220: No Such Thing As A Million Dots

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

My name is Anna Toshinski and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and fellow QI elf James Rawson and we are going to tell you our four favourite facts from the last seven days.

Starting with Rawson.

My fact this week is that Usain Bolt could fly on Titan.

Do we say Usain or Usain?

Oh good question.

I say Usane.

Do you?

But Usain Usain.

Let's call the whole thing up.

So Titan, we're talking about the.

Oh, is it Titan?

No, it's Titan.

We're talking about the moon.

We are talking about Saturn's largest moon, and it has a couple of things going for it that make it really great for human flight.

Well, one bad thing, lack of humans.

Yes, that is a bad thing.

But a good thing is that its gravity is only 14% as strong as Earth's, so pretty low gravity.

And its its air pressure is 50% higher than Earth's, so really weak gravity and really strong, nice thick air.

So people have said anecdotally for years that if you could get people on there, strap some wings on them, they'd be able to fly like birds.

But in 2014, some students from the University of Leicester actually did the physics and they worked out that if you were wearing a normal wing suit, which has a wingspan of about 1.4 square meters, and if you were running at 11 meters per second, you would be able to run, jump up, and take off and fly.

So great.

So if you're a normal person, you couldn't, right?

It's only if you're as fast as Usain Bolt.

It's just him and a few others who are cracking that speed, isn't it?

So

Usain Bolt can go at 12 meters per second, or he could in his heyday.

He's now retired, so I imagine that he's useless.

But yeah, Usain Bolt in the day could do it.

A normal person could do it if they could run at six meters per second, but they would have a large and unwieldy wing suit.

So they wouldn't be able to get away with the normal sort of day-to-day wingsuit that we're all wearing now.

Very cool.

You'd also need a very warm coat, though, wouldn't you?

Because the temperature is about minus 180 degrees Celsius.

Yeah, quite a warm coat.

And actually, a warm coat would weigh you down quite a lot, and then the physics probably wouldn't work anymore.

Well, if you had a very big coat, do you remember when you were a kid and there was like high winds, like gales, and you would hold your coat out and then try and fly with it?

Yeah, that was great.

Or your umbrella.

Sometimes you'd fly with an umbrella.

Yep.

Well, I wasn't Mary Poppins when I went to school.

But actually,

you couldn't do it with the winds because there's not much wind on Titan, is there?

No.

And that's because the temperature is always very low, and we get our wind on Earth because of the changes in temperature with the sun.

And they don't really get those changes of temperature.

Yeah, which is why they, because they've got lakes.

One of the reasons it's so great for human habitation, apparently, is that it's got stable liquids on its surface, hasn't it, which is extremely unusual.

And it has an atmosphere that is sort of similar to Earth's, but it's liquids

similar-ish.

It's not similar.

It's got a vaguely vaguely similar level of kind of thickness, and it's got some nitrogen in it.

It's got lots and lots of nitrogen.

There's no problem with nitrogen.

You like nitrogen, you're going to love Titan, but it's got no oxygen, basically.

So the lakes are made out of methane.

They are.

So it has a lot of methane and ethane in it, which I imagine means that it smells really bad on there.

Well, in fact, I think they might have looked into how the atmosphere there smells.

They've tried to recreate it.

Scientists did this this year or last year.

And they got some methane and ethane involved.

They got some nitrogen involved, and it still wasn't behaving quite like Titan's atmosphere.

And then they added some benzene, and that's the crucial ingredient that mimics the atmosphere, and it smells like petrol.

So the whole place, if we live there, smells like a petrol station.

Yeah, I love it.

I love the smell of petrol stations.

Can I just say, it's one of my favourite smells.

Yeah, it's very nice.

I like that, too.

But a lot of people kept saying how good Titan would be.

And they were saying things like that.

You know, it's got some liquid, it's got an atmosphere.

It's the only other place in our solar system where it rains.

Basically, it just sounds like a recipe for a a very bad picnic.

I think it's really, really habitable compared to the other moons in the solar system, which is a bit of a low bot.

The other thing about picnics is instead of wasps flying around, you have 100-meter runners kind of flying around.

Another good thing about Titan, since you're so busy bound mouthing it,

is that this is so they've recreated also Titan's lakes because there's a plan for NASA to send a submarine up there in 2025.

I'd send a spaceship if I was NASA, but go on.

You need to write to them.

They're sending a submarine up and they're going to get there and they need to dive so they need to deal with the coldness of the liquid.

But they've realised that icebergs can't form.

So one of the people recreating this has said a really vital positive is the fact that because the freezing temperature of these methane lakes is so low, icebergs are not a possibility.

So you won't get Titanic on Titan.

And also the submarine won't crash into any icebergs.

Do you know who might be crewing this submarine that we're going to send up?

Robots.

Bacteria.

Come on.

Well, it's a stretch.

So there are deep-sea bacteria which theoretically could survive there.

Well, they could drive a spaceship or a submarine.

There'll be an intense training montage with the bacteria.

No, but they're called, oh, this is a tough name.

Methanothermococcus oconoensis, and they can survive irrespective of temperature and pressure and vitamins and toxic chemicals.

And I think they live around vents very deeply.

Did you say?

Yeah,

they won't even need to take vitamin meals in pill form when they're in space.

I don't say on Satsuma, right?

I think basically they just go into hibernation, and as soon as the conditions are right for them to spring back into life, they do.

So we could possibly set up a submarine full of those guys and just see how they did.

I went on to Yale Scientific Magazine because they had an article, Why Can't Humans Fly?

And we can't, turns out.

We would need a wingspan of at at least 6.7 meters to fly, according to this website.

That's 6.7 across the whole wingspan, so 3.35 either size.

Yeah, it's still a lot, and it would make the wings too heavy to function, hopefully.

And also the muscles that you need and stuff.

Those wings would need to have smaller wings

helping them fly.

But we've sort of cracked quite an important human-powered flight thing really recently, didn't we?

Because there was a prize set up in 1970, I think it was, awarding £250,000 for the first person to make a human-powered helicopter.

And it was thought to be impossible and all these studies were written saying it's impossible.

And I only found it because I was reading a Washington Post article saying no one's come anywhere close to achieving this in 2011.

And then in 2013, we did it, or engineers from the University of Toronto did it.

And they've built this helicopter, which is basically about the size of a football pitch with these.

Powered by one human.

Yeah, it's unbelievably light.

It weighs only 50 kilos, but it's ridiculously large because, as you say, you've got to have really big wings.

And there's a little guy on a bicycle in the middle of it who's desperately cycling.

That's amazing.

And then, well, it's not as amazing as it could be.

So, my wife flies helicopters.

Yeah.

And we always have to find a place for her to land, which is not too many trees around and stuff like that.

I think if your helicopter is the size of a football pitch, that is going to be tough, right?

It's too big.

I looked up a list of names of

human-powered flight machines.

Oh, great.

They were called things like the Reluctant Phoenix.

That's the drag name, isn't it?

That does sound like they once crashed it in a bowl of flames, yeah.

They couldn't get it back again, right?

There was the Reluctant Phoenix, the Perkins Inflatable, which I liked.

There was the Puffin, the Puffin 2, and there were three called Icarus.

Why do they name it after the thing that the one who died, yeah.

They only read the first half of the story, I think.

This is great.

Don't need to finish.

Really respect this guy's confidence.

Usain Bolt, who I know you've touched on in the past, but did you know that so he has scoliosis, so he has curvature of the spine.

So his legs are actually significantly different lengths from each other.

So Richard III.

Not quite as dramatic as Richard III, I don't think.

But his right leg is half an inch shorter than his left.

The prevailing wisdom is that if you want to go in a straight line as fast as you can, you should be symmetrical.

And obviously he's not quite symmetrical.

And they don't know if he was symmetrical, would he go faster?

Or does this slight off-balance somehow work in his favor?

Because he goes pretty quick, from whatever stands, actually.

Yeah, you do know about the sports.

For someone who doesn't like sport, you've picked a very sport-based fact involving both sprinting and flying.

There is a sprinter at the moment called Brianna Liston, and she's 12 years old.

She's from Jamaica.

And in 2017, she ran the 100 meters in 11.86 seconds, which is unbelievably fast.

And in fact, if she'd have taken part in the 1896 Olympics, she would have won by more than 0.1 of a second.

12-year-old girl.

The team behind the Cassini mission, which was the probe that went to Saturn and it dropped off

the,

how do you pronounce it?

Huygens?

It's the moon lander that they dropped down.

It's the only human thing ever to land on a body beyond the asteroid belt.

And now it's there.

It's going to be there for millions of years.

It's very, very cool.

Anyway, the Cassini probe, the team behind it, they spent 20 years working on it.

This huge long project.

And they got so close that they had all these cool team things that they did together.

So they had a softball team called the Roving Marauders.

And whenever there was a big date in Cassini or Saturn or whatever, Titan history, they would brew a special beer and they give it a special name.

Yeah.

Nice.

Do you think we should do that?

We don't have enough of it.

We already do, James.

Do we?

But softball's only a three-player game.

And there's a no James's rule

and I already turn up, so.

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Okay, we should move on on to fact number two, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that in 1604, one of King James I's grooms rode from London to York and back five times in the space of five days for a bet.

Wow.

Did you choose a James Facts because James Rawson is here today?

I did, yeah.

Yeah, why have you never done a James Fact before?

I just never noticed you being here, I guess.

Yeah, this is really cool.

So, this is a guy called John Lepton, and it was first recorded in this amazing book, which I wasted all my research time reading today, which was this book called Abridgment of the English Chronicle.

And it was written in 1604 by a guy who died in 1605.

So, he just got in there.

And yeah, it was this story that he sort sort of said that he reckoned he'd be able to go to and from London and New York five times in six days.

And he ended up managing to do it with one day to spare.

Wow.

It is really good, though, isn't it?

Yeah.

Is it a different horse every time?

That's the annoying thing.

It wasn't recorded how often he changed his horses.

You would normally change your horse, though, on a journey that long, I would think.

Would you?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

From my knowledge of horses.

Probably swapping at Watford Gap.

Yeah.

So when he finished this, according to the book that I read, it said, I think this is probably the same one, he finished his appointed journey to the admiration of all men in five days, and upon Tuesday the 28th he came to court at Greenwich to His Majesty in as fresh and cheerful a manner as when he first began.

Yeah.

Although he arrived on, so he was due to arrive on the Saturday night.

It's really cool,

this account, because it really gives intense details of the time that he arrived, how long he slept for.

He arrived on the Friday night, and then there there is a gap in our knowledge

for the Saturday and the Sunday.

So you can only imagine he got absolutely hammered in New York for Saturday and Sunday, woke up with a heinous hangover on Monday and then struggled back to be cheerful on Tuesday.

Sounds great.

One thing that I think I read about this, which I think is quite interesting, from the Journal of Sport History, it said that this could kind of be seen as the first sporting record.

So it wasn't really until the 19th century that people became obsessed with like, I've done this sport in this amount of time, you know, that kind of record-breaking mentality.

It was another two centuries before men began routinely to abstract the quantified performance as a mark to be equalled or surpassed.

But this is kind of the first instance of that happening.

He said, I can travel this long in distance.

Yeah.

Will you put money on it?

Exactly.

Yeah, that's really cool.

They do, don't they?

They call it the first sort of sporting match that we have a record of.

But I was reading, again, in this book, that there were lots of really weirdly progressive rules around it.

So it became a huge gambling thing.

You often bet on horse races then as now.

But if you won more than 100 marks on a horse race, you had to give up all of your remainder to the poor.

So that was a rule that was introduced in James's time.

There was an act passed in Scotland that said, stop feeding horses hard meat in summer.

That practice being held one among other occasions of dearth of victuals, which I think is basically the poor people need meat in summer.

And if people keep feeding it to their horses, then the poor people aren't getting it, which is just very progressive.

I feel like the National Lottery.

Exactly like the National Lottery.

Or if you win more than 100 quid, you have to give the rest to the poor.

Have you been?

Not quite like the National Lottery.

Do you know about John Lepton's other horse feet?

No.

Do you mean hooves?

Yeah, hooves.

That's it.

So shortly after this event, there was,

remember, remember the 5th of November?

the gunpowder plot.

And a couple of days after, Thomas Percy was a fugitive.

He was involved in the conspiracy.

Everyone was looking for him.

So he had connections in Northumberland, Cumberland and Yorkshire in the north of England.

And people thought that he might be sort of hiding out there.

So our hero, John Lepton, was sent to see if they could find him.

Wow.

Nowhere.

And according to my source, John Lepton missed his man and his epic ride took him to Scotland before he realised that the trail had gone cold.

So in that instance, he sort of overshot his mark a little bit.

Well, because he was so fast, fast, so he was probably going by the average time he was told it was.

He probably thought he was in Wolverhampton.

Yeah.

And then looked around and he was in Scotland.

I've got a thing about a great horse racing bet.

Oh, God.

Well, this is a bet about distance and travel.

So there was a guy called Lord March

who

made a bet that he could get a letter 50 miles in an hour, which at the time exactly was impossible.

I would take that bet.

Yeah, exactly.

No horse could run at 50 miles an hour for an hour.

Even if you were on a cheater, it would be pretty hard a cheater couldn't do that he won the bet no yes he didn't use horses he used pigeons no that would that's quite a good idea although i don't even they i'm not sure they can go at 50 miles an hour what he did was this is very clever he put the letter inside a ball okay and then he hired oh um hamsters no no

He hired 20 expert cricketers and for an hour they threw it in a massive circle all the way around over and over again.

And the letter travelled more than 50 miles

in that hour.

Doesn't count.

He won the bet.

Well, I wouldn't pay up.

Hasn't got anywhere.

I think that's a really crafty, crafty little march.

He's a clever man.

I've got a couple of ridiculous wages from the 18th century.

So I think that wages really took off in the 18th century when it all just got a bit silly.

In 1735, Count de Buchberg bet a large wage on riding to Edinburgh backwards on a horse, which was accomplished in just under four days.

I don't know if the Count did it or or if he got someone to do it.

So, just to be clear, the horse is going forwards, but you're facing backwards, or is the horse facing backwards?

I think it's like on a train where the train's going forward and you're facing backwards.

Yeah.

You probably didn't need to make a train analogy there.

It's like a horse going forward and you're facing backwards.

And in 1770, I read this from The Gentleman, which is just so great.

Two Earls about that one could ride from London to Edinburgh and back in less time than it took the other one to draw a million dots.

Who's counting the million?

I do not know.

So they announce the wager, but then there doesn't seem to be any sort of follow-up or result section in the following in the details.

So you don't know who won the data.

So I don't know who won.

It's actually, actually, you only don't know who won because it's a very long line of dots, and you don't know what happens at the end of the long line of dots.

Yeah, there's a lot of suspense.

But he could make the dots in the most expedious manner that he could contrive, which I think includes hiring people to draw dots

or some sort of mechanical.

Hire a million people, it's just one dot each.

Just glue a million pencils together and make one dot.

Just glue a million pencils together.

Does it count the time that you take gluing the pencils together?

Or

yeah, that's all part of the problem.

I mean, you know, it's a problem, you see.

Like the time it takes me to press a dot, write a dot, you're not going to be able to do one pencil gluing, are you?

I would start just drawing dots, but I would instruct a friend to go and hire a lot of people immediately to come and join and hire more and draw more dots.

I reckon a thousand people at a thousand dots.

Oh, easy, yeah.

But I'm paying a thousand people.

What if peasants?

Yeah.

18th century peasants?

They just do what you tell them.

But so many peasants are illiterate.

I don't know if that's a good idea.

You can still draw a dot if you're illiterate.

No, they were really illiterate back then.

You just get lines.

What if you get a paintbrush and just kind of flick it?

Does that count as a dot?

Let me revisit the wording.

Amazing.

But what a good bet because he would be drawing dots, drawing dots, and the other guy would be riding to Edinburgh.

It's very exciting and suspenseful.

And they're different kinds of achievement as well.

Yeah.

I think that'll be really exciting to me.

I think if

they had the Grand National and they also had some dot

writing competition at the same time,

it would be a hell of a lot more popular.

Yeah.

No?

There's another good bet, which is another kind of crafty bet, a bit like Andy's, where someone was outwitted.

This is in the 18th century, and the Earl of Barrymore, who apparently was known as Hellgate or Rake of Rakes, because he was big womaniser and a bit of a rake,

he thought he was a bit of a sportsman.

He was very tall and thin and his hair was all big and pointed.

He liked to gather leaves.

Yeah, like that.

He fancied himself as a sportsman and this guy called Mr.

Bullock challenged him to a running race.

And Bullock was a massively fat, unfit man.

He weighed 18 stone.

And he said, I challenge you to a race.

All I'm saying is I want a 35 yard head start and I want to be able to choose the route and Barrymore said yeah sure I'm way fitter than you look at you you're a mess and so lots of people put money on it everyone backed Barrymore and Bullock took those bets so he's the only one backing himself and the route he chose ran through an extremely narrow alley and so

he ran the entire route with poor old Barrymore not being able to squeeze past him on either side and apparently sort of wobbled from side to side as he went to make sure there was no way of passing.

Wow.

That is brilliant.

I've got a fact about jockeys as we're on horse racing.

Sure.

So jockey posture, you know that weird posture that jockeys have.

No.

They're kind of crouched on a horse.

They're all sort of hunched up.

This only caught on in 1898.

Before that, you would just sit upright and try and win the horse race.

And there was a guy, a jockey called James Foreman Sloan.

He started doing it.

And it was like the Fosbury flop, you know, in

high jumping.

Within 10 years, everyone around the world was doing it.

And horse race completion times improved by five to seven percent over those ten years solely because of this guy wow yeah I can't believe they didn't figure that out before it's so obvious and it's but it's not by reducing wind resistance which you might think it would be no I wouldn't have thought that I would have thought you were kind of getting a bit of a kind of a movement going I'm doing the movement grinding back and forth

It's when you're upright, you're like a sandbag and you jog up and down on the horse.

But when you're in jockey position, or as they call it, martini glass position, you can move relative to the horse, so you are moving at a more constant speed.

And I think it just helps the whole thing go a bit more smoothly, maybe for the horse and for you.

Like finding a resonance almost.

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

Do you guys know that the precursor to the steeple chase was the wild goose chase?

So I just came across this in an old book which was referring to a wild goose chase as an actual race.

And this was the main horse race that people bet on before the steeple chase.

And what you did was the horses all started running.

And after racing each other, after 12 score yards after 240 yards whoever was in the lead was the one who chose the route from that point onwards and you

amazing and so they all went into this really thin amendment

exactly um and it was mad and so you like dodge about you jump over a ditch and then suddenly you take them over a massive fence they didn't know what they were doing that's a really good idea but then if you overtake them do you then get to choose the route no if you overtake them then you've won wait but if you oh if you overtake them

there's no route to get wrong, is there?

So if you ever take them, you choose the route.

That's what I was thinking, but actually that's the end of the race if you ever take it.

That's the end of the race, because apparently when you choose the race.

When does the race end?

You just have to run forever.

This is why it was banned.

So again,

too many thousands of deaths.

It was very dangerous.

And it was banned, according to this Sports Illustrated or something in 1856, Sports Illustrated equivalent.

It was banned because it was too hard on the horses and the riders because they would just collapse in the end.

They'd just go on and on and on, dodging about, and then one of them would collapse.

That's amazing.

But that's the original wild goose chase.

In 2012, Prince Harry bought chairs in a horse called Usain Colt.

Amazing.

James, you can edit that into either section of the show.

I love that.

That's so funny.

Okay, we should move on to fact number three, and that is Andy's fact.

That's right.

My fact is that there are a species of wasps the size of amoeba.

So cool.

Very cool.

And not a special giant amoeba either, because there are giant amoeba we've talked about before on the show.

Yeah, because I was going to say there's an amoeba which is 10 centimeters long.

Exactly, so none of them.

And the smallest dog is 9.65 centimetres.

So

there are dogs that are smaller than amoebas.

So exactly.

Amoebae, James.

Yeah, can we clarify plurals?

Amoebae, amoebae.

Yeah.

So this is a wasp called Megaphragma mimaripenae, and it's 0.2 millimeters long.

It's the third smallest insect known.

The other two smaller ones are also wasps, so I've just picked this guy because he's been studied.

But it's the size of an amoeba, and it's got eyes, brains, wings, muscle, gut.

So, it's obviously made up of thousands and thousands and thousands of cells, but it's the size of a one-celled organism.

And it's done that.

There's been a study by a scientist called Alexei Polilov, and it found that basically they're missing huge amounts of stuff, and they have to cut down on their own brains and remove all the nuclei from the cells inside their skull just to make room for a few few neurons.

Really?

It's incredibly weird.

So do they have nuclei and then they extract them as they grow or they just don't have any nuclei from the start?

I think it destroys them until it only has a few hundred.

This is what I read.

Is it one of these that doesn't really need to make that many decisions in life?

Yeah.

It's life is simple.

Don't need that many neurons, right?

But it's got to make, it's only got

a hundredth perhaps as many as a bee.

Okay.

And bees themselves do not make that many decisions.

No.

Flower, hive, flower, hive.

It's about the size of a human ovum.

That does not help put things in perspective.

No, think of a human ovum.

Think of a very small full stop.

Think of a dot.

Think of a million of those.

I'm afraid you've only drawn 999,999 dots because this is a wasp.

The other earl wins the match.

What was the name of the wasp?

Megaphragma mimaripene.

There's another one which is small.

I think it might be small, one of the two that's smaller than this one, called Dicopomorpha ecmepturigis.

Something like that.

And it's the males that are really small in this species.

I don't know if it's the same with yours.

And the reason they're so small is because basically they never leave their egg.

They kind of live inside their egg and they mate with their sisters inside the egg.

And then the sisters fly off and they just die.

Oh, mate.

Broaden your horizons.

How?

That's crazy.

Yeah, so that's their whole life.

They just, they grow up in the egg, they mate with their sisters, they die.

So are these parasitic wasps, is it their own egg they're in or are they in someone else's?

They're in their own egg.

Okay.

Yeah.

But parasitic wasps are amazing.

Yeah.

Actually, you said WAPs there instead of wasps.

I'll say it again then.

But do you know that wasp used to be WOPS?

Really?

Yeah, and then it got changed just through people saying it wrong over the years.

As in it comes from an old Germanic word WOPS.

I really hope it shows an etymology with whoops.

It probably doesn't, but it would be nice, wouldn't it?

What, like, whoops, I've stepped on a

whoops.

Yeah, parasitic wasps are totally awesome, aren't they?

Well, there's a piece by Ed Young, who writes a lot about bacteria.

He writes for the Atlantic.

It's a great piece.

He's so good.

I just want to say he's probably my favourite science journalist, and you should all look at him.

I agree.

All right, cut off my turf.

Do you get his weekly email that he sends with all of his writings in it?

I'll call you Ed Yong today.

There's a piece by him

where he's saying everyone thinks the beetle is the king of the things because there are so many species of them.

So he writes a bit better than saying the king of the things.

I don't think he does.

I don't think it's possible.

So there are 380,000 species of beetle, which is a quarter of all animal species, which is a lot, obviously.

But there's a scientist from the University of Iowa called Andrew Forbes who reckons that there are so many parasitic wasps and that every single species of insect even has at least one and probably several species of tiny, tiny parasitic wasp inside it.

He reckons that wasps outnumber even beetles by about two and a half times.

So is that like if everyone on the planet had an average of two hats, then there has to be more hats than people?

Exactly.

Okay.

Except the people are beetles and the hats are wasps.

Yeah, exactly.

There are shed loads of wasps, given that we don't give them enough credit.

I think there are just over 5,000 species of mammal and 14,000 of ant and 200,000 species of wasp.

And even of fig wasps have many thousands of species of fig wasp, don't they?

So we need to pay them more attention.

But yeah,

they're so small that no one notices them.

Even if you find a new beetle, it's probably got loads of wasps living in it that you don't know about.

There's an amazing quote from Josephine Rodriguez, who is an entomologist, who was responding to this discussion about there being more wasps than beetles.

And she says, it doesn't surprise me at all that there are more wasps.

I really think the only people that would disagree would be the fly people.

So, just like the politics

within entomology is great.

I hope Erica McAllister isn't listening to this.

She's a fly person.

Has she been on that planet?

We've had her on, yes.

Yeah, she'll be fuming.

She'll go out and find 100,000 different species of fly today.

There's a really cool parasitic wasp called the green-eyed wasp, which parasites off a ladybird.

So it lays its eggs inside a ladybird, and then when they hatch, they come out and they immediately weave this cocoon between this ladybird's legs.

And this paralyzes the ladybird, but it also sort of possesses the ladybird, so it turns it into a zombie.

When you say, so weaving the cocoon between the legs, which paralyzes them, is it like tying someone's shoelaces together?

It's exactly the same as that, except also if you tie someone's shoelaces together and then you injected their brain with some kind of chemical that turned them into a zombie.

That is a next-level prank.

You get two detentions for that one.

But yeah, this is really cool.

So

this ladybird sits there and it's possessed, which means it twitches involuntarily, which scares away any potential predators.

So it's just standing there like this great fort with the babies all in between its legs.

And then they crack out and leave.

And the ladybird, I guess, dies.

No, not true.

Really?

A quarter of the ladybirds recover, and some of them are even parasitized again.

Oh, no.

Oh, yeah.

Do you want to hear about my favourite messed up wasp?

Yes, please.

Oh no, it's not.

It's a fly.

Anyway.

Well, Erica will love this.

Okay.

This is the smallest fly that exists.

Okay.

Okay.

And it feeds on itself really tiny ants, not even normal size ants, really small ants.

And what it does is the egg hatches inside the ant, parasitic fly.

It goes into the head of the ant from inside and it starts eating it.

So it feeds on the muscles that control the mouth parts, which are very big and muscular bits.

So the ant then can't chew.

So he's walking around thinking, oh, I can't chew anymore.

And then this tiny fly eats the brain.

So the ant now can't think anymore.

He can't even think, I can't chew anymore.

Yeah, exactly.

But it stays walking around.

It walks around for another fortnight while this fly is inside it eating it.

And then finally, the fly larva dissolves the membrane which keeps the ant's head on, and the ant's head comes off.

And then the fly just lives in the decapitated head for another fortnight, which I think is the most goth thing I can possibly imagine that is how cool is that and then once it's an adult it just leaves the head leaves this decapitated head longer how insane it's all up isn't it it's horrible you know that it's so fucked up it made charles darwin question his belief in god

um parasitic wasps he wrote a letter to a fellow naturalist asa gray said i cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent god would have designedly created parasitic wasps he used the technical term uh with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.

Yeah.

Wow.

It's a good point.

It's not a nice thing to do.

If there is a god, he's a goth.

He then goes on to say, or that a cat should play with mice.

So that also seemed to upset him quite a lot as well.

Oh, no, they're just having fun catching mice.

We've all seen Tom and Jerry.

Fortunately, he didn't live to see that Tara.

Do you want to hear my favourite parasitic wasps?

Yeah.

Oh, we've all got one.

It's so nice.

So it's Asacodes abitasis, and it's a parasitic wasp which lays its eggs in another wasp, which is called Dibrachis buccianus, and then that lays its eggs in the pupae of a species of Ichneumonidae wasps, which then lays its eggs in the caterpillar of the Crocopia moth, which lives and feeds in a poplar wild cherry or apple tree.

So that means it's a parasite inside a parasite, inside a parasite, inside a parasite, inside a tree.

Wow.

I think this is where my hat metaphor falls down.

It's the inception of the wasp world.

Yeah.

I was thinking it's the most disgusting Russian doll you could ever think of.

Do you want to know my least favorite wasp?

Yep.

It's the tarantula hawk.

And it's a type of wasp, and it has the worst sting, probably, of any wasp.

And the recommendation, if you're stung by this wasp, and this is in a peer-reviewed journal, is to lie down and start screaming.

What does that do?

Well, apparently what happens is it's so painful that you're not going to be able to maintain verbal or physical coordination after you're stung.

And you're likely to just kind of run off and hurt yourself or not.

Also lie down.

And so the best thing to do is just lie down and scream and hopefully someone will come and help you.

Oh my God.

Wow.

It's such a good name as well.

Is it a tarantula?

Is it a hawk?

No, it's a wasp.

The smallest fly in the world is named after Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Nice.

Is that an ironic kind of thing?

No, it's because it's got big arms.

No, come on.

It's a tiny fly with massive arms.

It's 0.395 millimeters long, and its arms are big relative to its body.

They're not the size of Arnie.

You don't just see a pair of arms lying on the ground and a tiny thing in between them.

And the scientist who discovered it, Brian Brown, said, As soon as I saw those bulging legs, I knew I had to name this one after Arnold.

Legs?

He doesn't have, of course, they don't have arms.

They've got front legs, haven't they?

Is that what you call your arms?

That's what I call my arms.

I've never known why you walk on all fours.

But we're all mammals have two arms and two legs, or four legs.

But I believe flies are not mammals.

Well, we don't have time together for this.

We should probably move on in this phase before you dig this hole any deeper and we lose you entirely.

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We should go on to fact number four, and that is James's facts.

Okay, my fact this week is when patonk players get into fights, it is known in the French press as bouleganism.

It's amazing.

Love it.

That's very good.

That's very good.

So I read this in a recent Telegraph article, and it is all about how they're trying to smarten up the reputation of the sport of patonk, which is French boule.

So for anyone who doesn't know that, it's basically you have a big iron ball.

Well, it's not that big.

It's about the size of a cricket ball.

Iron ball, and you throw it towards a small wooden jack, and whoever gets closest wins.

And they're trying to smarten it up.

They've stopped people from wearing jeans.

And also, they're trying to stop this booliganism, which is alcohol-fuelled brawls between players, which has been tarnishing the sport for the last few years.

And it's an extremely traditional French pastime.

I've seen people playing it.

People play it in a square near where I used to live.

On the piste.

I've been to play in that square.

It's brilliant in South London.

It's very nice.

You love it.

Yeah.

And you hire the equipment out from the pub.

Did you get into any fights?

Huge brawls.

I'm not allowed back to South London, actually.

Well,

I thought this can't possibly be true, but it goes back about 10 years.

So, in 2017, some referees had to be given special protection from booligans.

There were death threats at the World Cup in 2016.

Yeah.

It's just, there are so many stories.

One team said they were going to rip their heads off another team to let them win.

And then the tournament's organisers said this sort of incident happens quite often in Petonk in response to that.

There was one guy who got a 200-euro fine and a four-year ban for hurling a bull at his rival.

Wow.

Jesus.

Wow.

They are hard bulls.

They're super hard, aren't they?

You don't want that.

There was, I think, one guy, according to an economist article, was jailed for shooting dead a Petonk rival when one of his bulls landed on his foot.

What?

What year was this?

It didn't say.

It just said in brackets.

It was an economist article about Patonk, and then it was just like, for instance, the guy from Grenoble who was jailed for shooting dead a rival when his bull landed on his foot, close brackets, no more information.

Oh my god.

So I found three examples of people who've died in the last 10 years playing Patonk, and I was not looking for them.

They just kept coming up in my search results.

One of them was trampled by a runaway circus elephant, though.

So I don't know if that counts as the dangers of Patonk.

That's what eventually cleared us off the South London.

Actually, this thing about them not being able to wear jeans, it's annoyed a lot of Patonk players.

And one player has protested by turning up to an official tournament game dressed as a clown, which now I hear about it, seems a little bit too soon almost.

Yeah.

Although, at least if another player's ball lands on your shoe, it probably won't hurt your foot.

There is one thing that Petonk players are now allowed to do, which they weren't a little while ago,

which is to drink during matches.

And this is competition players.

And yes, you're right, they are trying to professionalise, aren't they?

Because they want it to be an Olympic thing.

But they did persuade the world,

like this is a very French thing, they did persuade the World Anti-Doping Agency it is okay to have a glass of pastis or whatever during a competition.

And they've been allowed to as of 2008.

But they are still asked to abstain from steroids, growth hormones, heroin and cocaine.

I can't imagine heroin's going to help you like the talk that much.

It's a slow game.

I mean, steroids aren't going to help you either.

Oh, come on, you can get some proper power in your...

If you're really big, you can just kind of lean over and put the ball

It doesn't make your arms lengthen.

Yeah, I don't really.

I think of Stretch Armstrong.

I can't get over how full both of your arguments are.

Andy's stories don't lengthen your arms.

And James, it's not really a game of power.

Look, we'll have a game soon.

But there are a few different shots you can play.

One where you just try and get it close to the jack, and another one where you try and bash the other guy's ball out of the way.

Oh, yeah, you can.

It's kind of like Quidditch.

Is it?

Yeah, because in Quidditch, there are people who are trying to score points, and those are the people in Patonk who are shooting for the jack, the tiny wooden thing.

And then you've also got shooters in Patonk who are the

bludgers who try to, you know,

just attack other people.

I mean, if they played it on Titan, look, every analogy breaks down eventually.

I'm just saying.

You've got scorers and knockers.

Do you?

Talking of knockers, can we talk about kissing the funny?

Smooth.

Thanks.

So, kissing the funny is when, if you if you lose a match 30 nil you then have to kiss the fanny

which is where you ideally have to kiss the bare bottom of a lady called fanny

but as there isn't always one available

you can kiss a picture of the bare bottom of a lady called fanny or quite often they have like small statues of fannies nearby that you can kiss the bottom of.

So do you have is that part of the equipment list for a match?

I assume it.

I assume it's a fanny or a picture of a fanny.

Every club has its own model fanny in France.

Wow.

They have them specially made.

There was a match where someone lost very badly, and a local waitress, I think, called Fanny, said, You'll have to kiss me on the cheek if you lose.

And then when the mayor lost really, really badly, she said, Well, you have to kiss me on the bum now.

Some clubs in Provence have special rugs to kneel on while you're kissing the statuette of the woman called Fanny on the ass.

Yeah.

It's a weird prayer.

Do you know why England is not so good at petonk?

Is it because we have crown green bowling or tempin bowling so we don't really play it as much?

That's a nice idea.

I think, well, my theory

as to why we're not a world-leading petonk power is that

we like to wear jeans a lot so we won't be able to play anymore.

That's another one.

This is a bit more historical is that Edward III forbade people from playing.

Legally, you were not allowed to play, especially if you were an archer.

And this goes back, you know, loads of sports were banned if you were an archer because you had to be doing your archery practice.

But until the 18th century, artificers, labourers, apprentices and servants were banned from playing any time outside Christmas.

Really?

Yeah, which is not good for training.

And also, yeah, because in Christmas,

the ground's going to be cold.

Yeah.

Snowy maybe.

So you might not be able to play anyway.

Poor playing conditions.

Good point.

Yep.

Yeah, it was thought of as a...

kind of corrupt sport, wasn't it?

Like only people of ill repute played it.

It was associated with saloons and gambling and stuff like that.

All back to the gambling.

Not the gambling.

Well you say that Britain isn't a petonk powerhouse, but we do have teams.

In 2002, Purcell sponsored and paid for the kit of the British nude petonk team.

Paid for the kit?

Yes.

So I think it was mostly sweatbuns.

So did you say it's a purcell?

Purcell, so the exactly the clothes detergent brand.

Why would you associate yourself with something as risque as nude patonk?

patonk?

Risque and also not terribly popular, I imagine.

Purcell makes your clothes disappear.

I mean, what are they trying to tell you?

Do they turn up to competitions saying, look, we're not wearing jeans?

I've got a quote from Pat Thompson, the team manager and president of British Naturism.

We might not have a Beckham or an Owen, but landing this sponsorship is set to boost the profile of naturist Patonk just as we go head-to-head with the World Cup.

Head to head.

What year was that?

2002.

And see, did anyone pay attention to that World Cup?

I think not.

Patunk kind of advertises itself as being good for kind of all ages, all genders.

It's not a super physically testing sport, even to the extent that you can buy magnets attached to cords so you can pick up the balls without having to bend down.

And this is a thing, so that's fine.

So you go fishing for your patunk balls.

Exactly, yeah.

But it won't pick up the wooden one, will it?

No, no.

God, you're right.

What do you do about that?

No.

Long hoover

uh you can get those claw things that park rangers have you know yeah you're right that's called a piglet it's called a cochonnette that little wooden thing yes or like we would call it a jack right yes um one of england's best players is called jack blows really

nice that's really cool

so prior to researching this did anyone else assume that patonk was an onomatopoeic name yeah patonk i mean it is onomatopoeic it just wasn't named for that reason yeah just not intentionally so.

There was an old man who loved to play ball, which involved taking three steps and then throwing your ball.

He had terrible rheumatism, so he asked if he could do it sitting down.

His friend said yes, and they agreed to be stationary when they threw the ball as well.

And that is petonque, which comes from the Provence words ped tanko, which means feet still.

Oh, yeah.

And I think that's really nice as an origin because it originates in basically early disability rights, right?

Because it used to be much more active.

So I think in Provence it was called Provence Long,

and you threw the ball really far.

It was often about throwing the ball quite a long way.

And the ball, for some reason that I couldn't discover, was sheathed in nails.

And it resulted in so many injuries in the 18th and 19th centuries that it was banned almost everywhere.

So, sorry, can I just say so?

The nails, the spiky bit is on the inside, right?

Yeah.

Because the way you said it, it could have possibly been kind of sticking out.

So it's basically cork, and then you would stick a load of nails so that the outside of it was the heads of the nails.

And so that's how you got your iron kind of ball.

So that's how you got the weight or whatever.

Yeah, so it's not like a hedgehog or something.

Yeah, got it.

That would be very dangerous, though.

Yeah, but maybe more fun.

Do you use a hedgehog?

Well,

no, no.

I was thinking of the sticky out ball.

Oh, sorry.

Yeah, I was thinking, oh, this is Alice in Wonderland.

I'm sure I've read this before.

The real piglet that you throw at the beginning.

Well, you know why the metal balls came about from the technology of the First World War.

So sort of making small mines and bombs and stuff.

Using that technology that was improved in the First World War, they could then make patonk balls.

Wow.

Yeah.

I did that.

So it was good for something.

It was.

So war, what is it good for?

Patonk.

Finally, we've answered the question.

Patonk balls are dangerous objects officially.

According to the Federal Transportation Safety Administration, you're not allowed to take them onto aircrafts.

Oh, yeah.

Did you find an example of that?

No.

I found a guy who he's a star player from Jersey, Keith Boliad, and he had his luggage seized en route to a big competition in Denmark because it had three suspicious-looking, perfectly round iron balls in it.

And obviously, they thought, well, this could be a bomb, what is it?

And he had to borrow another set and someone else's trousers because he travelled in jeans.

And the umpire wouldn't let him play in the competition.

So his game suffered very badly because he was playing with a set he wasn't familiar with the way it was.

It's important.

And different trousers.

Do you think it's important to like use your own balls?

Well, he says that they have slightly different weightings and slightly

possibly even different sizes.

Or just that he was used to the feel of his own balls.

He did size.

This is the newest baton part of the actual time.

Okay, we should wrap up.

Thanks so much for listening.

We'll be back again next week with another episode of No Such Thing As a Fish.

In the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, you can do so on these guys' Twitter accounts.

James is on at James Harkin.

And he's on Andrew Hunter M.

And James Rawson is on...

At Jay Rawson.

Sorry, it shouldn't be like James is the obvious James and you're James Rawson.

Just call me other James.

Random James is on James Harkin.

Say it again.

At Jay Rawson.

And also he is in control of all of our other social media accounts.

So if you want to abuse him anywhere, that's where to do it.

In fact, if you want to abuse anyone anywhere, just do it on social media.

It's fashionable.

If you want to get in touch with us as a group, you can get in touch with us via at no such thing or email podcast at qi.com.

That's all for this week.

We'll see you again next week.

Goodbye.

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