Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
Speaker 1: My Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. Listener mail, My name is Joe McCormick. My
Speaker 1: regular co host Robert Lamb is not with me today.
Speaker 1: I'm recording this one solo, but Rob is going to
Speaker 1: be back on Mike with us tomorrow. Today is Monday,
Speaker 1: the day of the week we typically read back some
Speaker 1: messages that you all of you out there, have launched
Speaker 1: into the mail harvester. And by the way, if you've
Speaker 1: never written into the show before and you'd like to
Speaker 1: get in touch to give feedback, corrections, commentary on a
Speaker 1: previous topic, or if you just want to share something
Speaker 1: interesting or say friendly hello, you can always reach us
Speaker 1: at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: By the way, Happy New Year everyone. If you are
Speaker 1: listening from an unsustainably crowded GYM or y m C,
Speaker 1: A good luck with that. Uh, today's mail bag might
Speaker 1: be a little bit weird due to holiday outages. Is
Speaker 1: I think all of these messages came in several weeks
Speaker 1: ago now, but we will do our best to get
Speaker 1: caught up two more recent emails in the coming weeks.
Speaker 1: All right, First, up in response to our episodes on
Speaker 1: the reptiles of the Galapagos, specifically our focus on the
Speaker 1: marine iguana, or, as one great scientists maligned them, those stupid,
Speaker 1: hideous looking creatures. Lurch rights the following, good morning, gentlemen.
Speaker 1: I think it was near the end of part two
Speaker 1: on the Galapagos reptiles when you mentioned the marine iguanas
Speaker 1: have slightly webbed feet, but you didn't see an evolutionary
Speaker 1: reason for the feature since they aren't used in swimming. Yes,
Speaker 1: or at least in our unexpert opinion, they didn't appear
Speaker 1: to be used in swimming, so you know, maybe they
Speaker 1: are in some subtle way. But anyway, going on with
Speaker 1: Lurch's message, I happened to be out romping with dog
Speaker 1: at the time. Uh. And this is dog with capital D,
Speaker 1: so I think Lurch here is referring to his dog
Speaker 1: who is named dog. So he's out romping with dog
Speaker 1: at the time. He listened to that episode as he
Speaker 1: enjoyed about eighteen inches of snow. Being half mala mute,
Speaker 1: cold weather and snow are like a birthday party for
Speaker 1: him every day. At the time he raised the question
Speaker 1: there was another dog, a German shepherd trying to keep up.
Speaker 1: He couldn't because he had to wade through an extra
Speaker 1: foot of snow the dog ran on top of. While
Speaker 1: all dogs, as far as I'm aware, have webb defeat
Speaker 1: what I call snow, dogs seemed to be able to
Speaker 1: deliberately spread their toes, bringing that webbing into play on
Speaker 1: snow and of course mud. This has the effect of
Speaker 1: spreading their weight over a larger area, letting them sink less.
Speaker 1: I've not seen any studies or anything on this. I'm
Speaker 1: basing it by comparing dog's footprint on pavement to that
Speaker 1: in snow. In the snow, his footprint is nearly twice
Speaker 1: the size of the one on pavement. How is this relevant?
Speaker 1: I know next to nothing about the Galapagos Islands, but
Speaker 1: I wonder if the webbing on the Iguanas might be
Speaker 1: of use when crossing sand. Well, lurch Uh, I do
Speaker 1: not recall this observation about dogs having sort of natural
Speaker 1: snowshoes ever crossing my mind before. But I thought this
Speaker 1: was a really interesting observation about dog pause, so I
Speaker 1: decided to look it up in the zoology literature, and
Speaker 1: it seems to me like you are exactly right about
Speaker 1: snow dogs and especially their near wild ancestor, the gray wolf.
Speaker 1: So I was looking at a book called Wolves, Behavior,
Speaker 1: Ecology and Conservation edited by L. David Metsch and Luigi Boitani.
Speaker 1: This was from University of Chicago Press, two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: and this is in a chapter by H. Match one
Speaker 1: of the editors and rolf O. Peterson on wolf prey relations,
Speaker 1: typically the effects of snow and other weather conditions on
Speaker 1: interactions between wolves and the animals they hunt. One really
Speaker 1: cool observation the authors make here. They say that during
Speaker 1: midwinter thaws, wolves will sometimes sleep through the afternoon in
Speaker 1: the early evening and then wake up to hunt prey
Speaker 1: in the nighttime. Why is this, The authors suggest it's
Speaker 1: because the wolves are waiting for the temperature to drop
Speaker 1: at night, which facilitates the formation of a crust on
Speaker 1: the top layer of snow, which plays to their advantage
Speaker 1: during pursuit of prey. And so the main effect of
Speaker 1: snow on wolves primary prey animals is to slow them
Speaker 1: down and hinder their movements because they're wading through these
Speaker 1: big drifts. But that's not always the case with the
Speaker 1: wolves themselves, and certainly not to the same extent. So
Speaker 1: here match and Peterson write quote, most prey probably have
Speaker 1: a heavier foot loading than do wolves, so they would
Speaker 1: sink deeper and be hindered more than wolves. Estimates for
Speaker 1: footloading and deer, for example, range from two hundred and
Speaker 1: eleven grams per cubic centimeter to four hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: one to one thousand, one hundred and twenty four grams
Speaker 1: per cubic centimeter, whereas for wolves the estimate is about
Speaker 1: one hundred and three grams per cubic centimeter. Ungulates are
Speaker 1: usually much heavier than wolves and possess hard hoofs that
Speaker 1: puncture snow much more easily than the spreading, webbed toes
Speaker 1: of a wolf foot. This difference can tilt the balance
Speaker 1: toward wolves during predation attempts on animals from the size
Speaker 1: of deer to bison. So this comes back to that
Speaker 1: observation that wolves might sometimes sleep through a warmer part
Speaker 1: of the day in midwinter to wake up in the
Speaker 1: dark and hunt. The crust that forms on top of
Speaker 1: the snow in the cold night air will support a
Speaker 1: wolf running on it, running on its naturally webbed biological snowshoes,
Speaker 1: and I think the technical term for the webbing between
Speaker 1: the toes is interdigital webbing. But a deer hoof will
Speaker 1: punch right through that crust and get stuck in the snow,
Speaker 1: so the deer will be unable to run at top speed.
Speaker 1: And I guess the question is do modern domestic dog
Speaker 1: breeds like the malamute have similar abilities. I didn't find
Speaker 1: any scientific research on this, but it seems to be
Speaker 1: just common knowledge among dog breeders that Arctic breeds like
Speaker 1: the malamute and the husky and so forth have characteristics
Speaker 1: that make them move well in the snow. And I
Speaker 1: found an article on the American Kennel Club website which
Speaker 1: does describe the malamute as having broad paws that helped
Speaker 1: distribute their weight over a larger surface area so they
Speaker 1: can run on the top of the snow. So, Larch,
Speaker 1: I think your observation about your half mallamute dog is
Speaker 1: probably exactly correct, and also probably not just a breed
Speaker 1: trait specific to the mala mute and husky and so forth,
Speaker 1: but sort of an ancestral trade that goes all the
Speaker 1: way back to their wolf ancestors or wolf like ancestors. Now,
Speaker 1: as for marine iguanas, I couldn't say. I couldn't say
Speaker 1: if movement on sand would have anything to do with it,
Speaker 1: though obviously I don't think the snow crust principle would
Speaker 1: really apply to sand, unless there's some kind of sand
Speaker 1: crusted phenomenon I've never heard of, so I don't know,
Speaker 1: but the interesting idea anyway, lurches email goes on from here.
Speaker 1: Lurch rights Iguanas hold a small special spot in my heart.
Speaker 1: In the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo nine, as I recall,
Speaker 1: I spent six weeks in the Virgin Islands as part
Speaker 1: of an emergency communications team. Nobody had electricity, including the
Speaker 1: hotel at which we stayed, so we left our doors
Speaker 1: and windows open at night to take advantage of the breeze.
Speaker 1: The third night, I dreamt I was being buried alive,
Speaker 1: rather terrifying, but wait, it gets worse. When I jerked
Speaker 1: awake and opened my eyes, I was nos to know
Speaker 1: is with the ugliest face I'd ever seen. The moonlight
Speaker 1: decidedly did not help. Teleportation is possible. But when I
Speaker 1: had stopped screaming, I was awake enough to realize I
Speaker 1: had been cuddled by three rather large iguanas. One of
Speaker 1: which had decided sleeping on top of me was a
Speaker 1: good joke. For the remainder of my stay, I always
Speaker 1: had at least one iguana share my bed at night.
Speaker 1: Seriously cool lurch. Uh wow, well that's a great story.
Speaker 1: Anybody else out there have that experience, Please right in
Speaker 1: if you've had iguanas crawl into bed with you. I
Speaker 1: don't think pets count. All right, This next message comes
Speaker 1: from Carl. Carl says, dear Robin Joe. Firstly, congratulations to
Speaker 1: Joe and family on their new arrival. Hope all are
Speaker 1: well and happy. Thank you very much, Carl, We all
Speaker 1: are indeed well and happy. In fact, I my first
Speaker 1: attempt at recording this episode, I had the creature on
Speaker 1: my chest in the baby Bjorn with me here. I
Speaker 1: was like, surely we can make this work. You know,
Speaker 1: she's just sleeping. Uh, she she can be my sort
Speaker 1: of silent co host. But the problem was she was
Speaker 1: not silent at all. In fact, she was she was
Speaker 1: breathing like Darth Vader, and it absolutely came through on
Speaker 1: the recording. So rather than have all the Darth Vader
Speaker 1: breathing and the Goblin snarls and all that, I decided
Speaker 1: to to wait to record this at at another time.
Speaker 1: So here we are. But maybe in the future she'll
Speaker 1: she'll join me on Mike when she's not quite so loud.
Speaker 1: Karl's message goes on onto eggs consumed raw. Now this
Speaker 1: must be related to the episode that Rob and I
Speaker 1: did on eggnog. Karl writes, when in Peru, maeen we
Speaker 1: drank many piece cooast sours, the national cocktail of Peru.
Speaker 1: One was served to us at the first opportunity on
Speaker 1: arrival and about every chance after that for two and
Speaker 1: a half weeks. It's made with Peruvian Piececo as the
Speaker 1: base liquor, UH fresh squeezed lemon juice, simple syrup, ice,
Speaker 1: egg white, and angustura bitters. It's shaken to a froth,
Speaker 1: strained into a glass, and topped with a few drops
Speaker 1: of angustura bitters. Quite tasty, by the way. The cocktail
Speaker 1: was invented by an American bartender, Victor Morris, in Peru
Speaker 1: in the late night in the early nineteen hundreds. Piececo
Speaker 1: is a high proof, local unrefined brandy that makes up
Speaker 1: most of the drink after ice. Maybe there's enough alcohol
Speaker 1: to kill any salmonella, but we never became ill or
Speaker 1: heard of anyone else becoming ill from drinking Piececo sours,
Speaker 1: which were even dispensed from vending machines in one remote area.
Speaker 1: I decided to serve them at a dinner after we
Speaker 1: after we returned home, but I used pasteurized egg whites
Speaker 1: from a carton. I still have the bottle of Piececo
Speaker 1: in my cabinet. It's not something you would enjoy over
Speaker 1: the rocks, say, and has no other uses I know of,
Speaker 1: but since it's been around before piece Coast hours were invented,
Speaker 1: it must have other uses. As always, I enjoy your podcasts.
Speaker 1: It's good to have Joe back. Carl. Well, thank you, Carl,
Speaker 1: it's good to be back. I've never tried a piaccoat sour.
Speaker 1: I will say, I don't know if I would fully
Speaker 1: count on the alcohol content of a cocktail to kill
Speaker 1: salmonilla bacteria that might might be present in a contaminated egg,
Speaker 1: especially immediately, because you might remember they found in one
Speaker 1: of those experiments we talked about in the egg nog
Speaker 1: episode that it actually took several days, from several days
Speaker 1: up to several weeks for a batch with alcohol content
Speaker 1: to become sterile. And I think the more likely explanation
Speaker 1: for the fact that you never became sick after drinking
Speaker 1: one of these drinks is that you just never got
Speaker 1: a contaminated egg. Like most eggs are fine. The CDC
Speaker 1: used to cite an estimate that it was about one
Speaker 1: out of every twenty thousand eggs produced annually in the
Speaker 1: United States that carried salmonella. Uh. By the way, I
Speaker 1: after the episode, I tried to look up and find
Speaker 1: the original source of that claim, and I believe it
Speaker 1: is a paper called Estimating the Annual fraction of Eggs
Speaker 1: Contaminated with Salmonella in tarot Titus in the United States,
Speaker 1: and this was by Eric Ebel and Wayne Schlausser published
Speaker 1: in the International Journal of Food Microbiology in the year
Speaker 1: two thousand. Now that number may have changed in the
Speaker 1: last twenty two years one out of every twenty thousand,
Speaker 1: If so, hopefully it's even lower, But I have not
Speaker 1: found a more recent estimate, so as far as I know,
Speaker 1: that's that's still the most recent guests anybody's come up with. Now,
Speaker 1: what does all that mean. I'm of course not advising
Speaker 1: people to eat raw eggs. You definitely do not want
Speaker 1: to get salmonella. It is awful. Uh so, caution with
Speaker 1: raw eggs is great, but also I mean, no reason
Speaker 1: to be overly fearful. Most eggs are fine. All right,
Speaker 1: on to the next message. This one comes from Chuck
Speaker 1: all so concerning egg based cocktails related to our eggnog episode,
Speaker 1: another discussion of the piececo Sour and our Vault episodes
Speaker 1: on the invention of the mirror and various psychological effects
Speaker 1: related to mirrors. Chuck says, dear Robert and Joe, happy
Speaker 1: holidays and great tidings to you both, and congratulations to
Speaker 1: Joe on the new addition to the family. These are
Speaker 1: the days that will seem so long, and it will
Speaker 1: vanish faster than you could imagine how true that is.
Speaker 1: And then Chuck takes a paragraph here to say some
Speaker 1: very kind things about the show. But then he goes
Speaker 1: on to say, I'm writing specifically because of your eggnog episode. Personally,
Speaker 1: I want to like eggnog more than I actually do.
Speaker 1: Every year I'm tempted by the ingredients and try a glass,
Speaker 1: but then I find it particularly revolting. Maybe it's the
Speaker 1: type of rum that's in it. I do recall, however,
Speaker 1: that back in the nineteen eighties, when I was a
Speaker 1: latchkey kid, Carnation made an eggnog flavored powder you put
Speaker 1: in milk as an instant break fist. Oh boy um.
Speaker 1: To my little brain, the flavor was amazing, but it
Speaker 1: could only be purchased as part of a mixed box
Speaker 1: of instant breakfasts containing vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate flavors. I
Speaker 1: think my desire to like eggnog comes from that nostalgia.
Speaker 1: That being said, I will no doubt keep trying eggnog
Speaker 1: every year to see if I strike gold. You guys
Speaker 1: also mentioned a dearth of egg based cocktails. If no
Speaker 1: one else has said this to you, uh and as
Speaker 1: you see now, we've got several messages about this. But
Speaker 1: Chuck says, I'd like to offer up the Piececo sour
Speaker 1: Piaceco is a brandy from Peru. I was introduced to
Speaker 1: the liquor by my wife, who is originally from the
Speaker 1: Peruvian city of cheek Clio. There are myriad varieties of
Speaker 1: piececo Piasco sours are kind of the national cocktail of Peru.
Speaker 1: Though Chile and Bolivia may claim Piececo, they, as my
Speaker 1: wife says, are wrong. Basic piececo sours are made up
Speaker 1: of piececo egg whites, sweet syrup, and some lime juice.
Speaker 1: This is shaken with ice to foam the egg whites
Speaker 1: and mix well, and then the ice is strained out.
Speaker 1: When you poured into a glass a few drops of
Speaker 1: Angustura bitters and you have an amazing drink. I heartily recommend.
Speaker 1: Chuck goes on to say two asides to set this
Speaker 1: first one up. It's going to reference a series of
Speaker 1: studies we talked about in our episodes on mirrors. These
Speaker 1: studies identified what has been called the strange face in
Speaker 1: the mirror effect, which is a phenomenon where if you
Speaker 1: put people in a room with dim lighting and you
Speaker 1: have them stare at their face in the mirror for
Speaker 1: at least ten minutes, the majority of subjects will report
Speaker 1: strange visual hallucinations and illusions, including everything from blurring and
Speaker 1: deformations of the facial features to seeing their face as
Speaker 1: another face entirely either belonging to another person known or unknown,
Speaker 1: or changing into a cat or a pig, or an
Speaker 1: alien or a monkey monster. And basically all UH respondents
Speaker 1: reported that in some way they came to see their
Speaker 1: face after prolonged staring in low light, as as other
Speaker 1: in some way as somehow not belonging to them, or
Speaker 1: or had some kind of dissociative experience. So the main
Speaker 1: study here was called the Strange Face in the Mirror
Speaker 1: illusion illusion by Giovanni bi Caputo in the journal Perception
Speaker 1: in two thousand ten, but it's been replicated under a
Speaker 1: variety of conditions in other studies. Sense anyway from here,
Speaker 1: Chuck writes one, I read a book when I was
Speaker 1: a teenager about exploring your past lives. Oh boy, I
Speaker 1: can't remember the title or author, but one of the
Speaker 1: techniques in it was to stare in a mirror at
Speaker 1: length in dim lighting until you quote see the faces
Speaker 1: you had in those previous lives. I'd forgotten all about this,
Speaker 1: but it rushed forward in my memories during your mirror episodes,
Speaker 1: and I've been meaning to write you to let you know.
Speaker 1: Apparently the staring in a mirror in the dimness technique
Speaker 1: was known and written about at least thirty five years
Speaker 1: ago by metaphysical believers. It's cool to get the true
Speaker 1: science about this now. Yeah. That that is really interesting, Chuck.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting about using the mirror to allegedly see
Speaker 1: faces of past lives, specifically because of a similar thing
Speaker 1: in Caputo's study. A full eighteen percent of respondents in
Speaker 1: that research reported seeing their own face transformed in some
Speaker 1: way to resemble one of their parents faces, And of course,
Speaker 1: seeing like a parent or an ancestor seems maybe to
Speaker 1: to suggest a similar strain of thinking to like seeing
Speaker 1: a past life. But there was another part of the
Speaker 1: result that was that there was an aggregate category of
Speaker 1: hallucinations which included seeing quote, an archetypal face such as
Speaker 1: that of an old woman, a child, or a portrait
Speaker 1: of an ancestor. Now, I suppose the causation in here,
Speaker 1: if there is any, could go either way. It could
Speaker 1: be that the strange face in the mirror illusion naturally
Speaker 1: tends to cause a substantial fraction of people to hallucinate
Speaker 1: their own face as transforming into that of an of
Speaker 1: a parent or what they believed to be the face
Speaker 1: of an ancestor, and that could give rise to this
Speaker 1: idea that you see past lives of your own in
Speaker 1: a mirror. Or it could be that if people widely
Speaker 1: believed you could see past lives by turning down the
Speaker 1: lights and gazing into the looking glass, that might have
Speaker 1: in fact primed people to report stuff like this in
Speaker 1: these experiments. So interesting. I wonder how widely um believe
Speaker 1: that that thing that you read in the book was Uh.
Speaker 1: One last thing about the strange face in the mirror illusion.
Speaker 1: An interesting finding of subsequent studies was that a mirror
Speaker 1: was not strictly part of the illusion. Instead, the necessary
Speaker 1: ingredients seemed to be dim light conditions, time, and a face,
Speaker 1: though not necessarily the reflection of your own, because there
Speaker 1: was another study that I think was also done by
Speaker 1: Caputo in which found similar effects simply by having people
Speaker 1: stare at each other's faces intersubjective facial gazing for prolonged
Speaker 1: periods in low light, and that this also produced kind
Speaker 1: of strange hallucinatory or perceptive illusion effects. Uh, if you
Speaker 1: did it long enough. Anyway, back to Chuck's message, and
Speaker 1: this is the second part of his his two part
Speaker 1: tangent to probably everyone that writes has a weird house
Speaker 1: cinema suggestion. And if I may, I suggest Big Trouble
Speaker 1: in Little China. Not only is it my favorite movie ever,
Speaker 1: but I know you guys referenced it all the time. Uh,
Speaker 1: and you've said that you should do a John Carpenter movie.
Speaker 1: I've seen it so many times I generally failed to
Speaker 1: realize how just plain weird the movie is. It was
Speaker 1: so odd that the marketing had no idea what to
Speaker 1: do with it. It dealt with themes and characters no
Speaker 1: one in the West had any deep, non colledge of,
Speaker 1: and the main character, the awesome Kurt Russell, of course,
Speaker 1: was actually the sidekick the whole time. I suspect many
Speaker 1: of your listeners have seen this very quotable film, but
Speaker 1: a weird house examination would be greatly appreciated. Yeah, Rob
Speaker 1: and I do mention this movie a lot. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's a it's a common it's a house favorite. Uh. Finally,
Speaker 1: Check says, thank you for taking the time to read this.
Speaker 1: You guys rock me. Have a great three sincerely, Chuck
Speaker 1: right back at you, Chuck. Alright. Well, I think that
Speaker 1: does it for today's mail bag, but we will be
Speaker 1: back with more of your messages next week and in
Speaker 1: the meantime, if you're new to the show, you can
Speaker 1: check out all of our other episodes anywhere you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts. Monday's we Read Listener mail, Tuesdays and Thursdays
Speaker 1: are our core stuff. To Blow Your Mind episodes. Those
Speaker 1: are usually about science and culture in some way. Wednesdays
Speaker 1: are our short form episodes. Those are called the Artifact
Speaker 1: or sometimes the Monster Fact Friday, as we do a
Speaker 1: movie show, Rob and I just kicked back and talk
Speaker 1: about a strange film, good or bad, on a series
Speaker 1: we call Weird House Cinema. Saturday's we haul out an
Speaker 1: episode from the Vault, and Sunday's we publish nothing at
Speaker 1: All Big thanks to our audio producer, Max Williams. If
Speaker 1: you would like to get in touch with us with
Speaker 1: feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic
Speaker 1: for the future, or just to say hello, you can
Speaker 1: email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 1: dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.