Little Fish: It's Nice To Say Titicaca

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0:43James Harkin:Hello and welcome to another episode of Little Fish. This is the bonus Monday episode where we put down our favorite facts from the last seven days and we go through your favorite facts. So we have gone through the inbox, Andy has picked out some of the best, and I am now going to sit here with Anna Tushinsky and James Harkin and go through them. So who wants to start? Go on, Anna.

1:05Dan Schreiber:Well, thank you. I'm going to start with this one from John Cornell. Sorry, I said that with an American accent. I don't know if he's American. That's just because of the university. From John Cornell. Yes, yeah, of course that was better. He might be a Cockney Barrow boy, if we don't know. Exactly. Equally likely. And he said, I love this fact, actually. Just came across this fact about the Hooli people of the Hella province in Papua New Guinea. And it is that the young boys of the Huli tribe aren't considered real men until they've attended wig school. And this is and he says, and made either an ordinary or a ceremonial wig.

1:42Dan Schreiber:And then he specifies I'm not a real man, sadly. And that's okay. No judgment about not making a wig. Are you guys real men? I've never made a wig.

1:51James Harkin:I don't think I've made a wig. You would remember, I think. My parents are hairdressers. I feel like I helped them in a lot of stuff as a kid. I can imagine baby Dan sort of crawling around, picking up all the discarded bits of hair from all the customers. Exactly. And weaving them into a little toupee in the corner. Presenting them to the customers when my parents are looking away and they never come back. And yeah, I'm sure that was a childhood thing. Yeah, I'm sure it was too. Funny old childhood you have.

2:18Dan Schreiber:Actually, in the source that I read, I think you guys might be men because it actually said that the oldest known tradition is where the boys learn the fundamentals of the Hooli tradition, which is how to grow their hair to make into wigs. And actually, I think it's more about how to grow your hair in a wig-like manner.

2:34James Harkin:I see. That's interesting because what would turn your hair into a wig-like shape is constant haircuts so that it grew as part of a shape. You can't make one bit grow longer than the other just by thinking it.

2:45Dan Schreiber:Well, you can, I think, according to maybe the Hooli people. That's the thing, Dan. You're making a judgment based on your own beliefs. And I think these people would say they believe that if you do think it and if you have the wig master who runs the school really think it, he's got the powers to make your hair grow. I would argue actually that Dan was making a judgment based on physiology of human beings rather than his own beliefs. Well, that's just your opinion, James. Physiology of human beings is an existing factual thing. Anyway. Have you actually been away at debate club for the last nine months?

3:16Dan Schreiber:I've been at wig school and I hoped you'd notice I'd been thinking my hair into being longer. There is a group of people in Peru. I think it's the guys on the on the lake on Lake Titicaca but it might not be those guys but anyway to become a man you need to knit a bobble hat that is solid enough that you can carry water in it and once you've done that you go through because these are all rites of passage aren't they yeah yeah wow why do bobble hats have to be so solid around Lake Titicaca well I don't know why they I don't know really I've worn one of those bobble hats the Lake titikaka ones when i went to lake titikaka yeah it's nice to say titikaka i know it's the only reason you raise this fact i think you see but yeah i got one of these hats and they're like just woolen hats with bubbles on the sides but yeah it's just part of the culture that you just have to learn how to do this and until you do it you can't grow up and that there's quite a lot of places that do things like that yeah yeah yeah i think that's funny because bubbles i think when you say bubble hat where would you say the bubble has to be on the top of course yeah yeah no i

4:22James Harkin:agree with that yeah but they believe it's on the side don't mess with their beliefs very insulting okay here is a fact from charles ekman uh sorry charles ekman and it's a bit of a complicated one so we'll see if i can explain it where i might not be able to but charles says there is no such thing as a random number generator because there is no such

4:45Dan Schreiber:thing as a random number i see okay okay so basically he's saying that randomness is not a property that a number can have if you roll a dice and you get a number four you have managed to generate that in a random manner but the number itself is not random the number is just the number four yeah okay so what he's saying then is that you can have a random number generator but not a random number generator. Hold on, what would a random generator be though? Surely anything. The generator is the dice, which generates a random number. So you can have a random number generator. So the number generator is the dice, which gives you the randomness.

5:27But you can't have a random number generator because randomness is not an adjective that you can put next to number in mathematics.

5:35Dan Schreiber:No, no, absolutely. I can see how you can have a random generator as well. And actually you can only use it as an adverb. Maybe you shouldn't be allowed to use random as an adjective at all. You just generate numbers randomly.

5:46James Harkin:Well, if you're a magician, you say pick a random card. That is a generator, the card system of which you're picking, right?

5:51Dan Schreiber:It's a random generator. Yeah. Something that's doing it randomly.

5:55James Harkin:But the numbers will never be the random thing. I'm just trying to work out when you would ever use this email in real life context. And it does feel like it's been used by this person. Yeah, I don't think so, really. I think it's just a bit of pedantic mathematical stuff. Yeah.

6:09Dan Schreiber:I think if the bar is when you're going to use stuff in a real life context, I think our podcast is completely dead. So let's not go down that avenue. The word random used to mean to run somewhere very fast and very ferociously. And then it made, they had lots of different meanings. But in the 16th century, if you're on a ship and you're firing like a cannonball, a random firing would be the way that you fire it to go the furthest. so that would be 45 degrees basically so if it said ever said fire in a random direction and you're on a 16th century vessel you mustn't fire it in any direction you must have fired at exactly 45 degrees this is why time travel is getting such trouble don't they they make very bad naval

6:56James Harkin:officers all right let's get on to another one uh this one comes from moit gray uh from radium hot springs in British Columbia, Canada. Accent does not work. Anyway, Mike Gray says, I am the mayor of radium hot springs in British Columbia. Yeah, and I thought our town might have a little fact for little fish. The village is named after the nearby hot springs, which were renamed in 1915 after scientists discovered trace amounts of radon, a radioactive gas in the water. The levels are completely safe, but it does mean our town is now named after what is technically a mildly radioactive spa.

7:38Dan Schreiber:Yeah, I don't know why they chucked the radium in because Hot Springs is a town that I'd go to. Radium Hot Springs, I'm not taking my clothes off.

7:44James Harkin:This is very cool because we've had Lords write in. I don't think we've ever had any mayors from Canada write in before. This might be our first one. I think it's our first. I think that's really cool. And I think also it's really cool. It's cool enough to be the mayor of somewhere, but to be the mayor of somewhere that has such a cool name. Yeah. Well done. That's a hell of a badge. It is really cool. and I went to their Wikipedia page and they have 1 ,339 residents there as of the 2021 census. We wrote a book called 1339 Facts. Exactly. So if you lived, if you're listening and you're from Radium Hop Springs, you could assign a fact from that book to every single one of the members of your area.

8:21James Harkin:That's very cool. Wouldn't that be cool? And every time a baby's born,

8:24Dan Schreiber:you have to kill an old person.

8:25James Harkin:Yes, it has to be a swap. Yeah, exactly. Pass the facts on. Yeah, yeah.

8:30Dan Schreiber:I have a this Andy sends around the facts that he's curated from the inbox isn't he he sends them to us and he sent this one this is from Gary Randall so he thinks that this is specifically good for you just before you read it out not necessarily for me you'll see why I've dragged Andy into this though so this fact is that Avril is a French name that means April I'm sure you know and Levine is a French surname which actually means the fool because it comes from a name that means someone living near a playhouse or an occupational name for a jester so that's lavine so avril lavine is actually april fool oh that's very good but wait andy i looked into it oh it's not true he's having you on andy's have it's an because it's an april fool in a fact about april fool and andy has yeah lavine doesn't mean the fool.

9:27Dan Schreiber:Levine just means the veen. The fool be lafou. Well, yeah, but I mean, it could have been a ye olde thing, but it's not. Someone's made up a clever trick. So who sent that in? Someone called Gary Randall, who I believe is either Gary Randall's been tricked or Andrew Hunter Murray's been tricked, but let the record show that I haven't been tricked.

9:47James Harkin:Good to have you back. I wonder when it was sent, if it was sent at the beginning of April, as in, I wonder what day it hit the inbox.

9:54Dan Schreiber:I had a look in the inbox and it's not there. So I think Andy might have a secret channel because this isn't in our main inbox. Right. Do you think Andy's done this to trick us? He could be the tricker. Oh my God. Andy is Gary Randall. Is it a nanogram? Wow. It's got and in it. Yeah, it's got Rand. It's got Andy in it. It does. Andy girl. Girl. Andy girl. It's Andy girl. Yeah. Because we know he loves Avril Lavigne. Do we? Yeah. He was a boy. She was a Andy girl. can I make it any more obvious Jesus okay that is very interesting actually great stuff do you remember Andy fell for a April Fool's trick on this very show not on this show on our main show oh yeah which was the elephants inventing the road system in the south of England yes that was good wasn't it what was the claim that they trampled the grass down or something yeah that all of the roads in the south of England are based on old animal tracks made by elephants oh can we lay into andy some more we got about if he was planning to fool us this is very much okay well that was a bad prediction by him if um he did that and here is another fact about a bad prediction uh from matt birch and he has found the worst prediction ever made by scientists and that is that the calculation for the energy density of a vacuum because their prediction exceeded the observed value by about 120 orders of magnitude.

11:27An order of magnitude would be 10 times more, two orders of magnitude, 100 times more. This was 120 orders of magnitude. They got it wrong. And the difference is so big, according to Matt, that if you said the universe contains one atom, you would be about 40 orders of magnitude out with that because there's one to the power of 40.

11:49Dan Schreiber:And this was 120 did you say? Yeah yeah so that's three times worse than you saying there's only one atom in the universe.

11:58Dan Schreiber:Ouch we've all made mistakes come on. I've got another mistake here this is from 1992 from the president of Sri Lanka who was called ran a singer promadasa and he spoke to soothsayers who said that by changing the country's name to sri lanka instead of sri lanka he would improve the country's fortune so he did that and he was assassinated the following year and the former spelling was restored but did the country's fortune improve i mean that's his fault it didn't say anything about improving his fortune that's true that's the thing with these soothsayers yeah they always tell you the truth but you think that they're not telling you the truth yeah you've got to read the small print always yeah well while

12:42James Harkin:we're on uh names of places uh here's an email that we got from david croy who says today i learned that north south carolina is in the center of the state why because it's named after john north put it in the book it says the bit where it says put it in the book was that andy adding a little comment it's different font yeah so um that's weird uh yeah this was named after a guy called john north um who in 1891 was part of the southbound railroad that came through the area he was an assistant on that uh and then um he donated 100 acres to the area and then it got named after him and he also became the very first elected mayor of north south carolina very cool

13:28Dan Schreiber:a very mayor-centric episode we've got today. And actually, I've got a related fact that I got sent from Lucy Frey. Oh, yeah. And this is that in my town, she says, in my town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, there's a pond downtown named Ashley Pond. And it is named after Ashley Pond. As in the surname is Pond? Yeah, her surname is Pond, yeah. But the pond is called Pond. What is Andy doing? Why is he? He's not even here. He's not here. What are we doing? Why did I read my one out that led into your one? Samuel Donaldson of Christchurch, New Zealand writes, One of the few tall buildings still in Christchurch after the earthquake is the Hight Building, named after James Hight.

14:16Officially the Puaka James Hight Building. Puaka B. Maori for the Rigel Star Cluster.

14:22Dan Schreiber:Really good. Okay.

14:23James Harkin:What is he doing? This guy is taking us on a ride. this is this is bullshit check this one out this is from jem condliff this is etymology rather than a fact but i think it's also a brand new fact says jem oh that's nice we always like those yeah you know when you have an amorous moment people might say andy got off with dan's sister what what that's what it says this is andy's weird way of telling you this under the pseudonym so go on what what's the rest of the fact why is he saying that why is andy seeing an email like that and sending that to me okay he says uh why do we say get off with i believe i can explain so jem says i work for a local newspaper and in our archives from a hundred years ago we had paternity cases where a man would have to pay for his illegitimate child's upkeep the court would possibly hear that nine months before the baby's arrival the couple went to a dance in a nearby town riding on a cart chartered for this purpose on the way home beer and lust would take over and said couple would prevail upon the carter to let them off at a secluded spot so the idea to get off with is get off the car yeah and that literally is i mean it's definitely that's that's the connection that gem is making i agree it's not very strong and i think andy only included it so that he could put the image of him making out with my sister into my mind andy you've been seen mate

15:52We've got time for one more, Anna.

15:54Dan Schreiber:One from Martha King. She says, this is the funniest fact she's found out recently. Get ready. Hold on to your britches. In the first two original Thomas the Tank Engine books, the Fat Controller was called the Fat Director. It's not the end of the fact. The reason was that after the first two episodes or the first two editions, the railways were nationalised and the bureaucracy was rejigged and director became controller. so that's why his name was changed from director to controller. He's called Mr Topham Hat now because you're not allowed to say Fat Controller anymore. Yeah. I will say that I preemptively looked this up because I read a lot of Thomas the Tank Engine which, by the way, is so full of weird old railway jargon that it's very hard to read to a young toddler.

16:37Dan Schreiber:But I knew my mum was going to come along and say, isn't it ridiculous you're not allowed to call him that anymore? So I googled it to check and it's not true. What? Yeah, yeah, you're totally allowed to call him that. He just happens to have been called Mr Topham Hat in some American editions, I think, but like modern editions, happily calling the Fat Controller. Is that right? Really? Yeah, there was never a thing. They did a whole bit of that on SNL last week. Well, they're incorrect, I'm afraid. Ah. Who knew that SNL was not a very rigorously researched, academic, fact-based show?

17:06James Harkin:Do you guys remember that we happen to know one of the Sir Topham Hats out there, one of the Fat Controllers? Oh, something's ringing a bell, but I can't remember what it is. So you know when if a kid writes in to somewhere that has a fictional character, sometimes someone is assigned to be the official person and they'll write back or they'll do certain things for them. Yeah, we know a former one, which was Craig Glenday, the current editor-in-chief of the Guinness World Records.

17:31Dan Schreiber:Wait, so what did he do? He wrote in as a kid to Thomas the Tank Engine and said, can I be the Fat Controller? No, no. I misunderstood this. Quite the opposite, in fact. Think about the exact opposite of what you've just said, and that's true. Thomas the Tank Engine wrote to Craig Glenday saying, can I be the Guinness World Records book? Sorry, look, feel free to explain off air. I'm sure the listeners got it. Kids would write to the fact controller and Craig would reply. I see. As I see. That's really cool. That's really cool.