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Chapter 1: What facts are discussed in this episode?
I'll let you take a bath on your own. For the bath,
Hello and welcome to another episode of Little Fish. This is the bonus Monday episode where we put down our favorite facts from the last seven days and we go through your favorite facts. So we have gone through the inbox. Andy has picked out some of the best and I am now going to sit here with Anna Tushinsky and James Harkin and go through them. So who wants to start? Go on, Anna.
Thank you. I'm going to start with this one from John Cornell.
Chapter 2: What is the significance of the Hooli tribe's wig-making tradition?
Sorry, I said that with an American accent. I don't know if he's American. That's just because of the university. From John Cornell.
Is that? Yes. Yeah, of course that was better. He might be a Cockney Barrow boy. We don't know.
Exactly.
Chapter 3: Why are bobble hats important around Lake Titicaca?
Equally likely. And he said, I love this fact, actually, just came across this fact about the Hooli people of the Heller province in Papua New Guinea. And it is that the young boys of the Hooli tribe aren't considered real men until they've attended Whig school. And he says, and made either an ordinary or a ceremonial wig. And then he specifies, I'm not a real man, sadly. And that's okay.
No judgment about not making a wig. Are you guys real men? I've never made a wig.
Well, there you go. I don't think I've made a wig. No. You would remember, I think. I don't know. My parents are hairdressers. I feel like I helped them in a lot of stuff as a kid.
I can imagine baby Dan sort of crawling around, picking up all the discarded bits of hair from all the customers.
Exactly. And weaving them into a little toupee in the corner. Presenting them to the customers when my parents are looking away and they never come back.
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Chapter 4: What is the story behind the Fat Controller in Thomas the Tank Engine?
And yeah, I'm sure that was a childhood thing. Yeah. I'm sure it was too.
Funny old childhood you have. Actually, in the source that I read, I think you guys might be men because it actually said that the oldest known tradition is where the boys learn the fundamentals of the Hooli tradition, which is how to grow their hair to make interwigs. And actually, I think it's more about how to grow your hair in a wig-like manner.
I see. That's interesting because what would turn your hair into a wig-like shape is constant haircuts so that it grew as part of a shape. You can't make one bit grow longer than the other just by thinking it.
Well, you can, I think, according to maybe the Hooli people. That's the thing, Dan. You're making a judgment based on your own beliefs. And I think these people would say they believe that if you do think it and if you have the wig master who runs the school really think it, he's got the powers to make your hair grow.
I would argue actually that Dan was making a judgment based on physiology of human beings rather than his own beliefs.
Well, that's just your opinion, James, that physiology of human beings is an existing factual thing. Anyway.
Have you actually been away at debate club for the last nine months?
I've been at wig school and I hoped you'd notice I'd been thinking my hair into being longer.
There is a group of people in Peru. I think it's the guys on the lake, on the Titicaca, but it might not be those guys.
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Chapter 5: What did Benjamin Franklin almost do instead of founding the USA?
But anyway, to become a man, you need to knit a bobble hat that is solid enough that you can carry water in it. And once you've done that, you go through. Because these are all rites of passage, aren't they?
Yeah, yeah. Wow. Why do bobble hats have to be so solid around Lake Titicaca?
Well, I don't know why they... They bump their heads a lot? I don't know, really. I've worn one of those bobble hats, the Lake Titicaca ones, when I went to Lake Titicaca, yeah. It's nice to say Titicaca. I know.
It's the only reason you raised this fact, I think, is so you get to say it.
But yeah, I got one of these hats and they're like just woolen hats with bubbles on the sides. But yeah, it's just part of the culture that you just have to learn how to do this. And until you do it, you can't grow up. And there's quite a lot of places that do things like that.
Yeah, yeah. That's funny because bubbles, I think when you say bubble hat, where would you say the bubble has to be? On the top, of course.
Yeah, yeah.
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Chapter 6: What unusual fact is shared about Radium Hot Springs?
No, I agree with that. Yeah, but they believe it's on the side.
Don't mess with their beliefs. Very insulting.
Okay, here is a fact from Charles Ekman. Sorry, Charles Ekman. And it's a bit of a complicated one. So we'll see if I can explain it. Well, I might not be able to. But Charles says, there is no such thing as a random number generator because there is no such thing as a random number generator.
I see.
Okay. Okay. So basically he's saying that randomness is not a property that a number can have. If you roll a dice and you get a number four, you have managed to generate that in a random manner, but the number itself is not random. The number is just the number four. Yeah. Okay. So what he's saying then is that you can have a random number generator, but not a random number generator.
Hold on.
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Chapter 7: What humorous predictions about elections are discussed?
What would a random generator be though? Surely anything...
The generator is the dice, which generates a random number. So you can have a random number generator. So the number generator is the dice, which gives you the randomness. But you can't have a random number generator because randomness is not an adjective that you can put next to number in mathematics.
No, no, absolutely. I can see how you can have a random generator as well. And actually, you can only use it as an adverb. Maybe you shouldn't be allowed to use random as an adjective at all. You just generate numbers randomly.
Well, if you're a magician, you say pick a random card. That is a generator, the card system of which you're picking, right?
It's a random generator.
Yeah.
Something that's doing it randomly.
But the numbers will never be the random thing. I'm just trying to work out when you would ever use this email in real life context. And it does feel like it's been used.
Yeah, I don't think so, really.
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Chapter 8: How do listeners become custodians of facts on the podcast?
I think it's just a bit of pedantic mathematical stuff. Yeah.
I think if the bar is when are you going to use stuff in a real life context, I think our podcast is completely dead. So let's not go down that avenue.
The word random used to mean to run somewhere very fast and very ferociously. And then it made, they had lots of different meanings, but in the 16th century, if you were on a ship and you were firing like a cannonball, a random firing would be the way that you would fire it to go the furthest. So that would be 45 degrees, basically.
So if it ever said fire in a random direction and you're on a 16th century vessel, you mustn't fire it in any direction. You must have fired at exactly 45 degrees.
This is why time travellers get in such trouble, don't they?
They make some very bad naval officers. All right, let's get on to another one. This one comes from Mike Gray from Radium Hot Springs in British Columbia, Canada. Accent does not work. Anyway, Mike Gray says, I am the mayor.
of radium hot springs in british columbia yeah and i thought our town might have a little fact for little fish the village is named after the nearby hot springs which were renamed in 1915 after scientists discovered trace amounts of radon a radioactive gas in the water the levels are completely safe but it does mean our town is now named after what is technically a mildly radioactive spa
yeah I don't know why they chuck the radium in because hot springs is a town that I'd go to radium hot springs I'm not taking my clothes off this is very cool because we've had lords write in I don't think we've ever had any mayors from Canada write in before this might be our first one I think it's our first I think that's really cool and I think also it's really cool it's cool enough to be the mayor of somewhere but to be the mayor of somewhere that has such a cool name yeah well done that's a hell of a badge
It is really cool. And I went to their Wikipedia page and they have 1,339 residents there as of the 2021 census. We wrote a book called 1339 Facts. Exactly. So if you lived, if you're listening and you're from Radium Hop Springs, you could assign a fact from that book to every single one of the members of your area. Wouldn't that be cool?
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