No Such Thing As The Mice Of The Fruit Bowl

10:52Anna Ptaszynski:You're the gummy deer who's eating the gummy snake. It's a nice reversey-persey. Lovely. When was the first self-checkout opened? What year? Quiz time. 1956. The first electronic...

11:03James Harkin:4000 BC.

11:05Dan Schreiber:Guys, a palpable disappointment on Andy's face. 2010.

11:09Anna Ptaszynski:Oh, Adam, you idiot. It's 1986. I was surprised at an electronic self-checkout, which I only really became aware of in about 2010. Where was it? Georgia. Georgia Oh I thought it was a supermarket Ex-Soviet country By the sound of your accent

11:31That's right

11:32Anna Ptaszynski:Stalin's homeland No sorry Georgia and America That is surprising Yeah But The reason they're not good Self-checkouts Is that If you're involved In a transaction It seems to you To go faster And this is a psychological thing Called weight warping Yeah You know If I'm having to hand over the stuff Then if I'm putting through my pot pies and I'm trying to make it beep and it doesn't beep and I do it five times and it's still not beeping I get a little bit annoyed but if someone else is doing that I'm like come on get on with it yes you're right and in fact there's a reason why it's good to use a self-checkout because it goes faster for you yes yes yes sorry yeah yeah very cool but we don't

12:10Dan Schreiber:actually have them because it seems faster for us we have them so that supermarkets don't have to employ any humans that's amazing that's a very cynical way of looking at it I'm dreadfully sorry I would say there's another contender for first self-checkout, which we've actually never talked about before, but we've talked about the inventor. 1956? You're really close. It's 1937. Oh, wow. And it's found by Clarence Saunders. Any of you guys remember him? Invented Piggly Wiggly, which is a supermarket that we talked about. He invented Piggly Wiggly in 1916. So Piggly Wiggly was like the first store where you went in with a trolley and put stuff in your trolley, right?

12:44Dan Schreiber:Yeah, or a basket, the first self-service. So usually you'd meet the member of staff and then you'd say what you wanted and the staff would go and get it for you. And Piggly Wiggly was like, you know what? The people could pick their items themselves.

12:54Anna Ptaszynski:It was an amazing idea.

12:55Dan Schreiber:Incredible idea. And everyone hasted it because it felt to them like they were shoplifting.

12:59Anna Ptaszynski:Oh, I thought that's why people might like it. It's a bit of a treat. A bit of a different... I think at the start, people rebelled against it a little bit and thought this is ridiculous. They did keep forgetting to pay. But do you know what inspired him to create Piggly Wiggly? What? He was looking out of a train one day and he saw some pigs rushing towards a trough. And he thought... Oh, yeah. Wow, what a metaphor. Maybe those pigs could be the people in my shop. I think is the idea. And then this guy went on a few years later and...

13:26Dan Schreiber:Yes, and he made Cadoozle, which some people think stands for or meant key does it all, which makes sense because it was fully automated in that you went into the grocery shop and everything was under these sort of like glass domes and you had your own key. And when you got to the item you wanted, you inserted a key in a slot and the key had a ticker tape on it. and you go around inserting your key into lots of different slots saying I want this object, I want this object and then you took it to the till and you gave it to a person who inserted your ticker tape into a machine which then could see all the things you'd said you wanted and then the machine automatically went and picked up your groceries and slid it down a conveyor belt towards you.

14:07Dan Schreiber:It was fantastic. Did he get this idea from seeing a lot of pigs using a vending machine? He did, yeah. And much like the pigs using a vending machine, It didn't work very well.

14:17James Harkin:He's an amazing innovator. He was just missing one person, really, in his life, and that's someone who could think of a decent name. That's clearly...

14:25Dan Schreiber:Do you think that was the problem?

14:26James Harkin:Piggly Wiggly. What's the other? Condoozle Loozie. Condoozle. Condoozle.

14:30Dan Schreiber:I think the problem was that everyone got the wrong stuff all the time because he didn't quite perfect it, which is annoying in a shop. So, Coathangers. Yeah. Who invented them? Someone you've heard of.

14:42James Harkin:George Coathanger. Ben Franklin someone famous Ben Franklin is about as close as you're going to get Thomas Jefferson correct no according to the Paris Museum of Fashion he invented them although according to the Monticello website which was his home there's no evidence that he invented them at all but for sure we invented coat hangers sometime in the 18th century but they didn't catch on and it wasn't until the 1850s that they became popular thanks to friend of the podcast the burgeoning

15:15Anna Ptaszynski:middle class we've got to get them on the next friend of the podcast t-shirt yeah and the disappearance of domestic servants so it meant that people were buying more clothes and they had to put them somewhere and they didn't have someone to iron them um then the wire coat hanger was invented by someone called albert j parkhouse in 1903 and he was working in a wire company they made like novelty wires it said but the company didn't have enough coat hooks for people to put their coats on and so he took a discarded piece of wire from the machinery and turned it into the shape of someone's shoulders and said we could do this uh but according to his granddaughter who's called barbara muscle he didn't make any money from it because the company took the patent uh sold a gazillion wire coat handlers and he never made a penny right he was muscled muscled out yeah as the name of his granddaughter's husband presumably came at that wedding he must have heard the name of that guy and thought, oh my god!

16:16James Harkin:This puts my whole life into perspective!

16:22Do you miss the muscle?

16:25Anna Ptaszynski:He's busy polishing the altar. I think some inventions are so good that you shouldn't be able to patent them. As in, if we had to pay a quarter of a penny to the guy who invented the coat hanger every time we bought one. I mean, technically you do. That's how capitalism works. Well, I don't pay anything for my co-hangers. I get them free from the dry cleaner. Stop stealing them! I get mine free from hotels, but it's really annoying because they don't have the hook bit on the top. You've got to take the whole wardrobe with you. It's a complete pain in the arse.

17:01James Harkin:Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Anna.

17:04Dan Schreiber:My fact this week is that the latest winner of the Nobel Prize in literature wrote a novel in 2024 that was one sentence long. that's short yeah that's all you need to do to get it just write a sentence no it was actually a really long sentence it was 400 pages long more than 400 pages yeah this is a guy called lazlo krasna hawkeye he's hungarian um i haven't read anything of him my brother's read a couple says he is a challenge i've read a few pages of one of his books this week oh yeah and it's dense it's hard even just looking at it it's like blocks of text and the one that I read which is called Satan's Tango does have quite a lot of sentences in it but they are all very long that's actually the one I think my brother likes it's objectively good

17:49James Harkin:the ideas seem good, I picked one up this morning there's one called Hushed 07769 and it opens with him, the character writing a letter to the Chancellor Angela Merkel because he's convinced the Big Bang is going to be reversed

18:01Dan Schreiber:so this is the one that's the one long sentence and apparently the opening, if that was what you read it starts, hope is a mistake and I think this might be That's a sentence. I believe it then goes on. I don't think there's a full stop at the end. I think it's hope is a mistake and. Blah, blah, blah. He just uses the word and a lot.

18:19Anna Ptaszynski:Also, semicolons cover a multitude of sins.

18:21Dan Schreiber:They do, although I don't know how many semicolons he's using and he says it's because he wants to mimic human speech.

18:26Anna Ptaszynski:Which I think is a very good and interesting point. People don't speak in short declarative sentences. Usually they pause, they deliberate, their words flow. You see, I'm doing it now. And he composes it all in his head, and then he only writes it down when he's ready, which I think is crazy. What? That must be so hard. I don't think the whole novel, but I guess the feeling of it. He has something in common with the man who invented Piggly Wiggly.

18:54Dan Schreiber:Okay. Okay. He was inspired for his first novel by a load of pigs in a field. Yes.

18:59Anna Ptaszynski:No. Yes. Really? Wow. Oh, my God. So he had a load of jobs. He grew up in Hungary, Cold War Hungary. And he had a load of different jobs. He was a miner for a while. We were all a miner for a while. Why don't I walk into these stupid jokes? Stupid jokes. That's the spirit. Thanks for the encouragement.

19:27Anna Ptaszynski:And then he was a night watchman for a herd of cows briefly. And then he got to do this. I mean, that's not a job. No farmers asked him to do that. Farmer comes in, yeah, they've been asleep all night. Okay, look, Abbott, it's no podcaster, but it was with the work that was going in Soviet Hungary. Fair enough. And then he got a job working on a farm, holding piglets in place to be castrated. Oh, gosh. And he just said this was a horrible job. They would have been wiggly piglets. They would have been wiggly piglets. And he realized he sympathized very deeply with these piglets, these poor piglets, which are being, you know, losing their knackers.

20:04Anna Ptaszynski:And he said he wanted to write about the world in a deep way as a result of that job.

20:08James Harkin:Wow. Yeah. We get to read him because of his translators, right? And he's had a few. But the most recent one is this lady called Otalee Mulsett. But she seems to be just his general translator. Because Anna, the article that you sent to us, which was a New Yorker article that had his story, all of his answers were translated by her. So even his interviews are translated by Otalee. And she says sometimes it can take up to three years to translate. Because you're translating a single sentence. You need to make it work. And it's really dense and it's really hard.

20:37Anna Ptaszynski:But surely not an interview for the New Yorker where they've got to go to press at the end of the week, actually. Honestly, give me three years.

20:44James Harkin:Honestly, the interview is like as long as one of his books and as intense. One of the opening questions, the interviewer talks about his Nobel Prize speech. And he says, you thanked your brother, your older brother, for lifting you on his shoulders when you were children because he taught you that there could be another way of looking at the world. What did you see up there? and he said at first nothing my older brother got angry at me because up there on his shoulders something frequently happened in my little trousers it was not so pleasant for my brother he would shake me in his anger and then i couldn't see too much of the world uh now that we're both very old i asked how awful it was for him he says i still feel it the urine is trickling down his neck i think we're talking about uh a hardened state oh are we because i thought you're in at

21:30Dan Schreiber:first oh are you sure it's not urine wow i've got to see my shrink

21:38James Harkin:i'll just book that you guys keep talking i'll just

21:43James Harkin:it's happened again don't worry we edit the show it's fine i'm sure james will help me out tomorrow's good my mom's fine yeah no she's great looking hot as ever okay see you soon

21:56Anna Ptaszynski:Sorry guys When you said he thanked his brother for lifting him up on his shoulders So he could see the world I assumed of course that was a metaphor But then if you say and I pissed on his shoulders Or worse while I was up there No it actually is lifting me up on his shoulders So I could Because you know what I've been standing on the shoulders of giants I assumed for years that that was a metaphor No it's not I literally got piggybacks from everyone in the scientific establishment Anyway long sentences

22:24Dan Schreiber:they're not gimmicks what I quite like is all the record holders for long sentences aren't like silly gimmicky people they're great writers like Faulkner held the record for a long time he got the Guinness World Record in 1983 James Joyce did a lot of long sentences he did but not as long as Faulkner's in Absalom Absalom I tell you what

22:41Anna Ptaszynski:he nearly got a long sentence after the you know obscenity trial and so on under which Ulysses was banned in the early 20s good one

22:48Dan Schreiber:tough to google long sentences isn't it when you're doing research because you get a lot of penal stuff not that kind

23:01Dan Schreiber:Anyway, Faulkner, 1 ,288 words. That was the longest sentence in literature in Absalom, Absalom, which I haven't actually read. But just thinking of postmodern literary techniques, one of my favorite books is his Sound and the Fury, where he wanted it to be printed in lots of different colors. Have you guys ever read it? No. It's incredible, but it's quite unclear who's narrating it sometimes. there's like a tangle of narrations and he wanted said George if only he thought of that I don't want to give too many tips to the greats but sometimes no I wish he was still alive to hear to your suggestion he wanted all the different people to have the font in different colors and finally they couldn't afford the publishing cost at the time but they released a special edition a few years ago which I now own of William Faulkner Sound and the Fury and all the different colors of the rainbow.

23:50Anna Ptaszynski:And does it assist the reading experience? I guess it makes it clearer.

23:53Dan Schreiber:Yes, it does.

23:54Anna Ptaszynski:Wow. Sentences are getting shorter. Are they? Yeah. Just in that little conversation, or more generally. So this is in New York Times bestsellers. There was a great piece in The Economist, analysing sentence length between 100 years ago and now. And sentences have lost one third of their weight, their heft. They've gone from about 22 words on average to 15. And Victorian sentences were thumpingly long. You read a Victorian novel, the sentences are just longer. There's more being expressed in each individual. It's Hemingway, isn't it? What did it? Yes. And Orwell. Bloody Hemingway. Wasn't it true?

24:33Like, have we said this before, that Hemingway supposedly lost one of his transcripts, but needed to deliver it like two weeks later, and so had to rewrite the thing, and then thought, oh my God, I'm not going to be able to write it the way it was. I'm just going to write really short sentences because it's easier.

24:47Anna Ptaszynski:I can't remember any of the adjectives or adverbs I use, so I'm just going to strip all of those out. It's just the man hunted the fish. And then I'll do those later. He sent that off to his publishers and like, I'm going to send the adjectives in a second package in case they get lost. I feel like that's at least a story that's told about him. I have heard that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

25:08Dan Schreiber:But yes, they have. Although I wonder about other languages because all these studies are always done about the English language. And it's very hard to research other languages. All I could find is speculation that French, actually, the sentences haven't really got shorter. And actually, in literature, they're getting longer, some people were saying. But it's hard to work it out.

25:26James Harkin:The Nobel Prize for Literature, there's a fantastic list, obviously, on Wikipedia where you can see every winner. And there's a photo with every winner as well. And that is so worth looking at because the first, like, six or seven people, all of them somehow look like a dog that's been shampooed and blow dried. Their hair is just, it's marvelous. Yeah, highly recommend going to look at it. Were you not looking at the winner of Crufts on Wikipedia? I did have that tab open at the same time. I'll go back and look. The early days, Sully Prathom is the first winner. I personally have never heard of Sully.

26:01I only know them as the first winner of the Nobel Prize literature.

26:04James Harkin:And there was a lot of controversy, as far as I can tell. There was a lot of newspapers saying, where's Tolstoy at the time, and why did this guy get it? And I think the prizes have always had that. But then we do have big names that you would recognize. There's Samuel Beckett, of course. Waiting for Godot was his big play, but he wrote novels as well. And one of them was called How It Is. It has no punctuation. And the entire story is a guy just trawling through mud, trying to just get somewhere and remembering his old life. Sounds awesome. Sounds fantastic.

26:35Anna Ptaszynski:I do think sometimes, would it kill them to give it to a mystery or a thriller writer? You know, just someone who's done a really good crime reveal. Stephen King. where's his yeah like where's where's the nobel you know for where's the agatha christie nobel for literature like that was a cracking plot where actually it was his brother all along yeah but he's he thought he was lost at sea but actually he was found in a mine you know they can win other prizes but this is for high literature right 2017 i reckon you'll like

27:04James Harkin:andy it was ishiguru kazuwa ishiguru and he wrote what was his book the remains of the incredible book right wonderful book so he he did win it um do you know what he did before he got into books shigero yeah pig farmer i don't remember disentangling coat hangers um he was a grouse beater for the queen mother at pal morrow now for american listeners we should say

27:28Anna Ptaszynski:no grouse hurt well actually lots of grouse get hurt really badly but not with not through the beating well that's that's the start of it so you're you're scaring them to fly up in the air and then they get shot. And then they get shot. And then they get shot. But you're beating the, whatever it is. The bush. The bush. Beating the bush. You're beating about the bush. You're beating the undergrowth that they're in to scare them up. To scare them up. Sorry, Kazuma Ishiguro was a grouse beater. For the queen mother.

27:53Dan Schreiber:Yeah, that makes me re-evaluate Kazuma Ishiguro, I have to say. Why? I don't know. I didn't know who was from that kind of stock. I don't think you have to be. Is the grouse beater usually one of the royal family?

28:03Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah, it's usually the Earl of Argyle or something. It's not.

28:07Dan Schreiber:Do you not think you'd be quite posh to be beating the cream mother's grouse?

28:12Anna Ptaszynski:So layered and innuendo What are we really talking about? Speaking of the history of some Nobel Prize winners Gabriel Garcia Marquez Who wrote 100 Years of Solitude As well as many other things But that's the main one Do you know what his favourite song was? Mambo No. 5 It's correct What? But not that version 100 % yeah oh yes and Anna's right the Lou Bega or the original it was the original the Paris Prada one but wait that's only because Marquez probably didn't live to hear the Lou Bega version which is infinitely superior or no the Bob the Builder version the height well did you know that where it goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 it actually goes all the way up to 100 and then years of solitude so when he in his memoir he wrote about when he was a young man he lived in a brothel in Barranquilla and that's when he learned to write and he would dance the night away and he keeps saying that his favourite song is Man Bomb No.

29:215 by Perez Prado

29:24Anna Ptaszynski:if you lived in a brothel you probably would have a little bit of Monica in your life, a little bit of Jessica by your side

29:37okay it is time for fact number three and that is james okay my fact this week is that zebras

29:43Anna Ptaszynski:don't get ulcers but zebrafish might mouth ulcers or stomach we're talking stomach ulcers but i'm gonna roll back on this all quite quickly okay okay so this is about a paper that i read from the journal Brain Behaviour Evolution by Bianca Fusani and Rui F. Oliveira. And their title refers to a book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky. And he says that animals don't get chronic stress because if you're a deer being attacked by a cheetah, you get really, really stressed for a few seconds. But then afterwards, you kind of forget about it. Right. And then you might get stressed again and then you forget about it.

30:28Anna Ptaszynski:But you don't worry. you know the nusyb was lying awake at night thinking exactly whereas humans when we make a very very minor faux pas we lie in bed at night thinking oh my god what did i do or when we know we've got something coming up we worry about it and that's a chronic stress which people used to think caused ulcers and now we know it doesn't cause ulcers but does um exacerbate them and so the paper was actually about zebrafish and whether zebrafish do get chronic stress and they are arguing that they do and they use this whole zebras don't get ulcers because it's a famous book they use that as the title of their and is it right is it like a self-help book is it saying well look zebras don't get stressed exactly there's no reason for you to be more zebra

31:13James Harkin:zebrafish are amazing by the way they sure are they are known as the mice of water because basically scientists are able to do so much testing on them because they've got 70 genetic genetic similarity to humans. So we have used them in so many different ways in order to learn about ourselves in the way that we use mice. That's pretty amazing.

31:34Dan Schreiber:You know, when people say that, we know that we've got 60 % genetic similarity to bananas, right? Yeah. So when people are like, oh, they're 70%. But they're known as the mice of the fruit bowl. That's true. But no, they're kind of not just genetically, their kind of body is built quite similar to us. So the heart is quite similar. Their brains are quite similar. Yeah. And for the outside, they don't look that similar but on the inside much smaller and also they're really useful because they lay transparent eggs and they have transparent larvae right which seems to be quite a key thing so it means that researchers don't need to get x-ray vision to watch what's happening inside them when they test them so they'll give them an infection and you can just use a telescope a telescope or a microscope that's where the eggs are they always send them to the moon actually to

32:19James Harkin:do the studies well you say it's just in the larvae but this is one of the extraordinary things about the zebrafish we have genetically modified the fish to create a new fish which is called the casper fish the casper fish i guess like the friendly ghost it's see-through so they've basically mutated two different genes so that as they get into adulthood they stay transparent yeah so you can see their heart working yeah exactly um is it a camouflage thing for the eggs to be

32:44Anna Ptaszynski:transparent i think i read that that it's it's useful so that other fish can't see your eggs as easily and eat them.

32:53Dan Schreiber:Makes sense. You're invisible, aren't you? Yeah.

32:55James Harkin:Oh God, that makes it even worse then that we've created out of zebrafish another new type of fish, the glowfish. Have you seen the glowfish? No. Okay, so basically scientists were taking green phosphorescent protein out of things like jellyfish and they were putting it into zebrafish. And what it meant was if you turn out the lights, they glow, right? And this has changed everything if any of them go back into the wild for the fact that they can't hide anymore because they're literally a beacon of light in the ocean. I can't believe they put them back in the water. That seems mad. You shouldn't do that.

33:27James Harkin:I think they wouldn't, but they do put them in fish tanks because they sell them commercially. So if you happen to have another fish that was a bit predatorial, even in the fish tank, it's got no chance of hiding.

33:35Anna Ptaszynski:They can't even hide in the little castle or the skull. I also think if you have two fish and one of them is a predator of the other, probably keep them in two bowls. Yeah. Yeah. If you've got a lionfish and you've got a zebrafish, it will end very poorly. It's all good.

33:53James Harkin:But a lot of people don't do their research. It's mad that this exists, I think. I don't think it harms the fish itself, but you can get them in starfish red, moonrise pink, sunburst orange. There's a whole... Yeah, it's Frankenstein-y, isn't it? It's very, yeah, it's very odd.

34:07Dan Schreiber:I definitely know people who've had aquarium fish where they get a bunch of aquarium fish and one fish eats all the others. I think that might be quite a common mistake that fish buyers get. So yes, do your research. It's a common mistake

34:16Anna Ptaszynski:that fish sellers sound like they're making. yes it's not a mistake for them they get to sell five more fish when the other ones get eaten it's a racket um so zebrafish whether they get stressed or not when they're attacked and they get stressed for that reason they will swim into a nice warm area of water and this is really interesting it's basically they call it an emotional fever so your body can metabolize things better when you're warmer and that's why when you are sick you get a fever because your body heats up and a lot of the mechanisms that will help you get better work better but what they do because they can't increase their own temperature they'll swim to a warmer bit of water which heats up their entire body and then can speed up like the tissues being repaired and stuff like that that's amazing isn't that cool so they make their own fever when they're stressed

35:05Dan Schreiber:wow that's why you should weigh in the bath if you're ill yes you'll get better faster Or if your child is feeling sick, just sit another child on top of their head and allow them to wee on them. They test antidepressants on them. So they do get depressed. And this is because zebrafish get depressed. Yes. And you can tell if a fish is depressed because it swims lower down in its tank. And that's literally the way. So you can tell if an antidepressant is working that you've tried on it because it suddenly starts swimming high up in the tank. and do you know how they get them depressed in the first place?

35:42Anna Ptaszynski:Is it reading the works of Lajlo Kresler? It is, yeah.

35:50Dan Schreiber:It's more basic than that. They get them drunk and then they let them have a hangover. They feed them alcohol for a few weeks and then they cut off their supply and then they get really depressed.

35:59James Harkin:That's amazing. You know they've been flying to space since the 70s?

36:03Dan Schreiber:On their own?

36:04James Harkin:Mm-hmm. Nope. With astronauts. The mice of space. The mice of space. They kind of are. They kind of are, Andy. Yeah. Yeah. Because in 2024, four zebrafish were up in space. That was one of the most, there might have been one mission since, but this is the most notable one recently because they survived 43 days. The longest any fish has ever survived in space. They went through a huge selection process. So these four were whittled down from 200 candidates and managed to get up there. Wow. They don't live long. so for them 43 days is about four years in space oh wow so that's how we see the change in what's going on with them so they're very useful but then this is a bit shocking they don't bring them back

36:45Anna Ptaszynski:they just pop them in uh sort of not out of the airlock well they put a pop them in some kind of

36:50James Harkin:container and they just let it burn up on entry back into earth yeah at the very least stick them

36:55Anna Ptaszynski:in a saucepan which you hang out of the spaceship what so that they float away so you'll have a

37:00Dan Schreiber:delicious fish supper by the time you get you land oh nice sorry right and these things are about three centimeters in length yeah but they're better than mice in space in theory because

37:12James Harkin:they don't have solid poos that go rolling around everywhere or floating around everywhere and they don't have gas uh that escapes the fishbowl so apparently they're just a better some kind of

37:20Anna Ptaszynski:poo though what yeah yeah why would mice sorry are you saying mice farts uh problems in space

37:28James Harkin:big problem if you're not read all the news recently what's happening the ISS is floating further and further away even if they did have solid poos yeah they're living in water right the poos are going to be in the water they're not going to disappear around the yes i think that's yeah yeah and you figured the mice would be in a container as well that wouldn't escape so what's going on nasa a lot of a lot of questions a lot of questions I actually had an insanely stressful moment Just before coming into the office today I was getting on the tube And there was a 70 year old man on a wheelchair How did you know how old he was?

38:07James Harkin:It was his birthday He had a balloon He had a badge

38:15James Harkin:And he got off the tube The doors closed but the balloon was stuck inside And he just flew Down the Oh, it was worse for me than him, I've got to tell you. I can't deal with that. No, he was in a wheelchair. He looked roughly 70 years old. And we came up to the escalator. And I went down. I thought, oh, there's a lift over there. But he thinks it might be here. And then I was watching him. And he turned around.

38:40Anna Ptaszynski:Oh, crumbs.

38:41James Harkin:And he went backwards down the escalator. It was amazing. Yeah, he put two hands on each of the sides. Yeah, I've seen that. Yeah. And I was watching the big wheel. And it looked like it was teetering over the edge. And the stress was actually less, are you going to hurt yourself? Because I assume he knew what he was doing. But if he did fall, I was in his path. You'd be like Indiana Jones.

39:01Dan Schreiber:Is that a scene in Indiana Jones? With a giant ball coming chasing him. But it would be an exactly 70-year-old man.

39:11James Harkin:Oh, it was horrible. I mean, stress is a fascinating feeling because you get over it. By the time I was off the escalator, it was gone.

39:18Dan Schreiber:I can't believe you've crowbarred that anecdote. Why? It just happened to me. It's so relevant.

39:24James Harkin:A life experience just before we talk about stress? I'm not going to bring it up.

39:28Dan Schreiber:I can't believe you were stressed by that. And also your takeaway is stress just disappears, doesn't it? Straight away. I think I'm saying it doesn't. Well, that was Dan's equivalent of being chased by a lion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you've treated stress like we're supposed to rather than holding on to it. I've got a question. Did you, when you got that sort of stress hormone in your body, did you do the fight or the flight? Because that's what happens, right? You know, that's the idea. Did you punch him in the face? That's the idea invented by a guy called Walter Cannon. Sounds so much like water cannon.

40:02Brilliant. Just with an extra L. But now, these days, we've gone from the two Fs to the six Fs. So you can have fight, flight, freeze, fawn, fine, or faint. It sounds like you had fine. Fine. As in it was fine. It was fine. It was fine.

40:20Anna Ptaszynski:I had fine. So fawn as in bowing and scraping and apologising. Yeah, so, yeah, exactly. It's like when you're in a stressful situation, rather than running or fighting, you try and almost calm things down. You apologise. And friend the person. That's my method.

40:36Dan Schreiber:And then feign is like you pretend you're okay, presumably. But what's fine? Faint, it was. Oh, faint. With an E or an A? With an A. So it's like you just collapse as if almost go into... Well, people do do that. If you're in very stressful situations, you might just go completely catatonic and not respond to it. But these feel like really not useful. Like fight or flight is a useful thing if you've got a lion attacking you. But is it useful to collapse? Yeah, because you play dead, right? You're playing dead, I suppose. And fine is just ignoring the problem, which there are definitely adaptive reasons for that.

41:11I can imagine.

41:12Dan Schreiber:We have the most amazing way of measuring stress levels now. So as we've said, raised cortisol is stress. I could find out from James how stressed you've been at different times of the year over the past year. Okay, how? Can you do it on me now? I need some equipment and I need to be a scientist.

41:31Anna Ptaszynski:I'm not bending over for that.

41:33Dan Schreiber:Come on.

41:34Anna Ptaszynski:Is it a part of James that it's been left in?

41:37Dan Schreiber:Yes. And you can actually tell much better on me. You could tell a much longer period of time on me. Oh, is it my breast milk? you're not producing much these days are you i'm very stressed so i suppose i'll kill this guessing game quickly i have longer hair than you guys cortisol goes into our hair the way now that scientists study stress levels and what causes human stress is they look at their hair and the cortisol levels and you can see it's a bit like ice cores are used to tell kleiner over time and you can see about a period of six of 12 months and so you know they've studied for instance the fact that people's stress levels peak in winter, we know.

42:19Dan Schreiber:And if they take hair from people who live in nice equatorial countries, there's not nearly as much cortisol in the winter segment of their hair, which was growing in winter, compared to in Norway, for instance, where there's much more stress.

42:32Anna Ptaszynski:And that's like how lots of tropical trees don't actually have very strong rings in the middle.

42:36Dan Schreiber:It's just like that.

42:37Anna Ptaszynski:Because they've got the same climate all year round.

42:39Dan Schreiber:These people are the tropical trees of the human world. That is crazy. Isn't that so cool? So yeah, I could just pluck a hair from your head and tell you that three months ago you were really stressed about something. It was probably my hair transplant. But that's a good point. This isn't working out. Some dickhead keeps plucking my hairs out. Does it go into all your hairs? No, just one. No, but if they... It takes ages to find out. I was thinking about other parts of the body.

43:11Anna Ptaszynski:I'm thinking because I don't know if they used your ass hair for the thing. Well, have a look. What do you think? It's very luxurious. And now have a look at this. You did bend over. Okay,

43:32James Harkin:it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the world record holder of most bug tattoos is terrified of bugs.

43:42Anna Ptaszynski:That's so silly.

43:43James Harkin:Yeah.

43:44Anna Ptaszynski:Why has he done that?

43:45James Harkin:He's just trying to increase his stress levels. Yeah, exactly. He's got 864 insects tattooed on his body. Not all bugs, by the way. So when they were doing the Guinness World Records count, they had to discount a bunch because they were... Arachnids? Arachnids, yeah. There were millipedes on there. They don't count. so uh it's it's a it's come on that's what it is i think a bug has to have like sucking mechanism or something like there's quite a lot of things that you would think are bugs and not bugs like if you ask erica mccallister for instance yeah right right so he could have creepy crawlies as a

44:19Anna Ptaszynski:or mini beast mini beast is a cute phrase they use okay so he's got even more of those but he's got

44:26James Harkin:864 864 insect tattoos on his body's name's michael amoya and he's quite a famous guy actually He appears on a lot of, he's big on YouTube and so on.

44:36Anna Ptaszynski:It is a bit of a trend, isn't it? Getting the most Tattoo X variety on you. So there's a guy who's got the most Marvel comic book hero tattoos. Oh, yeah. And it starts with one and then it just snowballs from there. Yes. So this guy's got 63 superheroes all over him. He's called Tom Radford, lives in Hull. And he says, I've endured pain in places very few will understand for tattoos no one will ever see, all for the sake of this record. Oh. Yeah. But his head and neck and hands are completely uncovered. Can you guess why? Yes. Head and neck and hands. He doesn't have any. He doesn't have a head or neck or hands.

45:16That was going to be my guess. He didn't have the head and he thought, well, there's no point having a neck. Does he work in a place where he can cover up the rest of his body quite easily, but can't cover his hands and neck.

45:30Anna Ptaszynski:What kind of place would that be? Strip club.

45:33James Harkin:No, strip club is the one place it wouldn't be because strip clubs you literally are showing the rest of your body. He's a bouncer.

45:43Does he do like sign language for children's TV shows? That's brilliant, Kaz.

45:50Anna Ptaszynski:And it doesn't want to be confusing. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's that he's promised his mother he wouldn't.

45:56Dan Schreiber:Oh. Okay, well, we were never going to guess that.

45:58James Harkin:why weren't you gonna guess two more guesses i would have got there yeah sweet yeah that's cool

46:03Dan Schreiber:um the most tattooed woman in britain or such she certainly was a few years ago becky holt um i just find it really interesting that her first tattoo was her boyfriend's name and it was on her crotch i just think that's such an interesting place to get your first tattoo usually your first tattoo would be arm arm you know belly on my fanny it's just like it's like Like this girl's going on to bigger things tattoo wise. What if her boyfriend was called Fanny, which is like short for Francis, like Fanny Lee. So she could write Fanny down there and then future boyfriends wouldn't know it was an ex-boyfriend.

46:39They'd be like, oh, you're just labelling your bunny pads. That's what it was. Yeah.

46:46Anna Ptaszynski:That's actually a really funny record to break is the most parts of your body clearly labelled with what they are in tattoo form. Head, shoulders, knees, toes you start with, then Fanny. Because that's the second verse of the song

47:04Anna Ptaszynski:I started looking up excuses for tattoos Mainly Nazi tattoos Because there are a lot of times where people You've become obsessed man Get tattoos And then they go on to a position of prominence Like podcaster Like podcaster Okay here's one Yeah, go on. I thought it was a Hindu symbol of peace. Ding, ding, ding. This year, the Barnsley counsellor for Reform UK, who was accused of having a swastika tattoo, his wife explained it was due to a brief interest in Buddhism as a young man. That makes, okay. Tick. All right. Here's another one. I'll give you the tattoo. Okay, okay, okay. Swastikas on Japanese maps means a temple.

47:48So someone tattooed an entire Japanese map like an Ordnance Survey map.

47:52Anna Ptaszynski:and then said, my body is a temple. Specifically this bit with a swastika.

47:57James Harkin:Someone's tattooed an early Rudyard Kipling book cover onto them because he had swastikas all over them. Youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature as well, by the way. Lovely throwback there.

48:08Anna Ptaszynski:Couldn't leave that on the table.

48:09James Harkin:Yeah, is it that? I wanted to tattoo the words, my struggle, on my forehead, but my tattoo artist was German and I wrote Mein Kampf instead.

48:20Anna Ptaszynski:I'm gonna give you the tattoo and you have to give me a great excuse for it. Okay. There's a German Big Brother contestant some years ago who was done for having an SS symbol tattooed on his arm. What was his excuse? Bear in mind that's also illegal in Germany, of course.

48:35James Harkin:And you mean, so it's the font really with the SS that we're talking about? Everyone used to call him a silly sausage.

48:45James Harkin:Which is what SS actually meant, didn't it? Hitler's silly sausages.

48:51Anna Ptaszynski:The elite silly sausages, yeah. It was the sound that his favourite snake made. It's as bad an excuse as this. Think of the font. What else is written in that font? Kiss. Kiss. He claimed that he was a fan of the band Kiss, but had only got the second half of the band name tattooed on him.

49:11James Harkin:He could only afford two letters and he went for that? That's so good.

49:14Dan Schreiber:He needs to get a best friend who's got the K-I. Quickly, get your best friend to get the K-I on.

49:20Anna Ptaszynski:I'll just give you the last one there was a Lee Mack fronted sky history reality series about woodwork called The Chop it was a very short lived series one of the reasons for which was that one of the contestants turned out to have a tattoo on his face saying 88 and that is a number often used by neo-nazis because H is the 8th letter of the alphabet HH Heil Hitler is the thing he explained when challenged that this tattoo was simply because his father had died in 1988 at which point it turned out his father was alive and well

49:53James Harkin:told the daily mail i'm here aren't i wow there's an interesting new tattoo that people are getting so every bit of content that goes up on spotify gives a little barcode and it's meant to be for just you know the actual playlists yeah exactly so you could get your favorite episode of no such thing as a fish find the barcode have that tattooed on you and then if you if you do it's just an option is all i'm saying but this is happening listen to this this is amazing because people are talking about having done it mary haley has the perfect party trick a barcode like tattoo of nearly two dozen fine lines that when scanned with a spotify music app prompts a phone to play mambo number five by lou bagel that was one stunning spotify have said listen great idea very cool but if the song gets taken down and re-uploaded the code is changed and that's a defunct barcode and a lot of people are also saying that when you get a bit older after a couple of years and the tattoo slightly loses a bit of its edge someone stands there and just ends up buying a tin of beans or something yes um the u.s navy in the early 1900s when certain people were coming and trying to join they were required to get more tattoos before they joined it's a little riddle but i'll just give the answer straight away no no no no no we have to guess so what use would be a tattoo for someone in the navy

51:17Dan Schreiber:because they did have an anchor that's not useful you wouldn't need that maybe it could show who's on your side identify mark if you're washed up that's a good one

51:31James Harkin:and it's possible that maybe there was areas where they did ask you to do that this very specific case was you were fixing things

51:40Anna Ptaszynski:sailors in the navy have to learn how to do a lot of knots. And you learn how to do them by diagrams, don't you? This is how to do a triple chank, calf hitch, whatever. So they're getting drawings of the knots tattooed on them, right? Yeah. Not right. What do you get at the sea? Zebrafish. So they were tattooing zebrafish onto their arms but if you scan them, it's a code for their favourite Spotify. That's number number five. And that's the international distress call. That's what you know. If you hear it, you know that someone's in serious trouble.

52:19James Harkin:The answer is that, and these are all great answers, by the way, but the one in this case is that a lot of sailors who were joining in the early 1900s had tattoos that were seen as indecent. They had naked women all over them. And so they would either be dismissed and not allowed, or you had to go back and have clothes tattooed onto the women.

52:37Dan Schreiber:Yes, because I read an interview with a tattoo artist from the 1920s, And it's interesting how things go in and out of fashion. It was in the New Yorker and it was saying how fashionable and classy tattoos suddenly were. And this amazing tattoo artist was saying, I have to put a lot of clothes on mermaids for sailors who are about to go into the Navy and aren't allowed to talk to them anymore. I went on to GuinnessWorldRecords.com and searched for ironic because this world record holder for most bug tattoos is terrified of bugs. so the world record for sticking matchsticks up your nose is held by scott consal uh who worked in er that was his job before beating the record and he says over time your nostrils stretch so you can insert more matches into each side if you wait a few minutes i want to personally say i don't think you should shove anything up your nose yeah um the first album by westlife produced five number one hits in the uk official singles chart which is a record ironically the album peaked at number two wow wow that's a pretty ironic richly ironic why didn't that get in the song the uh grand midway hotel in windbar pennsylvania has the world's largest ouija board it's now located on the third floor of the hotel, which is ironic because the inventor of the original Ouija board, William Fold, died after falling from a third-story building.

54:08And when are you sending these lyrics

54:09James Harkin:to Alanis Morissette for the rewrite?

54:18James Harkin:Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found online. I'm on at Schreiberland on Instagram. James? My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin. Andy? Mine is at Andrew Hunter M. Yep. And if you want to get to us as a group, Anna?

54:36Dan Schreiber:You can email podcast.qi.com or on Instagram go to no such thing.

54:40James Harkin:That's right. Podcast at qi.com. That is the main place to go. Send us your mail because if you send us your favorite facts, every Monday we put down our facts and we read out the best of yours. And if you also want to give us general feedback, Andy cherry picks the best and brings those emails to drop us a line. The bonus behind the scenes show that we make, which is part of Clubfish, which is a really cool club that we've set up. It's on Patreon, patreon.com slash clubfish. If you want to check it out, there's multiple different things, multiple tiers. So give it a go, check it out. Otherwise, do come back next week.

55:12James Harkin:We're going to be back with another episode. Thank you as ever to Leigh-Anne Lee, Ethan Ruperalia, as well as the larger Fishbuster team for all their work. And we will see you again next week. Goodbye. Thank you.