Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. Listener mail,
Speaker 2: This is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And this is Joe McCormick. And it's Monday, the day
Speaker 3: of each week that we read back messages from our mailbox.
Speaker 3: If you have never gotten in touch before, why not
Speaker 3: email us. You can reach us at contact at stuff
Speaker 3: to Blow your Mind dot com. We like messages of
Speaker 3: any sort, especially feedback to recent episodes, and especially if
Speaker 3: you've got something interesting to add to a topic we
Speaker 3: recently talked about on the show. But whatever else you
Speaker 3: want to write about, that's fine too. Send it on
Speaker 3: in contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3: What you got going on right now, Rob.
Speaker 2: Well, nobody asked about this, but I'm going no. No
Speaker 2: listeners asked about it, obviously, but I do want to
Speaker 2: throw in that. In our Weird House Cinema episode about
Speaker 2: the viewing, the topic of lopsong Soushong tea came up,
Speaker 2: and at the time none of us had any experience
Speaker 2: drinking it before. So after we talked about it a
Speaker 2: little bit, I ordered some up. I've now brewed up
Speaker 2: a few different cups of it, and I have attempted
Speaker 2: to add the perfect amount of honey so that I
Speaker 2: can have the proper viewing experience. And I have to say,
Speaker 2: it's a very interesting tea. I was a little frightened
Speaker 2: at first when I smelled just the pure smokiness of
Speaker 2: the dried tea, but the taste is a lot more subtle,
Speaker 2: and yeah, I think I'm growing to like it.
Speaker 3: Taste like tea smells like a big old barbecue brisket.
Speaker 2: Well, at first, that was kind of what the sense
Speaker 2: I got when I opened the pouch of tea for
Speaker 2: the first time, you know, like the whole house immediately
Speaker 2: smelled like this, kind of like smoked, you know, deeply smoked,
Speaker 2: almost liquid smoke, kind of a scent, but that dissipated,
Speaker 2: and then once it's brewed up, you know, it's I
Speaker 2: find that the aroma is not as intense and it
Speaker 2: is not like core to the flavor.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: It's interesting. I find that I really enjoy smoky flavors
Speaker 3: in food, and so I like some smoky ingredients, but
Speaker 3: smelling the smoky ingredients on their own I often find
Speaker 3: kind of unpleasant. Like one example is smoked paprika. If
Speaker 3: you ever want a like vegetarian alternative to adding bacon
Speaker 3: to a dish. Smoke paprika gets you part of the
Speaker 3: way there. I mean, it doesn't have pork fat in it,
Speaker 3: but it it brings a lot of that great smoky
Speaker 3: aroma that you get from like a smoked meat product
Speaker 3: and some of that complexity. But I find when I
Speaker 3: just smell smoked paprika by itself, it is an overpowering
Speaker 3: and unpleasant aroma. It's only good once it goes into
Speaker 3: the mix with other things.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I feel the same way about honestly, about
Speaker 2: like scotch and alcohol of that nature. You know, It's
Speaker 2: like I just straight scotch I never had a real
Speaker 2: passion for, but I did like some cocktails that had
Speaker 2: scotch in them.
Speaker 3: Well, I guess there are smoky scotches and non smoky scotches.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, some really some really go.
Speaker 3: For the peat trolls that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Anyway, enough enough about my beverages. I'll be back
Speaker 2: in a future Listener Mail episode to talk about the
Speaker 2: perfect screen driver.
Speaker 3: That's right, Okay, let's go on to our first messages.
Speaker 3: We're going to kick things off today with a two
Speaker 3: part response to our series on anomalous imagery. This is
Speaker 3: two different emails from our listener Ian. Let's see, Rob,
Speaker 3: Do you want to read the first one? Here?
Speaker 2: All? Right? Here we go? Uh. Dear Robin Joe, I
Speaker 2: was listening to your recent episode about the dindera light
Speaker 2: and you your brief discussion of palam ses. That made
Speaker 2: me realize that there is a form of palamses that
Speaker 2: most of your listeners will be familiar with, though they've
Speaker 2: probably never thought about it in those terms. I certainly hadn't.
Speaker 2: It is the computer hard drive. There is, of course,
Speaker 2: the surface level comparison, wherein hard drives are erased and
Speaker 2: overwritten repeatedly as you use your computer, but the similarities
Speaker 2: go deeper than that. For instance, when you delete a
Speaker 2: file on your computer, the actual data is not a
Speaker 2: raise from the drive, only the reference to that data
Speaker 2: that tells your computer operating system where on the drive
Speaker 2: the file is located in order to access it. On
Speaker 2: a mechanical hard drive or HDD, I am not sure
Speaker 2: how applicable this information may be to newer solid state
Speaker 2: drives or SSDs. The actual data comprising the file remains
Speaker 2: on the drive until the computer needs that space for
Speaker 2: another file and only then is actually overwritten. Even then,
Speaker 2: the overwriting is not perfect, and it is sometimes possible
Speaker 2: to use special software to recover old data that is
Speaker 2: underneath newer data. At least partially for this reason, there
Speaker 2: is even security software available for computers which use sensitive data,
Speaker 2: which constantly overwrite the empty portions of the drive with
Speaker 2: junk data to ensure that any deleted files are truly
Speaker 2: obliterated and not recoverable. It is somewhat akin to scribbling
Speaker 2: on and then erasing a chalkboard over and over to
Speaker 2: ensure that everything that was once written on it can't
Speaker 2: still be read. Finally, your discussion of what I'm going
Speaker 2: to call open minded skepticism involving being highly skeptical of
Speaker 2: any claims that such and such has done by aliens,
Speaker 2: while still being open to the possibility that one day
Speaker 2: evidence of alien intelligence may be discovered, reminded me of
Speaker 2: a saying often used on the PBS Spacetime YouTube channel
Speaker 2: when discussing new and strange observations in astronomy. The saying goes,
Speaker 2: remember it's never aliens until it's aliens. Thank you for
Speaker 2: doing more than your fair share of encouraging curiosity and
Speaker 2: reminding us all of the importance of open minded skepticism.
Speaker 3: Ian, Well, thank you for the kind words, Ian, And yeah,
Speaker 3: I appreciate the shout out to the PBS Spacetime show.
Speaker 3: I'm not a regular viewer, but I think I watched
Speaker 3: a few episodes of that and thought they were quite good.
Speaker 3: As for the idea of a palimpsest being sort of reproduced,
Speaker 3: at least metaphorically or I don't know, maybe you could
Speaker 3: say literally in a computer hard drive, Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 3: So palimpsests came up in our discussion because we were
Speaker 3: talking about how, like, so an ancient Egyptian inscription, you know,
Speaker 3: there might be one set of hieroglyphics on it at
Speaker 3: one point, and then there would be you know, that
Speaker 3: would decay over time, and then there would be a
Speaker 3: process of maybe partially plastering over that and then putting
Speaker 3: new inscription, like new information in it, maybe new hieroglyphics
Speaker 3: or illustrations of things on top of the old one.
Speaker 3: And this would happen on maybe the walls of a
Speaker 3: temple or like a monument or something like that, and
Speaker 3: the result was that you could get these sort of
Speaker 3: illusory emergent mixtures of the two different inscriptions, so you
Speaker 3: could have the part on top decaying, and then heart
Speaker 3: of the hieroglyphics represented there would sort of bleed into
Speaker 3: where the hieroglyphics below were revealed, creating these symbols that
Speaker 3: aren't actually part of the language. They're just sort of like,
Speaker 3: you know, these random emergent bleed through kind of creations,
Speaker 3: and some of them look like weird stuff, like a
Speaker 3: helicopter or something like that. Anyway, So I wonder if
Speaker 3: by way of this analogy with a computer hard drive
Speaker 3: being like a palimpsest, you could get similar things like
Speaker 3: in the future, will there be people looking back in
Speaker 3: time at like a preserved computer hard drive, or maybe
Speaker 3: the data image of a preserved computer hard drive and
Speaker 3: see things emerging, see illusory like sentences or something emerging
Speaker 3: because of splicing together of data from different points of overwriting.
Speaker 3: I don't know if it actually works like that, or
Speaker 3: works in a way that would give rise to that
Speaker 3: sort of thing, But I don't know that's interesting.
Speaker 2: It's far less romantic. Yeah, to may anyway, but you know,
Speaker 2: future societies. I feel differently about the matter.
Speaker 3: Will bits of work emails appear to run straight through
Speaker 3: into snippets of text from your discarded draft of your
Speaker 3: erotic vampire novel.
Speaker 2: Well, all vampire novels are erotic, Joe.
Speaker 3: Okay, we got a second email from Ian. Ian says
Speaker 3: Dear Robin, Joe. Last week, I wrote in about open
Speaker 3: minded skepticism and PBS spacetimes approach that it's never aliens
Speaker 3: until it's aliens. As of the time of writing this,
Speaker 3: I've not yet listened to the Listener Mail episode that
Speaker 3: previous message would have appeared on. Well, you certainly have not,
Speaker 3: because it's this one today, Ian says, so I don't
Speaker 3: know yet if you read it on the air. In
Speaker 3: the interim, I have now listened to your previous listener
Speaker 3: mail and the discussion about the difficulty of traveling between
Speaker 3: stars making visitation by aliens unlikely. I share Joe's view
Speaker 3: that I don't find any supposed difficulty particularly convincing when
Speaker 3: we're presumably talking about beings with more advanced technology than
Speaker 3: we have. By the way, for people who don't remember
Speaker 3: that previous discussion or didn't hear it, my point was
Speaker 3: that I wouldn't rule out the possibility of alien visitation
Speaker 3: on Earth based on saying, Oh, it's just too difficult
Speaker 3: to travel between stars, because my view now is just
Speaker 3: that I don't think we know enough to say whether
Speaker 3: that's too difficult or whether it's possible or not. That's
Speaker 3: just an open question. But that doesn't mean I think
Speaker 3: aliens have been visiting the Earth. I just think that
Speaker 3: that is not a particular reason I would rule it out. Instead,
Speaker 3: I would just say, where's the evidence. But Ian comes
Speaker 3: back to say, once again, PBS space time has become relevant. Specifically,
Speaker 3: the episode is Interstellar Travel Possible? That episode discusses the
Speaker 3: dangers and difficulties posed by traveling to another star and
Speaker 3: investigates whether they are solvable. The oversimplified version is that
Speaker 3: traveling from one star to the next should be doable,
Speaker 3: if not exactly with our current technology, then with technology
Speaker 3: only a little more advanced than we currently possess Essentially,
Speaker 3: from a physics standpoint, we know the problem is solvable,
Speaker 3: and achieving it is what I like to call an
Speaker 3: engineering problem. Granted, actually solving that problem would be a
Speaker 3: massive undertaking for our current civilization, and it certainly wouldn't
Speaker 3: be easy, but there's no reason to think it couldn't
Speaker 3: be done. As Matt. I guess that's the host of
Speaker 3: PBS Space Time. As Matt sums up in the episode,
Speaker 3: the universe may be trying to kill us, but it's
Speaker 3: not trying quite hard enough. That's good. So, given that
Speaker 3: traveling from one star to another is conceivably achievable in
Speaker 3: the not too distant future technologically at least, resource allocation
Speaker 3: being an entirely different matter, just like how no one
Speaker 3: has gone back to the Moon since the seventies despite
Speaker 3: us clearly having the technology, A civilization, even a few
Speaker 3: hundred or thousand years more advanced than ours, should be
Speaker 3: able to do it without too much trouble. Certainly not
Speaker 3: so much trouble that it serves as an explanation for
Speaker 3: why UAPs can't be aliens or as a satisfactory answer
Speaker 3: to the Fermi paradox. Personally, I find Akham's razor a
Speaker 3: far more convincing argument against aaian visitation than any specific
Speaker 3: practical objection as to why it's impossible. As always, thank
Speaker 3: you for your wonderful and enlightening podcast. Ian, Well, thank
Speaker 3: you for both emails. Ian, and I would say regarding
Speaker 3: the second one, Yeah, I think you're right on the money.
Speaker 3: I would agree with you here. I don't see any
Speaker 3: particular reason to rule out the possibility of alien visitation.
Speaker 3: The stuff about the difficulty of traveling that doesn't seem
Speaker 3: like a prohibitive consideration to me, though it is something
Speaker 3: I guess we should consider, you know, arguments of that sort,
Speaker 3: but that's not enough to rule it out for me. Instead,
Speaker 3: it's just the dearth of good evidence, like we've been
Speaker 3: talking about in these episodes. It's just like you would
Speaker 3: expect at some point to have good evidence that it's
Speaker 3: actually aliens and not just one of the millions of
Speaker 3: things that you know, we've seen over and over again
Speaker 3: being mistaken for aliens, like balloon and camera artifacts and
Speaker 3: airplanes and birds and natural geological formations and animals of
Speaker 3: various types and all kinds of weird looking natural phenomena
Speaker 3: and pieces of human technology always being mistaken for aliens,
Speaker 3: and then when you get more information, oh, oh, actually
Speaker 3: this is what it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know. I still come back to the scale
Speaker 2: of things though, in thinking about all this, and I
Speaker 2: was reminded of this after our initial episodes. We were
Speaker 2: just where we were discussing this because I was listening
Speaker 2: to the audiobook of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and
Speaker 2: there's one great part in there where Douglas Adams is
Speaker 2: talking about how the sheer size of the universe is
Speaker 2: such that the human imagination cannot contain it. And I
Speaker 2: thought that was a well written little phrase there, to
Speaker 2: sort of sum it up, like it is just so
Speaker 2: big that even when we think we are understanding the
Speaker 2: scale we're talking about here, we're only sort of summoning
Speaker 2: up a placeholder of how truly vast it is, and
Speaker 2: how small we are, and how insignificant we are in
Speaker 2: terms of both location and also duration. All right, shall
Speaker 2: we dive into a little stickiness?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, all right.
Speaker 2: This one comes to us from Kenny. Kenny says, Hi, Rob, Joe,
Speaker 2: and JJ. I was fascinated by your discussion on the
Speaker 2: atomic stickiness of gecko feet. I wonder what the evolutionary
Speaker 2: path for that adaptation was like. Anyway, the topic reminded
Speaker 2: me of highly polished metals sticking to one another. I'm
Speaker 2: a PC gamer and enjoy building upgrading my machine every
Speaker 2: few years. The central processor in a PC is covered
Speaker 2: by an integrated heat spreader, over which a cooling fan
Speaker 2: or water block is placed. Since the metal surfaces aren't
Speaker 2: perfectly smooth, a thermal paste must be applied to fill
Speaker 2: all the tiny air pockets before the cooler is screwed down.
Speaker 2: This ensures adequate heat transfer, but better cooling means more performance,
Speaker 2: so people will take it to the extremes. I saw
Speaker 2: an enthusiast who had lapped the integrated heat spreader on
Speaker 2: his CPU. He employed the quote Whitworth three plate method,
Speaker 2: which involves three metal plates labeled A, B and C.
Speaker 2: With the aid of an abrasive, they are used to
Speaker 2: polish one another in alternating pairs A and B, then
Speaker 2: B and C, than CNA, and so on. The plates
Speaker 2: smooth one another out and can then be used to
Speaker 2: polish other objects to very high degrees of smoothness. After
Speaker 2: lapping both the ihs and the underside of his water block,
Speaker 2: he achieved such high polish that they fit together perfectly
Speaker 2: enough to effectively leave zero trapped gas to act as insulation.
Speaker 2: What he discovered after the test fitting was that the
Speaker 2: CPU adhered to the bottom of the cooling block. It
Speaker 2: was sticky enough to pull the CPU from the socket
Speaker 2: when he lifted the block. I now realize this must
Speaker 2: have been due to the Van der Waals force, as
Speaker 2: the atoms of the two components were close enough to
Speaker 2: act as if they were in a single piece of metal.
Speaker 2: I saw the Action Lab exploring a similar phenomenon in
Speaker 2: this video about gauge blocks, and Kenny includes a link.
Speaker 2: I'd meant to send you a topic idea, but this
Speaker 2: turned into a pretty lengthy email, so I'll save it
Speaker 2: for next time. Thanks for everything you do, Kenny.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Kenny. That's really interesting. So if I'm understanding correctly,
Speaker 3: you're saying like that with enough polishing and smoothing of
Speaker 3: a flat piece of metal, it will stick to another
Speaker 3: polished flat piece of metal. So like even without an adhesive,
Speaker 3: you just like touched them together and then they get
Speaker 3: stuck as if they are glued, And that would make
Speaker 3: sense that I want to be clear that I don't
Speaker 3: feel confident to judge what are the operative forces here,
Speaker 3: especially since like even experts in this area sometimes disagree
Speaker 3: about like what are the most operative forces in why
Speaker 3: things are sticking together? But Vanderval's force, from what I know,
Speaker 3: does seem like a plausible explanation. So like normally things
Speaker 3: don't stick to one another. Dude to Vanderval's forces because
Speaker 3: not enough of their atoms are actually getting close enough
Speaker 3: together for Vanderval's forces to activate. But that's like how
Speaker 3: the gecko feet work.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: They've got so many of these extremely tiny little hairs
Speaker 3: on them that fill in all the nooks and crannies
Speaker 3: of whatever surface they're touching and get so close to
Speaker 3: the atoms in the surface that Vanderval's forces take over
Speaker 3: and they stick. Most normal things, even when they're touching
Speaker 3: each other, just can't get that close. And so it
Speaker 3: sounds like that could be what's happening with these highly
Speaker 3: polished pieces of metal, though I would wonder also if
Speaker 3: there is if there's a suction cup thing going on here,
Speaker 3: Like if the gas between two things is evacuated in
Speaker 3: some sense, but there is some kind of cavity between them,
Speaker 3: if it's kind of like pushing a suction cup onto
Speaker 3: a piece of glass or something. I don't know. I
Speaker 3: don't know, maybe if the polishing wouldn't really leave enough
Speaker 3: pockets for there to be voids with negative pressure. I
Speaker 3: don't know.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, one thing that we learned from just
Speaker 2: looking at the research for guarding gecko feet is that
Speaker 2: you know, it's possible that there are more than one
Speaker 2: adhesive situation going on at once with a given scenario.
Speaker 3: Though we have to acknowledge that that's right, more than
Speaker 3: one mechanism could be working at the same time. But yeah,
Speaker 3: very interesting, Kenny, thank you. Okay, I think we're going
Speaker 3: to finish things out today with a message about Weird
Speaker 3: House Cinema. We have some more good messages, but for
Speaker 3: time reasons, I think we need to save them for
Speaker 3: next week. So one more today. This is about Weird
Speaker 3: House Cinema. And this comes to us from Chalk. Chock says, Hi,
Speaker 3: guys on Weird House Cinema on September first, and as
Speaker 3: an aside, this would be talking about the Devil's Men
Speaker 3: aka Land of the Minotaur. Chock continues, saying, you said
Speaker 3: the priest and comrade went to the church to get weapons,
Speaker 3: specifically a crucifix and some holy water. Apparently the filmmaker
Speaker 3: was also lazy about checking facts. Holy water is just
Speaker 3: water blessed by a priest. He didn't have to go
Speaker 3: looking for it. He could have just made some because
Speaker 3: he was a priest, right, Yeah, he is a priest,
Speaker 3: so he could just get some out of the tap,
Speaker 3: I guess, and less sure, but Chock says, well, what
Speaker 3: doo anti climactic? Probably anyway, thanks for all your shows, Chock.
Speaker 3: You know, this is a case where I think it
Speaker 3: was just more important to be dramatic than to be factuals.
Speaker 3: They wanted to send him to a roadside chapel, kind
Speaker 3: of kind of decaying scenic roadside chapel to get the
Speaker 3: holy water and get all the tools of holiness, which,
Speaker 3: by the way, I don't even recall them using the
Speaker 3: holy water in the movie. Did they use it? I
Speaker 3: think dub pleas he just says some Latin and they
Speaker 3: all blow up.
Speaker 2: But I thought that he also like splashes holy water
Speaker 2: on them or on the minotaur. But yeah, he makes
Speaker 2: everybody blow up, and I'm not sure everybody was touched
Speaker 2: by the holy water, so it's a little foggy.
Speaker 3: The Latin would have done it. But I agree if
Speaker 3: Rob said in the episode that it was you know,
Speaker 3: it was a nice dramatic moment, and I agree. Then
Speaker 3: a movie that was somewhat lacking in nice dramatic moments,
Speaker 3: I felt like that one kind of worked.
Speaker 2: Yeah, some of the nicest scenes where Donald Pleasant's doing
Speaker 2: church stuff, Like there's a scene where he's praying in
Speaker 2: that where you know, it's just establishing his character. Really,
Speaker 2: there's nothing amazing about it, but it's a nice sequence.
Speaker 2: It's well framed and all, and then we get a
Speaker 2: similar vibe. I mean these were probably shot at the
Speaker 2: same location, like the same afternoon. They were particularly inspired
Speaker 2: that day. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I think that's probably right. Okay, does that do it
Speaker 3: for today?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I think we're gonna go ahead and close up
Speaker 2: the mail bag. But we'd love to hear from everyone. Yeah,
Speaker 2: keep them coming in. If you have thoughts about current,
Speaker 2: past and future episodes of stuff to blow your mind,
Speaker 2: you have any thoughts about the various movies we've discussed
Speaker 2: on Weird House Cinema on Fridays, you know, also just
Speaker 2: responses to other listener males or our short form artifact
Speaker 2: in Monster Fact episodes, or the thoughts about where else
Speaker 2: the monster fact artifact concept can go, like is there
Speaker 2: something else or some other kind of fact to be born?
Speaker 2: I was thinking like, oh, you know, crime, true crime
Speaker 2: is all the gauge. Should I start doing the murder fact?
Speaker 2: Probably not. I would vote against against the murder fact Okay,
Speaker 2: but your brain. We're brainstorming here, so all you know,
Speaker 2: all ideas are valid.
Speaker 3: What if it's the mino fact and it's just minotaur
Speaker 3: facts every week?
Speaker 2: Oh well, you know, we could, we could get we
Speaker 2: could make that work for for probably a month. But
Speaker 2: then again, we're just basically doing a sub show of
Speaker 2: the monster fact. So it would be the monster fact,
Speaker 2: mento fact or something to that effect.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 2: Accept when we're talking about artifacts, then it's the monster fact,
Speaker 2: mat of fact, artifact, and then it starts getting complicated.
Speaker 2: Then we're lost in the labyrinth. Okay, I think we
Speaker 2: got to wrap it up all right, take us home,
Speaker 2: Jeff Huge.
Speaker 3: Thanks to our regular audio producer JJ Posway and our
Speaker 3: guest audio producer today Chandler Mays. If you would like
Speaker 3: to get in touch with us once again, you can
Speaker 3: reach us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 3: dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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