No Such Thing As Uncle Egg

11:05Dan Schreiber:can't believe that I think the Quakers need to sue them they just made up the name Quaker because it sounds really ironically honest and full of integrity they didn't make up the name sorry they didn't invent the word Quaker apparently one of them read a encyclopedia article on Quakers and thought Oh, they sound great. I'm going to call my cereal after them.

11:24Anna Ptaszynski:You wouldn't do it these days, I think. No? Just pick a religion.

11:31Scientologist flakes.

11:34James Harkin:There was a company called Early Bird who got sued because they named one of their products Hall & Oates. H-A-U-L-I-N. That's good. And they got sued by Hall & Oates, the band. Daryl Hall. Yeah. I think that's reasonable. I do think that's reasonable. I think that's fair enough because they've obviously taken their name. Yeah?

11:50Anna Ptaszynski:Rolled Oates. Oh, yeah. And steel cut oats. Any prefs? If I was to see them both on the shelf, and I wanted to get some very special oats, because Andy's coming around to stay over, and I know that he loves his oats, and I want to get him something special, I would go for the rolled oats, because I feel like it's more done by a caveman with a big stone and rolled it over to make it work. Well, actually, steel cut are the least processed. They've just been sliced around a bit. The rolled ones have been steamed a bit, I think, and rolled into a flake. So if you want to go with classic, the hardest possible one to cook, you want steel cut oats, which is what I use.

12:30Anna Ptaszynski:Oats are very good for one medical condition and you have to get into a big bath full of oats to cure it.

12:36Dan Schreiber:Oh, I know because we had it recently.

12:38Anna Ptaszynski:Go on.

12:39Dan Schreiber:Chicken pox.

12:40Anna Ptaszynski:Oh, no. Oh, well. There are two conditions that can be cured by oats. I was talking about sunburn. Really? Must be the same kind of soothing skin thing. Apparently you make a nice cool bath. Yeah. Drop a load of oats in it, and then you get in. So you basically are the porridge.

12:56James Harkin:Interesting.

12:56Anna Ptaszynski:That's pretty cool. You're like the little blob of jam. You're the blob of jam, for sure. That's it. You're not the oats, yeah. That's really interesting. Do you know that in Scotland, they would make oatmeal poultices for minor boils? So what you would do is you would get the oatmeal, and you would put some butter in it, and you would boil it up, and then you would cool it, and then you would put it against your boils. and if the boils were really difficult then you would use urine instead of butter oh no i think it's fine i think actually it's not that bad doctor i think it's fine i think i think i'll have the oats please and they're also good apparently for curing your own warts and what you had to do was take 81 stems of oats bind them into nine bundles of nine and hide them under a stone and as the stems rotted your warts would disappear did people just have a lot more warts and boils back in the day.

13:50I feel like, yeah, because we hadn't cured them all by doing this oats thing. Yeah.

13:54Anna Ptaszynski:I just feel like there are many more boil cures that are older than...

13:58Dan Schreiber:Yeah, you're right. Yeah.

13:59Anna Ptaszynski:Has anyone here ever had a boil?

14:01James Harkin:Yeah.

14:02Dan Schreiber:Oh, really?

14:03James Harkin:I think I had one on tour with all of us on the top of my butt, remember? Was that the one where you came round to my room and poured oats into my back?

14:14Yeah, I've had warts on my feet. Yeah, same. When I was a child. As a kid, you get warts, don't you?

14:20Anna Ptaszynski:Not sure I've ever had a wart. Really? Yeah. Okay, podcast.qi.com if you want to give Andy warts.

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15:05Dan Schreiber:Stop the podcast. Hi everyone. We'd like to let you know that this week we are sponsored by Saley. Yes, Saley is the app that you can download, which allows you to use the internet on your phone wherever you are on this earth. That's right. Quite often, like when I've been abroad before, I thought, oh, I'll just use my own data plan. It'll be fine. And I've come home and the bill has been a little bit on the extortionate side of expensive. So the last time I went abroad, which was to China, I decided I wasn't going to do it this time. I was going to go to Saley. I was going to get myself an eSIM.

15:39and honestly, it was so easy. It was so reasonably priced. It was so convenient. It always works wherever I went. I highly recommend personally to use Haley if you're abroad.

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16:30James Harkin:Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that the world's first electric, internet-connected SUV car, which was designed to help you easily locate parking spots and petrol stations, was Chinese and called the wrong way. Very, very beautiful.

16:49Anna Ptaszynski:Beautiful. So, I've just been to China, and I got a car to pick us up from the airport, and it was on an app. And when we arrived there, I looked at the app, and it said to look out for wrong way. and I thought it was like a joke name that the driver had given himself or something. So I Googled it and it turns out that Rover, the car manufacturer, I think went bust in the UK. But then a Chinese company bought the technology, but not the name. And they made a new name that was kind of a transliterated version of Rover. It's Ro-e-we. But if you pronounce it in pinyon, then you say it wrong way. It sounds almost exactly the same as wrong way in English.

17:30Wrong way.

17:32James Harkin:So just further context on the name thing My Chinese name, which I grew up with in Hong Kong Is Xie Bo Xie Bo is Schreiber Xie and Bo But it doesn't really work because it's Uncle Egg When you put those two words together You? Yeah, my Chinese name is Uncle Egg That's kind of cute Yeah, so that always just caused embarrassment You should shave your head I think you could definitely pull off an Uncle Egg

17:59Dan Schreiber:And your beard Because eggs aren't hairy on the bottom, are they? It could be like an egg coming out of the chicken.

18:04James Harkin:Oh, I could be an emerging egg. That's lovely.

18:07Anna Ptaszynski:That is nice. Stick a little feather on your face and some bird poo on the other side.

18:13James Harkin:And what's really useful about pinyin is you would use the alphabet that we use in English. But Mandarin has four tones as well. And so if you say a word, often if you just had p-i-n-g, ping, you wouldn't know if it's ping, ping, ping, ping. So that's what it gives you. on top of each word it gives you the guidance of the uh the arrow as it were i think what's interesting with that is like because chinese is like non-alphabetic they're always approximate i think yeah that's fair to say that's why you get sort of like a word which is uncle leg but actually yeah you can translate those two syllables to something which doesn't say uncle leg it might say disgusting pervert i was gonna say excellent podcaster but yeah i mean yeah yeah Well, there are four tones.

18:56James Harkin:And that's why satire in China is actually really good and really subtle, because you are able to make fun of political characters via the use of pinyin and Chinese characters, because of the multiple meanings. And when the government arrests you, do they get to say,

19:11Anna Ptaszynski:I don't like your tone, young man. Yeah, that's good. Can I check your fact, James? Yeah. You said this was the world's first electric internet-connected SUV car. According to their website. So why are you using it to locate petrol stations? Ah, well Where do you wash your car? Good point I pay the local kids A fiver That's a good point actually I do go to petrol stations to buy food Flowers for your wife? Flowers for my wife It's all the best stuff there, isn't it? Screen wash Ginsters pasties I also go there to wash my car And often there are charging points in petrol stations But that's a very good point It was just me being flippant really

19:53Dan Schreiber:I think we shouldn't be calling them petrol stations You should call them Y flower stations Or something We can't let petrol keep having dominance It might be an interesting reason

20:03James Harkin:That something that is going on in China With electric cars Which is replaceable batteries As opposed to charging your existing battery

20:10Anna Ptaszynski:You just drive over the marks And then the machine does the rest And it's especially useful for big heavy trucks Where obviously putting in a load of electricity Even at very fast rates Would take a while but a battery swap three minutes that's how the first electric cars were someone would come take out your battery and put a new one it and the reason was it was kind of based on old stagecoaches and stuff where you would take your horses and you would swap your horses over and so it's just the obvious thing to do whereas now we plug the horses in but also like they're gonna get rid of mobile phone integrated batteries aren't they that was in the news last week yeah in the eu at least i think they're gonna make it so whenever you buy a new phone the battery has to be replaceable you You don't just have to get rid of it as soon as the battery goes.

20:54Oh, that's quite good.

20:54Dan Schreiber:That's much better. That's quite good. Yeah. They are the world leaders, aren't they, in electric cars now, China? 65 % of electric cars are sold by China, partly because they had massive subsidies. So they have ended up with these electric car graveyards because electric car tech has come on so fast. So, you know, in the early 2010s, I think there was huge investment in the subsidies. Hundreds of companies start making them. And then the year later, everyone says, well I don't want an electric car that can only drive 20 miles because there's a new one that can drive 50 and so there are these giant car parks with thousands of cars in them Wow So they made last year 31 million cars in China How many do you think Britain made?

21:36I'll say 1 million I'm backing Britain Yeah well you slightly overestimated it 700 ,000 And Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey made more than us last year as well as the Czech Republic and the big hitters like Germany, India and Japan.

21:54Anna Ptaszynski:Right. But China's journey to this is so recent, isn't it? It's fascinating. And it's not entirely because of, but a hugely influential person behind it was a guy called Wang Gang. So he's China's Minister of Science and Tech. And he got that job in 2007. But he had been a teenager in the Cultural Revolution, really horrible time for all concerned, went through that. And then after it ended, after Mao died, he went to university, studied internal combustion engines, worked at Audi. And China bought a load of Audis for, you know, if you get a top government job, you get a really nice government car, which would have been a Western car like an Audi at the time.

22:34Anna Ptaszynski:And he noticed every time he went home, wow, we're using more and more oil in China. And oh, yeah, the pollution is getting worse and worse. Wonder if there's anything we could do to change that. And just pitched it to the then minister. and then last year they sold about 8 million electric cars plus 5 million hybrids. They've just completely overtaken the rest of the world.

22:56Dan Schreiber:China is also world leader in car carriers or ROROs. I think that's for a boat, isn't it? RORO your boat. RORO your boats. RORO stands for roll on, roll off and they are car carrying boats so they are more convenient than LOLOs which are lift-on lift-offs for boats carrying any kind of cargo that doesn't have wheels because you drive cars on and off them. Yeah, you get row-row ferries, don't you? Yes, exactly. And China's about to build the world's biggest one, which is going to carry, any guesses on how many cars?

23:30Anna Ptaszynski:That would be a lot. 10 ,000?

23:34Dan Schreiber:That's a good guess, actually. That's a lot. 12 ,800. You're kidding. Pretty good, right? That's a lot. Can I ask one more question just on this? China has just built a new snooker building where you can go and play snooker. How many snooker tables do you reckon there are in this building? Oh, no. No, I heard this on TV this week.

23:54Anna Ptaszynski:Because China is the other centre of world snooker apart from Sheffield, right? It's like Sheffield and China. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

23:59James Harkin:Okay, I'm going to go big as an opening. I'm going to say 100 ,000.

24:06Okay.

24:06Anna Ptaszynski:One for every 50 ,000 checkers boards that's currently in existence.

24:11Dan Schreiber:I'm going to bring it back to reality and say a thousand is exactly the right answer it's all very nice

24:19James Harkin:1 ,000 sneak tables in the same room it doesn't sound as much now that I dropped my bomb on that it's your guess that sorry well it's just because 12 ,800 is far more than I thought could fit into I left a 20p on one of these tables

24:37Anna Ptaszynski:to show I was at once can i just can you finish that are you finishing that i haven't finished on row rows but also

24:46Dan Schreiber:the stevedores which is cool because you rarely get to use that word um stevedores being people who pack and unpack ships dozens will work on a ship at once they have a huge car park for the cars that need to get on the ship let's say 40 stevedores jump in 40 cars zoom really really fast because they've got to get 13 000 cars on this ship drive up the ramp one after the other pin them down and then they will jump on a minibus get back there and then speed the other

25:10James Harkin:cars up it's so cool that's really that's the way but i recently got the ferry from dover to calais and it was a very different experience there were no stevedores as far as i can see when we came back into dover we got stuck for an hour because i had to reverse out and say sorry the ship's not long enough to reach the port they do this trip every day it's not long enough we had to we had to repark it in a different parking spot that's amazing wild um the whole scale of this stuff

25:36Anna Ptaszynski:in china is just nuts isn't it so we have just had the beijing motor show which has pretty much overtaken any other motor show in the world you know it used to be detroit or whatever okay it's now beijing so in one of the halls of the beijing motor show recently um one of the halls had more electric cars like models than are for sale in the whole usa and there were 17 halls at the beijing Motor Show.

25:59James Harkin:Everything's just huge in China. In China, this was my memory of it, apparently it's still the case, seatbelts are really hated by Chinese drivers and they often don't do it, but they get in a lot of trouble if they get pulled over by the police. So one way around it was this company started releasing t-shirts that were white t-shirts with a seatbelt pattern over the shirts and that became a massive craze and police had to pull over more people than usual to see if it was the shirt or an actual seatbelt. And the problem is, most cars these days have the noise that goes off the alarm if you've not got your seatbelt on so there was a big craze of sort of uh blingified seatbelt buckles without the strap on it that you put in to confuse the car into thinking that the seatbelt was in but you would get like pokemon versions or you would get snoopy or winnie the pooh yeah because that is annoying when you have a bag and you put it on the passenger seat and then your car for the next five hours says yeah you're not wearing the seatbelt Yeah.

26:53Dan Schreiber:Or a baby. Same thing. The key is to just do the seatbelt up behind you. Right. Problem solved. My grandmother used to just hold it across her. She just wouldn't plug it in. She would just pull it out and then hold it across her. Because she was a generation that were against it on principle, right? Well, there was like a theory, wasn't there? Like if you're in a crash, you don't want to wear a seatbelt because you want to be flung away from the wreckage.

27:18Anna Ptaszynski:Carl's just crashed. I want to be as far away from it as possible. in 1907 there was a peking to paris race which was a big deal for cars in china at the time but the chinese suspected that all the races were spies because they were mostly europeans who had come over and some of these cars they had like the mud guards on the car they were especially arranged so you could take them off and you could use them as planks whenever you needed to drive over a swamp oh cool um and in kazan in russia because it had to go through russia um two youths fled in terror when they saw the car because they'd never seen one before and in nizhny novgorod one of the cars frightened the horse and the locals started throwing stones at the drivers because they were like oh you come over here frightening our horses uh the winner was a guy called prince scipione borghese and he was so far ahead of all the other cars he was 17 days ahead at one point that he attended four days of celebration in Moscow halfway through the race and he still won by a week that's really funny the first

28:24Dan Schreiber:sort of car was in China oh yeah yeah made in China 1680s car number one what no hang on

28:32Anna Ptaszynski:come on

28:33Dan Schreiber:car number one 1680s car number two 1890s or something but yeah this was made by a Flemish Jesuit missionary so it was a nice merging of east and west back then a guy called Ferdinand Verbiest. It was Qing dynasty and he invented a car which was steam-powered with coal powering it, which is pretty amazing. Sorry, 1680? Correct. Didn't even really have steam-powered stuff then.

28:55James Harkin:Who would have been Andy alive to experience this? Oh, what a good question.

29:02Anna Ptaszynski:Well, not Oliver or Richard Cromwell, sadly, of course. This Verbiest guy, did he drive, run, travel?

29:10Dan Schreiber:I see what you're doing because of the name. yeah he was the verbiest guy yeah it was very good um the only problem with that's not the worst joke you'll hear to though

29:24Dan Schreiber:uh he it was 65 centimeters long and it was actually a toy for the emperor oh come on but it still works you could certainly you could squeeze into that if you're desperate you can squeeze into a 65 centimeter how fast would it it's just a run around and it's good for parking yeah it didn't say how fast it went but it could go for an hour before it needed more coal. Amazing. And he's interesting because he's the only Westerner ever to have received an honorary name after death in China. So if you've done something impressive in China, the emperor would give you a name after you died. And the emperor really liked him because he did other cool stuff.

29:56Dan Schreiber:And so he was called Qin Min, which means diligent and clever. Very nice.

30:02Anna Ptaszynski:Can I tell you one of my other Chinese electric car heroes? Wang Quanfu. So he's the head of BYD.

30:09James Harkin:Oh, and they're the biggies. There's one other, but

30:11Anna Ptaszynski:Again, they used to make batteries for mobile phones, and then they got via that into bigger batteries and then thought, you know what, cars. He once showed investors, he was at a meeting with Warren Buffett, who was at Berkshire Hathaway, his huge investment firm. BYD, in their very early days, were trying to get investment from Warren Buffett. And at an investor meeting, Wang Tranfu once showed investors how clean and safe his batteries were by drinking from a glass of battery fluid in front of him. What? He said, look, this stuff is great.

30:46Dan Schreiber:Wait, but I don't need it to be drinkable.

30:48Anna Ptaszynski:I know, I know. Yes, it's unclear what point he was making, actually. Is it not highly acidic, battery fluid? I guess his stuff was not.

30:57Dan Schreiber:Right. He didn't drop down dead as part of the PR stunt.

30:59Anna Ptaszynski:Oh, sorry, I forgot to say, he dropped down dead as part of the PR. But he got the deal. Yeah, that was very impressive.

31:11James Harkin:Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the reason a World War II bomb whistled as it fell from the sky is because it had a big whistle on it. Is this a specific bomb we're talking about, or is it all the bombs? It wouldn't have been every single bomb, absolutely, that's right. But these are German bombs, and the idea was it was an intimidation tactic. Like the Blitz ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it would have been those. because a lot of the memories of people during the Blitz talk about the whistling sound of the bomb as it came down. And the Germans decided that they wanted to use this as a tactic.

31:49James Harkin:So they literally attached a whistle-like device to the fins of the bomb so that as it came down, it created that sound.

31:57Dan Schreiber:Whereas when we now go, we think, oh, that's just the sound of a bomb. But actually it's not, it's the sound of a whistle. I actually think it's the sound of something falling. Like in my head, it's like Wally Coyote makes that sound, right? when he's falling. So I just thought it was... Actually, I never really thought about it. And if I did think about it, I would know it was wrong. But I kind of just thought, oh, things that fall just go like that. But that will have come from the bottoms, right? Because the sound is getting deeper, yeah?

32:22Anna Ptaszynski:But as we know from the Doppler effect, if there's a police siren driving past you or something, it will get higher as it approached you and then deeper as it went further away again. It's because movies have tricked us.

32:34James Harkin:Yeah. The whistle that you hear in the movies is the perspective of the pilot, not the person on the ground we should do i've started doing that since i read

32:44Dan Schreiber:since i read since i like read read this and was like oh yeah of course you know with kids when you feed them you go as an airplane what i've started doing

32:55James Harkin:as it descends into his mouth it's interesting because it was used as a sort of intimidation tactic i read an account by a guy called harold troughton who in 1941 he was he was a young boy and he remembers being in his kitchen and he hears the noise of the bomb coming down. And so they immediately jumped under the table because many tables had cages underneath them as a bomb protection device. Turns out it was the neighbor's kettle whistling and that's how sensitive everyone was at the time specifically to that sound. There was loads of it around in the war.

33:24Anna Ptaszynski:Bombs? Loads of bombs. Yeah. No, loads of noise being used to a certain extent psychologically. Throughout all of history. All of history. Yeah, you're right. So the Stuka plane, which is the Junkers 87, JU-87, they had little fan-like whistling devices put on because they were dive bombing planes. So the idea is you dive down as close as possible to the target, release the bombs when you're really close so they land accurately and then you fly off again. But they were fitted with special devices which made them scream. And it was a very terrifying sound to hear, the scream of this Stuka plane.

33:57Anna Ptaszynski:But it did slow them down a bit by about 15 miles an hour. So they took them off eventually because it makes them easier to shoot down. Well, do you remember the Night Witches who we've mentioned before? The Soviet female pilots. And they were in really old rickety planes because they gave them the wooden planes. But they couldn't go very high. But they were very noisy because they were old. And they used sound because it would just disrupt people's sleep. You were on edge all the time. Or also you would have to use anti-aircraft stuff in the middle of the night so no one could get any sleep. So it's kind of a psychological thing in that way that you disrupt.

34:32I think it's called harassing fire, it's known as. Which is where you deliberately do something just to harass people and not necessarily to bomb them.

34:40Dan Schreiber:Well, the famous example in the Second World War that our grandparents always used to talk about was the doodlebugs, wasn't it? The doodlebug was basically a German drone, essentially. Is that the V1? Yes, the V1. Which it would be fired and it was sort of like powered by a poof, poof, poof, poof, sort of jet as it went through the air. and it was programmed to stop at a certain point and the famous thing about the doodlebug, which everyone always remembers, is that when its engine was programmed to cut out, that was when it plummets out of the air. So you hear that poof, poof, poof and then a sudden silence which actually a friend of mine in the village, Laurie, is in his early 90s and he still remembers whenever you heard that silence, you know you probably don't have time to save yourself at that point.

35:20Well, he must be very happy to live next door to someone with a young child. Never any silence.

35:27Anna Ptaszynski:The V2, which was the successor rocket, you don't have that psychological nightmare of hearing it and then cut out because it's going so fast that you don't hear it. You just hear a big bang. Right. If you hear the big bang, you know you haven't been killed by it.

35:41Dan Schreiber:That's a good point. Relief.

35:43Anna Ptaszynski:I mean, they're both bad. But not as bad as the big bang theory. No. If you hear that, you know. Oh, no.

35:53Dan Schreiber:You long for silence. Here's an interesting whistling bomb. In 1965, the Attack Squadron 25, the American Squadron, toilet bombed Vietnam. So they wanted to mark the fact that they dropped six million pounds of ordnance on the country and they did it by taking an old toilet, taking it up on the plane and then dropping it out. And because of the holes in the toilet or something, it just whistled all the way down. Right. And that's to commemorate how much they've dropped on... It's just like soldiers, you know. Soldiers being soldiers. Soldiers being soldiers, yeah. But actually, previously in the Korean War, there was a kitchen sink bomb that was dropped on Korea because someone had said, we've dropped everything on them except the kitchen sink.

36:39And so they deliberately just got a kitchen sink and dropped it down as well.

36:43Anna Ptaszynski:Gosh, you've got to make your own fun, haven't you, in war? It gets your sense of humour changes a bit, doesn't it?

36:48Dan Schreiber:Yeah. I like this real nonchalance in an article I read from Time magazine in 1940 because it's September 1940 this was written, so middle of the Battle of Britain. And it said, last week while screaming bombs were falling on London, C. Martin Wilbur, curator at Chicago's Museum of Natural History, caught attention to the exhibit of Chinese whistling arrows and used the Blitz as a way to segue into ancient Chinese whistling arrows. But these were the precursor. So these were arrows that were hollow on the inside. And so they whistled as they flew and they were to frighten people. And the Manchu emperor used them to scare people off the streets when he was walking through.

37:28Dan Schreiber:So they couldn't harm people, the ones that he used.

37:31James Harkin:How interesting. Genghis Khan used those as well. That was a biggie. Yeah, and that was more so used as an intimidation tactic prior to a siege. So if the noise and the confusion, it'd scare horses. If you had all these arrows and this noise coming, so it would cause chaos amongst the enemy and then you make your strike. That was kind of like one of the earliest things in war, wasn't it? to scare the horses. That's why you would use, you're scaring the opponents as well. But scaring the horses was a really big deal. And then people started using elephants in warfare and noise is really good against elephants because elephants are like really weirdly skittish about loud noises.

38:08Yeah, they really are. Perhaps I too am an elephant. So they get annoyed. Don't show us that party trick again, Andy. They have very sensitive hearing elephants. So Alexander the Great learned that a good thing to do when battling against people who had elephants was to get a load of pigs and trumpets, make the pigs squeal and blow the trumpets, and then the elephants would run away.

38:33Dan Schreiber:I know, you know, if you're one of his cavalrymen and he's, do you want a pig or a trumpet to carry on your horse? When he's run out of trumpets, you've drawn the short straw, haven't you?

38:42Anna Ptaszynski:But if everyone's going hungry, you can't eat the trumpet. Good point. So it's a mixed blessing. That's true. Is that just because elephants have got really big ears that their hearing is so good? I think some of the hearing goes through their feet as well, doesn't it? I think they just don't like vibrations. Yeah. I don't know, because they don't like bees either, do they? Because of the buzzing of the bees. Yeah, they hate bees. Not the stings, the buzz. And mice. Is that true? No, it's cartoons. Yeah, but we're dealing with whistling bombs falling. I did find TVTropes.com, which advised me on the whistling bombs thing.

39:15Anna Ptaszynski:Oh, yeah. So please remember If you should ever find yourself In an area often bombarded From the sky That not all projectiles Make such a sound If you are informed Something deadly may land nearby You should duck or take cover Even if you don't hear the whistle I think if you're taking your advice If you're in a bombardment situation And you're reading You're on TVTropes.com Well look I could I tried to speak to the boffins At fun.com I think these days It's like the buzz of a drone Isn't it? Yes Yes yes

39:44James Harkin:Yes, we do get to hear a close example of a whistling bomb in London these days. When would you have heard that? On nights of celebration, on bonfire night, fireworks. The whistling sound, it's a manufactured sound that's attached to it. And so like all these things, like the toilet has a hole in it, it has holes. It's not even by holes. It's a chemical mix that's called whistle mix. And whistle mix, yeah, potassium benzoate is used. I'm going to start a tribute act of Little Mix called Whistle Mix. We just play very high-pitched.

40:21Anna Ptaszynski:For dogs. That's insane. Yeah. And is it the fireworks? It's because they're going further away. It's because they're going away. They're doing the right thing. They're doing the right way around. They're making lots of physics. Thanks, fireworks. My favourite bomb disposal person, as we're on bombs. Have you heard of Peter Gurney? He was this massive hero of bomb disposal. and obviously people who do bomb disposal are unbelievably brave. Yeah. Particularly when you're dealing with bombs that, for example, have been planted, whether it's a car bomb, like a Second World War bomb or a bomb that's been fired and then not gone off.

40:56Anna Ptaszynski:They're all kind of made in a factory, right? So you know roughly how to do them. People have known how to defuse particular bombs. Can I just say, Andy, I actually think the people who defuse those are quite brave as well. Okay, well, yeah, I guess. That's true. but the really brave people no when you if it's like an IRA bomb or something which has just been made by an enthusiastic amateur what's that TV show where that woman goes around diffusing bombs oh I don't know no it's a real TV show

41:31Anna Ptaszynski:so Peter Gurney did this he diffused thousands of bombs over his career in Berlin and Egypt and Libya but he just had to walk towards them you know knowing nothing about the structure and then like seeing what was there and because they have tricks on them. So what would he use?

41:46James Harkin:Intuition? Well, like how could you possibly use any logic for an unlogical thing?

41:50Anna Ptaszynski:Lots of experience or like if one part of it is removed, then that'll trigger another bit and you have to work it out. So he would often use medical scalpels, a ball of string, garden secateurs and fish hooks. And then this moment happened in 1991 in February. Some shells were fired at 10 Downing Street and one and more in the middle of town. One landed in the garden of 10 Downing Street. Hugely dangerous. He has to walk towards it, but the buildings around there are really tall, so he has no radio signal. Is this Statue era? John Major, it would have been. So he has to straddle this bomb, right?

42:24Anna Ptaszynski:And what he's armed with is a twig and a spanner that he's borrowed from the Prime Minister's boiler, okay? Why doesn't he bring his equipment? I guess, I don't know why he didn't have it with him, but it was an immediate, urgent thing. he didn't have time to go and get it. It's just landed in 10th Street. I bet that happens to him all the time. Oh, Christ. Another. Prime Minister, have you got any secateurs? No, but I've got this spatter from my boiler. And my lucky twig. So he was sitting astride the bomb. And this is from his obituary. By the way, he died last year, age 93. He survives this.

43:00Anna Ptaszynski:He was conscious of an intense heat through his fire-resistant trousers. as he so he's remembered to put his fire resistant trousers on I don't know why he doesn't have his kit Prime Minister do you have any clothing that I can use? I do have these fire resistant trousers but as he put it in his autobiography braver men walk away he suddenly realised that if he didn't do something quickly he would never again sing anything other than soprano so he has to hop off the bomb scoop up some snow from a nearby snowdrift because it's February shove it down his trousers than get back on the bomb. And he manages it.

43:37Anna Ptaszynski:He defuses it. Wow. Incredible. And like I say, he lived to the age of 93 and he died last year. Bravo. Peter Gurney.

43:43Dan Schreiber:I can't believe he needed to be straddling it rather than just next to it. Because that's... I mean, he'll refuse that excuse with me in this. That was also John Major's excuse with Edwina Curry.

43:58James Harkin:Well, I've got one other old ancient whistling noise to intimidate. It's the Aztec death whistle. Have you heard of that? Yeah. Yeah. So in the 1990s, they were doing some excavations in New Mexico when they found this boy who was in a temple underground, dead, holding.

44:16Dan Schreiber:A long time ago, right?

44:17Anna Ptaszynski:A long time ago. A long time ago, dead. So expected. We're too late.

44:25James Harkin:Not the surprising bit. Okay. So he was holding in one of his hands this object that no one had really seen before. And it was called the Aztec Death Whistle from then on. And you would blow into it and it would make a noise that sounded like a wind. Everyone thought maybe it was used for rituals when wind wasn't available. And they're not sure whether or not there's lots of theories but might've been used in the war field to intimidate people. And so I happen to know someone who owns a modern death whistle, Aztec Death Whistle. And so I reached out to them to give us a sample. So this is a friend of the podcast.

44:59James Harkin:So here we go.

45:04Anna Ptaszynski:Bit of death whistle there for you by Rhys Darby.

45:08James Harkin:Yeah, so thank you, Rhys. But knowing Rhys, that could have been just him screaming. I do have questions if that was just him. But I've read about those death whistles, and I think we might have done it on QI, or we might have thought about doing it on QI, that probably the modern ones are bigger, and they're deliberately made to make screaming noises, and the original ones, like you say, are more windy-based. More wind-based. Yeah, I think that's... And some people are trying to push that they were used on the battlefield. But again, we've got so little info about it, but it was found in this temple.

45:41James Harkin:But that scream is very realistic. Sounds like a woman wailing. Yeah. I mean, it sounded like Rhys Darby wailing. I'll check with him.

45:51Dan Schreiber:Sounds like Rhys Darby wailing after he sat on a hot bomb.

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47:01Anna Ptaszynski:okay it is time for our final fact of the show that is andy my fact is flatworms sometimes grow heads at both ends by mistake how do we know they're doing it by mistake yeah would you do it on purpose for a party trick yeah yeah they do they normally grow them the right way around and occasionally things go wrong. So that's why we think it's by mistake. Okay. Yeah, scientists haven't done the requisite interviews to find out if this is just like a fun thing for them. So, right, flatworms, right? These are, for anyone who's not familiar, these are just, I mean, as they sound, they're flatworms.

47:40Anna Ptaszynski:They're not your fancy, posh, ringed worms. They're not even related to earthworms, really, are they? No. Like things that you get in your garden. These are completely different. These are just useless little flatworms. What? Oh, no. Oh, disagree. We've got a disagreement of opinion about them.

47:56Dan Schreiber:They're only flat at the edges, like toasties, like those jackals. That's what they remind me of.

48:01Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they're very ancient life forms, obviously. And there are loads of different species of them. Some of them breed by just separating themselves in two. These are the ones that if you cut the head off, they grow another head. Or if you cut it in two, it becomes two worms. Or if you cut off a tiny bit, it grows a whole new worm from that. so imagine if i right now grew a head in like roughly where my stomach is yeah and then everything above that head grows a new pair of legs from there does the head look exactly the same as yours or does it look like a brother or i think it's a cloning thing so there's a new andy's head in the middle of my stomach yeah and then from above that i just grow new legs and hips and everything and then that andy has my legs already why has it got the same name i would Give it a different name Because that's going to get confusing Even if it's Andy too That's better than Andy

48:50James Harkin:Okay yeah sorry So Andy too gets my old legs Right Does Andy one and Andy too Communicate with each other? Do they We're not close We're not friends But yeah we're colleagues

49:00Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah I mean that's as close As you get to a friend Isn't it really? Look I know I know you grew out of my body I just don't think We're quite there yet So that's That's how the flatworms do it

49:14Dan Schreiber:Wait I didn't understand that explanation even though it was really good so you're saying grows up your tummy and then he he keeps your original legs but some new legs grow higher up your body old andy me i grow new legs

49:28Anna Ptaszynski:and he gets my legs and he grows a new head right lucky him because you have very long legs where you keep a lot of your height it certainly is i've got a real job growing another pair of

49:39Dan Schreiber:legs as long and listen as those but no one said listen but okay and sometimes these flatworms get

49:48Anna Ptaszynski:it wrong right oh dear they will they will grow a second head this is quite confusing they grow a second head halfway up them facing the right way but then at the bottom of the top half so my old andy right me i accidentally grow another head after separating off so i andy i'm now ahead at

50:05James Harkin:this end and head at the other end as well is your new bottom head yeah is that facing upside down or the right way are you like the king of clubs yeah yes uh-huh yes right facing the wrong

50:17Dan Schreiber:way and you've got no legs now right or do you also still grow the legs well i'm a worm with this so it doesn't matter but you gotta move you just said you grow new yeah if it goes right you grow new legs that was the analogy i was but actually good point worms don't have legs hang In this whole analogy, whenever Andy says legs, you have to imagine it's the tail of a worm.

50:38Anna Ptaszynski:I don't think I could have made it any clearer than I have done. I think you're right. So let's imagine Andy 1 and Andy 2. Okay. Andy 1 has now got two heads and has no tail. Yeah. How are you going to poo? Don't know. You don't know?

50:57Dan Schreiber:Haven't thought this through, have you?

50:59Anna Ptaszynski:We've consulted with each other and neither of us know. And that's why I said by mistake in my original fact Because I do think this is an error Do you know James? I do know How am I going to poo? Well the lucky thing is that flatworms poo and eat in the same hole Yes That's not lucky for most of your life But in this specific instance where you have two heads It doesn't matter so much because you can poo out of your mouth But surely I'm sorry this is now getting a bit gross But if I've got a head at either end aren't things heading the other way towards Andy too I'm not gonna have to put out anything he's been eating you would eat it and poo it out of your face and then Andy too will eat it and poo

51:42James Harkin:it out of his face okay that's fine well that's fine you'd have to come to a compromise if it was that other version when you you'd take turns in eating and then being the the anus for the meal

51:51Dan Schreiber:wouldn't you oh I thought like no curries or something oh right yeah yeah yeah because you

51:56James Harkin:want to be a date and then suddenly you're just pulling out your mouth i don't think i'm going on many dates let me tell you about my lissom legs for god's sake

52:09Anna Ptaszynski:over there there's andy with two sets of legs upside down he's surrounded by women

52:17Dan Schreiber:the thing about the heads coming off and the new heads coming is the new heads have the same memories and we don't understand that. It's crazy. They tested this with planarian flatworms, a kind of flatworm. They trained them up half on a rough surface, half on a smooth surface. And then they got them to find food all on a rough surface. And the ones who've been trained on a rough surface darted to the food because they like traveling on it. The ones who've been raised on the smooth surface were like, oh, what's this rough surface? Anyway, then they cut all their heads off. And then when the new heads came back, the heads that had been raised on the rough surface remembered to be chill about the rough surface.

52:55Dan Schreiber:It's like a really complicated way of showing they have memories. I don't know why they didn't just ask, you know, do you remember 9-11 or whatever? But that's how they did it. And they remember their upbringing, even though it's a different head. They do really stupid experiments with these things, though, don't they? Because they're so wacky, they want to see what their limits are. So there's a guy called James McConnell in 1964 who put some flatworms in a maze and taught them how to complete the maze. And then he chopped them up and fed them to another flatworm. What? And then put that flatworm into the maze and the flatworm could also complete the maze without being taught how to do it.

53:32And his theory was that basically they had learned through their food. Interesting.

53:37Dan Schreiber:Is it like talking to them from inside? Well, it turns out that no one's been able to replicate this experiment. And what they think happened is the first flatworm left a load of slime in the maze and the second one just followed the slime. He didn't clean the maze out That's loose

53:53Anna Ptaszynski:But given what we know about them, given that they can regenerate Memories after being decapitated I mean, yeah, it sounds like that experiment Was flawed, but it's crazy what they Can do, yeah. What can they do? They can regrow their head and remember I thought you meant once it's regrown What they can do. Well, we know someone who can't remember Things even with the same head It's just, it is just nuts, isn't it? Like, if we could harness these abilities we'd be unstoppable. We would. If we could they can regrow from 1 279th of their original mass.

54:24James Harkin:That's insane.

54:25Anna Ptaszynski:So I don't know what that is for a human. It must be your little finger or something.

54:29Dan Schreiber:And they're also there's so many firsts in the flatworm world. They so they're incredibly old. They're about 839 million years old. I'm going to take away the about because that's a very precise number. They are 839 million years old. They're probably the first hunter and the first thing that moved with any kind of purpose rather than just floating like plankton. So they chose what direction to go and moved. They're the first animals with a nervous system, a head, a brain, eyes. They're the first animal ever to internally fertilize rather than just leaving eggs around. And they were the first bilaterally symmetrical animals, i.e.

55:05Dan Schreiber:ones with left and right sides, like pretty much all animals we know today. They pioneered that, having a left and right side. So obviously you get like jellyfish and stuff or stuff that's symmetrical in lots of directions. But yeah. And I was looking up other, I was looking up asymmetrical animals. There are some really cool, can you think of asymmetrical animals?

55:25Anna Ptaszynski:An amoeba?

55:27Dan Schreiber:Are they symmetrical? I know what you mean, but they're just as likely to be blobby on one side as the other, right? It's not like they'll always have this on the left and always have that on the right. I was thinking like starfish, but I don't think they are, are they? They're symmetrical. I'm talking fiddler crabs. Oh, fiddler crabs, yeah, because they have one massive claw. The massive claw. Flatfish. Remember the eye migrates around a flatfish so that it has two eyes on one side. Javelin throwers. Javelin throwers and Rafa Nadal. And chronic masturbating.

56:00Fiddler people.

56:05Welcome back, Anna. Thanks very much. Did you read about the new flatworm they discovered that was named after COVID? No. Humbertium covidium. They just named it after that because a lot of the study was written during lockdown. But there's another flatworm called Hancock anus, which has nothing to do with covid, surprisingly. But they get involved with penis fencing. Oh, penis fencing. It's because they're all hermaphroditic. They're always fighting over who will be the one that puts their sperm into the other one. And the way that they do it is by a little bit of a penis fight. and then the winner gets to inseminate the other one.

56:46Dan Schreiber:Yeah, because it's worse to be pregnant, as I personally know, than to not be pregnant. Yeah, but at least they get nine months off.

56:56Dan Schreiber:Off. Wow. We'll see you after the show, James.

57:03Anna Ptaszynski:I was reading about the native and non-native flatworms because, okay, they're great, they're very interesting, but lots of them are not native to the UK and they absolutely decimate normal earthworms. They hunt them, they kill them, and native earthworms, which are really good for soil, obviously, and are brilliant in all sorts of ways, just get written off when flatworms invade. That's because we're trading plants and trading soil and stuff. But as a result of this, I found and joined the Earthworm Society of Britain. Oh, that's nice. Membership is£5 per year. Okay. How did these guys make any money and all of these people that you join, like the Lighthouse Keepers Association or the Wallpaper Association, they're getting so little money from you.

57:49Anna Ptaszynski:Well, those guys are 25 quid. This was a fiver. It didn't say anywhere what you get for the fiver, but I was so excited by that point that I just joined.

57:56James Harkin:Maybe you sponsor an earthworm. You know, you'll get letters from it. I think you got it cheaper because you got an early bird discount. Beautiful.

58:06Anna Ptaszynski:Why isn't that on their website?

58:11Anna Ptaszynski:I'll tell you what happens when my membership is processed. I'm very excited.

58:15James Harkin:Yeah.

58:15Dan Schreiber:Oh, so that's it. You're a member.

58:17Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah.

58:18Dan Schreiber:Okay. Looking forward to installment two of that. God for James' joke. Everyone's going to think they forgot to put in the end of that anecdote. There wasn't one, guys.

58:27Anna Ptaszynski:What happens is, Annette, I've developed this tactic where I just say something and then these guys save me.

58:33Dan Schreiber:That was my thing. Did you guys come across the Myers tapeworm trap?

58:39James Harkin:The Myers? Tapeworm trap?

58:41Dan Schreiber:Yes. No. So tapeworms are a kind of flatworm, famous for living in your tummy and eating all your food. And they're things that you don't necessarily want living inside you. And so in 1854, a doctor called Alpheus Myers patented a trap. And it's so good. I don't know why it wasn't mass produced, actually. It's a hollow tube made of gold that contains a bit of cheese. What? What? And you swallow the trap. You leave it in your tummy and as he explains, the worm will eventually seize the cheese. You have to fast for a few days so that the worm's really hungry. It will seize the cheese and then the trap will spring shut on it and trap it.

59:21Dan Schreiber:And then you can pull it out with a string. So he says, and he says the convenient thing is you can just fix the cord that hangs out of your mouth somewhere on your shirt. Right. A bit like a baby's dummy. Right. Yes. So you can go about your day.

59:33Anna Ptaszynski:But it's dangling out of your mouth all the time. Yes.

59:35Dan Schreiber:But eventually he says you'll feel the tugging And you'll see the string move And it'll be the tapeworm tugging on the cheese And at that point you just pull the string up And you extract the tapeworm I have a question

59:47Anna Ptaszynski:I have a few Isn't your body constantly trying to process And push this tube through you Because you've swallowed it And that's how your intestines function The peristalsis would take it down to your stomach But I think it could theoretically stay there If you've got something else so stomach I thought tapeworms were in your lower intestine or something Andy, well done

1:00:11Dan Schreiber:you've highlighted the flaw in his plan the tapeworm couldn't have got up to the tummy so it wasn't actually a perfect invention except for the fact that it wasn't in the right organ but could he not just shove this golden trap up his arse

1:00:24Anna Ptaszynski:as I'm sure a lot of early potential investors told him

1:00:40James 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 and you can get us as a group where anna um god i can't

1:00:59Dan Schreiber:remember uh online yeah no such thing as fish.com or you can email podcast.qi.com correct or we're on instagram do instagram at no such thing or tiktok probably yeah uh otherwise just come back

1:01:12James Harkin:next week because we're gonna be back here with another episode and we'll see you then goodbye

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