237: No Such Thing As A Closed-Minded Tortoise

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from 2020 Audio.

My name is Dan Schreiber, and 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.

Sorry, Dan, can I ask you who 2020 Audio is?

Yes.

Came out of nowhere a little bit.

Yeah, sorry about that.

2020 Audio is where we are recording the audio book for our book of the year, which will be entitled Audio Book of the Year.

And we are in the very booth that...

it has been recorded.

Yes.

The very booth.

Yes.

The honor of being in the same booth as the No Such Thing as a Fish Team were when they recorded their audiobook not one hour ago.

Yeah.

They're authors.

We're mere podcasters.

It's such an honor.

Okay.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy.

My fact is that there are whales alive today who were alive before Moby Dick was written.

Wow.

Does that mean so that book was written about a real whale, wasn't it?

Yes.

So might that whale still be alive?

No.

So, it's because there are different kinds of whales, there are particular whales which do live for at least 200 years.

We know that, but they're bowhead whales.

And I think the whale in Moby Dick was a sperm whale.

Yeah, yeah.

So, I don't know how long-lived sperm whales are, actually.

It's possible.

Well, there's a bowhead, sorry, you said bowhead whales, right?

So, bowhead whales are they've got a life expectancy that can actually go up to 250 years.

I read it.

So,

that would mean that not only were they alive longer than, let's say, the book itself Moby Dick was written, but potentially there's one that's alive that was born the year that Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, was born.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, he wrote the book at 32 years old.

Wow.

And it was in 1851.

Yes.

So here's another thing.

The first New England whalers.

So the first people from North America who were whaling around there, they started in 1791.

And that was 227 years ago.

So there might be some whales alive who who remember a time before whaling in that area of the world.

Wow.

Oh my God, the time when they were free roaming the waters with no fear.

Well, this is the thing.

So there was this massive bout of whaling in the Arctic, especially between 1848 and 1915.

So the bowhead whales in the Arctic, all but about, I think, 1,200 of them were killed.

30 years ago, there are only about 1,200 left.

So it's not like we have an individual.

We can definitely point to that whale and say, that one was alive before maybe Dick.

But they did find one

recently, which had a harpoon in it.

And they tested the age of the harpoon and they found it had only been manufactured between 1879 and 1885, that specific harpoon.

So the whale was probably harpooned sometime from 1885 to 95.

Or it could be someone who just likes old harpoons.

Like a modern day guy who's,

you know, he's just using really old material.

It could have been harpooned three years ago with an ancient harpoon.

He just wore it off eBay.

Yeah.

But they reckon that that one that they found the harpoon in was 211 years old.

So So that's, yes.

So basically these bowhead whales in particular are very, very old.

And it's one of the best ways to date them sometimes is when the harpoons came from because they're often found with harpoons in them embedded in their blubber, aren't they?

But we should say with bowhead whales, you were saying there were only about 1,200 left.

That was about

30 years ago.

And today there are 14,000.

Some good whale news.

Oh, that is cool.

So actually, conservation has really worked.

Wow.

But yeah, people used to harpoon a lot, but whales can survive a huge amount of harpooning.

So in fact, the whale that Moby Dick was based on was a real-life whale called Mocha Dick.

You can see how Melville really used his imagination when he switched names there.

And Mocha Dick was a super famous whale in the 1830s to sort of terrorise boaters.

And it would swim really calmly next to whaling boats, but then at the first sign of aggression from the boat, it would like attack the boat and tip people out.

And when it finally died in 1839, it had 19 harpoons lodged in its side

various bits of harpooning.

19.

Yeah.

Wow.

because they get stuck in the blubber don't they yeah um mock a dick was a sperm whale i think but the bowhead whales they have more blubber than anyone they have up to half a meter thick of blubber

wow that is a lot i think why is your sort of body shaming the old bowheads a little bit aren't you well they're really weird animals aren't they because they've got um

They've got a skull, which is up to 40% of their body length.

So the skull alone can be over five meters long.

And

the really weird thing about them is that they have the largest mouth of any living animal.

Wow.

But they have no teeth.

Like large in terms of depth, breadth, pink volumes.

Volumes.

Yeah, so it's larger than a blue whale's mouth, even though the bowhead is slightly smaller.

It's got such a massive head that I read this fact about blue whales, which I guess must be true about bowhead whales, if it's true about blue whales, which it might not be.

But it is that the amount of water that a blue whale can fit in its mouth is heavier than a blue whale itself.

What?

Oh, really?

Yeah.

That's plausible, actually, isn't it?

Because

are you going to say, why don't they sink?

No, I wasn't.

I was going to say, do they expand to a double blue whale size, like a puffer fish?

No, it's about different densities, so I guess water's more dense

than blubber, especially, because blubber's quite buoyant, isn't it?

Yeah, that's why women, I think, are often better at floating.

This is actually only my subjective experience, but I find it quite easy to swim.

And I'm often swimming with men who sink more easily.

And I think it's because women naturally have a bit more

regularly harpooned on the downside, aren't you?

I've got 14 harpoons impaled in my sight at this moment.

I should just, sorry, just one more thing I learned about harpoons that I didn't know,

which I found out from that one that was discovered that was 130 years old.

They had explosives in them, which I didn't realize they did.

So they harpooned them and they were timed explosive.

This is in the mid-19th century, timed explosive.

So they went inside and then they were timed to explode once in there.

That's interesting because, generally speaking,

whalers would not, they didn't use harpoons to kill whales, did they?

That's you kill a whale with a lance or with a club or something like that, you use your harpoon to kind of catch it, and then it kind of drags you along until it gets tired.

And then, once it's tired, you can kind of kill it with something else.

I see.

The bowhead whales, they have we said before that they have giant penises in their heads.

What?

I'm not sure.

Well, the sort of very penis equivalent thing.

They have this massive ridge of tissue, and it's called the corpus cavernosum maxillaris.

Now, any Latin or penis fans might remember that there is a thing in the human penis called the corpus cavernosum, and that's the thing which fills with blood.

Those are the chambers which fill up.

And they do the same thing in the whale, but they have to cool the whale down.

So when the whale is swimming around and is getting really active, there's a real risk that they'll overheat because they've got so much blubber that they can get really hot really easily.

So they engorge this corpus cavernosum maxillaris, which means in the head, with blood, and then it opens its mouth, cold sea water flows in, cools the blood, flows back out.

So it's their way of cooling themselves down using this giant head penis.

That's weird that they need to cool themselves down because they are found in cool water, which is one of the reasons for their longevity, isn't it?

Yeah, but they're constantly wearing a really thick coat, basically.

Good morning.

And if you're trying to do anything in a thick coat.

Nightmare.

Nightmare.

It is a bit like having a big coat all the time on a cold day.

But then whenever you want to cool down, get in an erection and pouring cold water into your bus I mean that's effectively what we're saying isn't it yeah it doesn't sound like a crazy way of cooling down it does I think people would call you crazy if you started doing that yeah

not on the bus you know but

oh I actually have a coat fact related to whales really yeah this I love this some of the earliest waterproof jackets were made from whale intestines and it was the Inuits who used to wear them because they are really waterproof obviously because intestines are full of water bodily water, but very permeable because the nutrients have to permeate through them.

And so, yeah,

they would turn them into waterproof jackets.

I don't really know what an intestine looks like, but I imagine it's a bit like a puffer jacket because it's going to have lots of folds in it.

You're right.

All the folds.

So what would they do to preserve it so it doesn't rot?

Oh, I guess they're keeping it on ice most of the time anyway.

Yeah,

that's a good point.

That's a good point.

If you dry it out, I guess.

Don't know that.

Oh, that's true.

We wear leather clothes sometimes and then rot.

Just cure it.

Yeah, cure it with urine, for instance.

If you get cow hide and then you put a load of urine on it for ages and ages and ages, it'll get cured and it won't go rotten.

This is very weird.

I have another whale-based clothing fact, which I didn't even realise.

And it's about Moby Dick, too.

So there's a whole chapter in Moby Dick on the whale's penis.

And it's called The Cassock.

It's pretty gruesome.

reading but they they the men the whalers they cut off a whale's penis they skin it and then they turn the skin into a sleeveless robe, kind of like a onesie.

Oh, cool!

Yeah, for and for it's it's specifically for a man called the mincer, and his job is to chop blubber and keep cooking it in the pot.

Isn't it true that someone had a yacht?

I want to say Jackie Onassis, it was Onassis, the husband, oh, is it Aristotle?

Aristotle Onassis, uh, and well, I think you're going to know this fact, Dan, if you say that, but did they have um a chair which was had whale penis as the

yeah, it was the skin of the chair was whale penis, I believe.

It was upholstered in it, yeah.

Yeah, oh,

who thought first of pissing on a cowhide to cure it?

What unknown genius?

They used piss for a lot of things, didn't they?

Yeah, they tried everything, didn't they?

We on everything see what sticks

mostly, it's not useful.

It's always just one person in the village going, Have you pissed on it?

Just for everything, every new thing being tested.

My iPhones stopped working.

I wonder, though, if the penis bit in Moby Dick stayed in the British version, because the one that was printed in Britain was massively changed, wasn't it?

Which caused serious problems.

So when it was published, I think it was actually published in the UK, maybe just before America, because of a weird copywriting quirk that...

They wanted to avoid piracy.

Yeah, exactly.

But it was printed in the UK at first, but the UK publishers were kind of a combination of really careless and really prudish.

They cut huge tracks of it out, and also they cut out the epilogue.

And I should say, if you haven't read Moby Dick and you don't want to spoil it, then fast forward like the next 15 seconds of this.

But...

Oh, I'm putting my hands on my ears, but I've got cans on.

It's just going to make the sound more intense.

Yeah.

And also, when James says cans, he doesn't mean actual cans on his head.

He's wearing hairphones.

I'm wearing the southern French city of can.

Anyone who tuned out will be tuning back in right around now.

Go away for five minutes and then come back.

Disappear, go make a cup of tea.

Basically, the epilogue is a crucial part of Moby Dick because it's narrated famously by Ishmael, hence Call Me Ishmael being that famous line.

But

at the sort of apparent end of Moby Dick, then the ship goes down, everyone dies.

It's only in the epilogue that it's explained that Ishmael has survived.

So that was cut out and it got terrible reviews in Britain because all the reviewers said, well, it doesn't make any sense.

How the hell is this story being narrated by someone who clearly died at the end of the book?

Yeah, the ghost of Ishmael.

Yeah.

The reviews were so bad.

So I read about a few of them.

One review in the Boston Post said, we have read nearly one half of this book and are satisfied that the London Athenaeum is right in calling it an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact.

And the spectator said, nothing should be introduced into a novel which it is physically impossible for the writer to have known.

Thus, he must not describe the conversation of minors in a pit if they all perish.

So that was exactly that problem that you were internal, yeah.

And it killed his career.

Yeah, he had a terrible career as an author for someone who's a household name.

It sold 315 copies, and he then just gave up.

But actually, it didn't become popular, I think, until relatively recently, is that right?

I think it was the 1950s because the British flawed edition remained the most commonly read one for so long.

And it was only when like the seminal text was published in, I think, the 50s that people suddenly went, oh, this is quite good.

Now that it makes sense.

Yeah.

And his other stuff sounds really interesting.

He wrote a book called The Confidence Man, and it's a book which is all about a con man who fools people.

It's set on one single day, and I think it's known to be the first book ever to just be set in a single day.

And that day happens to be April Fool's Day because he's conning someone, and the book itself was released on April Fool's Day to tie in with that.

Just one other thing, as well, that Herman Melville in what he's written is he wrote what is said to be the longest poem in American literature.

It's almost 18,000 lines.

Are you going to read it for us now?

If you want to fast forward at home for another three hours,

what's it about?

It's a poem and pilgrimage in the Holy Land.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sounds great.

On very old things.

Oh, yeah.

This was in the news this year.

I'm not sure if it's true, but it has been claimed that some Russian scientists have found an extinct lion cub underneath the snow in Siberia.

And inside that lion cub, they found two nematode worms, which must be at least 40,000 years old, and they brought them back to life.

What?

So there are two 40,000-year-old worms currently living in Russia.

They came over to Salisbury for two days.

Not that that, I mean, isn't that amazing?

That is amazing.

Wait, so they were, um, sorry, what?

So how did they bring them back to life?

40,000 years ago,

these worms were just happily living inside a rectum of a lion.

Yeah.

And then the lion died and then it got frozen.

And then they just kind of went into almost like a hibernation kind of thing.

And when they defrosted them 40,000 years later, they just kind of

yawned and woke up and they're alive again.

The Austin Towers of the worm world.

They're going to get none of the cultural references.

It's so difficult bringing them up to speed.

It would be interesting.

I know we'll never know, but to put a modern day of a species worm next to it and just see if they chat.

Just to to know if that

I would love to know how much has happened in the worm world that there would be enough of a difference in their conversation.

I'd love to know what you think you would see if that happened.

Because I'm telling you, it would be nothing.

They're just going to sit next to each other for a bit.

I wonder if they'd have sex with each other.

Yeah.

Because there's an age difference, isn't there?

And then there's a 40,000-year age difference.

Well, do you know that a very big age difference I found in nature, actually, is that between the world's oldest tortoise, so tortoises, another animal that lives a long time, and the oldest living one is Jonathan.

He's 186 years old, and the girl that he's been trying to get off with is only 26.

He's been trying to get off with her since 1991.

The problem he might have been having is that they discovered last year Frederica is actually most probably a male.

Oh.

I'm sorry, you said girl.

I thought you meant a human woman that he was sort of infatuated with as a tortoise.

No, you mean a female tortoise?

A girl tortoise, yes.

Yeah.

Turns out he's just been trying to mount another man, make babies.

Which is fine, of course.

It's totally fine.

It just won't make babies.

No.

And also, if you're 170-odd years old, you're probably quite right-wing in your opinions.

You think he's most certainly homophobic?

I'm just saying, at that age, I think people do get a bit like that, don't they?

I don't.

I think tortoises are more open-minded.

I can't believe I was getting a shit for talking about what worms would say to each other and you're discussing.

Tortoises are more open-minded.

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

My fact this week is that the European Space Agency has a sound system so loud that if you heard it, it would kill you.

Your head would explode, is probably not what would happen.

This is claimed by the ESA.

They've said that they have this

big sound system.

Well, they definitely do have the sound system, don't they?

Definitely, yes, they have the sound system.

It's in the Netherlands, and it's the ESA's large European acoustic facility, otherwise known as LEAF.

It's 16.4 meters tall, it's 11 meters wide, 9 meters deep, and it uses nitrogen gas in order to make the sounds.

And what they use it for is to test rockets.

They smash sound into rockets to simulate what it might be like for when a rocket is exiting or re-entering Earth.

So what they've said is that if you were in this room and they closed their door and this was put on, that it could kill you.

That's a bit disputed by, I think, every site I've read that talks about it.

We're not sure that it could do that.

It only gets up to, I believe, 154 decibels.

Most scientists believe that 154 decibels probably will burst your eardrums.

It will cause pain, but it won't explode your head in the way that perhaps they're suggesting.

But it won't be pleasant.

It won't be pleasant.

Especially, it depends what kind of music it is, as well.

Don't forget.

Yeah, do we know what kind of music they play to the Rockets?

Well, I read metal.

I read, no, it's just sound, unfortunately, as in.

Oh, sorry, granddad.

No, it's just sound.

You and Jonathan the tool just say, funny hell.

Well, one guy who was interviewed about it, who works there, says that they do, you know, you plug an iPod in and he would love to play rock music or whatever, but actually, it's just a bunch bunch of noise.

And so, basically, with what sound waves are, is it's molecules in the air, and they're kind of getting closer together and further apart, closer together and further apart.

So, it's a change in pressure.

So, if you make a sound loud enough, there'll be a big enough change in pressure that it would definitely kill you, in my opinion.

I'm pretty sure it would.

Like, it would probably explode your lungs, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't explode your head as well.

Wow, I think sound waves become a shockwave basically at a certain point, effectively, don't they?

About 190,

where is then like the you know the shockwave that makes a big sonic boom.

But yeah, they apparently also, it doesn't have to be sounds that you can hear.

So there's infrasound, which is sounds that are out of the range of human hearing frequencies.

And people have found that if you expose humans to infrasounds that are over 100 decibels, they have blood pressure and respiratory rate changes that they can't control.

They just feel their breathing changing.

And if you take the decibel level high enough, even though they can't even hear the sound, their lungs will deflate and inflate.

So it can be used as a means of artificial respiration.

If you play this inaudible sound, it's amazing.

That's awesome.

Yeah, so any of these things, loudness is basically how big the amplitude and whatever is.

So it could be really, really, really, really loud, but you still can't hear it because it's below, say, 60 hertz.

Yeah, right.

And that, to me, that's just blows my mind a little bit because how something can be really loud, but you can't hear it, that just doesn't make any sense.

It's astonishing.

I I don't like it because it can affect you.

Who knows what sounds we're being played right now that are screwing with our brains?

I know.

Well, that's what they thought, didn't they, in the American embassy in Cuba, wasn't it?

So everyone was feeling sick, and they thought maybe there's some infrasound kind of weapon they were using.

I think, probably, we think that isn't true, right?

But I don't think it could work in theory.

They've not decided one way or the other, or they certainly haven't said if they have.

So, loud noise also causes heart disease?

Really?

Yeah, so it's really strange.

It induces a stress response, it disrupts disrupts your body at a cellular level, and it induces a kind of fight-or-flight response.

So, when the stress hormones increase, that can lead to vascular damage.

And this happens even if you're asleep.

A loud noise will increase your blood pressure.

Wow.

So, it's kind of the same, even if you're not hearing it consciously,

it just affects the body.

Does that explain why every time I've ever walked into a club, I immediately want to run away as fast as possible?

That'll be it.

That's possible.

Did you know the scientists have only just discovered why cocks don't deafen themselves?

Cockrels.

Cockrells.

Cockrells?

Let's call them roosters.

So, roosters crow at over 100 decibels, which is extremely loud.

It's the same as running a chainsaw right next to your ear.

And we didn't know why they don't just go deaf, why their eardrums don't explode.

And they've looked into them, and there are a couple of reasons.

So they've got an eardrum that's surrounded by a nice, soft, squishy tissue.

But also, when they tilt their head back to start crowing, then they've got this little flap of material which drops down and covers their ear canal completely so they've got their own built-in ear plug.

Do you remember those dolls that kid that you would get as a kid and as you sat it up the eyes open and away you lay down

the same thing?

Yeah, it's exactly the same thing.

Technology.

Wow that is amazing.

It's cool.

It's like being able to stick your fingers in your ears if you don't have fingers.

It's like having a finger inside your ear.

Yes.

That you can just kind of maneuver it inside the ear and stick it in the little canal.

It's exactly like that.

Hey, you know that song, Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution by ACDC?

No.

It's track 10 on Back and Black.

It's one of the more famous songs.

It's a very good one.

Sing it for us, give us the rest.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

We're not allowed for legal reasons.

For legal reasons.

We're not allowed to let Andy sing.

The lyrics are Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution.

And it goes on.

There's a group from Mississippi State University who recently tested whether or not rock and roll is or ain't noise pollution to aphids.

No, sorry, to beat to Beatles.

To the Beatles.

They played rock to beetles.

There's a beetle called lady beetles.

They live in fields and they prey on aphids.

And the scientists played ACDC at them quite loud,

along with some other music.

And they found that when it was country and folk music, the beetles didn't mind.

But when it was ACDC,

specifically back in black, the number of aphids they caught was cut in half.

And the aphid population rocketed, and then the plants in the field were 25% smaller.

So it has a big impact on on farming, basically.

So they have concluded, they said, as fans of ACDC, we sadly must disagree with the band and conclude that rock and roll is noise pollution for beetles.

It's so weird.

I find that so weird.

Do you?

Why do you think that we?

Because I think ACDC is

melodic as much as...

So we're about to get into the argument about whether it's metal or rock.

No, I just find, I do find that addiction.

We don't know what's making them stopping eating the aphids.

It might be that they're enjoying the music so much, they're just kind of bopping around and they don't have time to do that.

Yeah, or they've gone off to buy the CD or something.

Yes,

that's that's possible.

Just speaking of music, metal, Metallica this year has released a whiskey.

So they're like growing a number of bands that are releasing their own alcohols.

They've gone for whiskey, but the way that they are distilling the whiskey, the distilling process, is they are playing heavy metal to the whiskey.

Right.

It's very cool.

So it's a process that they're calling black noise.

And the idea is it's shaping the whiskey's flavor.

So they play Metallica's music through a subwoofer and they disrupt the whiskey inside the barrel.

So it's sort of just getting mixed up and mixed up.

And it's a molecular level of infusion going on.

Yeah, what is absolute bullshit?

What are you talking about?

They do this all the time to whiskeys, don't they?

There's always like, oh, this one's been at the bottom of the sea.

This one's been in space.

This one is like, can they not just make nice nice whiskey that people want to buy?

Listen, I'm getting this from a very, very good source.

This is the press release released by the band.

And yeah,

it's increased wood interaction that kicks up the wood flavor characteristics in the whiskey.

I don't know what that means.

I don't know where the wood bit came in.

The wood comes from the barrels.

From the barrels.

The whole point is that the wood you use in the barrels sort of reacts with spirits.

That's where the taste comes from, the whiskey.

The barrels.

As in they put tasteless alcohol in there and then it's in the barrels for 25 years and then seeps in all the flavor from the wood and that's where the whiskey

is 25 years for you is it

some of us just have six week whiskey

and anna just gives it a quick tip slips it down the barrel out into the glass tips are twiggered there

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

Okay, my fact this week is that South Korean teachers are banned from drinking coffee at school.

Poor teachers.

I would say that is one of the best things about being a teacher, that you can drink lots of coffee all the time, isn't it?

And that you help nurture young minds and all that kind of stuff.

But yeah, this is the thing that's happening in South Korea.

Basically, they've been banning energy drinks in the schools quite a while because it's happening all over the world, actually.

Even in England, we're going to ban energy drinks to kids, aren't we?

Yeah, under 18s.

But they've gone one further in South Korea, and they say no coffee for children, no caffeine for children, but not even that, no caffeine for adults as well.

And the idea, I think, is you just have none of it on campus at all, so no one could possibly get at it.

But it's not like, I mean, I remember from when I was at school, it's not like we would try and sneak into the staff room to get some of that sweet, sweet Ness Cafe.

Not to go behind the bike sheds and just have a little espresso.

And this is the idea that it's bad for your health, which

mostly people think.

Although, there's a new study that has come out, and I know studies are always coming out swinging one way or the other, but this one's a really huge one.

It's done by the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health.

It's one of the largest studies of its kind.

It's been going for 10 years, and it's found that drinking seven cups of coffee every day is the healthiest number of cups of coffee you've got.

Absolutely smashing it.

Isn't that weird?

Is that right?

That is, I mean, it's not a million miles from what I get.

Well, there you go.

You're the healthiest.

It followed 500,000 people over a 10-year period and then looked at who had died at the end of it.

And it found that you reduce your chance of death by 14% if you're drinking eight plus cups of coffee.

Eight cups.

And by 16% if you drink seven cups of coffee a day.

Is it the caffeine that's the good ingredient or is it coffee in general?

As in, if someone were to drink decaffeinated coffee all the time because they couldn't hack the pace of normal coffee, would they still be healthy?

Andy, there's no hope for you.

I'm sorry.

No, they don't know because it's just a statistical study, it's not a biological study as others.

They've just looked at the who's dead, right?

But they've adjusted for other factors, as in it could be, you know.

I'm sure they've done all the stuff that scientists are meant to do, like in chest for other mitigating factors.

One would hope.

South Korean schools aren't the only place to have banned coffee.

Got a bit of a history.

All of Sweden did in 1746.

Wow.

Yeah, this is very interesting.

They They banned coffee and it was banned by King Gustav III and it was banned because they just thought that it was very bad for your health.

So what he wanted to do was ban it and then experiment on it to see whether or not he was right in his belief or whether or not his advisors who told him that were right in their belief.

So what they did was they started giving it to convicted criminals to test to see whether if they drank coffee all day, every day, or at least, you know, and they all ended up being beheaded.

So it was concluded, very bad for you.

Well, here's the thing.

the king ordered an experiment to be done on two identical twins.

They were both on death row, but they were both put just for life imprisonment if they went and did this because they wanted to see how long it could last.

So, one was given coffee every day, and the other one was given tea.

And unfortunately,

Gustav III died before the experiment finished.

He was having energy drinks every day, wasn't he?

Yes, exactly, yeah.

So, he

was assassinated in 1792.

Sorry, sorry, guys.

Too soon.

Too soon.

But yeah,

we don't fully know what happened.

Well, no, the really great thing was that the two doctors were assigned to study the patients, one doctor each.

But both the doctors and King Gustav all died before either the tea drinker or the coffee drinker.

Yeah.

Great.

I've read an account saying that the tea drinker died first and that the solitary coffee drinker, who was meant to be living this unhealthy lifestyle drinking coffee, lived longest of all of them.

I think there is a question that it's an apocryphal tale, though.

i mean it sounds so neat yeah i found somewhere else where it was bound go on this is in the ottoman empire so there were lots so the it basically originated for the first time in yemen in the 15th century as in grinding the beans mixing with liquid there have been various other attempts to use caffeine beans before that uh but yemen is or modern-day yemen i guess is where it first appeared same as eddie azad

Really?

Is he from Yemen?

Yeah, he is.

He was born there, wasn't he?

Yeah.

Well,

I thought that might go somewhere.

He then moved to Bexhill-on-Sea, which is where comedians like Milligan were stationed

during the early bit of the Second World War.

Where is that, Bexhill on Sea?

Bexhill-on-Sea is just near, it's on the coast.

It's sort of, you can see France in the distance.

Oh, on the south coast.

Oh, there's some really nice towns around.

I've got some stuff here.

Thank you about Yemen.

Where it is, I try to.

So basically, it became really popular because it was very delicious, but also

it was seen as quite dangerous and quite political because you'd have a coffee house which is where people meet and they can discuss and they can discuss politics.

So it's not like meeting at a mosque where things are a bit more policed and you're only there for religious purposes.

So it's a secular space.

And also the coffee was brewed for 20 minutes and it was served very, very hot.

So you could only drink it in tiny sips.

So you kind of have to chat.

So the Ottoman Sultan in 1633 cracked down on it.

And this is supposedly true that he walked around Istanbul in disguise with a big sword ready to behead anybody he found drinking coffee.

Is that right?

Well, this is the story.

And again, it may well be apocryphal.

I love the detail of a big sword.

He wasn't turning no fruit knife around.

No way.

It was banned by Frederick the Great.

Yep.

1781.

Because he thought that people should be taking beer instead or beer gruel instead of coffee.

Oh, yeah.

He thought it was a bit of a luxury.

Beer gruel?

Beer gruel would be like the porridgey stuff that you get at the bottom when you've been brewing beer.

And he was brought up on that, and he thought other people should be having that.

They shouldn't be having this luxurious stuff from Yemen.

But he actually did himself have coffee.

Although the difference was he boiled his with, instead of water, champagne.

Wow.

The best way to have it.

Would that be nice?

Would it?

Yeah.

I think after the fourth or fifth cup, you start to enjoy it a bit more.

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

My fact this week is that facial recognition technology for chickens allows you to pre-order a specific chicken and watch it grow on the farm before it ends up on your plate.

It's actually quite nice.

This is a technology that's just being patented and developed in China, and it's to make sure that your chicken is totally free-range.

And they've developed really advanced facial recognition technology for chickens, which is about, you know, late 90s% accuracy.

And so you pre-order your chicken, and then, I guess, four to six months later, once it's waddled about on its nice free-range farm for a while, and you've been able to check it every once in a while, then you get to eat it.

You check in on it.

Check, check in on it.

You check in

on it.

But yeah, facial recognition is going to be everywhere, isn't it?

Well, the technology seems, yeah, really advanced in some areas and really crap in others.

For instance, there was the trial at the 2017 Champions League final in Cardiff, where it was revealed that it had wrongly identified more than 2,000 people.

So the technology flagged up 2,470 people as potential criminals by comparing them to a database of potential criminals.

It turned out 2,297 of those flags were false positives.

Still some positives, though.

Some positives.

I think the Met police at the moment have a 98% false positive rate for their facial recognition technology.

No, but the South Wales police, they've been improving that technology since the Champions League final.

I think they switched to a new algorithm and at a recent event they only got 10 false positives which was 0.02% of the total number of matches.

I'm sceptical.

So I went to an exhibition last night at Somerset House.

It's really good.

It's basically a massive design exhibition that's taken over the whole thing.

It's on for a few weeks.

Each country has its own room and design piece.

And the American one was testing facial recognition.

So I had a go, and it asks you to sit in a chair and it scans your face.

And it does lots of, you know, investigating your face, everything about it, and then tells you how old it thinks you are,

whether you're male or female, all that kind of thing.

You're skeptical about this because I think you're 174-year-old Tartars told Jonathan.

It wasn't quite that wrong, but it asked me to try and look really angry.

And so I did.

I tried really hard.

You know, I put loads of angry faces on.

You've all seen those faces.

You've all seen those faces a lot.

Give us a fake angry face that you would have given it.

No, that

to me is screaming constipation.

But basically, then it guessed what expression I was trying to do, and it said, calm and then

and then it guessed my age and it guessed that I and I was there with my friend she did it and I did it.

It said it thought I was a female aged 15 to 20, which is extremely flattering, but I'm not the kind of person.

I mean, no one has wrinkles between 15 and 20.

Why can't it spot that?

And it said my poor friend was a female aged 55 to 61.

It was my age.

So I thought that was

on average.

They got it right, pretty much.

Right.

Is that what they're going for?

In Finland, they're testing a new technology.

So the idea is that when you walk into a shop, they're developing scanners that when you walk in up to the till, you give a meaningful nod, as it says in the quotes, that's how they've said in this video.

You give a meaningful nod to the scanner, and that's how you pay.

And it's memorized through in the same way it would your bank card details.

Your face is creepy.

Creepy, creepy, creepy.

I am going to trick all this facial recognition stuff, and I found out a method I can do it.

By deliberately disfiguring your own face.

That's right.

So it turns out that you can't trick good facial recognition systems by wearing makeup.

Even if you're wearing weird goth style makeup, it doesn't work.

But there is a guy online, and his name is Tachyon, that's his Twitter account.

He has found that the kind of makeup worn by fans of the insane clown posse,

aka Juggalos, right, they wear very heavy clown makeup and it completely redefines what the computer sees as your jawline.

So we may still see people wearing clown masks for bank robberies, but they'll just be wearing clown makeup instead.

That's very clever.

But they tried to train them up, didn't they, recently?

I think you mentioned fleetingly in a podcast a few months ago, Andy, that the South Wales Police sent facial recognition AI to a massive Elvis impersonator festival, the biggest one in the world, in order to hone its techniques to see if it could distinguish between different Elvis impersonators.

Ooh, speaking of Elvis,

I've been reading up on him recently.

I was reading this one article that was published on the NME, and it's one of those things that we don't usually naturally go to when we're doing our research.

You know, something that's like 101 amazing things that you'll, but this article was called 75 Geeky Facts You Might Not Know About Elvis Presley, and it was genuinely incredible.

Every

okay, here's one: um, the inspiration for Elvis Presley's trademark jumpsuit and quiff look was a comic book hero, Captain Marvel Jr., is what inspired Elvis Presley's look.

This is the geekiest foundations for what has seemed to be the coolest singer of the 1950s and 60s.

So, did he say that?

Did he used to read them?

He must have as a kid, yeah.

He was obsessed with them, I believe, when he was younger.

And so, that's what he based his look on.

Here's another one: just before he died, Elvis commissioned his stage electrician to design a version of his big white jumpsuit that he wore, which would fire laser beams into the audience from the suit.

I mean, that's incredible.

I've not heard that before.

Do you know Elvis?

He, Elvis Impersonators.

Do you know the first Elvis impersonator was in 1954, which is two years before Elvis's first hit single?

This guy was called Carl Cheesy Nelson.

And he was

cheesy was his nickname.

That was his middle name.

Okay.

And basically, what had happened was Elvis had been delayed for a show.

And this guy was a really good friend of Elvis.

And so he did the whole show just copying his entire style.

That's so cool.

So that's a good thing.

That's funny.

Just while we're on impersonators, and again, from this NME article, really fascinating.

In Somalia, owing to strict Islamic law, elves impersonators are required to have beards.

So you can do everything.

And I'm reading these facts word for word, I should say.

It's such a brilliant article.

Just one more thing I found really interesting about facial recognition.

Oh, yeah.

Do you know that shops in London have it specifically for celebrities?

So a bunch of stores in London, more than a dozen stores in 2013 installed this technology, which is VIP facial recognition technology, to stop that moment when someone super famous walks in.

And as a shop assistant, you're supposed to be really kind of nice and obsequious to them, but you don't know who they are.

So it has a database of all celebrities' faces.

And as soon as a celeb walks in, then a thing pops up on these guys' tills that says, oh, Julia Roberts has just entered the building.

And also with a bit of info about her, like she is this size and she likes this style of thing and go and force her to buy some shit.

If only Hugh Grant had had that in Notting Hill when Julia Roberts walked into his bookshop.

Oh, if only.

They could have done the whole film in half an hour.

You're so right.

And he would have sold her a book she actually wanted to buy because it would have had her preferences.

I have a thing about facial recognition and celebrities.

This is weirdly similar to that.

So

it's still on the tricking facial recognition thing.

There are specially designed glasses which can make facial recognition computers think that you are Mila Jovovich.

Who?

Mila Jovovich?

Yeah, Mila Jovovich.

I think she's in the fifth element.

She's a model slash actor Resident Evil.

She's in all six of the Resident Evil movies and she does a brilliant job at them.

So they only tell you when it's her?

No, no, no.

They make the computer think that you are Mila Jovovich.

Got it.

So it's really bizarre.

They can be made up to look like normal tortoiseshell glasses, but on the front of the rims, they've got these specially printed images, okay?

And the frames kind of overlay the face with with pixels.

And when the computer looks at you, its calculations are disturbed and it thinks that you are someone else in its database.

And I think there are limits, as in, I think you might have to be a woman, for example, with a slightly different bone structure, or you might need to be white, as Milajovich is.

Do you think also people might start robbing banks looking like Milajovovich?

What an idea.

And then she's just going to get arrested, obviously.

Yeah.

So it'd just be her and the insane clown posse in prison.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James?

At 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, which is at no such thing.

You can also go to our Facebook page, no such thing as a fish, or our website, no such thingasafish.com.

We have everything up there, all of our previous episodes, linked to our upcoming tour in 2019.

We have links to our new book, which is coming out very soon.

And we just want to also say very quickly a thank you to 2020 Audio for allowing us to record here today.

Also, a massive thank you to Ruben, who's next door right now, recording this for us.

And he did our audio book.

He's awesome.

And he's a DJ.

So go find him on what's your app, Ruben?

Do you have a Twitter at Rubicon UK okay that's it we'll be back again next week we'll see you then goodbye

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