119: No Such Thing As 4D Surgery

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Hi, everyone.

Dan here.

Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Before we get started, we just want to let you know that we have now completed our run for the first series of our TV show, No Such Thing as the News.

If you missed it and you want to see it, head to no such thingasthenews.com, where we have all the episodes either on iPlayer for viewers in the UK or on YouTube for everyone who's international.

Please watch them.

We loved making them.

Hopefully, we'll get to make more.

But in the meantime, here's another episode.

And you'll notice James is away this week.

He's in Transylvania.

So we have in his place another QI Elf, Stephen Colgan.

Steve's just actually published a book.

It's called Why Did the Policeman Cross the Road?

How to Solve Problems Before They Arise.

It's in bookshops now.

It's an amazing book.

It's all about his time when he was a police officer and all the problems he had to solve as a part of Scotland Yard's problem-solving unit.

How cool does that sound?

Okay, that's it.

On with this week's show.

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 Shriver.

I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, Andy Murray, and Stephen Colgan.

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 heart surgeons now perform surgery while wearing 3D glasses.

3D glasses, like the ones you get in the cinema.

They're slightly more modern, but they are 3D glasses.

Do they get other special effects as well?

Like, does someone blow in their faces while they're doing the operation or spray a bit of water?

Because then that's a 4D operating experience.

That's true, yeah.

The reason they do this is because with heart surgery, a lot of the way that they do heart surgery now is via camera going in because they can't get into such delicate spots.

So they have to watch it on a camera.

And so it's really hard to know if you're further than you think you are or if you're not close enough.

It's just hard to get perception.

So what they realized that they could do is by adding a 3D camera to the thing that goes into the body, you could then wear the 3D glasses and you would have total immersive and proper experience of a 3D operation.

It's insane.

Plus you look awesome.

These aren't the old red and green ones, are they?

So they're slightly more modern.

Yeah, I have been to the cinema, I'd like to clarify, since 2005.

We say that, but even the ones at the cinema, they actually can reduce the brightness of the screen by up to 88%.

They would have to light it quite.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, maybe that's the modification.

But when they used to do it with the 2D normal operations, it would take something like two hours longer or four hours longer because it was so hard.

You had to be so careful.

And now with these glasses, they can do things at twice the speed.

They have the time.

time of what the operation should be.

So it's just, yeah, it's amazing.

Well, the whole 3D thing is a really interesting area anyway, because I remember a few years ago hearing Andy Naiman go on about this.

Andy Naiman, the magician and writer, he's a huge fan of 3D movies.

And he was saying that 3D was kind of brought into cinemas as a way of fighting back against new technologies that the cinemas were worried that people would stop going to the cinema.

So like in the 1950s, it was because of the rise of television.

In the 1970s and early 80s, it was because of video coming along.

And in the modern age, it was because of computers and the internet and that sort of thing.

And people would go, oh my God, people aren't going to go to the cinema anymore.

So 3D kept coming back as a gimmick over and over again.

But now they've spent so much money on the infrastructure, we can't get rid of it now.

Wow.

We're kind of stuck with it, yeah.

These people should have watched more knockoff TV D's and realized most of them the sound is out of sync with the visions and it cuts off halfway through anyway.

So cinemas are safe.

Say that.

Well, if you go to the cinema and you hate watching 3D movies, but you happen to be in a 3D movie, you can now buy, and it's been for a while, 2D glasses that turn a 3D movie back into 2D.

Yeah, so this is on if you go to 2D-glasses.com, you can now buy these glasses.

And it's basically the guy who invented them, his wife hated going to 3D movies, so he invented it so that she would still come to the movies but get the 2D experience.

I was looking into this a bit more and looking at a few medical papers about this, and apparently there's 12% of people who can't see 3D anyway.

Well, when they're wearing the glasses, yeah.

Why is that quite surprising?

Is that due to visual impairment?

Well, not impairment, it's just that the rods and cones in their eyes can't pick it up very clearly.

So these are people with 20-20.

Yeah, there's people who otherwise have got good good vision.

The other thing is the rods and cones in your eyes, they discovered last year your eyes actually do see 3D separately.

So your eyes can actually see each eye can actually see 3D on its own.

But when that's combined with parallax, which is where you're seeing it from two slightly different viewpoints from each eye, that gives you perfect 3D vision.

So they don't reckon that the 3D vision that we see in cinemas is actually anywhere near as close to real 3D vision anyway.

That's really amazing.

Because we obviously just think the only reason we see 3D is because we've got two...

Well, that's the parallax thing isn't it you see things from two slight viewpoints and your brain superimposes them but apparently each one of your eyes can actually detect 3d anyway on its own apparently there are three or four different things that come together to give us 3D vision and and a couple of those we got anyway because even if you shut one eye you've still got a fairly good idea of how far things are away

it's only when things get close to your eye like you're trying to thread a needle that it all goes completely to pot oh wow yeah so I was distracted because Anna was launching her hand into her own face I was practicing my one-eyed 3D vision

and all it's made me think is I'm really really short-sighted in my left eye.

I was looking into sort of surgical innovations

and things that surgeons are doing now that are improving medicine.

And I've been corresponding with a couple of doctors who have told me amazing things, and I just wanted to mention them.

They're called Peter Brindley and Martin Bede.

Oh, no, this isn't about personal ailments or anything, is it?

No, it's fine.

Although they've assured me it will clear up in four to six weeks if I keep putting the ointment on.

Okay, get this.

There are, to train surgeons,

one thing you can do is simulate smells for them, smells of particular things in an operating room.

So there are cookbooks available online where you can cook up the smell of internal organs or cerebral spinal fluid or whatever it might be to sort of train surgeons more effectively for when they actually get in there and are operating.

Wow.

Yeah, that's cool.

Why is identifying a smell?

Well, identifying a smell is useful medically.

Is it?

To identify a disease.

So, yeah,

so a lot of people could diagnose by going, oh, okay, you've shot yourself.

I was reading, there was an interview, there was an article on cracked written by a surgeon saying some uh some secrets of the trade, and he was recounting.

So, he recounted two quite amusing things.

Uh one was that at one point a man woke up while he was restarting his heart because they'd have to give him, I think, a dose of adrenaline to get his heart going, and maybe it was too much.

The man woke up, and uh the surgeon said, When he saw a resident elbow deep in his organs, he gave us the exact look you picture somebody having when they wake up to find a stranger's hands inside their chest.

We all know that.

That's like the opposite of a metaphor.

He looked at us exactly like we were doing the thing that we were doing.

Yeah, I read a few articles about doctors revealing secrets about surgery and stuff.

One weird one, I wish I wrote it down, this is just going from memory, but about how with every surgery, if you're a man getting surgery, they have to hold and squeeze the penis just to make sure there's no urine in it.

Who has been

Dan?

I think you've been had.

If that's the excuse he gave you.

Where were you at the time?

If you weren't in a hospital at the time.

He said he was a doctor.

My mum's never going to consent to another general anesthetic.

Now she knows this.

That's outrageous.

Yeah, I don't know how they get it out of the ladies, actually.

Yeah.

We'd probably have a doctor to pick him up and shake him a bit and then put him back down.

I did read some stuff about, I mean, you talked about keyhole surgery earlier.

There have been a number of scientific papers, people looking at whether people playing video games gives them skills that will make them better surgeons in the future.

And there's one particular paper I was looking at which was called The Impact of Video Games on Training Surgeons in the Twenty First Century, which was kind of looking at all the existing papers that have been written on it and and bringing all the the data together.

And apparently they found that current video game players made thirty two percent fewer errors when they were involved in doing surgical uh work and performed twenty four percent faster.

So it could well be all that time spent in your bedroom.

Uh could mean you're gonna be a really good keyhole surgeon one day.

Yeah, of course.

You're not allowed to be stoned when you perform surgery, though.

So that's what puts them off.

The robot thing is cool.

So there are surgeons who now perform operations routinely from like 400 kilometers away from their patients, aren't there?

There's this guy called

Mr.

Tickle.

Yeah, no, there's this guy called Mehran Anvari who does almost all of his operations on different continents.

And he just does it by you put this sort of console on your head.

It looks like one of those things that, you know, when women get their hair permed in hairdressers, it's like one of those, and then you just control that, and you're remotely controlling it.

Yeah, exactly.

But there was one, so I think the most used one is the Da Vinci surgical system, and that's used in about 200,000 operations worldwide.

And it's a virtual reality thing.

So you stick your head in a console, and you can be in a different room, but your voice will blast into the patient's room while you're in the surgery.

So you can tell the nurses what to do.

Blast this.

This is the voice of the surgeon.

Well, one doctor said?

I've heard one surgeon get carried away while doing this and shout, I'm Conan the fucking barbarian.

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Okay, it is time to move on to fact number two, and that is Steve.

Okay, my fact is that one day we may all be drinking pigeon milk.

First of all, I should say that pigeon milk isn't milk like we get from cows because birds can't lactate.

It's actually produced in the bird's crop, a little space between the throat and the stomach where birds will store food, sometimes to soften it up before swallowing, but sometimes

if they're looking after young, they can keep food in there to regurgitate to the young later.

And there are some species of bird, pigeons are one of them, that actually can make a kind of secretion in that crop to feed the young birds.

And they generally do it when the birds are first hatched.

It's a bit like, you know, in humans, you get colostrum, you get the stuff that mother first produces when babies are born.

And it allows the baby to put on weight very quickly and it also feeds their immune system.

Well, this stuff does the same job, and they reckon it's part of the reason that pigeons are able to survive so well in cities.

So, is this why we're going to be drinking it?

We need to survive in cities.

What they're saying is that they might be able to switch on some parts of the DNA in pigeon milk and put it into other animals' milk that we do drink, which means that milk won't taste any different, but it'll actually boost our immune systems.

Oh, okay.

So, they sort of secrete it, don't they, pigeons, from their crop?

It's like curd, if you like.

Yeah, it's like pottage cheese texture, isn't it?

That's a pretty thick secretion.

Yeah.

Weird.

It's because their crop is sort of lined with these cells which are full of fat, and those are the cells which extrude this milk.

Okay, right.

Yeah.

So I was looking into birds which produce milk.

You've got pigeons.

where both sexes can do it.

You've got flamingos where both sexes can do it.

And you've got penguins, emperor penguins, only the males produce milk.

That's very odd.

Oh, a feminist society.

Basically, sort of.

But I was looking into the flamingo milk because I thought that sounds like a cool thing.

And it turns out flamingo milk also pink.

Oh, yes, I was so hoping you were.

So there have been a load of studies done, especially at Exeter University by a guy called Paul Rose.

Everything is pink.

Okay, so we all know flamingos are pink.

But the milk is pink.

The inside of a flamingo's egg is pink.

The egg yolk of a flamingo egg is pink.

Their skin is pink.

When they get the breeding season, they decide how they're going to have sex.

They're all hanging around together, and one of them goes deep pink.

He sort of flushes.

And if all the other birds start to go pink, they all start breeding.

So going pink is a way of saying, I'm ready to mate with you.

Yeah, and presumably it just depends how attractive the flamingo that's gone pink is.

Because either all of them do it, or only one or two of them do it, and then they feel embarrassed.

Okay.

So the reason they're pink is that they eat the algae and the little shrimp things, which are which are pink.

So this is a whole species that goes around thinking it's a colour that it's not, and it's just because they've got a weird diet.

Yeah.

So one day they'll just have a new food taste or that bacterial die out and then they'll go back to their normal colour and be like, what?

Why aren't we eating flamingo eggs with pink yolk

every day?

Because it's harder to store flamingos than it is to store chickens.

Because you just need slightly taller

coops.

Building.

That's it.

You can just drill a hole in the top for the head to poke out.

You'll get in trouble for that.

Oh, well, one shop.

It was either, I can't remember, maybe it was M ⁇ S, they sold recently double-yolk eggs.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because about one egg in a thousand has two yolks in it.

I've never had

them

and detect two yolks.

That's very clear.

You say wow, as if that's the most advanced technology you've ever heard, Dan.

They can just use an x-ray camera to see inside an egg.

No, I just thought it's a lot of effort, isn't it, to buy the scanning machine, to buy the eggs.

Absolutely.

To buy the eggs.

To throw away the other eggs.

I don't think they.

Thousands, 999 eggs were smashed.

Useless, useless.

Buy the eggs, throw the rest away.

Back to pigeons very quickly.

There's a theory that pigeons killed a lot of Tyrannosaurus rexes.

Explain it.

The only issue with the pigeon is it needed to die in order to kill the T-Rex, and that was to be eaten by the T-rex.

A paleontologist called Dr.

Steve Salisbury, University of Queensland, has been looking into it.

And he says that basically they have evidence of avian infectious disease in dinosaurs.

And they noticed it in the back of their jaws, these little holes in the back of their jaws, which could only have got there by eating something.

And so pigeons could carry this disease, but they were immune to it.

And so the T-Rexes were eating pigeons, which is an amazing image.

If you think, I mean, I didn't know how far back pigeons went, but the disease would then carry through to their jaw, and that would be a bacterial infection that just destroyed them.

Wow.

very cool.

Everything killed the dinosaurs, didn't it?

I'm amazed that they survived so long.

Apparently, it's like an earthquake, a great global event.

They all drowned

a Martian invasion.

Smoking.

It's true.

Have you ever seen?

I mean, people always say, you know, you never see baby pigeons.

Well, there is a good reason for that because they stay in the nest a lot longer.

They don't fledge early like a lot of other birds.

They stay in there for ages, saying, Feed me.

But if you ever see one in a nest, it looks remarkably like a dodo.

It's got this huge bill that comes out with a lot of them.

Well, dodos are their closest known relations.

Dodos were pigeons.

Dodos were pigeons.

I've learnt so much in this section.

They can fly.

They do backward somersaults, pigeons, and no one knows why.

Is this in the air?

It's in the air or on a branch.

In the air.

So there's a pigeon called a Birmingham Roller, which is called that because it does this rolling.

And yeah, we don't know why, but it seems like they might just do it because they like it.

And one of the reasons we think they might like it is because before they do the somersault, when they're in the air, apparently they engage in arching, frequent arching, and wing clapping.

They just start clapping their wings together in excitement at the fact that they're about to do an awesome trick.

People say they pre-applaud their efforts.

Get it going, guys.

Get the applause going.

Bit cocky, isn't it?

They're like the Covent Gardens treat performers of the bird world.

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

My fact this week is that books used to be stacked with the spines facing inwards.

That's amazing.

It's so ridiculous.

It's so weird.

It's just so weird that this is more widely known.

So the reason this happened, uh uh which is really interesting and I learned this when I discovered a book called The Book on the Book Shelf by Henry Petrosky.

He found out that they did this because books were incredibly precious back in medieval times.

Almost always the last thing you would do to a book after you'd bound it is send it to a jeweler and a goldsmith to get it all decorated.

They were had lots of like really precious diamonds and jewels on them.

Book jazzled.

Book jazzled, exactly.

So they were really precious and so then they were always chained or they were usually chained to the shelves where they were stored.

And they'd usually be in monasteries.

It was mainly kind of monks who had books.

And obviously it's easier to chain a book to a bookshelf or a cupboard if you're doing it via the spine, because you can just put the chain through the spine.

And so that's how they attach them.

See, I kind of assumed it was something to do with fading or something like that, because I've got some quite old books at home, and the spine is much more faded than the actual front and back papers are.

Oh, really?

Because they the spines were sort of the least desirable part.

They were almost something you should hide, like the hinge of a door.

Yeah, it's sort of philosophical, Petrosky says, that shelving books with their spines inwards must have seemed as natural and appropriate a thing to do as to put the winding machinery of a clock toward the wall or behind a door.

Cool, but still a nightmare trying to find a book in a library.

Yeah.

You can imagine it just walking in there, just faced with all the pages.

Okay, there is a library in Dublin called Marsh's Library.

Yeah.

It's a really early public library.

And they don't have chained books, because chained books is obviously to keep them safe, just in case people wanted to nick them or anything.

So they don't have chained books, but they do have cages which you have to sit in if you want to read certain books.

What?

Yeah.

And they're really nice cages.

I mean, they're not what you're picturing.

But they are sections of the library, little alcoves with sort of grills across them, and you get sort of shut in there with the really precious books.

So you're like a zoo animal.

People can observe what a human reading looks like.

Yeah, cage reading.

Cage reading.

It's the next extreme sport.

I was looking into libraries generally when I was researching this topic because old libraries are really fascinating, the systems that they used to run by.

And I was reading about, and this is from The Independent, about how the New York Public Library has unearthed this huge file of questions submitted to them by members of the public.

So before the internet, before Google, where would you get your information if you needed it immediately?

You would go to your library and you would submit a question and have them answer it for you.

And the librarian would go off and look for it and either call you back or just next time you're in, give you the answer.

And they publish some of their favorite questions.

So they include, why do the 18th century English paintings have so many squirrels in them?

And how did they tame them so they wouldn't bite the painter?

So that was from 1976, and they have it on a little card that they've kept.

1976.

From 1976, as far as

1956, what kind of apple did Eve eat?

And then

this.

Telephone call, mid-afternoon, New Year's Day, 1967.

I have two questions.

The first is a sort of an etiquette one.

I went to a New Year's Eve party party and unexpectedly stayed over.

I don't really know the hosts.

Ought I to send a thank you note?

Second, when you meet a fellow and you know he's worth $27 million,

because that's what they told me, 27 million, and you know his nationality, how do you find out his name?

You can see why she was desperate to track that guy down again.

Yeah, I'd start with a thank-you note, actually, and I'd say, by the way, the man wearing the gold suit from last night,

what was his name?

So 1976, you're saying, wow, as far as then people still sending in questions.

The library, the New York Public Library, have said that they still get 1,700 questions a month today.

So they are the original Google, right?

Librarians are the original Google.

And now it's kind of exactly the same situation as Black Cabs and Uber, I think, isn't it?

So now presumably librarians just can say Google it, and they're putting these old school knowledgeable ones out of business.

Just like the way that Cabbies now will say, just Uber it.

So this is the thing.

So just you were talking about old libraries, Dan.

So in very early monasteries and libraries, and places where books were extremely precious, right,

some places had a system where the librarian has a key, right?

And all the books are kept in trunks, you know, these great big trunks.

But there are also two other locks.

And there are two other keys.

And you have to have all three people present, all three librarians, for someone to borrow a book.

Wow.

What?

Yes.

Crown jewels.

They're so valuable.

And then there's a a ritual of book return as well.

So I'm quoting here: the librarian shall read a statement as to the manner in which brethren have had books during the past year.

There's a monastery.

As each brother hears his name pronounced, he is to give back the book which had been entrusted to him for reading.

And he whose conscience accuses him of not having read the book through which he had received is to fall on his face, confess his fault, and entreat forgiveness.

And I think that's ripe for return to libraries.

Absolutely.

It's more powerful than a fine, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

I did find out what the biggest fine whatever was for a library.

Oh, yeah,

it's surprisingly modest, actually.

It was $345.14.

What?

Well, this isn't as a lot, is it?

But

it was at two cents a day for a poetry book, Days and Deeds, which was booked out of the Kennewi Public Library in Illinois in 1955.

And they found it in her house 47 years later.

Wow.

For 47 years, it only accrued $345, which in current money is about 203 quid.

That's good to know.

Surprisingly modest.

Do you know someone who was responsible for a cool bit of book innovation, as in the way we see books?

It was Lewis Carroll.

Really?

Yeah, so in 1876, he wrote to his publisher saying, guys, could you please put the name of the book on the outside on the dust jacket?

Really?

Yeah.

So dust jacket is a really interesting thing.

You used to not have dust jackets on books at all, and then you developed really nice bindings, like Anna says, and you would then have a dust jacket to protect against the dust, but it was plain, and you'd just throw it away once you'd open the book.

It was just unnecessary packaging.

And then they started having transparent dust jackets so you could see a bit of the spine.

And then eventually people started drawing on the dust jackets, and they started it in about the 1830s.

And in 1876, Lewis Carroll had to ask his publishers, though, can you put the name of the book on the spine of the dust jacket?

So it was still not widespread even then, I think.

Wow.

Yeah.

People often say that he invented putting the name of the book on the spine.

I don't know if that's true.

People often say.

This is a good idea on 19th century figures and books.

So Humphry Davy, who's an extremely famous chemist who we've talked about before, who discovered a bunch of metals, famous metals, and who was important in electricity and battery making, he never wanted to waste time by being tempted to read the same book again.

So every time he finished a book, he destroyed it.

He mutilated it.

So he would never be tempted to go back and reread it.

Did he do it as he read?

Every page.

Did he tear off?

I'm never reading this again.

And then he gets to, wait, who was that character?

That's amazing.

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

My fact is that in May, an internal memo by the Egyptian government on how to crush the press was accidentally sent out to the press.

It's so pleasing.

So Egypt is a very repressive government, and they're constantly arresting journalists and things like that.

And um they in May uh sent out memos to journalists from the the ministry uh the ministry's official email account about how to counter this news media campaign which was saying, By the way, the government keep arresting journalists and they were saying, Oh, well we can we can stop all coverage related to this, we can undermine the credibility of the journalists union and we can monitor s news websites around the clock with more stuff and it was basically this whole series of measures designed to shut down the press and then they put it out as a press release basically.

Oh my god.

Fantastic.

Yeah, and I got this from a report in The Economist about press freedom and loads and loads of it not happening, as it were, all over the world.

So, lots of people being arrested.

There was someone in Thailand who was prosecuted recently for being sarcastic about the king's dog.

Wow, okay.

Yeah, really?

Yeah,

it's quite hard to prove sarcasm.

It's one of the because you can always just say, I was being genuine.

Or you can say, Oh, yeah, I was being really genuine.

I think you will still get locked up, unfortunately.

It's worth a try.

My favourite thing that's happened recently in terms of freedom of expression and people getting oppressed for,

for instance, satirizing leaders is your favourite oppression story.

I'm really big into those, yeah.

No, that's not true.

No, my favourite thing that's happened along these lines was in December 2015 in Turkey when a Turkish guy was on trial and he'd been accused of insulting the president, Erdogan, because he compared him him to Gollum from Lord of the Rings.

And the trial had to be adjourned because it turned out that the judge on trial hadn't read Lord of the Rings, and so it was impossible to ascertain whether or not this was an insult.

And in the end, they had to call in five experts to deduce whether or not comparing the president to Gollum was an insulting thing to do and to decide whether or not Gollum was an evil character or a good character.

I can't believe they needed five as well.

Why don't they just try the film?

Five.

No, because it takes because they needed the experts to interpret it.

So they they had two academics, two psychologists, and a movie/slash television expert.

Mark Camode.

Eventually, Peter Jackson got involved.

He released, I think he released a statement or he tweeted saying that actually it shouldn't have been seen as insulting because Smeagel, in fact, which is who was depicted in the satire, was a very good character, a lovable and honest guy who should never be confused with Gollum.

So he got his all-rins.

Did you want to swing it in favour of the defendant?

I think it was concluded at the end of the trial that it's not insulting to compare someone to Gollum.

Oh, good.

Well, we can say that President Erdogan is exactly like Gollum, then, can't we?

And we can't do that because in Germany, for example, a poet wrote a poem about saying that President Erdogan has sex with goats

and

has been arrested and I think

is awaiting charges now because there are laws against insulting foreign heads of state.

This is a huge thing across Europe as well.

So in Iceland, I think you can get up to six years in prison.

I mean, something insane like that

for insulting not your own head of state, but a foreign head of state.

Yeah, that is mad.

Well, they have to call in people to decide whether it's offensive to say someone has sex with goats.

I don't know.

Yeah, they need five.

There was quite a big international incident of an insult that was done recently between the President of Argentina and Pope Francis.

And basically, the President of Argentina made a huge charitable donation towards a cause that Pope Francis had set up and been talking about.

The amount that this guy gave was 16,666,000 pesos, which is roughly just under 1.2 million American dollars, but it contained the number 666 in it, and the Pope was convinced that that was a deliberate move by him to sort of insult him and sort of undermine him.

So he rejected the charitable donation.

Well, it contained the number.

So it was like...

16,666,000.

There's 666 right there.

I think we've done on QI, isn't it?

That it's not 666, it's 616.

Although it is just about possible that the Pope isn't an avid QI fan.

He's going to feel like a fool when he gets that clacks

as he's watching the show.

I'm quite fond of gaffes with politicians.

There was a great one in 2013 when the Australian opposition leader Tony Abbott was criticising the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, and said, No one, however smart, however well educated, however experienced, is the suppository of all wisdom.

I quite like that one.

Do you know that George Bush Sr., when he was president, threw up on the Japanese Prime Minister?

I mean, he did have an intestinal flu at the time, or so he claimed.

But what was really funny is that it actually became a phrase for vomiting in Japanese.

It's called to do a bush, or bushu zuru.

It means to do a bush.

It means to throw up.

It's so great.

I love you saying that he had an intestinal problem, or so he claimed.

So the suggestion is he might have just

managed to bring voluntary vomit out of his mouth.

To insult the Japanese Premier.

Is that what we're saying?

Finger down the throat.

Excuse me.

Did you see one as well recently?

This is quite a big gaffe.

The Queen's Honours List this year.

A lot of amazing people on it.

And they included, by accident, two serving soldiers from the SAS.

They released their names.

They're still active, and it's the first time ever that that's happened.

Wow.

Yeah, and so they had to immediately delete it.

And the newspaper has been quite good.

They've not published their names, but they were on there.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

We're here to reveal that.

James Harkin.

Mark Camo.

That was a bit like in two thousand and three there was a schoolgirl in Devon called Claire MacDonald.

She was fifteen uh and she suddenly started getting emails from the Pentagon.

And she got about eleven emails a week that uh were full of state secrets.

They came from uh the Ministry of Defence, they came from the Pentagon.

They detailed various things like communications problems on British warships, New Zealand's defence strategy.

One of them actually had uh details for how to avoid leaks from the Secret Service Department, tips on how to avoid leaking information.

And it turned out that there was a Navy commander who was supposed to distribute it to an email list and made a typo.

And she was getting all these emails.

She replied to them saying, I really don't think this is meant for me.

I'm a schoolgirl from Devon.

Heard no response.

She just kept on receiving them.

And if that's a code word this week,

schoolgirl from Devon.

Yes, we're all schoolgirls from Devon.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

Steve at Stephen Colgan.

Czezinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group Twitter account, which is at qipodcast.

And also go to no such thingasoffish.com, where we have all of our previous episodes.

And also, why not go to no such thing as thenews.com, which has all of our previous TV episodes.

We will be back again next week with another episode.

Do go out and buy Steve's new book, Why the Policeman Cross the Road.

And we will see you again for another episode next Friday.

Goodbye.