up.

And I think the word mummy comes from bitumen because of that

thing.

Does it?

I think so.

Doesn't it come from a word for bitumen?

Yeah, yeah.

I wonder why it stopped.

Presumably, it stopped.

I think it ran out.

Wow.

I think they got all of it.

They scavenged all the bitumen.

Speaking of things that came out of the ground unexpectedly,

such strong links.

A man in the Dutch city of Amsterdam has recently been injured after a pop-up public toilet that was sunk into the ground, emerged unexpectedly.

The man was hit by a moped which was thrown up in the air.

So it's like a toilet that just comes out at night for revelers and stuff like that, and they keep it underground normally.

But just for some reason, it just popped up.

And there was a moped on top of it, and it flew in the air and it hit this guy.

Wow.

Wow.

So cool.

How fast do they pop up?

Because when the glow is they spring out around like a jack-in-bottle, amazing.

That's terrifying.

I've got a fact about toilet paper, actually.

While we're on toilets, this is another thing you can make toilet paper out of.

You can make it out of milk.

What?

Yeah.

There's a company, I think it's a German and an Italian company, they teamed up.

One made fabrics and one was a design company or something.

Anyway,

they made this thing which is called Careza dilatate, which is milk caress.

And

it uses a protein which they extract from soured milk.

So it's all waste milk.

If the cow has been ill and you can't sell the milk to customers.

That's not how you get sour milk.

You get only sour milk by having normal milk and it going off.

It's not like, oh, this milk is off.

It must have been a sick cow.

Sorry.

They take the normal milk from sick cows and then it sours.

Alright, I'm sorry, they're separate things.

But it's so it's waste milk, so the farmers can sell it for a very small amount, not for the drinking milk price.

But then you can turn it into toilet paper, which I guess you can also eat.

So you can, if you're hungry on the loo, you can just eat a bit of this milk toilet paper.

It's a sick cow.

I don't want to eat milk luro roll from a sick cow.

Wait, is milk bad if it's from a sick cow?

Yeah, that was another thing I was thinking.

Like, I'd never thought of that.

It depends how sick, I guess.

Yeah, that's, yeah, it depends what's in the

bacteria.

If it has mastitis, for instance,

then that might be bad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But

if it's communicable to humans, then it's a problem, isn't it?

It's weird, Amsterdam.

So that toilet, I've never seen the one, James, you were talking about earlier that comes through the ground.

That's a problem.

You don't see it.

You don't see it.

It's the last minute.

Yeah, and

they're good for women.

They make them.

So the ones in London that you see are purely urinals for men, but these ones can be used by women.

And they've just seem to have innovations for toilets that are sort of groundbreaking.

There's an amazing one.

Do you guys remember that?

Yeah, in that case, yeah.

Remember the little little fly that got used on a urinal for men?

So the idea is that a urinal would have a little drawing of a fly in the center of it, and that would encourage men to try and aim to hit the fly.

I saw that, but unfortunately, there was also a fly in the room flying around.

So I kind of chased him around with a chip of urine.

That was not pretty at all.

Welcome back to that restaurant.

But yeah, so that was debuted in the 90s in Amsterdam's airport.

Yeah, in Schiffel, wasn't it?

Yeah, in Schiffel, yeah.

And that's now used globally to help the reduce spillage that happens in a lot of bathrooms.

That's good.

Yeah.

The Netherlands, making waves in toilets, basically, I think we've learned from this.

Another bit of Netherland toilet technology.

Oh, yeah.

Rotterdam has a revolving toilet.

Wow, that sounds extremely disconcerting.

Can you think of what that might be?

Is it a public toilet?

Yeah.

It's not in a revolving restaurant.

Nope.

Okay.

Is it because they couldn't afford a door, so it's a way of turning your back on people while you're we, so they can't see you?

Really good idea.

They'd still be able to see the back of your head.

Oh does it have a big sail on top and whichever wind direction is prevailing the toilet faces that way.

For what reason?

So that the wee doesn't blow back in your face.

Exactly that reason.

No, not that.

It's because it's got two toilets in it and so you use one of them and then you walk out and there's a detection that can tell there's no person in it and then it flips around the two toilets and it can clean the other one

while the other toilet, so the previously clean one is now in that place.

Do you know what I mean?

Yes, yeah.

Does that make sense?

So, is there while I'm inside one toilet, is someone else going to be cleaning that other toilet and I have to wait for them to finish that?

I think it's kind of robotic cleaning.

Right, okay.

So, yeah, so you're there and you use the toilet, and then you leave, and then it flips around.

So, there's now a clean toilet there, and the old one is being cleaned by a robot.

That's great, it's not a human.

Imagine it turning around and you're just hearing a voice go, oh, Jesus Christ.

Oh, man.

Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

cows.

Uh, you're actually on an Organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious, organic food gets its start.

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

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Extraordinary.

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Learn more about their delicious dairy at ov.coop.

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

One frequent result of winning the lottery is going bankrupt.

This also applies to people who just live near people who have won the lottery.

Very good.

So it's so unfair.

What do Neighbours of lottery winners tend to go bankrupt, basically.

It's doubly unfair, isn't it?

Yeah.

Really?

Why?

Well, because you've not won the lottery and you've gone bankrupt.

Yeah, it is.

It is doubly unfair.

Yeah.

It's weird.

So why?

Why?

Well,

there's a study that's been done by researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada and Georgetown, and they studied a Canadian province which had 7,000 lottery winners.

And what they found was in areas where people have won the lottery, the bankruptcy rate goes up by 6%.

And this might be because people keep it a secret, the fact that they've won the lottery.

So people borrow more around them because they want to keep up with the Joneses, as it were.

They think, oh, wow, they've got a yacht.

I think we better get a yacht.

And they start borrowing more money and then they take more.

Why do we need that?

We live in the middle of Canada.

But they take more risks and they borrow more and then they're likely to go bust.

I suppose it doesn't even have to be a secret, right?

Even if you know they've won the lottery, if you see them buying something nice, then you want to keep up.

Yeah, exactly.

And I think, didn't one of the studies find that the neighbours would buy conspicuous goods?

Because obviously you're buying goods that you want people to see.

You want people to know that you're doing as well as those neighbours who've won the lottery.

So it said they'd buy things like cars, posh cars, but wouldn't spend money on indoor items like furniture.

Just got to sit in the car if you need to sit somewhere.

Just empty barren homes.

Seven Ferraris outside.

Wow.

So I guess it's statement making as opposed to, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

It is.

It's classic keeping up with the Joneses.

Yeah.

And it's nearly a third of lottery winners declare bankruptcy according to some estimates.

Wow.

It's amazing that.

I think in America, winning the lottery sometimes doesn't mean winning the big prize.

It can mean winning a smaller amount.

They just still would call that winning the lottery.

Whereas I think in Britain, if you say, I won the lottery, you have to win over a million quid, I would say, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So

there are lots of studies.

There's one which I found debunked saying that 70% of lottery winners go bankrupt, which I think there's not much evidence for because that's just too many.

But I found others saying that lottery winners are likelier to declare bankruptcy within the first five years after winning the prize than the average American.

Right.

Because in the first two years, you're probably fine because you probably haven't spent all the money within two years.

Yeah.

I was reading about Britain's first ever lottery.

So this was over 450 years ago.

This was in the 16th century.

And it was the prize was not just money.

You'd got other items as well.

So runners-up would have a prize.

So you would get gold jugs or linen.

And the lottery took three years to do.

So you took three years to run.

You'd have to buy ourselves a gold jug because Next Star have just got a really nice gold jug.

But check this out.

If you just bought the ticket alone and you didn't win anything, what that ticket did give you was a prize as well, which was you avoided any kind of arrest.

You had a pardon from being, you had a pardon if as long as it wasn't murder and something that really was, you know, you'd you'd stolen someone's entire contents of their house, including their gold jugs, you would have a pass on being arrested.

You take a chance and you get a get out of jail free card.

Yes, is this that this is Queen Elizabeth's, isn't it?

It is, yeah.

Yeah, so she set it up because she wanted to raise lots of money for shipbuilding, and I think the legal immunity only applied for a week.

It was seven days, yeah.

It was so that you could go in, and it was, it was if it, so it didn't count if you committed piracy, murder, felonies, or treason But you and it was so that you could go into towns and buy your ticket because she was desperate for people to buy tickets wasn't she and if you went in as a criminal and there was a wanted sign on the door then

it was a version of the purge like you have this everyone suddenly seven-day window But that's what I was wondering people surely didn't just buy it and then do something illegal did they that can't have happened I'd steal another ticket

after seven days seven days perpetual scam

Yeah but after you've stolen the ticket I'm not sure you're immune anymore because then you've bought it So I think you're just immune when you go in to buy it.

So I think as soon as you committed that crime, they'd be like, we've got what we want out of you.

There's one that was done, which was in Sweden, which was a speed camera lottery.

And that was, it was, you would buy a lottery and it would use all the money that it was generating from people who were going past speed cameras and speeding and that excess money.

So it kind of turned it into a thing where you actively wanted to not get caught because you could then win the money from people who were speeding.

It was a sort of psychological thing.

So wait, if you were speeding, were you not eligible to win the speed camera fund?

I think everyone was allowed to win.

Yeah, I think it must have been.

You couldn't be excluded.

So you weren't incentivised to not speed.

You were actually incentivised to speed so that there was more fund in the speeding lottery for you.

Not really.

Once you're only winning your own money back.

You're more incentivised to egg other people on to speed.

Yes, yes.

Just everyone sat in a bus going, faster, faster.

I could have been my kid through college.

We've previously mentioned the dog poo lottery, haven't we, in Taiwan?

I think we must have done it.

It sounds like the kind of thing we went for.

You had to have a bag of dog poo to get a ticket.

Oh, okay.

So, is that incentivizing you to

make your dogs poo?

It's incentivizing you to poo in a bag.

Well, it's really incentivizing.

Do you think they checked?

They must have checked.

Do you think they ran strict DNA checks on the dog poo lottery?

Mr.

Murray, we notice you don't actually own a dog.

And yet you've entered this 500 times in the last week.

We have questions about your diet.

I was reading about the guy whose job it is to go around and tell people that they've won the lottery, which I think might be one of the best jobs you can have.

So, he's in Britain, he's a guy called Andy Carter, and he basically is the person who goes to people's houses once they know they've won and asks what they want to do about it.

Do they want to set up a bank account?

Oh, but they already have one.

Do they want to put their money in it?

Do they want to keep it under the mattress?

That kind of thing.

He doesn't sound very professional.

Every week he's like, you already have a banking card?

Wow.

I've got to get myself one of those.

Yeah, he gives them various bits of advice and stuff.

And he's, yeah, so he's called Andy Carter.

And he says that he often has to go in disguise.

So he'll often have to go as like an estate agent.

Because.

If I saw Andy Carter rocking up the road now, I'd be like, oh, that's him.

That's a new person.

No one knows what he looks like.

But that would be great news if you saw Andy Carter walking up to you.

But if you see him walking up to your neighbour, the point is that 85% of people keep their identity secret because we're all such greedy populations.

No one knows what Addie Carter looks like.

Nobody.

But they see us a big name badge, which I doubt he does.

He usually dresses as one of those big lottery balls.

He just has to cover that up with a cloak when he visits.

You know, if a weird man walks up to your neighbour's door, you'll ask them who you are.

I don't think anything about it.

I don't know my neighbours.

I live in London.

I don't

met most of my neighbours.

Well, people are very nosy in the regions.

I would assume it was one of my neighbours if I saw Andy Carter walking up to a house.

Anyway, Andy did say he gets some quite weird people.

People are so secretive.

So he said once he had to go and organise the lottery wins with a man who was keeping it secret from his entire family.

And so he said he went, he visited the man, he said he was pacing around the room and asking me how long the visit was going to take, as his wife had popped out to Tesco and he wasn't planning to tell her.

He reassured me they're perfectly perfectly happy, very much in love.

She's just not interested in the money side of things.

Wow.

That's pretty dodgy, isn't it?

Yeah, that is.

Those two are not together anymore.

He does always bring his balls with him.

He says it's one of the first things people want to see.

Now I think that I do see why he's in, you know, in disguise.

Because if weird mans come to the door and they're saying, can I see your balls, please?

Oh, it must be Andy Carter.

Just the estate agent, this is how they sell things these days.

Well, that's a good reason to want to win the lottery because I'd insist on meeting Andy Carter somewhere really weird, and I'd ask him to come dressed as a particular thing as well to bring his balls.

Yeah,

they're not his balls, sorry, they're not his, they're the lottery's balls.

People always want to see a few example balls.

Prove you're Andy Carter,

show me your balls.

Anyway, Robert Mugabe won the Zimbabwean national lottery in 2001.

Just a fact.

There were the chances.

Did you know that in 2014, 80% of donations to the Scottish Pro-Independence campaign came from one Euro Millions lottery winner?

No.

Unbelievable.

Well, there was this couple called Colin and Chris Weir, and they got 161 million in 2011.

And they provided 79% of the donations to that campaign.

That was money well spent, wasn't it?

10% of people who win more than a million pounds buy a caravan.

Do they?

Yeah.

10%.

That's quite a high proportion.

It is.

It's so weird.

I wouldn't have thought the cost of a caravan was super prohibitive.

I wouldn't have thought you needed a million pounds to buy one.

To buy the top end.

But let's say you win a million quid.

You could probably give up your job.

Yes.

You could yeah, you could give up your job, right?

Yeah.

But probably you'd want to go on a lot of holidays.

But you couldn't go on lots of massive, really round-the-world gold-plated aeroplane holidays for a million quid, could you?

You're right.

So you have to have something where you can go on nice holidays, but you don't have to pay a a lot of money for that.

You could live in a caravan until you died if you had a million quid.

It's the dream.

Living the dream.

Well, on giving up jobs, I read a really interesting stat, which is that 86% of American lottery winners, and this is people who've won the jackpot, so they've won millions, 86% of Americans stick with their jobs, whereas in the equivalent, in Britain, 41% do.

Are we much lazier?

Would you, Anna?

I'd be out of fear like I shot.

God, if I find a five-pound note on the street, I'd just be

okay.

It is time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that the 10th Correspondence Chess Olympiad, which is done entirely by post, took so long to complete that the winners of both gold and bronze represented countries that no longer existed.

Pretty amazing.

So this is a competition that is still going to this day.

I believe they're on the 21st, although online on Wikipedia, it says they're on their 10th.

So maybe there's a few different governing bodies.

I think the ladies' one is on its 10th, maybe?

Is it right?

Okay.

So here's the thing.

The match that we're talking about with the 10th Correspondence Chess Olympiad, that started in 1987.

And it takes years and years to finish the games and get to the final and have a winner.

In fact, the 11th Correspondence Olympiad started before the 10th even finished.

They just get bored and they go, we've got to get going.

So the winners of the 10th in gold place was someone from the USSR.

And in bronze was East Germany.

both of which were dissolved countries by the time the winning the winner was announced in 1995.

But these days, I think most tournament matches are limited to just only two and a half years.

Yes.

So these days, if you're still going after two and a half years, then an independent arbitrator comes along and says, I think you're winning.

And it's amazing.

So the system, the way it works is that you send a postcard to the person that you're playing against, and you have three days to make your move and send another postpartum.

postcard back.

So they look at the dates on the postcard.

But because of the mail taking so long in certain countries, you know, know you might not receive it for weeks months even uh so it's very important that little date that sits on the actual postcard itself yeah so it's the date that it arrives is when you start which you can just say that is whenever you want actually yeah um so people have noticed that if people are really struggling towards the end that it seems to take a lot longer for the letters to arrive to them but then the when you send it that's when the post mark is so you can't cheat that one can you yeah i really like the idea that you can use uh you can use help as well.

So you can use books or magazines or the internet, you can use anything short of running the entire game through a chess software program, which is frowned on.

It is, I'm banned.

Yeah, but it means that the better players, it's a slightly different skill to playing normal chess, isn't it?

So if you play normal chess, there's time limits, apart from anything, the person you're playing against just gets really bored and doesn't want to play anymore.

But in this, because there's not really any time limits, well, you say, you know, three days,

you have 30 days for every 10 moves.

So you could take, you know, 30 days or 20 days if on one.

Well, that's what I find.

I find that really worrying about this.

I think I would be extremely bad at it because it's a classic encouraging people to leave it to the last-minute thing.

You've got 30 days for 10 moves, so I know I'd forget about it for 29.5 days, and then suddenly you've got to send, you know, 10

postcards.

I don't know if you've done your move yet.

I did mine days ago.

Exactly.

Yes, James, come on, I've just got to do this other thing.

I reckon it's more stressful.

There's a guy called Croydon H.

Jarvis who took eight years to complete one move.

What?

What?

How?

In his defence, it wasn't his fault.

So he started, he was a British guy and he started playing correspondence chess with a German in 1931.

And they played a lot together.

And then in the middle of one of their games, the war interrupted.

That probably wasn't his fault.

No.

It was inconvenient for them, though.

So they couldn't post during the war because Postal Service were interrupted.

And for two years afterwards, they couldn't post to each other.

And then I think in 1948, he got a postcard from his opponent saying, Look, mate, are you going to finish this game?

Otherwise, I'm claiming victory.

It's amazing.

And lots of people, even if the postal service wasn't affected, they weren't allowed to do it because people thought they were codes, didn't they?

Yeah, I think.

Even Humphrey Bogart was visited by the FBI because they thought he was sending secrets through postal chests.

What secrets did Humphrey Bogart have access to?

He wasn't, he was an actor.

Yeah, but he always played spies in movies, didn't he?

So, yeah.

Yeah, there was one guy called Graham Mitchell, wasn't there, who a load of postcards surfaced recently which had bizarrely cryptic stuff.

So he was deputy head of MI5 in the 1950s, and it's thought that he was corresponding

using postal chess as a way of exchanging secrets on the case.

It was reasonable that they would suggest that then.

Yeah, although he has been exonerated.

That is literally my personal opinion based on having read the postcards.

What did you get from the postcards?

They just seem like you wouldn't write sentences quite like that.

Instead of saying queen to D4, he would say queen to Balmoral on the 17th of April.

There was a 19th century chess master called Joseph Blackburn who was arrested as a spy for sending chess moves through the mail because they thought they were secrets.

I really like him because he thought that drinking whiskey improved the brain.

And every time he played chess, he tried to prove it.

So he always drank whiskey during every game.

And according to the official records, he played more than 100,000 games of chess in his career.

Wow.

I've been looking at the chess records.

This is full of absolute great stuff, this Wikipedia page.

It's really funny.

But there was one which I really like, which is, you know, people play simultaneous chess.

They play lots of games at the same time.

So, I'm just going to read this out verbatim.

The worst result in a simultaneous exhibition given by a master occurred in 1951, when international master Robert Wade gave a simultaneous exhibition against 30 Russian schoolboys aged 14 and under.

After seven hours of play, Wade had lost 20 games and drawn the remaining 10.

That's a bad day, isn't it?

Maybe he was letting them win the kiss.

Maybe.

That is amazing.

So, simultaneous chess is one very challenging form of chess.

It gets more challenging if you're blindfolded playing it, which is a thing that people have done historically.

And this has been considered in history multiple times a really dangerous thing to do.

So, blindfold chess has been, and you don't have to be blindfolded, you just have to be not able to see the board when you're making your moves.

So, it's about being able to memorize exactly the position of the board.

Because you'd knock over pieces.

So, yeah, this is a thing, and it was quite popular in the 19th century.

There are prominent blindfold chess players.

There are a couple called Morphy and Steinitz, both of whom played, and they kept having these mental breakdowns.

And so, it spread that it would give you brain fever.

And there's a lot of reports say the USSR banned displays in it in 1930 because it was so bad for your mental health because it was too challenging.

Kasparov's coach spoke out against it and said this is bad for you and so Kasparov never played it and it's thought that might be why.

So it's actually a really dangerous thing.

Because you have to hold the whole board in your head.

Yeah.

Don't you?

You're not allowed to look at the board.

No.

But what if you I just because obviously some you might miss here you know a three for a four and be playing a completely separate game to the game that your opponent thinks.

I don't think you're going to miss here a three for a four, are you?

Well, I don't know.

A D for an E.

E4 E4 and D4.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, you're right.

Is that so?

Do they tell you if you've gone off board and you're just playing?

E52

to Z91.

Yes, I don't know.

You must lose immediately, right?

Otherwise, it can't be like, could I put that porn on D4?

And they go, no, you can't.

That's an illegal move.

Okay, what about the bishop to E5?

No, sorry.

You lost the bishop ten turns ago.

What are you doing?

And you also sunk my battleship.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that when they're about to be born, baby sharks sometimes pop their heads out of their mother's cervix before taking a look around, deciding against it, and retreating back into the womb.

What do they not like the look of?

Who knows?

Just the world.

Wow.

You can't say we haven't all fought at some stage in our lives.

Wouldn't it be better to just revert back into the womb?

That's horrifying.

It's amazing.

It's so good.

How many times can they do this?

Will there be sort of a 10-year-old shark still in his womb with her going, you've got to come out sometime?

Well, we don't really know because people don't really know much about sharks, especially before they're born.

But this is quite a recent study by Kiyomi Murakama and Takaturu Tamita who developed an underwater ultrasound machine and have been able to look at what's happening inside the body of a tawny nurse shark as she has some embryos.

And they found this out.

There's a few other things.

They found out that the shark, so sharks have two uteruses, and the sharks like to swim between the uteri

and eat unfertilized eggs.

Yeah.

The unfertilized brothers and sisters.

That's the thing that happens.

That's so cool they're practicing they're doing their length before they come out of the womb which is super cool and it sounds quite arduous because there's quite a thin tube isn't there connecting them a u ben connecting the two uteri and they squirm their way through it swimming between two different bits of the womb just to eat your

yeah eat some eggs would-be siblings and they're kind of there's always more than one shark i think they give birth usually to three or four and so sometimes all of the sharks will be in one of the uteruses eating all of the eggs and then they'll all migrate to the other uterus and then eat all the eggs there.

And do they eat each other or is that a different species?

It's a different species.

These guys might do as well for all I know but that's sand sharks as well.

Yeah,

sand tiger sharks.

I guess that's the thing though like you might be looking out the cervix just thinking is this another room inside mum and going and just because you've already you've already found one room how do you know mum is massive

exactly um sharks and eggs are really quite clever

so they recently discovered that they can react really well to predators.

Even so, a shark's laid an egg and it's sitting there, and they've done ultrasound and they found out that if there's even so much as a vibration nearby, or if something walks nearby that's emitting slight electromagnetic radiation, then the embryo inside senses it and it completely freezes and it holds its breath because it knows that if it's even moving its gills, then it's going to be giving off an electrical signal that the thing might be able to sense.

So, even in the egg.

That's very cool.

Can be scared.

Yeah.

Wow.

um sharks they have they have teeth

and they have different teeth all the time so we've got baby teeth and um adult teeth but they shed their teeth throughout their whole life but this actually starts before they're even born so they have teeth in the womb embryonic teeth and they lose those and they get more teeth so they like they lose their baby teeth before they're even babies so does the mother shark have a load of loose teeth rattling around in her womb well it seems like it might be that that might be true and also that this might have thrown previous studies into disrepute because embryonic teeth of great white sharks are almost identical to adult teeth of sand tiger sharks.

So, a lot of things that they thought were sand tiger sharks

might turn out to be embryos of great white sharks.

They're having to check through them all now.

Wow.

It's such a niche crisis in the aquatic studies world.

But yeah, they have sharks that have up to 50,000 teeth in their life some of them shed teeth once a week which just must mean they are loaded tooth very well

although I don't know where she'd leave it the money

on the seabed on the seabed oh

lovely very nice um it's weird so we do know so little about birthing of shark for example a great white shark we've never seen one be born ever yeah it's amazing we've somehow just not managed to see that um and uh so occasionally aquariums and other such places studying these sharks get insight into ways that they give birth.

In New Zealand, an aquarium saw an amazing thing where there was a shark that was giving birth but was having problem with the birthing process.

So another shark came up and bit its abdomen.

And in the process, allowed, it was basically a C-section, gave it a C-section, and the little sharks were able to swim out.

And both the baby sharks and the mother shark survived the incident.

Yes, it was just, they were just witnessing some sort of bizarre technique.

Wait, so it bit shark bit the abdomen open so that the things could escape.

That is extraordinary.

Yeah, it's weird.

I also can't believe they can do it well enough that the shark survived.

You would have thought if you're tearing open the abdomen of a shark, let its babies out.

Yeah,

they didn't even know that the shark was pregnant as well.

So that was a huge surprise.

They just thought another shark was eating a shark and then suddenly they were just preparing.

Could it be that they were just eating the shark and it just so happened that there were some babies in there?

That is possible.

Yeah.

So sharks can have virgin births even if they are not virgins.

No, they can't.

They can.

But isn't that, by definition, impossible?

Not a virgin birth.

So it depends how

it depends how you define a virgin birth.

But in 2017, there was a leopard shark in Australia, which had previously mated with a male.

And then, I think they said, oh, we don't actually want any more sharks to be born.

So they moved her into her own bit of the aquarium.

And then she kept laying eggs like a chicken.

She laid the eggs like a chicken while she was plucking.

She plucked.

She waggled her fins around.

no she laid these eggs just you know non-fertile fertile eggs as they call it right got it but then some of them started hatching so these were uh

clones basically of herself which she she'd sort of switched from a sexual into an asexual mode that's never been observed before wow that's weird it's a fresh excuse for sorry my boyfriend climbed into my bedroom in the middle of the night and i didn't tell you isn't it

asexual reproduction i don't know how it's happened

um so that can i talk about baby shark the song?

Yeah, you've been waiting

so patiently.

Well, it's just because you say that they can have virgin birth, so that means that there's no daddy shark, first of all.

Okay.

It's going to be another famous Harkin Link, isn't it?

So, I tweeted this a while ago.

And today, when I was Googling baby sharks for this podcast, I found an article in The Sun from September last year saying baby shark is being blasted over factual inaccuracies by boffins on the internet.

Several Twitter users have taken to the site to point out the various ways that earworm has got biology wrong.

Podcaster and QI researcher James Harkin pointed out

I had no idea that this was in the sun in September last year and I had no idea that they'd quote.

Wait, what did you point out?

I pointed out two things.

One, that sometimes there's no daddy shark because they does it mention daddy sharks in the song.

It also mentions grandma shark.

And since great white sharks don't reach sexual maturity till their mid-30s and their maximum lifespan is around 70 you hardly ever get grandma sharks in nature

and the sun picked it up James Hume absolute boffin

I love it when you blast inaccuracies

oh you've made it to the sun I know what an honour an official sun boffin

oh man that's huge

I just got one last thing just to quickly mention in 2018 there was a story which I'm annoyed that I missed for the book, but it was a shark got, well, someone attempted to steal a shark from a San Antonio aquarium in Texas.

And they did so by simply just taking it out of the water and dressing it as a baby in a buggy.

They did not dress it as a baby.

Well, they put it in the buggy.

They just put it in a buggy.

But they pretended that it was role-playing.

They were just dressing it as a baby.

A buggy does not count as baby clothes.

They dressed it as a naked baby.

They had it wrapped in a blanket.

You'd wrap a baby in a blanket.

They'd put it in a bucket.

You'd put a baby in a bucket.

And then they put the bucket in the buggy.

How is fatherhood going now?

Anyway, they were challenged on the way out, so I don't think that's a baby anymore.

Yeah, buggy looks fine, bucket looks fine.

Hang on a second.

Okay, that's it.

That's 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.

James.

That's James Harkin.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

And Shaczinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account at no such thing.

We have a Facebook page as well, no such thing as a fish, or go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

We have everything up there from previous episodes all the way to links to our upcoming tour of the UK.

Please come along.

It's going to be amazing.

We'll see you again next week with another episode.

Goodbye.

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