176: No Such Thing As A Communist Caterpillar

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

My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with James Harkid, Anna Chasinski, and Andrew Hunter Murray.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with my fact.

My fact this week is that in America, you get traffic jams caused by people chasing tornadoes.

These are people who actively get in cars when they hear a tornado is out there in the fields and they try and track it and chase after it in buses and cars and so on.

And it used to be a very niche thing, but but then tv shows started happening and more and more people got into it they've still quite niche isn't it quite niche but but uh big enough that it's clogging up the roads because thousands of people are doing it now and they're rural roads as well right so it's not like you can get there always sometimes it's just in the middle of a field that the tornado is happening i don't really know much about tornadoes clearly i think they don't um adhere to roads and fields and boundaries in general i think they just go where they want

yeah it's true i met recently in america someone in shelbyville who was talking about training to become a storm chaser.

She does it for a living now, and she was going to be one of these people who were going to look for them.

And it happened.

Her interest was sparked after her entire house was destroyed.

Wow.

Yeah, so they all have these bunkers in America that they go into for tornado shelter.

And they don't have enough.

They're very angry because the government hasn't done enough about it.

But when you say they all, do you mean people in Tornado Alley?

Yes, yeah.

Sorry, what's Tornado Alley?

Oh, it's just the area of America where most the the vast majority of tornadoes happen.

So it's Kansas kind of area, isn't it?

Okay, I didn't hit The Wizard of Oz.

Hence The Wizard of Oz.

Yeah.

Indeed.

But so Twister did a lot.

The film Twister did a lot for Tornado PR, didn't it?

Yeah, that was the big moment, really.

I think this is where Tornado Chasers first picked up on the idea.

And they did loads of research and they got really involved with the

government weather systems team, whatever they're called, the NOAA, I think.

And they had lots of scientists on board with the film.

And Bill Paxton got really into it.

And he did a documentary after it about tornadoes, I think.

But there was a really sweet moment earlier this year because he died in February.

That's right.

And there's this thing called the Spotter Network, which is this online network that all tornado chasers are on.

And so the Spotter Network gives a GPS location for where the phone's owner is.

And so all these tornado chasers lined up and spelled out the initials BP up Tornado Alley.

British Petroleum.

Yeah, I know, it's weird.

Because Bill Paxton had shares in British Petroleum.

Well, exactly, yeah.

But it was huge.

So

I was looking at the initials and people were tweeting it, and there are all these little green dots for where all the tornado chasers are, spelling out BP.

I looked at Google Maps and it was a massive amount of space they were covering.

So the line of the P was 230 miles high.

Really?

Wow.

I thought it was just in a field or something.

But you don't need cars bumper to bumper for 230 miles, do you?

You can just have two cars, 230 miles.

I'm just checking.

What you said about they use GPS, I think that's why this is so popular now, isn't it?

Because in the olden days, in order to find a tornado, you'd have to go to the weather forecasters and you'd have to, you know, be quite an expert.

And these days, you just need an app and a car.

Yeah.

And you can just find it.

Yeah.

Yeah, because you'd need to know in advance.

And we just have we still have really bad tornado forecasting systems, don't we?

I think the average amount of time between when you're told that there's a tornado coming towards you and when you have to be out of your house is 13 minutes.

Yes.

Still.

So this is the big problem with the storm chasers.

People now, if there is a tornado warning in their area, have to be prepared to leave extra early because just trying to flee their houses, they're going to get caught up in the traffic of the people actually heading towards the tornado.

They'll be heading the other way.

It just, yeah, I guess so.

So it'll be fine.

Well, yeah, I don't know.

Unless you need to turn left or right.

Yeah, exactly.

Some roads are now.

Have you ever seen a disaster movie?

Like, everyone goes in the same direction, and if you go in the opposite direction, you might get eaten by Godzilla, but at least you can get there quickly.

Yeah, that's true.

But no, you can't, because everyone's gonna film Godzilla because of the Godzilla app they've got in their phone.

To extend this metaphor too far, speaking of movies, did you say you had a load of trivia before we started?

I had a fact about Twister, but Anna read it out just now.

So was that it, the Bill Paxson thing?

I've got one more.

In the film Twister, do you know what the noise of the tornado was?

Ooh, uh, I will give you a thousand pounds if you get it.

Was it the a camel's moan that was slowed down?

Oh, shit.

So my back details are...

Please do read them out because I'll need them to get that thousand pounds back.

Yes, it was a camel's moan slowed down.

How do they make a camel moan?

That sounds like the start of a joke.

So the other one bit of trivia about Twitter is that it was the first Hollywood movie released on DVD.

Really?

That is a good bit of trivia.

That's cool because it would have been the first movie to spin as well in order to play it.

Oh, yeah.

Although the spools of a VHS do spin as well.

Ah, damn it.

You're right.

Yes.

Sorry.

Yeah.

They used to have in the 1980s a mobile observatory.

So these days they have armored cars and armoured trucks and things.

Some of them with radar dishes on the back to measure information when the professionals do it.

But in the 80s, they had one which was a massive barrel and they just had to leave it in the path of a tornado, let it gather all the data that way, right?

The really cool thing was it was called the Toronto Tornado Observatory or

Toronto.

They had the same one in Africa and they called it that after the bands.

Do you know that one way to judge how much wind speed there is in a tornado used to be whether it would strip all the feathers off a chicken?

No.

As in, you would have a chicken near one or you would throw a chicken at it.

They would fire a chicken out of a gun, like a cannon kind of thing, towards the tornado to see if it would get stripped.

While it was happening.

While it was happening, yeah.

And then you go, oh, all these chickens have lost all their feathers, so it must have been more than 341 miles per hour.

Oh, okay.

Is that reliable?

It's not reliable.

And the unreliability of it won a 1997 Ig Nobel Prize.

And it was worked out by Bernard Vonnegut, who's the brother of Kurt Vonnegut.

Wow, cool.

Really?

And so

what happened was they always used to use this system and then he realized that there are reasons why it might not work.

One, because he said that maybe the explosion from the gun might have got rid of all the feathers.

And the other thing is that sometimes chickens have particularly easy to pluck feathers.

It's called flight molt.

And every now and then, like once a year or something, you can pluck them quite easily.

So if you get them at the wrong time, you might miscalculate the speed.

I was reading about a different cannon just yesterday, which was meant to fire humans out of.

So it's a human cannonball style cannon, but the idea was for firefighters and people who needed to get to meetings in warm water buildings.

Yeah, it never went through.

I was reading it in a new scientist book.

Do surprise me.

It never went through.

It was a new scientist book, and it was using, so it was an air cannon.

The human was inside.

And the idea would be for firefighters, if they needed to get to a top of a building that would have taken too long, they would have been shot out of the air cannon to the top of the building.

Would it not have been a tube that they went through the tube the whole way?

The word was cannon.

Yeah.

That's interesting.

So cannons, as in human cannonballs, they're usually springs rather than

air.

So the idea was this was air propulsion.

I have air propulsion.

I've never considered what actually is the form of propulsion for a human cannonball.

Well now you know.

Now I know.

I did always sort of assume it was gunpowder.

Did you?

But it makes no sense.

Have you guys heard about the proposed Great Wall of Kansas?

No.

This is to stop tornadoes.

How big is it?

It's a thousand feet high, 150 feet wide, and it would cost $60 billion per 100 miles.

This was proposed.

That's pretty high, yeah.

That's as tall as the Eiffel Tower all the way along.

This is a physicist from Pennsylvania, I believe.

He presented this.

Not an engineer, then.

No.

He said: if we build three east-west Great Walls in the American Midwest,

one in North Dakota, one along the border between Kansas and Oklahoma to the east, and the third one in South Texas and Louisiana.

We will diminish the tornado threats in Tornado Alley forever.

And he was presenting that research in 2014 to the annual meeting of American Physical Society in Denver.

Everyone said it's nonsense, obviously.

But he believes that it's a similar thing with mountain ranges and how they can curb tornadoes.

That's the idea behind it.

Tell you what, if you're a teenager in America and you're looking for a new career, be a massive wall builder because it seems like

I think if Donald Trump can't pass a 20-foot high wall, then I think the odds of passing a thousand-foot-high wall

are slim.

Hey, do you want to hear about an eclipse chaser?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Two out of three.

Yes, please, Andy.

Yes.

Quorum.

No, there are these people.

So America is about to have a massive eclipse on the 21st of August.

It's going to pass across a huge band of America.

and I think 88 million Americans live within 200 miles and a lot of those people are expected to move towards this band as it moves.

But there are certain people who spend their whole lives, all their life savings, everything seeing eclipses around the world.

And one of them is a guy called Mike Kentrianakis and he works for the American Astronomical Society, which is good because before that he was bankrupting himself traveling around the world seeing eclipses.

One of his marriages, I think it maybe his first marriage, broke down partly because his wife didn't want him to go to Argentina to see an eclipse.

Would she not let him see his son?

Oh,

hello.

Very good.

That's very good.

But

it's got a heartening end because now he's got this job and he gets paid to go to all the eclipses.

That's really cool.

Before he was spending all his money doing it.

Although his marriage is still over, isn't it?

Yeah, I guess if you're purely driven by money, fine.

But, you know, if there are things more important in life, he's lost his family.

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

I mean, he may have found love again.

We don't know.

But he said they had other problems as well.

But this was just an indication that she wasn't able to support the thing he loves more than any other.

Yeah.

What a weird.

I mean, once you've seen an eclipse, you've seen them all, haven't you?

Apparently, it's an incredible experience.

And some people, the first time they experience it, that's all they ever want to do again.

So do you all remember when we had one in the UK?

Yeah, it was fine.

Yeah, it was okay, wasn't it?

Was it total?

Yes.

Yeah.

I missed the total.

I think it was cloudy in the bits of London.

Yeah, in the bit where I was, I was in Sheffield.

It wasn't quite total there, but it was pretty total.

I think you had to go to like the Silly Islands or something.

Yeah, I was in Cornwall where it was total, total, but it was quite cloudy.

So I think we've probably said this quote on the show before, but it's worth saying again.

It was Ian M.

Banks who said that if aliens did ever visit us, it would be to watch an eclipse, a total solar eclipse, because the rarity it must be in the universe of having a moon and a sun the exact same size that that could happen.

It's a tourist attraction.

That's why they would come to Earth.

Come for the eclipse, stay for the Kardashians.

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

My fact is, there is a special quarantine centre for chocolate in the English countryside.

Yeah, this is incredible.

It is.

It's amazing.

I didn't know these existed at all.

It's a place in Reading, and it's called the International Cocoa Quarantine Centre, or the ICQC.

And it's got about 400 different varieties of cocoa plants all in massive greenhouses.

And scientists observe them every week, and more of them come around every month, and they do special checks on them.

And basically, it's because if you're moving cocoa from one country to another, there's a real risk that a disease will move from one country to another.

So if a new blight made it to West Africa, where loads of the world's cocoa is grown, and it's a massive plant for their economy, that could cause massive hardship, distress, and disaster.

So every variety moving around the world spends two years in quarantine at the ICQC in Reading.

Right.

Yeah.

And it's quite, is it quite new?

Was it built a few years ago?

No, it's been going since 1985, but they've got a new home since 2015.

So

yeah, yeah.

So sorry, just so I can wrap my head around this,

they're collecting the cocoa plants from around the world to sit there to put through quarantine.

It's not chocolate bars.

It's not

that's why all the chocolate you is off now.

But what I mean is

if a new plant is going to be used or if they're going to use it for mass shipment, they have to then send samples to these guys?

No, you have to send.

You send the budwood, which is a little length of branch with a bud sprouting, right?

They put it in an insect-proof cage, just in case it's got any insects which are carrying disease on it, for a couple of months.

Then they grow it, they grow a clone.

That's called an indicator varietal.

And then, if after two years the plant is completely free of disease, it's allowed to go on to the place it was going to go to in the first place.

So, if you ever want to send cocoa from one part of the world to the other, it has to go through Reading.

Exactly.

Wow.

It's like getting a train to Bristol, isn't it?

And also, looking at photos of this place, it looked a bit like I assume they keep elements of the cocoa that's been sent to them.

They don't just send out the whole thing.

It looks like it's

the life raft of endangered cocoa plants.

Yeah, it's the one true spot that we know we're preserving them.

Yeah, it makes it, nothing makes me feel patriotic usually, but reading about this, I thought, wow, we are so special.

We in Britain are saving the world's chocolate.

That's a big deal.

It is pretty impressive.

And the world's chocolate is kind of under threat, isn't it?

So the demand is massively exceeding supply at the moment, and we're running out of cocoa plants.

They're really hard to farm, so I think only 30% of them.

If you have a cocoa farm, only 30% of your plants will actually flower and create the cocoa because there are so many pests, and they've got these diseases with really cool names like Frosty Pod and Witch's Broom.

So, there's a list on Wikipedia of all these diseases,

and a lot of them have the word pod at the end, like Frosty Pod.

And so do a lot of podcasts.

So, I wonder if you can tell me whether these are

cocoa disease or Podcast.

So Frosty Pod, you've said.

Black Pod.

Ooh.

Disease.

Podcast.

Disease.

It's a disease.

Ghost pod.

Podcast.

It could be either, couldn't it?

It really could.

Disease.

It's a podcast.

Two for two.

Chicken Pop Pod.

Disease.

Disease.

Podcast.

Podcast.

It's a comedy podcast.

Mealy pod.

Mealy.

Mealy.

Disease.

A podcast.

It's a disease.

And I got a million more of those, but that was the end of the game.

They're just the four that we're sponsored by this week.

Oh, that was a very exciting game.

We've never had a game before.

We just have a game every time.

Yeah, that's great.

So this place was, this is how important this is to the chocolate industry.

It was funded mutually by a large group of the biggest chocolate makers in the world, from Cadbury through to Mars, through to Willy

through to

no no he doesn't exist that wasn't there is a Willywonka candy they call me there's

oh then it could be

then very he very well may be an investor in this place Anna does this still make you feel really patriotic that our country is doing this when actually it's just a load of multinationals it's gradually seeping away my

nascent nationalism sure

and just quickly do you know why this cocoa chocolate quarantine centre is in Reading.

Oh, no.

Well, Reading was, their football team's called the Biscuit Men, so there's a biscuit company there.

Exactly, it's for the chocolate biscuits.

No, it's not, sadly, it's not that.

It's because it's so cold in Britain, and particularly Reading, that

none of the diseases which they're potentially harbouring in the centre could survive outside the wilds of the countryside around Reading.

Isn't that right?

Yeah, so well, that's why it's in Britain, basically.

Reading is an afterthought.

So, this is really common with other crops as well, isn't it?

There are various other things that get quarantined in countries that are the opposite of where they came from.

It's like going on a gap year.

You go somewhere as different as you can to your home country.

So I think bananas, most bananas spend some time in Belgium in transit.

Coffee goes to Portugal and spends some time being in Portugal.

And yeah, it has to be places where the usual pests of those crops won't survive in that climate.

Portugal, though, as well, it's quite warm, isn't it?

Presumably it's come from like Brazil or somewhere.

But what the opposite of Brazil is it?

Portugal?

It's not.

It's very much the same.

It's not the exact opposite, you're right.

But are you a colonial oppressor of Brazil, if anything?

Are you sending every banana there?

No, Dan!

Not every chocolate bar goes to Reading.

You can just listen back to Andy's explanation at the start.

Okay.

Do you know what the most expensive chocolate ever sold for is?

And this is in terms of...

Okay, do you want the price or what's in the chocolate?

Maybe price and what the chocolate was.

Okay, I'll say a million pounds, and it was a bar flecked with gold.

Yeah, so

this is a hard one because I think there probably are more expensive chocolates on the market.

So this was sold at Christie's auction house.

Okay.

Okay, so it was a historical piece of chocolate.

It was something that Mallory took up Everest.

Very close.

You're totally in the territory in that it's exploration.

Is it Shackleton took to the sun?

So close.

It's exactly in the yes.

Scott.

It's a bit like I did all the hard work.

Scott's first expedition to the Antarctic in the early 1900s.

And how much did his bar...

It's one little lump of chocolate.

Was it made of gold as well?

No.

No, it was just made of chocolate.

Yeah.

£20,000.

No.

I'll go for, for a bar of chocolate, £7,984.

Okay.

I think, actually, less than that.

I think £4,500.

£470.

Okay, yeah.

We overshot it.

£20,000 was way off, wasn't it?

Yeah, but I would have thought £20,000 was more in the ballpark of something that is attached to an extraordinarily historically important trip.

The thing is, I bet they did an auction with lots of different things from his expedition.

They did.

And this was probably the shittiest one of them.

Yes, his diaries went and they went for 600 quid.

600 quid?

No, of course not no.

No, they were like 90,000 to 100,000, something like that.

So this is for the one person who couldn't get anything else and they're like, oh, just get the chocolate out.

Yeah, just, yeah, bring the chocolate out.

Something to eat on the way home.

Exactly.

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

Yep, my fact is that to celebrate the communist revolution, the Bolsheviks planned to build a tower in St.

Petersburg that projected the news onto the clouds.

And this was this really cool idea.

It was part of...

So as soon as as the Bolshevik Revolution happened, Lenin launched this thing called the Monumental Propaganda Campaign.

And the idea was to build all these monuments.

It's quite a clever pun when it's translated into English.

But the idea was to build all of these monuments, which were a big piece of Soviet propaganda.

And this guy was commissioned, this architect called Tatlin, Vladimir Tatlin, was commissioned to design something that was going to be called the Monument to the Third International.

And so in 1919, he designed this insane building, which is often called the most influential building that was never built because it's inspired lots of artists and designers ever since, and it's just really fascinating.

And it was going to be 400 meters tall.

It was going to be made of steel and glass and iron.

It was this double helix structure, so it looks like a spiral on the way up.

And it had these amazing features.

So various bits of it rotated.

These huge glass cubes within it rotated at different speeds.

And there was a plan on the top bit to have this information center, which would issue news bulletins that in the night time or on a cloudy day shot up into the sky and broadcast in light the news announcements or propaganda onto the sky onto the clouds very cool it's very cool I think people might be familiar with this tower because it's quite a famous iconic thing yeah they had a replica of it in the Royal Academy last year or the year before I think

and it looks a little bit like the tower at the Olympic Park.

That's exactly what I was thinking.

And often if you see any kind of old pictures of Soviet Russia from the 1920s, this is kind of an iconic image, right?

And they used it, and it kind of represented their ambition.

So it was used as a Soviet icon in the 50s and 60s to show how great they were.

Wait, so this building wasn't built, but all the plans and the drawings were released, and we've then sort of subtly built it

without.

At the time, even they built a lot of smaller versions of it.

But the problem was that it was so massive that there's no, it was impossible to build, basically.

They wouldn't be able to get enough iron they wouldn't be able to get enough steel and for something yeah that was supposed to be like uh building something which has a real social purpose but the fact is that it was impossible for them to make anyway pretty ironic guys

considering what happened with the communism uh-huh yeah good

communist anti-communist satire nice idea but

doesn't work in practice right yeah doesn't barely doesn't get off the ground no the thing is andra it's never been properly tried that's the problem it's just tried in the wrong place.

It was the wrong environment.

If only someone had the balls to actually do it, it would work brilliantly.

Yeah.

Can you tell me about the cubicles inside?

Is that like a revolving restaurant or kind of, yeah, yeah.

But like James said, they had to have a social purpose.

So a restaurant's a bit too frivolous.

They were just going to be like meeting rooms, conference rooms.

But what I mean is, were they single cubes that were shifting inside the building or was the whole of the building revolving?

So there were different layers of the building and it would revolve at different rates.

So one of them would revolve once a day and another one would be once a week and another one would be once a month.

And then the bottom one would be, I think the bottom one would be once a year.

It would revolve.

And so you'd be able to tell what date and time it was by.

It's a giant calendar.

A little bit, yeah.

And it was in a double helix as well, even though the structure of DNA hadn't been, I think, discovered at this time.

Around the cylinder and the cube and the pyramid and everything, there was this huge double helix.

Yeah.

There's this one guy who's written a big kind of biography of this building who says that it was never intended to be built.

So some people think that it was just a thing that was meant to represent, I don't know, the ambition or the symbolism of the new Soviet Russia, that it wasn't meant to be built.

But we don't know.

The news in the clouds is that a was scientifically, is that a practical thing?

I'm purely thinking it is out of the fact that the Batman logo can be put into the sky.

I know that is a good documentary

with sequels, but I don't think it was.

This is the thing I had no idea that they were experimenting with these wildly technologically advanced ideas, but I don't think that was practical.

It is practical.

It's practical now.

Yeah.

because there was a guy in Nottingham called Dave Lynch and he fired a ghost rider onto the clouds in Nottingham a few years ago okay a ghost rider yeah so it's like a ghostly horse rider guy cool and it was a bit like my bridge's if you know that old one of the first animations yeah of like a galloping horse yeah it was it literally was that it used exactly the same projector as MyBridge didn't it but it used a laser instead of light but there's quite a long way to go until we can watch Liar Liar on a cloud.

Is it?

Yeah,

it's right, because it's done with a laser, so it's all in the green light of the laser.

But

what they were originally doing was the news, so maybe it would be less difficult to put like Kay Burley on than Liar Liar because she's only in one studio.

That's true.

Did I miss a reference?

Why are we using a Jim Carrey movie from

the sorry?

I'm just trying to think of a really good film.

Liar Liar.

You came to my head.

Okay, cool.

Sorry, I thought I missed a reference, but that was just a...

I absolutely did not.

I'm playing.

I was just crowbaring it in a little bit.

Your Your choice of movie to play into the clouds was Liar Liar.

We just spent half the podcast talking about Twister already.

What would you put into the clouds?

I just, I, well, the a latest movie, the new Spider-Man, or a Game of Thrones episode.

Here's the thing about that.

If you put the latest Spider-Man in, then no one's going to go to the cinema because they can just watch it in the clouds, right?

But if you put Liar Liar on, which is probably on terrestrial TV pretty much once a year or something, then it's fine.

You don't lose any money.

Once a day in my flat.

And also, Dan, when people listen to this podcast in a few months, they'll go, new Spider-Man, what's that?

Whereas Liar, Liar is sort of...

That's timeless.

Well, yeah, that's a movie that endures.

You were talking about the bat signal.

Yes, I was, yeah.

Do you know how they summon Batman on a cloudless night?

Do they project it onto the moon?

They project it.

On a star.

They project it.

Onto a star.

Do they just call him?

He's probably got a phone.

Well, there is the bat phone, isn't there?

No, it's none of these things.

Supposedly, I mean, this is, it's all made up.

Side of a building.

Side of a building.

Is it?

Yes.

How come we've never seen that?

Is it just very bad weather in Gotham City most of the time?

Yeah, I think so.

And someone incredibly geeky on Quora pointed out, actually, because Gotham is near water, it's liable to have more cloud because there'll be

water rising.

I don't know how true that is weather-wise, but also smog.

Probably for them, it's quite good to have bad pollution.

Yeah.

Is it quite polluted, Gotham City?

Yeah, the Batmobile is diesel, I think, isn't it?

So that's pretty.

It was so embarrassing that time he accidentally filled it up with unleaded.

That was Robin that did that.

That's why he's never allowed to take it out anymore.

So there was the tallest building ever envisioned was the X Seed 4000 and it was going to be in Tokyo and it was going to be four kilometers high.

pretty much in the shape of Mount Fuji and it would be able to accommodate between half a million and and one million people.

Wow.

Wow.

And they did the kind of plans for this.

Yeah.

But never built it.

Why not?

Unrealistic again.

Well, according to the managing director of buildings and data, George Binder,

he says that they never really meant to build it.

The purpose was to earn some recognition for the firm.

Yeah, all these people claiming.

We never really meant to build it.

They're always saying this.

And they reckon it would have cost a minimum of about 500 billion US dollars to make make it.

But from the other fact, I saw that we eat about $100 billion a year on chocolate.

So we'd only have to give up chocolate as a world for five years and we'd be able to build this tower.

Cool.

I don't, no, it's not worth it at all.

Why not?

I think the vast majority of people in the world would vote to keep chocolate and not have a random tower built for 100 pounds.

So we would be saving chocolate potentially.

We would replenish the stock.

We would perhaps allow for the leaves to breathe.

But the other thing is that you get a lot less chocolate grown if everyone stops eating it.

So, actually, the stocks would crash down.

There was another Soviet building that was supposed to be built was the

thing that was going to replace the 19th-century Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which was like St.

Nicholas I's huge landmark in St.

Petersburg, what became Petrograd and then Leningrad.

And so, the plan was to build this amazing skyscraper that was going to be, it looked like a huge wedding cake, and on top of it was going to have an 80-meter-high statue of Lenin, and in his head was going to be a library, a Soviet library.

And it was, again, it was kind of a ridiculous plan.

But they flattened the Tsaris Cathedral.

So they said, well, get ready for that.

And then the USSR ran out of money.

So that just remained flat.

And all it became was the world's largest open-air swimming pool.

Ah.

Which is kind of cooler than a giant Lenin.

The designs were amazing for...

I remember seeing the designs for that building.

For Leninhead building.

Yeah.

Would the Leninhead building have had a massive swimming pool where his bladder would have been?

Ah.

That's not very appealing, is it?

Because of the associations.

Why not?

I don't know.

It'd be fun.

A patriotic Soviet bladder.

I guess.

It'd probably encourage you to pee in it.

Yeah, it would.

The associations of the word bladder.

That's true.

And you could have a water chute coming out through the urethra.

Oh, yeah.

So great.

I like this plan more and more.

The more I think about it properly.

But if you've got a watershed coming out, the bladder's behind that.

So when you come out of the end of the urethra, you just fly into mid-air, right?

Yeah, you just launch back into the the city you launch you know on concrete could be a new design for you know these cannons that fire firefighters up to the top of buildings

i don't think we should give up on it but let's park it

let's park it for now

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

Okay, my fact this week is that caterpillars are more likely to vomit when they're on their own.

Right.

We all throw up when we're lonely.

Come on.

Is that why they do it?

I don't know if they're lonely, but the reason that they vomit is to get rid of predators because predators don't like being vomited on.

And when they're in a group, they don't need to do it because they're in a group.

And actually, one of their mates can vomit instead.

And so what happens is, if you vomit, it's bad for you because you're getting rid of your nutrition and you need that food.

But if you're in a group and someone else vomits, then it gets rid of the predator and you've still got all of your food inside you.

And so a study was done in 2012 that found that this caterpillar of the large white butterfly,

they are more likely when they're in a group to try and cheat and let someone else do the vomiting.

Oh, wow.

But what if they all think that?

This is typical, selfish, individualistic 21st-century society.

If you all think someone else

will pick up that rubbish, then no one's gonna do it.

That's why caterpillars need to go back to a Soviet system.

I think that last fact's really infected you a bit.

It's amazing how they're all waiting for the other guy to get the round in, basically.

Sorry, I've just been working out the caterpillar is very almost an anagram of capitalist, isn't it?

So it's no wonder they brought down the Soviet system with their self-serving ways.

Did you see the caterpillar they found, I think, last year or the year before?

It was in Peru and it's from the Nematocampa genus.

It was in the Amazon and it responds if you shout at it.

It doesn't like being shouted at.

And it's got these tentacles on its back and there's a film of it.

And if you just yell at the caterpillar like that, then its tentacles just flick out straight away.

So it's like, you know, when you're talking to a microphone and you watch the sound waves go up and down as you do.

It's like that.

As soon as you yell at it, it like fires out these long tentacles from its back.

We don't know why.

Is it scared or is it attacking you?

We have no idea.

You could use it as a way of measuring sound, couldn't you?

You absolutely could.

So you could use it like as a clapometer or something.

Yes.

If you want to know who's the most popular, you get them to applaud and then you have loads of these little caterpillars and the longer their tentacles go out, the more popular you are.

Oh, wow.

That would be so cool.

Until the RSPCA got onto you, that would be unbelievably cool to have a massive caterpillar.

But you could do it on like Britain's Got Talent instead of having the judges just have audience reactions.

Yeah.

Well, in the chairs, they're all caterpillars.

I do like that, actually.

I would watch.

And the longer the tentacle, the more they liked it.

You measure the tentacles.

But we don't yet know if they like it or not.

so the worst acts might get through.

Yeah, it's their extent.

It's actually just the loudest acts.

The acts which promote the loudest audience response.

Sorry, sorry.

So they're not in the judges' seats.

Sorry, they're the audience.

They're much more democratic than Britain's Got Talent.

No, they are in the judges' seats.

The caterpillars aren't the audience because you need an audience to make the noise.

But the caterpillars.

Yeah, but booze are noises as well.

Oh, yeah.

You're so right.

Actually, there have been many times doing stand-up.

I've been very grateful for the fact that boos are also noise.

How did the sugar go, Andy?

Well, they were very loud.

More vomiting caterpillars?

Yes, please.

The caterpillars of the small mottled willow moth, they vomit not just what's in their stomach, but also kind of a detergent.

And they do this onto ants.

And the reason being that they have a lot of kind of water in their stomach.

So when they vomit it onto the ants, this detergent kind of stops the surface tension of the water from being a blob on the ant's head.

And instead, the water goes all over the ants, and then he has to kind of clean it off, otherwise he'll drown.

Oh, wow.

And so,

yeah,

that's amazing.

I thought you meant like a detergent, like, if I had a big boozy night out, I'd vomit and be like, I need to clean that up.

Oh, no, I don't.

It's just cleaned itself up.

That would be a great bit of evolution.

Yeah, if you just had to vomit into the washing machine before you closed it.

Did you know that, so reading about a caterpillar vomit, the evolutionary biologist in a lot of the articles who studies caterpillars vomiting is called Jane Yak.

There is a species of caterpillar that lives on coca leaves, and when they vomit on predators, their vomit contains cocaine.

Whoa.

Whoa.

Which presumably the predators don't like for whatever reason.

Oh.

But it itself is not high all the time on cocaine through eating it.

Yeah, so it doesn't

metabolise the cocaine to make it go crazy.

Yeah.

But when it's eaten by the predators, something happens to them and they don't like it.

But is it worth

if you find, where is this?

I don't know, but it must be where coca leaves grow, so South America.

Somewhere in South America.

That's so cool.

If you find a caterpillar in South America, is it worth giving it a snort just in case?

No, I don't think so, because it might be one of the other ones.

So for instance, the eastern tent caterpillar, they'll deliberately eat parts of the cherry leaves that contain cyanide and they'll vomit out cyanide.

Wow.

Okay, so it's not worth risking it for the cocaine high in case you get the cyanide poisoning.

Yeah.

Yeah, fair enough.

You know the Very Hungry Caterpillar, the book?

I do.

A copy of that book has been bought every minute since it was published in 1969.

No,

because shops close.

Yeah.

You mean on average?

Yeah, but the world turns, Dan.

World turns.

Shops open.

Oh, yeah.

Just when the bookshops in Japan are opening for the day.

That's true.

Is it a big seller in Japan?

Yeah.

It's been translated to every.

What I'm saying is that it sold 30 million copies, all right, you wise guys.

Which if you add up all the minutes between 1960 and I don't know.

But it could have sold them all yesterday.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it didn't because I remember reading it as a triangle.

Yeah.

It might have got a free copy.

It might have been like a preview copy.

It wasn't like a free copy, probably.

Proof copy, yeah.

But there you go.

But it's been proof copies this whole time.

This is the year it's finally published.

How shall we do?

10,000?

No, let's do 30 million copies.

Okay, it's impressive guys.

Anyway, but my point is that the plot of the very hungry caterpillar is completely inaccurate.

What?

For one very simple reason.

Because on the first day he has an orange, on the second day, he has two apples, and I'm getting the fruits a bit wrong.

But he eats a lot of stuff over the course of the day.

It's a cocaine.

I don't think you've read this book.

My point is that almost all caterpillars have one specific plant only that they like to feed on.

So the very hungry caterpillar is an absurd fiction.

It should have just been been every page.

He ate an apple, he ate another bit of apple, he ate another bit of the same apple, he ate another bit of the same species of apple.

That's what you're recommending for the sequel.

Yeah, I am.

Wow.

Very hungry and factually accurate caterpillar.

Did you know, you know, flies vomit, so you're always told a fly lands on your food and then it vomits straight away because it can't metabolise food internally.

So it takes it in and it vomits up its enzymes.

Is that true?

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

Okay.

But one problem that they have is at crime scenes, because if there's a lot of blood at crime scenes, then flies will have come along and they eat a lot of the blood and then they vomit on the walls straight away and they create little blood spatters.

And people who are crime scene specialists have to know to tell the difference when they're looking really close up at blood spatters between blood vomited by flies and blood spatters.

This is amazing.

So what you can do is if people check your hands for blood after there's been a crime, you can say, oh, just a fly landed on it and vomited on my hands.

So I was nowhere near it at the time.

And on my shirt, and on this bat.

Oh, this one fly, man alive.

Yeah.

Anyway, he's my witness.

Come on, Derek.

Tell them how you did it.

You're about to do Dickie Tommy, haven't you, Derek?

And all this cocaine on my hands as well.

Oh, that's Colin.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at Egg Shaped, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

And Czechinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at qi podcast.

You can also go to our website.

We have all of our previous episodes up there.

We have links to the tour that we're going to be doing in October and November in the UK.

We have a link to our book, which comes out in November as well.

And if you want to, why not join us on Monday evenings on Facebook Live, where we're going to be discussing the contents of this episode so you can pick apart all of my interesting and accurate theories or talk to us about anything that you want.

We will be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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