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Little Fish: A Biscuit, A Railway Station, And A Mutt

December 28, 2025·32 min·3 clips

Scientists renamed a Python-coded blob detector to avoid calling it PI-BDSM.

This episode of Little Fish features hosts James Harkin, Dan Schreiber, and Andy Murray sharing listener-submitted facts. The show adopts a more informal and silly tone than the main No Such Thing As A Fish podcast. Peter Drake contributed a fact about mathematical graphs having properties called "girth" and "Wiener index." Jess Weyer noted a mathematical function named the "popcorn function," also called the "raindrop function" or "stars over Babylon." James recalled the "Tits group" in mathematics, named after French mathematician Jacques Tits, which relates to the "Coxeter complex." David Reed shared that a radio telescope program was named PYBDSF (Python Blob Detector and Source Finder) to avoid the acronym BDSM. The hosts discussed RAS syndrome, meaning Redundant Acronym Syndrome Syndrome, and the EGOT award concept created by actor Philip Michael Thomas. Lord Borwick submitted a quiz question about the letter X on Big Ben's clock faces, with the answer being zero because designer Augustus Pugin used the letter F instead. A related fact revealed the company Stannah won an Elevator World award for installing lifts in the Big Ben tower. Peter Monroe wrote about a new pterosaur species discovered in a 100-million-year-old fossilized vomit, termed a regurgitolite. Marcus Dahlian listed unusual historical proposals for temperature scale fixed points, including the melting point of butter and the temperature inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. Robbie Williams clarified that German chocolate cake is named after a person named German, not Germany, and uses Baker's chocolate, named after founder Dr. James Baker. Ben Wright noted Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi was born in Nice, France, linking him to Garibaldi biscuits and Nice biscuits. The episode concludes by assigning custodianship of past podcast facts to Patreon supporters, including facts about Aztecs wearing popcorn necklaces and China using Top Gun footage to represent its air force. Other reassigned facts cover a lost key costing over £1 million, Ken being an accessory to Barbie, and a bear named Pyrrhos facing castration. A surprising claim is that the designer of Big Ben's clock faces deliberately avoided the letter X. A memorable moment involves the hosts building elaborate biscuit-based puns from the Garibaldi fact. The tone is conversational, humorous, and loosely structured, with hosts frequently bantering and tangentially expanding on facts. Listeners who enjoy quirky trivia, lighthearted comedy, and spontaneous digressions will appreciate this episode. Those preferring tightly edited, highly researched factual content might find the informal style less engaging.

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