50: No Such Thing As Doing It Dinosaur-Style

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For the final trivia question, what is the largest mammal in the world?

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with the three regular elves.

It's James Harkin, Andy Murray, and Anna Chaczynski.

And once again, we've got around the the microphone with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the 2012 law prohibiting nudity in San Francisco was proposed by a politician called Scott Wiener.

Keeping it high, Brown.

Yeah, just like that.

I just like funny names, really.

Yeah, that's my favorite thing.

It's also that nominative determinism thing, isn't it?

Yeah, we've actually met the person who coined nominative determinism.

Really?

Yes, it's Mr.

Determinism.

Yeah, it was Mr.

Determinism.

No, it's a British guy called John Hoyland.

Sadly, he passed away last year,

but he used to write for New Scientists, and he coined it.

And he coined it because he saw on the same day two things when he was out in the shops.

The first thing was he saw a book that come out on the Arctic by a Mr.

Snowman.

And then that very same day, he read a scientific paper on Incontinence by J.W.

Splatt

and D.

Weedon.

Yeah.

We don't and Splat.

It's quite a famous paper that actually.

Is it really?

Wait, Mr.

Snowman.

Yeah Mr.

Snowman.

Is that a name?

Does anyone here know anyone called Snowman?

I don't think it's a...

How can it be a name?

Andy often denies the existence of people introduced to him if he doesn't agree with their name.

So after finding this guy called Scott Weiner, I try to look for other political names in America, uh funny ones, and good old BuzzFeed has one.

It has a list of the thirty-one weirdest political names, and I want to give you a few of those.

So the former House Representative from New Hampshire called Dick Sweat,

uh pre precinct committeeman from Arizona Frank Schmuck,

and this is my favorite one, it's not rude, but Butch Otter, who is the current governor of Idaho.

But Butch Otter is such a good name, that isn't it.

Yeah, yeah, I'd vote for a butch otter.

And there was Anthony Wiener, wasn't there?

Who was, I mean, you know, who'd flash people by text or something a couple of years ago.

Oh, yeah, that was right.

That was Anthony Wiener Gandalf.

I'd never thought about how technology has sort of made the flashing community way more just the relaxing stay-at-home.

Usually it was really hands-on, wasn't it?

You had to go out into the street.

To be hands-on was a whole different crime.

What do we think of, so sort of the reverse thing, which is popular among celebrities now, naming your child after where they were conceived or after something that's significant to them, which goes back longer than I thought.

So, Brooklyn Beckham.

Beckham was a business.

Brooklyn Beckham, yeah, I think.

And so, in 1863, a boy was born and he was named Leicester Railway because

he was born at Leicester train station.

Born, born.

Actually,

Rudyard Kipling is named after the place where his parents either met or conceived him, Rudyard Lake, which is in in Staffordshire, I think.

Yeah.

Someone recently went through all the censuses from 1790 to 1930 finding all the funny names there.

And there were some really good ones.

Some of the best ones, so parents, Mr.

and Mrs.

Day in 1899 named their son Time of.

1899?

Yeah, 1899, Time of Day.

Yeah, I didn't think people had that kind of sense of humour back then.

I know, neither did I.

And yeah, so also in the 19th century, they found I'm a hog, I'm a pig, I'm a nut, and I'm a hooker.

After which, I guess the name I'm a went out of fashion eventually, as a car slate.

I'm a snowman, would have been interesting.

So, okay, so this guy, where is he banned?

Nudity?

San Francisco.

So, was it not banned there?

Was that the first time it had been banned in San Francisco?

Yeah, because it's not banned in old places, it's not banned in the UK, for instance.

You're allowed to go around naked as long as you don't deliberately cause harassment or alarm or distress.

I found out that so you can go to you you know, like youth camps in America, summer camps.

There's now a youth summer camp that's a nudist camp, because it was thought that, I guess, young teenagers didn't have enough opportunity to engage in nudism or whatever.

But there's a rule at this summer camp, so I think there are three or four of them in like Florida, Texas, Arizona.

There's a rule that on the occasions that you do wear clothing, so occasionally there'll be scenarios where you put on some clothes, it's not allowed to be sexually alluring.

One of the first ever guys to be arrested for or fined for indecent exposure was this was in 1927.

And can anyone guess the part of himself he revealed?

Okay,

his bottom.

No, it was his chest.

Oh, really?

He was sunbathing, just took his shirt off, and that was it.

He was fined and arrested.

Yeah, and the magistrate said, I'm going to hold, rightly or wrongly, that to expose the upper part of your body is indecent.

I think it is highly likely to shock persons of ordinary sensibility.

I, in summer in London, I'm actually in agreement with that guy.

There was, speaking of topless, there's a really weird story in 1842 where there was an uproar because, so this was reported in a northern newspaper, and it was that women who worked down mines were being photographed topless.

And it turned out it was all over the newspapers, and it turned out that women were working topless down mines because it was really, really hot.

And I think it turned out it was only in one mine.

It was at Hopwood mine in Barnsley.

But there was suddenly this big campaign saying women shouldn't be working down mines because it was seen as indecent that they were apparently being forced to be topless.

That's weird.

I was just reading today actually, in Mongolia, they have an annual sporting event called the Three Manly Sports.

And one of them's wrestling and one of them's throwing something.

And the wrestling one, it's only men.

And the way that they find that out is they make sure that they wrestle topless so that you could tell the difference if there's a woman wrestling.

That's a very obvious other way of finding it out.

Not like during a wrestling match, though.

Oh, yeah.

What about that fact about Princess Anne was the only person not to be gender tested in the 1980s?

1982.

Summer Olympics or other.

The Olympics, yeah.

She could be a man.

Nobody knows for sure.

We are not saying that Princess Anne is a man.

Anna is.

We're just saying we can't rule it out.

So I was looking into nudity, which is extremely hard to do on the internet.

Oh, my God.

The distractions available.

But I started looking into strip tease because I suddenly thought, oh, I don't know the history of strip teasing.

That's odd, it was research.

It was radiant.

Every week.

But I'm surprised how far it goes back.

I mean, it goes back to like, I think it was the 1700s.

And what's really weird is that they used to strip tease in front of, it would be in a court and you would be just having a fun night, and then a strip tease would start.

And I always said that strip tease was accompanied by music.

But I was thinking the music back then wasn't exactly the same

as

yeah, when you've got your harpsichord out, there's not really a kind of sexy song to go with the strip tease.

And then I read that a big thing that actually puts strip teasing around the world is more of an art form.

There was Gustav

Flauber, he saw an Arab custom that he saw in Egypt, which was this dance.

It was the dance of the bee.

Oh, is it the one where she takes off her clothes because she thinks she's got a bee inside her clothes?

Yeah, again, not very sexy when watching someone.

It's just just like, it seems like strip teasing slowly introduced the idea of sexuality much later in the day.

I think strip tease must go back further than that, though.

Yeah.

It does.

If you Google.

Oh dear.

Nudity.

Right.

And obviously, for this, you have to be quite careful.

But

the results that came up for me, you know, the autocomplete options on Google,

were nudity in Far Cry 4, which is a computer game.

nudity crossword clue,

third one is nudity in Dragon Age Inquisition, another computer game.

But then I realized these are tailored to me.

I don't own either of those games.

Until now.

You all know, presumably.

I wanted to see if there was any political parties who were up for nudity.

And so I googled the National National Nudity Party

and I found only one hit.

It was a Facebook page and it had one like.

The National Nudity Party.

And it was a guy called Nenad Filopovich from Serbia.

He is the only member of the Facebook National Nudity Party.

It's not much of a party, isn't it?

I mean,

I've held some pretty dead parties in my time, but that was bad.

The first ever organized nudist movement was set up by just three people.

They were Englishmen living in Bombay in 1890, and they disliked the dress codes of the British Raj, which are very, you know, you had to wear so much, and it was very hot.

And so they established a group called the Fellowship of the Naked Trust, and they began to meet together in the nude.

And they were the only three members

that lasted for just two years,

and then they stopped.

And I just want to know what happened at these.

I presume nothing much happened at these meetings, just three men.

Something happened for it to stop, didn't it?

Someone stepped over a boundary there.

I was looking into the history of clothing because I thought, because apparently, for the majority of our time on earth, we have been naked.

String apparently is what changed everything.

The invention of string, because it meant you could harness all you know, all the clothing could be harnessed.

So string was really hard to make.

So they ended up they used hemp.

Hemp was the big thing that would, you know, you could put it into small strips, you could wear it in larger patches.

And the thing about hemp was it was going really well and everyone was using it.

And then suddenly they discovered that you could smoke hemp and get really high.

And then they all got naked again.

Yeah, exactly.

Stoned off their asses.

Yeah, so hemp turned into a high as a result of clothing.

The other thing is that in the early American times, they used the hemp for their ships as well.

And they needed the hemp, and no one really wanted to grow it.

They all wanted to grow food because you got more money.

But so, one of the first, in fact, it was the first ever drug law in America was to make it that you had to grow hemp.

Yeah.

That's right.

I just read in my notes, I've actually misspelted this when I was writing about nudicy and a surge in nude crises.

And I actually meant to write cruises, which there have been a surge in

which is not a crisis.

But there have been a surge in nude cruises.

And also the first nude chartered flight by a

German tourist company.

You know, in Germany, apparently.

So I haven't been to beaches in Germany.

So this is just what I've read.

But most beaches are named.

You'll have signs on the beaches.

FKK is one sign, and that points to Freikorpe Kulfe, which is free body culture, and that's a naked part.

And then you have the one that's called the textile beach,

which really does sound like the loser's beach.

The knitting beach.

Do you know about German agricultural nudist traditions?

They're good.

Try me.

Okay.

So lots of different bits of Germany have nudity-related customs to encourage the crops and the harvest.

So, for example, in Saalfeld, women would walk around the flax fields naked on a particular night of the year.

And this went until the 19th century, where women in Reidlingen would walk naked and urinate in the flax fields, urging the crop to grow as high as their breasts.

And men did the same thing as well.

Men would walk around the sorbs, they would walk naked in the fields, chanting, flax, flax, grow as high as the scrotum.

So the men's crops weren't growing as high.

All right, let's, we got to move on to our second fact.

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So time for fact number two.

Fact number two is my fact.

My fact this week is that Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, got so large that he couldn't fit at his dinner table anymore.

Rather than going on an exercise regime, he decided to cut a semicircle in the table so he could fit his stomach in and continue eating.

It's just wonderful decision making.

Yeah.

That's an example of why he was such a genius, though, right?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So he, I mean, this is the thing.

I'd never heard of Erasmus Darwin, because obviously his grandson Charles really is dominating the column inches.

But he was extraordinary.

Yeah, Rasmus Darwin was awesome.

He was a serious polymath, wasn't he?

He's like the epitome of polymath.

And he came up with loads of inventions, really cool inventions, some of which actually did work.

So the steam car, very early person to experiment with steam and create a steam-operated vehicle, a wire-drawn ferry, a horizontal windmill.

Don't know what that's useful for, but whatever.

Hey, I know how windmills work.

There's more.

All right, go on.

I will.

An artificial bird and a magnetically operated fake spider.

Also, really cool, like an early joke toy.

That's good.

He also invented, he came up with an idea of using hydrogen balloons to increase increase the amount that could be carried in wheelbarrows.

Wow, that's a good idea.

That's amazing.

He sounds really clever, but then I also read that he once tried to cure a five-year-old boy's problem with squinting by fixing a ginormous fake nose to his face.

And that was his solution.

He was like, this will definitely work.

Just walk around.

This will be fine.

Do enough that it worked.

Well, no one noticed his squinting anymore.

The thing about the balloons, I just remembered actually, Benjamin Franklin he had a number of other ideas for uh hydrogen balloons and one of them was that he would put his food, attach his food to a hydrogen balloon, and then he would let it go miles into the air to keep it cool, so you wouldn't need a refrigerator.

And it would keep the food cool up there, and then when you wanted it, you'd just shoot it down, the food would come down, you could eat it, and it'd be cold.

That is much more convenient than a refrigerator.

I'm amazed we're not all doing it.

Apparently, he was really attractive to women, though, despite being so corpulent.

He sounds like a really charismatic guy.

Women fancied him.

He was a bit of a female magnet.

I think he had sex before.

14 children?

Yeah.

12 of them legitimate to not.

Yeah.

Should have invented the condom.

But one of the cool things about him is he kind of inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.

There it is.

Yeah.

So when they were all Mary Shelley and Byron and Percy Shelley, they were all staying in Lake Geneva and they were telling each other ghost stories.

And Mary Shelley writes in her diary, she says, Byron and Shelley had a load of conversations to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener, i.e., they were going on about it.

They talked of the experiments of Dr.

Darwin, who supposedly preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case.

What is vermicelli?

But it means little worm.

It was a small worm, wasn't it?

Well, I think it's pasta because

and then he brought the pasta to life.

Yeah, he brought the pasta to life.

And I've misresearched.

That's not useful for anyone.

That would have made a very,

I think it's still pasta.

It would have made a very different Frankenstein.

You just have to get lots of hot water over him and then he does come like this.

I think it was a one, but whatever.

And he invented, well, he kind of came up with the theory of evolution, for which Charles gets all the credit now.

But he came up with lots of early iterations of the theory.

Yeah, he didn't do natural selection, did he?

But he thought that everything came from something smaller, something very, very, like a very tiny piece of pasta.

Everything grew from there.

But he didn't realize survival of the fittest, he didn't really have that.

Just speaking of Charles Darwin, I read a thing about him which I really

thought was extraordinary about the Times.

So when he went on the Beagle trip,

he wasn't the naturalist on the Beagle trip.

And actually, we went to, three of us, I think, went to the Wellcome Institute that you can go to in London.

And they have this kind of, there's this behind-the-scenes area where they have all these amazing documents that no one sees in the public, one of which is the diaries of the naturalist from the Beagle.

And what's amazing about it is the naturalist spent more time just going, who the fuck is this Darwin guy?

And it's literally a bitch diary, the whole diary of him going, he's talking about tortoises and this theory of them going, like, it was, it was so bitchy, and they've never published it.

They really need to.

But Darwin almost didn't make it onto the Beagle because Fitzroy, who was the captain, didn't like the shape of his nose.

He thought it was in a, he believed in a, what was the theory that was

a physiognomy, yeah,

which meant that you could tell someone's personality by their physical traits, and he thought it meant Darwin was arrogant and stubborn.

It was just a theory in those days that

you could tell someone's personality by the shape of their face, or you would have people who looked a bit like criminals.

And actually, it's dated back all the way back to Roman times.

And also, I mean, remain, we say their eyes are too close together.

I mean, it remains today.

We do make judgments based on people's physical characteristics.

I do.

Never trusted you.

This is quite funny about if we're talking about Darwin's family.

So, Darwin married his cousin, which is quite well known.

But I like the fact that one of his sons, called George, became an academic, and one of the only academic papers that we know about that existed

was published in the Journal of the Statistical Society, and it was titled Marriages Between First Cousins in England and Their Effects.

Just tell me that.

So, he was both the author and the subject of that.

He wanted Parliament to add, Charles Darwin, this is, wanted Parliament to add a question to the census, they did, saying, Are you married to your first cousin?

Have you noticed anything going wrong?

And they wouldn't do it.

They wouldn't allow him to add that question to the census.

They said it was too personal.

I read a sentence about Charles Darwin, and I know nothing more about it because I just thought I don't want to go further than this.

The sentence was, Charles Darwin hated religious controversy because it exacerbated his bowel problems.

Plays hell with mine.

Well, Erasmus Darwin, just going back to him, he got in a lot of trouble because he didn't believe in the Judo-Christianic God.

He still believed in God, but just not the main one.

And he believed in some kind of distant entity.

And I think he changed his, because he believed in evolution, he changed his family crest to everything from shells or something like that.

He put those words on it, yeah.

He was wrong.

He was wrong.

Well,

in the specifics, yes, but in the general thrust, no.

Just going back to his inventions as well, he invented a circulating swing to cure madness.

It's a spinning thing.

You put a person who's got mental issues back in the day, they had one at Bedlam.

You would put them in this machine, it would spin them round, make them feel nauseous, they would vomit, lose control of their bladder and bowels.

Some bled from the nose and ears, some had convulsions, and many passed out.

Then he stopped the machine as suddenly as he could, and this invariably had a calming effect, subduing even the most violent patients.

So it worked.

Do you still feel angry?

See, he's saying nothing.

Your fact was about tables, right?

Yes.

I don't know.

It feels like a long time ago now.

Yeah, okay.

So, my favourite table, I think, is a table.

We've all got one.

We've all got one.

Welcome to my favourite table.

It's my spin-off show.

One episode.

It was Louis XVI, and it was in his chateau at Choisey, which I'm guessing is somewhere in France, and it was his table of volante.

And it was because he got annoyed at the fact that between courses, the servants would have to come and bring you your food, so they'd have to take away your plates and like bringing your main course up to your starter.

And he thought this is really disruptive.

So, what he made happen was he cut a huge hole around the dining room table and he had it lowered into the servants' quarters between courses so that the servants down below could stock it up and then raise it back up to their level, which apparently was less disruptive.

Was he friends with Benjamin Franklin by any chance?

That's a good table.

That's a good one to start the series, I think.

I think it is, yeah.

A few corpulent people.

Yeah.

Daniel Lambert, he was the fattest man ever when he was alive, weighed 318 kilograms.

He was the heaviest man in history.

But John Brower, who died in 1983, he weighed over 635 kilograms.

So even though this guy was the biggest at the time, we've gone twice as big now.

And Lambert was so fat, apparently, that he couldn't sink.

He was.

I'm not sure how that works.

There's something weird there.

And he was from Leicester, and he would float along the River Stour, allowing children to hitch a lift on a salary.

Seriously.

It was a more innocent time.

It was a more innocent

That isn't discovered that.

He was really strong.

He once fought a bear in the streets of Leicester.

Why was a bear in the streets of Leicester?

I don't know, but you've got to be glad that he's there when it happens.

He gets out of the water.

Get down.

Sorry, kids.

You've got to fight a bear.

And then he got so famous and he exhibited himself in a house in Piccadilly in London.

And people would go and pay to chat to him because apparently he's quite a raconteur as well.

And at the same time as he was exhibiting himself in Piccadilly, down the road on Sackville Street, there was a fat baby

known as Master Wybrants, Mr.

Lambert in miniature.

And people would go to see this fat baby.

Well, just while they were there.

If they couldn't get a ticket for Lambert, they'd go and see the.

Like the fringe.

It was a fringe event.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Surely they did a double act.

Yeah, they should have done, shouldn't they?

It's another theory why um humans have put on weight in the last sort of couple of centuries, as well as all the dietary change.

Well, yeah.

Um but another theory is that w uh humans all used to weigh less, and this is uh you know hundreds and thousands of years ago, because they were constantly exposed to infections and infected with stuff, and when you're infected, when you're fighting an infection, your body warms up and you burn calories or more of them.

So that's the answer, is to just constantly be ill.

Well, it

people think that though obesity might be infectious and I like this because it's a good excuse for obesity.

But yeah, there's this theory, they've tried it on mice, where they've implanted bacteria from obese humans into a mouse guts and then they took another bunch of mice and implanted bacteria from like normal weight humans into a different mouse guts and the mouse guts with the bacteria from the fat humans got fat and then and the mouse gut mouse mice with the bacteria from the not fat humans didn't get fat and then when they put all the mice together the thin mice were infected with the fat mouse bacteria, and they all got fat.

So they think the fatness might be infectious, caused by bacteria in your stomach, which I don't believe, but

I would like to.

Guys, we've got to move on to our next fact.

Time is against us.

Okay, time for fact number three, and that is Andy.

My fact is that Spotify's random function is not random.

It used to be random.

It used to play any random song, but then human listeners kept inferring order and seeing patterns where there weren't any patterns.

So now they've had to change the algorithm so it's structured, but in such a way that human listeners think that it's random.

Can I just ask quickly, who are the non-human listeners?

That's amazing.

So we see patterns in the algorithm and it's not there.

And so they had to create a fake one.

Yeah.

So it plays if you've got, say, five different genres of music in a normal, completely random pattern.

Occasionally you get clumps or clusters where it would play two or three jazz songs in the same,

you know, consecutively.

And they've had to change it.

So it now completely mixes up the genres.

So yeah, they've had to abandon it.

Or doesn't completely mix up the genres, even spreads them out at proper intervals.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Because people don't believe.

Yeah.

Because people just can't kind of figure out randomness.

Humans can't really, can they?

If you ask everyone in this room to stand randomly somewhere in the room, then they'll all spread out pretty much equally.

Yeah, when actually, in real life, there'd be clumps everywhere.

Yeah, yeah, but don't do that, guys.

It's the gambler's fallacy, isn't it?

It's the thing that makes gamblers think that if there have been 20 reds in a row on a roulette machine, that's good.

The 21st is going to be not a red, and it's just not true.

I think the first instance, the first time it was reported and studied, was in 1913 when a roulette ball fell on black 26 times in a row, and all gamblers are going, come on, it's not possible.

It can't do it again.

Yeah, I also think that's not possible.

That's amazing, isn't it?

One thing they didn't say is that on that roulette wheel there'd been a mistake with the order, the work experience boy who painted them all black.

Eventually they changed it back.

So if you get someone to put a random list of 30 coin flips, say, and I actually flip the coin 30 times and you do a random number like HTHT, whatever, you'll be able to tell which is the man-made one just by looking at it.

And that's because

most, if you do 30, you're likely to get about five in a row which are either heads or tails, but no human would do that.

Yeah, it seems implausible.

Yeah.

So there used to be a machine you could get called an out-guessing machine.

And they had those in America, I think it was in the 50s.

And you would have to choose either left or right.

You would say left, and the machine would have to guess whether you said left or right.

And then you would keep doing it, and eventually it would guess almost every time because humans just go into a pattern.

Yeah.

It's like rock, paper, scissors on the New York Times.

You can play rock, paper, scissors, can't you?

And it's the same thing.

And the game learns as it plays against you what your patterns are.

So the more you play it, the less likely you are to win it because it becomes better at predicting what you're going to do.

Yep.

I love counterintuitive.

That's terrifying.

Yeah.

We can't do that.

It's such a simple game.

Well, remember how chickens could beat you at knots and crosses.

Yeah.

So is everyone, not just me.

So you would be able to get these machines.

They had one at Coney Island in America and they're in other places as well.

And basically in knots and crosses, as long as you don't make any mistakes, no one can beat you.

It's been solved.

The game's been solved.

And so they just taught these chickens to peck into the right places.

So if there was a knot there, they taught it to put a cross in the next place and whatever.

And it became impossible to beat them.

So it became impossible to beat chickens at knots and crosses.

It's so annoying.

It's so annoying.

I can beat a chicken at so much.

Name it.

Chess.

Boggle.

Can I just quickly mention something about Spotify?

Because Spotify is obviously a really, amongst musicians, they hate Spotify because the royalty system that Spotify give is just terrible.

And I think it's actually changed now.

I think money is getting better with royalty payments with Spotify.

But there was this great case I read about a band that decided to beat the Spotify system to make money off them.

They released an album.

This was in March 2014.

It was a funk band called Volfpeck.

And they put up an album called Sleepify.

And Sleepify was a completely silent album.

It was about 10 tracks.

First one was called Zed, second was ZZ.

All silent tracks, and they encouraged people to just stream it on a loop while they were going to sleep so that they would get the numbers of counts.

And they ended up raising $20,000 for their tour.

And the best bit about it was everyone was like, did Spotify actually pay it out to them?

Because Spotify took the album down after a while, saying that you're cheating the system here.

So they released a statement saying they did, in fact, pay us, but the statement they released was an audio track on Spotify.

People who listened.

That's great.

I was just going to talk about improbable maths and probability.

Does that sound fun?

Yes.

Yes.

From the people who brought you my favorite table.

So that was my favorite physical table, my favourite mathematical table.

So, why was they looking at you?

Yeah, because this fact is kind of about things that don't seem like they should be right to the human brain, but they are.

So, the fact that, like, if there are 23 people in a room, what's the probability that two people have the same birthday?

And what is it?

50%.

Yeah, which is really unlikely, right?

You don't think that's going to be the case.

And so, the Monty Hall problem is quite a good example of

like counterintuitive probability.

So in short, it's basically where probably some of you know it.

If

you're given three doors and there's stuff behind each door and there's a goat behind two of the doors and behind the third door there's a car.

Imagine that you want the car, not the goat, which I've always thought was a serious problem with the Monty Hall problem.

How do you do?

I've got the car.

One in three.

And I blew it.

So the Monty Hall problem presumes that you want the car.

And it's that

you pick a door.

I might try this one down.

So you've got three doors, you've picked a door, you haven't opened it, and then I open one of the doors that you didn't pick, and there's a goat behind it.

And I say there's a goat behind this door.

Do you want to switch your choice, or do you want the thing that's behind your original choice of door?

Okay, so the idea is that you switch that high that.

Exactly.

You switch because there's a two-thirds chance that you're going to get that if you switch you'll be right, whereas there's a one-third chance that you'll be right if you don't switch.

And it feels counterintuitive because it really feels like there must be the same probability that my door will be right as there was at the start of the day.

It feels like it should be 50-50, right?

Yeah.

But when this was

popularized, this theory by this woman, Marilyn Savant, who had, I think she had the Guinness World Record for the highest IQ, and bizarrely, she had the name Savant in both of her

mum and her dad's family line, as in know-it-all, Savant.

Yeah, isn't that weird?

So someone wrote into her column saying, Can you tell me which is the right door to pick?

And she wrote the answer saying, You should switch your choice, because there's a two-thirds chance that you'll be right if you switch your choice.

And she got something like 10,000 letters from a thousand of which were from PhD students or people with PhDs saying, you're wrong, you're completely wrong, you're an idiot, how dare you say this?

And she was just inundated with letters saying,

and it's quite a basic thing.

She should have given three addresses.

Anyway, I think, sorry, I think my whole point was pigeons are better than we are at solving that problem.

So they tried the Monty Hall problem on pigeons and they got them to peck a certain door and then each day it was done every month and each day they were told to peck a certain door, and they would learn gradually which was a door.

How do we know whether the pigeons prefer goats or cars?

We need to move on to our final facts.

Come on, very quickly, just on seeing patterns where you shouldn't see them.

So, things like spotting faces, which is called pareedolia, where you see a face in a cloud or a wall.

This goes back centuries, and just a couple of examples of this thing, pareedolia.

In 2012, somebody sold for, I think, $8,000 a chicken nugget shaped like George Washington.

And it's a bit like George Washington, but only because it preys on the ability to see patterns that we're going to be able to do.

Yeah, but there's only so much like George Washington that a chicken nugget can get to me.

It's never going to be a great Commander-in-Chief.

Mean President's very quiet today.

Okay, this is

we do need to move on.

So let's

one very last thing.

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It had a handle, which was a black handle, and it had a little extra bumpy bit, and it looked like his hairstyle, and it just, it's uncanny.

But the company denied knowledge of it, and they wrote a public statement saying, if we had designed it to look like something, we would have gone with a snowman or something fun.

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All right, time to move on to our final fact of the show, and that is Jaczinski.

My fact is that the animal kingdom forgot how to have sex for 40 million years.

So.

Justify that claim, Tushinsky.

The first known creature to have sex was Microbrachius dicchi, which was a nice bit of nominative determinism there.

And that was 385 million years ago.

It was a kind of fish.

It was the first thing to copulate internally.

So before that, people were just leaving eggs and sperm leaving around the ocean.

We've had this problem quite a few times.

People is my catch-all term for all creatures.

Animals undersea, prehistoric fish, were leaving eggs and sperm around, which were just getting fertilized like that.

Microbrachius Dickey did it 385 million years ago and just didn't really catch on.

40 million years, animals decided they were going to stick with the whole egg sperm, leaving them in the water thing.

And then 40 million years later, they went, okay, let's try this whole thing.

He went right after all.

But I've got a theory.

So the way Dickey did it was, is it's like bony protrusions on his side.

So they had sideways sex.

Like

one of the paleontologists who discovered it called it like square dancing sex.

And so the bony protrusions of the male fish locked into the bony holes in the female fish's side.

Can I read Anna

exactly how they did it?

If you know that.

Okay.

So the male had a large L-shaped sexual organ.

Nothing wrong with that.

Which he had to get into position to dock with the female's genital plates, which were very rough, like cheese graters.

They acted like Velcro, locking the male organ into position so he could transfer sperm.

Very familiar, very familiar indeed.

Andy, when you have sex, you should say, this shag is brought to you by the letter L.

So yeah, maybe sideways isn't the way to do it.

And then they started doing it differently, and it got more popular.

That's like,

there's one dinosaur called the Kentrosaurus.

Oh, yeah.

And it's it's very it's it's a dinosaur that we know how it's made of, we know how it looks, and the only thing we can't work out is how it had sex.

They have no idea because every move that would be a normal dinosaur sex move would end up in castration for the dinosaur.

So no matter what position, and I imagine they sat there with toys going, How about this one?

Ah, he's lost his balls again.

And we still don't know, it's a mystery, we have no idea how they had sex.

And it's weird calling it doggy style, because that's what they were saying, when they predate dogs.

Yeah.

I just assume we call it dinosaur style.

Dinosaur style.

Okay, my favorite thing about sexual positions, sorry about this.

But it is funny.

The gold swift moth has lots of different positions for having sex, but they all involve staying completely still so as to avoid being noticed by bats.

Again,

I can't tell you the number of times a bat has ruined an otherwise lovely evening.

Just wait.

Their vision is based on movement.

Sorry, just on a complete tangent, I found out a thing about bats the other day, which is that some

Mexican free-tailed bats, there's a particular species of them, they use their sonar to jam other bats' sonar.

So a bat's going in to bite an insect or to seize some prey, and another bat from the site will deliver this huge blast of sonar, which completely knocks out the other one's systems.

The insect gets away, and this second one has a bigger chance of getting it.

Wow.

How cool is that?

Anyway, sorry.

In 2013, we found the fossil of two bugs.

It's stuck in the oldest copulating fossil we've ever found.

It's 168 million years old, and they were in the missionary position.

So the oldest sexual position we have is actually missionary.

There was one really recent one.

It was two turtles that were fossilized in the Coitus.

This was 47 million years ago when they were caught that way.

And they were having sex near a lake when they were overcome by volcanic gases and they died and then they sunk down, sunk down and turned into fossils.

And one of the researchers said many animals enter a trance-like state when mating or laying eggs, and it's possible these turtles simply did not notice that they were entering poisonous waters before it was too late.

So what a way to go.

I always wondered how that happens, how you can get fossils of animals that are in mid-biting each other or mid-having sex or whatever.

And in the sex one, it seems like they might just be in a trance and they don't notice.

They're just so into it.

Another thing that animals have forgotten how to do is stick insects keep forgetting how to fly.

So stick insects developed wings hundreds of million years ago or hundreds of million years ago, and four times they've lost their wings again and have had to re-evolve their wings.

They keep just like not bothering, isn't that weird?

Yeah, that's cool.

The closest non-human ancestor of ours was called Australopithecus cediba.

And according to the skeletons that we have, what it looks like is about two million years ago,

they evolved how to walk on the ground and then evolved back to go back into the trees again.

Wow.

Yeah.

Wait, hold on, so they came down from the trees.

They came down and they became like a primate that walked on the ground, and then they went back into the trees and then lived back up in the trees for another, you know, 100,000 years.

That's like dinner like the ground.

I read a Douglas Adams book called Last Chance to Sea, and he talks about the

Kakapo in New Zealand.

Kakapo basically was a bird that flew,

and then New Zealand lost all of its land predators, so it just came down to the ground and hung out, and it just spent time on the ground.

It basically eventually lost the ability to fly,

but it didn't know that.

And so there was a big thing where they were going extinct because Kakapos kept climbing trees, just going for a quick fly, and they'd jump off and they would just plummet to the ground.

Then they didn't know.

And they didn't say to each other, maybe we can't do this anymore.

They just kept doing it.

Were they the ones who, I might be wrong about this, but were they the ones who were like quite naive when humans came and they didn't realize that we were just going to kill them, like we do with all animals?

And so they would just walk along, and if a human came up to them, they wouldn't run away.

They'd just sort of stand there and then people would just bonk them on the head and they'd die.

And then they were also quite curious birds, and so the next one would come along going, oh, what happened to Jeff?

And he'd walk around and then just walk up to Jeff and then he'd get bonked on the head.

And then the next one would come and and they just died out.

And then the next one was like, no, fuck that.

Let's fly out of here.

Another thing about them that Douglas Adams said is that they have a mating call, which the male does, which is really boomy and bassy.

And they're just going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

I don't know if that's him.

So the thing is, is that he describes it as like being a sabufa, like a real

in the back of a car.

And the problem with that is that that sound doesn't appear from a location.

It appears all around you.

The bass kind of just appears everywhere.

So the female's going, Where the hell is this guy?

I can never find the male.

And so they ended up not having a lot of sex because the female was.

Come here, where?

Here, where?

Here!

Yeah, that's not good evolving.

Yeah, they've evolved very badly.

Speaking of

a long time ago, things coming down from the trees, Australopithecus,

there is a theory that we developed by pedalism to allow men to show off their larger penises.

Because men,

everyone listening to this has a very large penis.

Everyone, all men.

All men.

All men.

I always wondered what that was.

Compared with all other primates, human penises are large.

So the erect gorilla penis is three centimeters long, the chimpanzee is eight centimetres.

So there is a theory that, I mean, it's not a widely subscribed to theory, that we developed walking upright so men could show off.

Just so you know, we're going to to have to wrap up.

So,

any last comments?

I'll have an odd animal mating weird thing.

So, the green spoon worm, do you know about this guy?

Okay, when a green spoon worm is born, it doesn't have sex, it swims around the sea looking for a roving tongue of a female.

So,

it's an organism, right?

It might be, it's not neither male nor female, and it swims around looking for the tongue of a female.

If it doesn't find it, he becomes female and then has the tongue thing.

And if he does, he becomes male, crawls through the female's mouth into her ovary and becomes a sperm-producing machine.

And he feeds through his skin because his mouth is constantly spewing out sperm.

Whoa!

Jesus.

I mean, I think sperm-producing machine is a valid description of the male of most species, right?

I love that when I was like, we need to wrap up, James is like, no, not yet.

We do need to wrap up.

Okay, go ahead.

I like, so there's a kind of strider bug, or Jesus bug, which is one of those ones that runs along water, which the women don't really like copulating.

Females.

Females.

The female people

don't really like copulating because they are usually fertilized the first time they copulate, and so they only want to do it every couple of months, whereas the men want to do it constantly.

And it's like often a tension in the animal kingdom is that men want to have sex loads to give you their sperm, but women, once they're fertilized, they don't want to have sex.

So anyway, the men or the male strider bugs, as they're sometimes known,

have developed these protrusions on their legs where they can grab a woman's eyeball.

So, he grabs the female's eyeball and clutches, and they're specially designed now, the front legs of this strider bug, to get around the eyeball, pull her to you.

I really caught her eye.

Not quite as romantic anymore, is it?

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thanks so much for listening to the show and being here tonight.

If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said on this episode, you can get us on Twitter.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James.

At egg shapes.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

Anna.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

And if you want to hear any of our previous episodes, you can head to no such thingasafish.com.

There's about 49 episodes up there.

We'll be back again next week with another live episode from Soho Theater.

We'll see you then.

Have a good night.

Goodbye.

Oh, thanks so much, guys.

Thanks for coming.

We're going to be up in the bar now just drinking and hanging out.

So, if you want to do that, if you want to let us, because this is our first one here and we've got five more, let us know if that was shit or if it was fun and

what we can do different.

We can still cancel the other five.

But now we better get out of here.

Thank you very much everyone.

Thank you very much.

Let's be real.

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