251: No Such Thing As An Accidental George

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

My name is Anna Dzhinsky, not Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Anne Miller.

Once again, we've gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with my fact, which is cockroaches can carry 900 times their own body weight on their backs.

Amazing.

It's impressive, isn't it?

So, what is 900 times bigger than a cockroach?

900 cockroaches.

Oh, that's

cockroach firefighters must be very good indeed.

I'll take everyone.

Oh, I've just got everything from your house.

Don't worry about it.

Well, I want the whole house.

Oh, no, it's still on fire.

I worked out that that would mean that I would be able to carry the biggest dinosaur that ever walked the earth, which is Argentinosaurus.

Wow.

So, if I was a cockroach.

That would look really impressive.

If you you were a cockroach.

As a human, you would be able to carry it.

If I was a human-sized cockroach and the laws of physics didn't really apply to me, but just this one particular fact applied to me, then I'd be able to carry that down.

Oh, and if dinosaurs still existed.

There are a lot of big ifs in there, but it's still impressive.

So yeah, this is, I read this in an article which was published by Science, the journal Science.

The article was actually written by someone called Elizabeth Panisi.

This is a report on cockroaches and how they're basically impossible to squash.

And it looked into why.

So they're extremely flexible and extremely hard and really good at lifting stuff.

And so they worked that out, obviously, by how you'd think they did, by putting heavier and heavier stuff on cockroaches' backs and seeing at what point they crushed.

But we haven't said there are 4,500 species of cockroach.

So is this only one species of cockroach?

This was an American cockroach,

famously spoken.

Smeaton gym, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Juck.

Jockroach.

Oh, God.

I already think about how we had this image of cockroaches as sort of, you know, being very hardy and surviving everything, but it really varies.

There are 64 rays can kill 93% of German cockroaches, which is 10 times more than humans can take, but like way, way, way less than a fruit fly can take.

So a fruit fly can survive more radiation.

Oh, radiation.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

So we, because it employed some cockroaches are really hardy and some aren't.

But we sort of think of cockroaches as this one uniform thing, and actually, they're very different individuals.

Yep.

I think that's good speaking up for cockroaches.

They're not just horrible things.

They're each very special in their own way.

Do you know what happens to elderly cockroaches?

I read about this experiment, and it's amazing.

It's great.

Well, they get dodgery.

So, the scientists looked at elderly cockroaches and they found that their joints seize up and they have trouble walking up hills

and they spend less time moving around.

They move more slowly when they do move around.

They develop slightly racist views

by the other kinds of cockroaches.

So, basically, they did this experiment.

They tried to make them walk up slopes and things.

They only found one method which could rejuvenate an elderly cockroach and make it, you know,

this was testing whether a particular species could run off after being nudged.

Right.

And the best way to ensure that elderly cockroaches can run off after being nudged is to decapitate them.

Oh.

But it's a bit of an extremely different.

Yeah, but I'd rather be doddery.

Yeah.

So in this experiment that I got this fact from, they were mainly actually looking at how cockroaches can squeeze through such tiny spaces.

So, the American cockroach, for instance, which is about nine millimeters tall, can squeeze through a slit that's three millimeters high.

And so, they looked at exactly how they do that.

And it's really cool.

They'll come across this little hole, and first of all, they inspect it with their antenna, so you know, to feel around, feel how small it is.

Then they jam their head through, and then they squeeze their front legs through after it.

So, they're really pushing their body down, squeezing their front legs through, and then they sort of drag the rest of the body behind them.

And their back legs are really splayed out.

So when you look at it, they're completely flat.

Their back legs are splayed out, but sort of still pushing them.

And it takes them one second to do that.

Wow.

And they're much better than any animal at squeezing, except an octopus, I think, which can squeeze itself quite small as well.

That's terrifying, because what they're also really good at is biting.

So they can fight with five times more relative strength than humans can, which is terrifying.

And cockroaches will eat everything, including other cockroaches and humans.

And there's the thing about some sailors.

Cockroaches don't eat humans.

They do.

No, they don't.

Not all of you, because they're only small, but if they were big enough.

So sailors on ships apparently wear, some sailors wear gloves because cockroaches will sneak up in the night and eat their fingernails.

Really?

Yeah.

That's quite good.

Don't need to take nails as well.

No, day one, it's your fingernails.

Day three, it's your eyes.

So here's something I have in common with cockroaches.

They don't like mornings.

Inasmuch as they're literally unable to form any new memories at the start of the day.

So if you teach them something something at the start of the day, they'll just forget it.

And if you teach them in the afternoon, then they'll remember it.

Is there a reason, do they think, behind that?

They just go out really late.

Yeah,

we just like to stay up late.

You and your cockroach friends.

I'm glad you can speak on behalf of the cockroaches now, James.

But they don't.

They don't like the light, do they?

So I wonder if it's something to do with that.

Because their name Blattidea in Latin means insect that shuns the light.

And also the creepy ones might eat your fingernails, but I'm sure when I started at QI, it was a brilliant fact.

So we don't like the idea of cockroaches, but they don't like the idea of us.

So some of them, if they touch a human, will run away and clean themselves.

Human.

That's weird because they love touching, don't they?

I think we've said this before, but

that's why they like being in really tiny spaces and they like crawling into your ears.

And that's because they really like touching the edges of things.

And this comes in handy for a guy called Stephen Kutcher, who is Hollywood's bug artist.

So he's got this super cool job.

If anyone is using He's got a super cool job.

But his brother Aston's doing a lot better

in Hollywood.

Well, it depends what you mean by better.

But can you imagine those Christmas dinners at the Kutcher household?

What have you been doing?

Well, Stephen gets to say, I'm at the very top of my field, which is a bit more difficult.

I do think Aston Kutcher is.

We don't need to get into the Aston Kutcher debate here.

But anyway, so Stephen sort of recruits bugs for films like Spider-Man and

Stephen.

Are you around?

Are you free?

Are you?

He kicks his fingernails out and hopes they come to him.

him.

Yeah, it's like that.

And then he trains them up.

And so he did this interview for NPR where he was talking about a film called Race the Sun.

And what he had to do was he had to get a cockroach to emerge from a shoe, walk onto a bag of Cheetos, turn left, and then walk through some Cheetos that had spilled out of it and then stop on a magazine.

So he had to get a cockroach to do all of this without any prompting.

And he did it by folding the bag of Cheetos in a certain way.

And because they really like touching things, he just folded it in a way that they'd follow the folds around.

and it steered it exactly.

That's so clever.

I would just glue a magnet to the underside of the cockroach and then move that around under the filming surface.

I would do it in post.

Hollywood secrets from the no such thing as a fish team.

Yeah, that's really cool.

Yeah, you don't get that in heat magazine.

In Russia,

in 2008, they wanted to find some cockroaches in Moscow to send into space.

They need a 54.

They should have recruited my friend Stephen Stephen Kuchin.

Well, it took them three months to find 54 cockroaches in Russia.

And then everyone was like, oh my god, what's happened to all our cockroaches in Russia?

And there was a big worry about it.

People blamed like Cell Tower Radiation or GM food

or probably foreigners.

People blame whatever they blame.

We don't really know what happened.

But then around 2011, they started coming back.

And then in the early 2010s, there was a huge plague of cockroaches in Moscow.

So they kind of just disappeared.

And then they all came back.

And what it might have been is maybe they started using some pesticide the government did and then it killed them all but then they got used to it and then when they got used to it they really came back with a vengeance god wow well it's a big holiday big cockroach holiday

that's because whenever i go on holiday there's always cockroaches in the room

you have to start improving your accommodation on that

Whenever.

Oh, I did find one thing I liked, which is that as female cockroaches get older, they gradually lower their standards of what they think is acceptable in a mate.

Yeah, I think we can all feel for that.

But the male cockroaches.

We can all hope for that.

Males are completely unable to assess females' age or assess their reproductive fitness.

They're just willing to mate at all times.

But females start out with quite high standards, and then as time goes by, they broaden their standards.

Lower and lower, lower, really.

Yeah, and they're all cockroaches you're dating, though.

They don't move on to more attractive animals like lions.

That would be amazing, wouldn't it?

If all animals were dating all other animals,

um, well, they are very sexual, aren't they?

The only thing that they like more than food, I think, is sex cockroaches.

And they will actually, I think it's the males are very sexual, the females actually aren't as into sex.

And so, if a male is starving to death and it's got a bit of food in front of him, him but then you spray some female pheromone 16 feet away it will run to the female pheromone and die of starvation because it wants sex more than food yeah wow um do you guys know that cockroach milk is the most nutritious substance on earth or one of the most nutritious substances maybe he's running to the woman cockroach to get some milk rather than for sex you're right he must have read the same article that i did

yeah so i didn't know this they've they've milked the pacific beetle cockroach and they found that it has four times more calories than cow's milk.

And yeah, it's full of protein and fats and sugars.

And this cockroach is the only cockroach that gives birth to live young.

And then it sort of pumps out this special milk for its babies.

And it's really cool.

It looks really glittery because it's got protein crystals in it.

Wow.

Right.

Well, I'll look for a tiny, tiny bottle of milk in the supermarket next time.

It's not milk per se, is it?

It's something slightly different to milk, I think.

Yeah, I think.

Secretions.

Yeah.

Lovely.

What I mean is when you're in the supermarket, you won't be able to call it cockroach milk.

Like you can't, these days they're stopping people from calling things almond milk, aren't they?

If it doesn't contain lactose or something.

You're saying the dairy industry might get annoyed if I start selling my cockroach.

I think they will.

I think you might have to call it cockroach secretion, like Anne suggests.

And I don't want to buy that.

But I'm only one person, so.

No, I do think we need to work on the branding.

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Okay, let's move on to our next fact and that is Anne's facts.

My fact is that the first British travellers aboard the Orient Express were advised to bring a revolver and a teapot with them.

All the essentials.

So when the Orient Express began, it wasn't quite the luxurious train ride we imagined.

So actually, it went from Paris to Constantinople, but twice the passengers had to get off and get on boats instead.

So I think the idea was they wanted to bring protection in case there was a ruckus at the ports or anything.

And the teapots.

Making tea.

Making tea, of course.

Pass the time.

Your 14-hour boat ride.

If you've recovered from a ruckus, what do you need?

You need a nice cup of tea.

That's true.

So the Orient Express was founded by the company Wagon Lee,

Wagons Litz in English, and that was founded by George Knucklemackers,

who that's how you pronounce that in every language.

And he is quite interesting because he decided to do these sleeper carriages when he went to the United States of America.

And he went to the USA because he was encouraged to go there.

Because while in Europe, he fell in love with his cousin.

And his family decided that he should go to the USA to kind of get over her.

It's so strange because falling in love with your cousin was an occupational hazard in the 19th century.

It must have been an unsuitable cousin.

I think it was the cousin did not like him back.

But Malcolm Macker, so he set out that first trip to Constantinople, and actually there wasn't a full rail link for six years after his first Orange Express ran.

But also the Orange Express, we have this idea of it being this beautiful long train, and that's sort of, I think, the idea, because I read this fact in Night Trains by Andrew Martin, and he says, because it went on a long journey, we sort of assume it was long, but actually that first train, there were only five carriages, and one of them was a wagon carrying posts which helped them recoup some of their costs which is just

quite like the Orange Express you think of it as being you know 15 carriages long yeah it's got all this stuff in it it's only five carriages that's tiny yeah so make fewer suspects

but also Agatha Christie used to take the Ordnance Express a lot because she her husband's second husband was an archaeologist they take it to go to digs but she was apparently one time between Venice and Paris was attacked by bed bugs I shouldn't write that into the book oh yeah that's not what you want from your luxury training Is it?

You imagine, like, you know, like really grand and lovely.

Yeah.

Wasn't Nicholmacker's, was it Pullman carriages that he was inspired by?

Yeah.

He went to America and he fell in love with them,

which actually

carriages were a huge deal.

So they were these, yeah, this luxury way of travelling that was pioneered in America.

And they also gave rise to Pullman Porters.

And I didn't really say Pullman Porters were the people who carried your luggage on a Pullman carriage.

And George Pullman came up with the idea straight after the Civil War of only employing ex-slaves as these Pullman porters.

So, every single Pullman porter was black, and they ended up being really important in the civil rights movement because they formed the first union of black people, the first union that involved black people, and that allowed them to get together and to fight for their rights and things like that.

But they all, when they were working on the Pullman carriages, had to be called George.

So, every Pullman porter was called George after George Pullman, which some of them objected to because most of them weren't actually called George.

Yeah, you'd think the majority

It did turn out to be.

Most of them had other names.

And there was a society, there was a society called the Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeper Car Porters George.

And this was actually a genuinely, really important society, but it wasn't porters.

I mean, cruelty to animals and cruelty to children are surely higher up the list of prevention ofs.

No, it's not.

No, it's

prevention of calling people George.

This society was actually formed by other people who were called George in America.

So it had 31,000 31,000 members and they were saying, George is our name.

Stop just randomly giving this name to train porters.

I mean, I don't think they should have been calling these porters George, but you can't stop other people from having your name.

Well, these Georges, you know, they didn't want it.

You can think that your name's a bit too common.

You don't want to make it more and more common.

Yeah.

There is a phrase in fiction, or things like saying, leave it to George, which I thought was a sort of 40s phrase, or calling everyone George, was a thing that

I think it comes from that.

Yeah.

But then you couldn't, because eventually this society for the prevention of calling people George actually persuaded the Pullman Company to ban it.

So by 1926, there had to be a little rack installed in each carriage that said the name of your porter to ensure that you didn't call him George because the Georges objected so much.

If they were accidentally called George.

Not accidentally.

If they had their actual name.

They were forced to not be called George.

They were all called Herbert now.

And the interesting thing about Pullman, he was seen as this great entrepreneur, etc.

But there was a depression in 1893, and it meant that he cut the wages of all of his staff, but they were all staying in a town that he built, and he didn't reduce the rent.

So it meant that workmen might make $9.07 in a fortnight, but he would take $9 of it as rent, leaving them a paycheck of just $0.07

for everything else.

It's not worth cashing, is it?

It really isn't.

It's really bad.

So they strike because of this.

And then the soldiers came in, and I think quite a few people died.

And then Pullman's reputation just went from hero to absolutely nothing, which is not the same.

You're right, he's a zero.

But yeah,

he became really, really hated to such an extent that when he was buried, his family covered his coffin in a large block of cement because they were worried people would abuse his corpse because he was hated so much.

Must have been very difficult for the poor pullbearers.

You're right.

Did you know that in 1936, you could travel from England to France by train?

completely by train.

You still can?

You still can

do that.

But it's surprising then

that you could do it.

How did that happen?

There was no tunnel.

No, there was no tunnel, but there were ferries.

So there was this thing called the night ferry, which took trains on board it.

So it was only if you were traveling first class.

There was a specially committed, there are special trains, and they went, I think, from Paddington, actually.

And if you were in first class, your train just ran straight onto the ferry.

You stayed aboard it, and then it ran straight off the ferry at the other end.

But if you were in economy class, you had to get off the carriage.

So So were there tracks leading up onto the ferry and then at the other end there were tracks leading off?

So that meant they'd have to have the same gauge.

Yeah because they have different gauges in Europe don't they?

Or is it the

universal plug?

You know when you go on holiday and you can adapt it to it.

The carriage might go onto another gauged yard.

Yeah, because the carriage sometimes lifts up.

You've got a flatbed truck with a different gauge and then the whole carriage is lifted up.

It's lifted on, yeah, yeah.

It would be a weird journey, wouldn't it?

Your carriage being lifted up and swung and waking up at the wrong point and being like, where are we?

That's so cool.

So, I've got a fact about modern trains, which is about the Queen, who, as we know, has the royal train.

So, when she's travelling on the royal train and when she's been travelling overnight, there's a special instruction that gets given out, and that is that the Queen has a bath at 7:30 in the morning.

So, if the train is going then,

the driver is ordered to avoid any bumpy bits of track so that her bath doesn't slosh around too much.

That's weird knowing when the queen has a bath.

I think you'd be freaked out as the train driver.

Every morning at 7:30, you'd think, oh, she's bathing now.

Don't make any mistake.

She's naked 10 yards from me.

It's a weird thought.

It's a big train.

I don't think it's only 10 metres.

She's like in the cab, in the tub.

He puts the bath next to the driver's.

Move more coal.

Watching the vehicle bath.

Just one thing I had on suitcases.

So this is about luggage and suitcases.

and I was wondering what the history of luggage is.

And I read that the first wheelie suitcases were in 1153, and

they were used by the Knights to.

They were invented in my lifetime.

Well, you're a very old man.

I can't believe the Knights went to the Crusades with

little trunkies, basically.

Little trunkies.

You don't see that, do you?

You don't see them running into battle with

a little trolley behind them.

You would leave it behind, wouldn't you?

Back up in the hotel.

But no, I read this.

It was in A Lonely Planet Guide and another book, actually, and I can't find any source for it, but apparently, yeah, and they would use these wheelie suitcases to carry their chainmail and their arms and their tools and stuff.

And I guess a wheelie suitcase is really just

a bag on wheels, just a cart on wheels, isn't it?

It would have to be wooden, though, wouldn't it?

It would be like a wooden carriage with spokes.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't know when something stops being a suitcase and starts being a carriage.

Size.

It's just

mostly size.

The race wall carriage for the Knights Templar.

Anyway, if anyone has an actual source for the Crusades being people galloping into the Crusades pulling their wheelie suitcases,

it just doesn't sound very true.

It sure doesn't.

Okay, on to our next fact, and that is James's fact.

Okay, my fact this week is that the largest known prime number has 24,862,048 digits.

When written in binary, it has 82,589,933 digits, but they are all the number one.

That is unbelievable.

And presumably not a coincidence.

It's not a coincidence.

Okay, so I will quickly go through this.

Take your time, please.

I'll settle then.

So, prime number is something that has only two multiples, one in itself.

So, 12 is not prime because you can have three fours or two sixes, but eleven is because you can't divide it by anything else apart from itself.

That's lulled everyone into a false false sense of security and thinking, yeah, I know that.

Okay, now binary.

Binary is a number that's made of zeros and ones.

Rather than writing in ones, tens and hundreds, you write in ones, twos, fours, eights, sixteens, thirty-twos, stuff like that.

And so each zero or one represents a two, a four, an eight, a sixteen, etc.

So the binary number one, one, one, one is one plus two plus four plus eight, which is fifteen.

Anyway, so the large prime numbers that we're all finding at the moment are called Mersenne primes, and they're all in the form of 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2, etc., etc., etc., minus 1.

And they keep looking for all these different 2 times 2 times 2 things and check if they're prime.

And some of them are.

And it also happens that if you write any number that's 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 minus 1, it can be written as a string of ones in binary.

It's 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1.

And so this particular number, which is 2 to the power of 82,589,933 minus 1, is a prime number.

And it's also written as 111111111 in binary.

Wow.

Yeah, okay.

That's almost there was that.

That was well explained,

yeah.

Impressive.

You should be a maths teacher.

So I saw this in Scientific American, this fact, which was really good.

But here's a slightly more accessible maths fact from that article, and that is that the word 29, if you write it in capital letters, can be written with 29 straight-line segments.

That's quite nice, isn't it?

Sorry, if you write.

So the T is a line and a downwards line.

The W is 4.

And then if you add them all up, let's not do it all, but they count to 29.

That's really cool.

That's how you convince the kids that you're a cool teacher and stuff like that.

And then you make your calculator spell boobless, and

then you launch into the prime number stuff.

Yeah, Mersenne primes.

So Mersenne primes, like you say, are two to the power something and then minus one.

But we now keep finding these as the largest prime numbers, right?

Yes, so I think it's just because that's where people are are looking.

Got it.

And they're kind of easier to find because we know the kind of format that they take.

So we can keep looking for all the different 2 to the power of n minus 1.

We can look at the next one, the next one, the next one.

Eventually we'll find the prime number.

Got it.

But the gap gets bigger, doesn't it?

Because once you're up to immersed in 74 million, the prime number theorem says only one in every 50 million numbers is prime.

So you're searching in quite a big gap.

So they start clumping.

So if you start at 2, 2 is prime and 3 is prime.

So at that stage, everything's prime.

Yeah.

But then you get to four and it all goes wrong.

Yeah.

But then you get to five and they're prime again.

And then as you go up, there's fewer and fewer as you keep going.

So Marin Mersenne of Mersenne Prime fame was a monk.

He was in the minims, he was a what was called a minim monk.

And he was also known as the post box of Europe because he was

large and red.

He was a really crucial scientific figure in the 1600s and he was called the postbox of Europe because he he was unbelievably well connected.

So he was like one of these society ladies who brings people together.

So he was like really great mates with Galileo, with Descartes, with Pascal, with Hobbes.

And he used to, you know, communicate between them all and pass their letters to each other.

And that was

what he was going around spreading gossip.

He was the postman of Europe, not the postbox of Europe.

Yeah, you're right.

So yeah, and in that way, he sort of spread ideas.

ideas and then they were able to make discoveries based on each other's ideas.

That's very cool.

Very good.

You can earn money from discovering new prime numbers, which is nice.

So this thing called GIMPS, what is it, the great internet Merzen Prime Search?

It means that it's a little bit of software you can install on your computer and your computer will just in the background hunt for prime numbers.

But the prizes are really variable.

So currently, if you find a prime number that is fewer than 100 million digits long, you only get $3,000.

That's still not bad for doing literally nothing.

It's better than a poke in the eye.

But the first person to find a prime number which had 1 million digits, so that's 100 times smaller, got $50,000.

Oh, that's a big jump, isn't it?

No, and when the record passed 10 million digits in 2008, the prize was $100,000.

Yeah.

Not worth it.

I think you should get a prize if your number is particularly pleasing, because I found an article called The Best Prime Numbers of 2016, which I was very excited to read.

And among the nominees is 314,159.

Why is that special?

It's 3.14.

Yeah, it's basically 100,000 times 5.

Nice.

Isn't that beautiful?

I'm going to propose that as the best prime number of all years, not just 2016.

That is a really good one.

I've got a rival.

Mine's maybe an evil prime number.

Maybe it's a good one.

It's a 6666.

It's basically that, yeah, but with some stuff around it, yeah.

So

this is called Belphagor's Prime, and it's a palindrobe, and it's also a very pleasing number.

So it's one, followed by 13 zeros, 13, very unlucky number, followed by 666, followed by another 13 zeros, followed by one.

Could you get unluckier?

And that's a prime number.

That's a prime number.

That's really strong.

It's a cool one, isn't it?

That's very good.

My favourite prime number is.

Sense you didn't think you'd say this week.

Is this going to be a spin-off podcast?

My favourite prime.

My favourite is the number 524,287

because that was proved to be prime by a guy called Cataldi in 1588.

And then that was the largest known prime number for 200 years.

Wow.

Really?

Yeah, until Euler came along.

That spoilt sport Euler.

Andy, what's your favourite prime number?

17.

Any reason?

I like it.

I genuinely find it pleasing.

And I've liked it for years as well, by the way, guys.

I didn't just make one up for four things that I liked.

Can I say another pie thing?

Just because I really like this.

So

if you want to memorize pie, you can use a sentence.

So this is the first few digits of pie.

How I want to drink.

Alcoholic, of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics, which is 3.141592653879.

And that's the number of letters in each word.

I'll say it again.

How do I want to?

Hallelujah.

3.11.

All right, Mr.

17.

How I want to drink.

How I want to drink.

3.1415.

Oh, clever.

Alcoholic.

9, of course.

2.6.

2.6.

And you can go on forever.

I mean, pi goes on a long time.

And I was hoping we could.

I was going to make one up for James's Prime number, but yeah, 23 million digits.

We said we did a prime number

podcast in episode 98.

I don't know if you remember that.

I'm sure the listeners at home will remember.

This was when the last really big prime number was found.

And we said that if you were to write it out, it would take three months.

But I worked out that this one, if you were to write it down, would take you nine months.

But then again, that's the 24,862,000 version.

If you were to write it in binary, it's 82 million digits, but they're all the number one.

And so I timed myself writing the number one as quickly as I could.

Oh, God.

I could do five a second for ten seconds.

Don't want to show off, but I did that quite a bit.

That's really impressive.

Why you should put that on your Tinder profile.

And so I worked out that even though it's a lot longer, it would only take me six months to write the binary version out and it would take me nine months to write the

are you factoring in the inevitable arthritis that's going to hit you in about month three i was thinking getting halfway through and forgetting how many ones you've written

and be like uh that's a really good thing

there are other good ways of doing it so for example you could write with all four digits all four limbs at once you could put a pet a pencil in each hand and in each foot yeah does it have to be coherently written or does it have to be just all over the place

i think you need to be able to tell that they're ones and not just

okay what you could do is you could get a pencil and you could just draw a long line, just run along a very long wall, and then someone after you goes along with a rubber, just rubbing out gaps and then turn it kind of

horizontal, isn't it?

God, have you been drawing wands the wrong way?

Oh, and these dashes are actually wands.

My phone number

dashes.

But all these methods are going to be considered cheating in this fictional and absurd game that you've created.

And actually, in these versions, I don't sleep in any of them either.

Right, yeah.

For six months, there's no sleeping.

Okay, anyone got anything else?

You have some illegal prime numbers.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, ones that you're not allowed to say.

Say one, I dare you.

Rude wife.

4, 8, 5, 6, 5.

Actually, it's got 1,401 digits in it, so I'm not going to say them all.

That's the only reason I'm not going to say them all.

Not because you're afraid.

No, they're not afraid of the people who make DVDs anymore.

So this is a decryption algorithm which could theoretically be used by a computer to circumvent a DVD's copy protection if you know what this prime number is.

And people wanted to put it on t-shirts and stuff like that because they were so annoyed by the man telling them what prime numbers they can and can't say.

But I suppose DVDs aren't really used that much anymore, so doesn't matter.

That's one of those archaic laws, you know, that you find on the books thousands of years later.

Like anyone who has a black calves allowed to urinate on their back wheel and carry a bale of hay or something.

Exactly.

Yeah, let's strike it from the Magna Carta.

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Okay, let's move on to our final fact, and that is Andrew Wantemari.

My fact is that to preserve their anonymity, Michelin restaurant reviewers are advised to not tell even their parents what they do for a living.

Ah, it's really secretive.

Yeah, that's why.

So, why is it so secretive?

Is that so the restaurants can't spot them?

Basically,

right?

Yeah, because

Michelin pride themselves on their anonymity.

This comes from a huge feature that the New Yorker wrote about this about 10 years ago, actually.

So, a lot of Michelin company executives have never met an inspector.

You are kind of allowed to tell your spouse, for example, but it's not.

Otherwise, they'd be a bit suspicious that you're taking them to restaurants every day.

How are we affording this?

You don't have a job.

Yet you eat it.

And they do eat out a lot.

They have to dine out 200 days a year.

Oh, didhams.

Well, they're driving in between places and they have to fill out reports for hours and hours a day about these places.

They have to eat the maximum number of courses offered.

They can't skip pudding ever.

They have to eat everything on their plate.

What?

Yes, true.

Because they have to judge, you know, whether the seared whatever is.

You're not having pudding until you've eaten your vegetables.

It's basically like being a child.

Wait, but they don't have to eat all of everything, surely.

What a taste.

If they've had one pee, it's not like the last peas.

You don't have to have all the peas.

Yeah, if the peas are awful.

The article says they have to eat everything on their plate.

That's true, actually, because what happens if one of the peas is off?

But they bring it to the page.

When they read this review, they want to know that, don't they?

But if they also, if they bring you 500 peas and you think there's too many peas, you can't just have one pee and say, oh, yeah, the peas are great.

You should make a note.

They bring too many peas.

I think the reviews are normally more complex than knowing too many peas.

Why do they keep sending into little chefs?

We're never going to give them a star guide.

Well, I like that Mr.

Michelin is sort of, we think of it as sort of fine dining, but it wasn't meant to mean that.

It was meant to mean one star was very good cooking.

Two was exceptional, worth a detour, and three was exceptional, worth a special journey.

It was supposed to be how much it was worth making the trip.

So it could have been if there was a really good little chef.

So two is worth a detour.

So basically a one Michelin star restaurant is not worth making a detour to go to.

If you're passing, if you only go to a one Michelin star restaurant if you're walking past them,

yeah, they're staying next door.

That's really funny.

I was reading about restaurant reviewers in newspapers, which is a similar kind of thing, isn't it?

There's a famous one whose name is Frank Bruni,

who I really like because his name is the plural of Frank Bruno.

And he says that he always wears a wig and fake mustaches, but the problem was that one of his books, his early books, had his face on the cover and then the dust jacket got put on the internet.

But you think you wouldn't put your face on the cover of your own book, would you?

No, you can't complain about your book cover appearing on the internet.

Maybe he didn't know that he was going to be an anonymous restaurant reviewer.

Maybe it's a different book.

The UK doesn't have many anonymous reviewers.

There's Marina O'Loughlin, who writes for the Sunday Times, and she always covers her face with a plate.

No, give her away.

Not when she dines at the restaurant.

Oh, your peas are in your lap, Marina.

And she says it's a real struggle because obviously it's quite a small, you know, haute cuisine food scene.

And she also has done interviews saying, My husband is incapable of going out for dinner with me without bellowing Marina at the top of his voice.

Oh, my God.

But I have read about people who, when they're dining by themselves, like to take a notebook because it sort of freaks people out.

It's if you go in and sit there with your notepad and a pen.

Excellent.

Everyone's like, well, so Michelin reviewers aren't allowed, are they?

They're not allowed to take notes because, yeah, it gives the game away.

It's a great bluff to pretend that you're not a Michelin reviewer.

Well, that's what I always do.

I go to Michelin style restaurants and I don't take a notepad.

And I just think, as soon as they see that, they think I'm a reviewer.

They're sent into a panic, every single customer.

It's like being a really low-stakes spy, isn't it?

It's like if you're a coward but you want to be a spy, you should be one of these people.

There's one I really like, Ruth Reichel, I think that's how you say her name.

And she goes to enormous lengths.

So she was a reviewer for the New York Times as well.

And she started wearing disguises because she realized that restaurants were offering rewards of up to $1,500 for people who could spot her so that they would know if she was going.

And so she created all these alter egos.

And she really lives the part.

So she said, her first alter ego was a mousy woman called Molly Hollis.

She was a woman who had 30 years and 40 pounds on the real me.

I said, Rachel, so she probably dressed it up.

And then she turned into Chloe, a brazen blonde who flirted with waiters, and then sweet, earthy, red-headed Brenda.

And then

after a time, she was followed by frumpy old Betty.

Wow.

But I think the thing about being spies is really interesting.

So obviously spies aren't allowed to tell people what they do for a living.

And there was a former CIA agent called Douglas Lanks who did an AMA on Reddit.

And he says he told his family he was a low-level salesman because he doesn't tend to invite more questions.

But when he got sent to Afghanistan, he told his family family he's going to Hawaii because he thought that's far enough away but they kept trying to visit him and he was like yeah we can't do that but the best that's the same thing as the restaurant guy it's like why are we going to these casinos every day

but the best bit i read about the spies thing is that there's not really a way of testing who's psychologically sort of good to be a spy and what sort of effect keeping the secrets has on you because there aren't enough spies who've come out about being a spy who will volunteer for your survey.

And there was a paper in the Journal of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, which I would love to read, about, yeah, this problem that you can't study the spies because it's all secrets.

So we don't really know what impact creating a false identity has for the spies and presumably for the restaurant critics as well.

I read what I think is the first restaurant review of all time from 1859.

What the hell was that I just experienced?

It was like having a meal at home, but I was in someone else's building.

Yes.

No, it was better than that, actually.

It is,

if you can believe it.

It was written in 1859.

It's really long.

And actually, it's a review of lots of restaurants.

They went to about 10 different restaurants.

A lot of it is taken up, by the first full page of the paper, is taken up with the person saying how bizarre it is that the editor sent them on this mission in the first place.

This stupid idea that will never catch up.

Is it English or is it French or is it?

It's New York Times American in New York.

And it's so good, actually.

It really, it starts the tradition from the start of the A.A.

Gill style.

Great Great reviewing.

So it describes one of the restaurants he goes into.

He says, you walk in, there's a pervading atmosphere of gravy, of which you become more sensible.

He said,

of which you become more sensible as you penetrate further into the crowded room.

A guest has no sooner seated himself than a plate is flung at him by an irritated and perspiring waiter.

It's so good.

I want to go to this restaurant.

You're like a perspiring waiter.

The jerking of the plate at customers is closely followed up by a similar performance with the knife and fork.

And he's very strong on waiters' outfits.

That seems to be the thing that this reviewer most cares about.

He says, I prefer the man who is so good as to bring me what I'm about to eat should not appear in soiled garments.

Where were the standards?

They asked.

That too is my bare minimum.

And the other waiter's shat himself.

But the food was delicious.

You can't judge by the shitting himself level of the waiter.

He'd put you off a bit.

One of the first professional restaurant critics was Grimaud de la Renier,

who was French.

And

he became a gaunte because something that happened in an early age.

His parents were away, and his father returned from wherever they were to find a pig dressed up and presiding at his dinner table.

What?

And the story made the rounds in Paris, became quite famous.

And so the family disinherited him and sent him to an abbey close to Nancy where he became friends with the abbot.

And the abbot taught him the art of good eating.

And then eventually he became a restaurant critic.

And did he learn that the art of good eating does not involve dressing up a pig and sitting at your dinner table?

But you're a guy who cared about the waiters' outfits would have loved this.

There was a pig in the most immaculate of dress.

He had not the shits himself.

I read about him, and he was really cool, De La Rainier, and he created this jury.

So the first restaurant critic was, there were 17 of him because it was him and 16 buddies.

Prime number.

Right, my fave.

And they met every week to taste food.

But obviously, you couldn't have 17 people going to the same restaurant as a critic because it would definitely be pretty obvious.

But they met.

So it's so hard to book a table for that many people.

Yeah, true.

But they met every week at the same place, and the restaurants sent their food to them.

No.

Yeah.

that's such a good idea.

It's weird, isn't it?

So, yeah.

Although I would have thought the food quality might degrade in transparency,

and he also gave his own funeral to see who would come.

Before he was dead, yeah, yeah.

And then he rose from the dead halfway through.

Oh.

Brilliant.

He was a dramatic guy.

Really fun.

Um, I looked a bit more into the history of Michelin.

So when they started doing the guides, there were only three thousand cars in France, so it was a bit more of a it wasn't thinking everybody had.

And so I didn't realise that the Michelin man, you know the guy made out of tires, was really posh when he first came out to appeal to these like upper classes.

So he had a monocle, a cigar, cuff length and a signet ring.

And then as cars became more for everyone, they had to like tone him down a bit.

Really funny, really good.

Well this is because I don't think people know the reason that the Michelin stars came about, right?

The reason the Michelin guy came about was'cause they made tires and they wanted to encourage people to use their tyres by driving to lots of restaurants, so they wore them out so that they would have to buy new tyres, which does seem like a convoluted way of selling more tyres.

Should we just cold-type the tyres?

Nah.

Oh, but that must be why he's made of white tyres.

Because we've said

tires used to be white.

They actually coloured him black for a brief period when tires became black with asphalt, but because it was bad for printing, it didn't really work, so they made him white again.

But do you know what he's called?

He has a name, which is Bibendum.

And

his name means now is the time for drinking, or there's drinking to be done.

But not driving.

Well, no, that's not exactly.

And he was always, he was initially known as the road drunkard.

I just say, genuinely.

And basically, the posters for him originally showed him, as Anne says, with a monocle and with champagne and everything.

But he was drinking a big glass, and the glass was full of nails and broken glass and all this horrible stuff.

And the idea behind the poster is that Michelin Tyres drink up obstacles without puncturing.

So he can soak up all this broken glass and all these nails and he won't deflate.

He'll be fine.

That's not an easy message to get from that image, is it?

It's a weird image.

Also, it's strange for something that is associated with high-quality food and drink to sort of be recommending a glass filled with crap.

And that does show that they didn't really adapt the original logo because it was originally designed for a beer company, wasn't it?

And I think it was rejected.

The guy who drew the Michelin Man Bibendam, that's why he was called that and why he was drinking.

But what was he?

Why was he made of tires?

They did adjust it to make him big of tires.

He was a portly man.

They thought, oh, we'll add some tires in for him.

You can see why the beer company rejected it.

The only reason why he is made of tires?

I just thought it would work.

Distinctive.

He used to do live gigs, The Michelin Man.

So this was in 1898.

He had his first ever live gig, which is Andre Michelin, one of the brothers behind the company.

He hired a stall at a Paris cycle show.

He set up a big cardboard cutout of the Michelin Man, and then he hired a cabaret comedian to crouch behind it and provide banter with the audience.

That's brilliant.

And he was apparently so good and drew such a massive crowd that rival stall holders started pushing and shoving and getting angry because he was taking all their custom and they had to call the police.

Wow.

Yeah.

He was a comedian.

Yeah.

A big hard drinking comedian.

Nails swilling, cufflink wearing.

You two had a lot in common.

We would get along.

Okay, that's all of our facts for this week.

Thanks so much for listening.

If you would like to get in touch with any of us, you can find these guys on their Twitter feed.

So, Anne is on.

Andy's on Andrew Hunter M.

James is on James Harkins.

And you can email me on podcast at QI.com, or you can listen to any of our old episodes or get tickets for our tour if you go to no such thingasafish.com.

That is all from us this week.

We'll be back again next week with another episode.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Calls a goodbye.

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