WEBVTT - From the Vault: Odds and Evens, Part 3 0:00:06.240 --> 0:00:08.360 Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My 0:00:08.440 --> 0:00:11.000 name is Robert Lamb, and today is Saturday. Once more, 0:00:11.080 --> 0:00:13.640 so we have an episode from the vault. This is 0:00:13.680 --> 0:00:16.680 going to be Odds and Evens, Part three, and it 0:00:16.720 --> 0:00:24.680 originally published nine to twelve, twenty twenty four. Enjoy Welcome 0:00:24.720 --> 0:00:34.160 to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio. Hey, 0:00:34.240 --> 0:00:35.600 welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. 0:00:35.680 --> 0:00:38.440 My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, 0:00:38.560 --> 0:00:41.200 and we are back for the third and final part 0:00:41.280 --> 0:00:44.919 in our series on the psychology and cultural significance of 0:00:45.320 --> 0:00:49.920 number paroity pr it y parody referring to whether a 0:00:50.080 --> 0:00:53.159 number is even or odd, and we are ending it 0:00:53.240 --> 0:00:57.200 with an odd number of episodes that just felt right now. 0:00:57.240 --> 0:00:59.000 If you haven't heard the other parts in this series, 0:00:59.040 --> 0:01:00.800 you might want to go back in list into those first. 0:01:00.920 --> 0:01:04.640 But in part one we talked about the mathematical principle 0:01:04.760 --> 0:01:07.640 of number parity, as well as some evidence that people, 0:01:07.760 --> 0:01:13.480 if given the opportunity, will sometimes project associations and emotions 0:01:13.480 --> 0:01:17.960 onto even and odd numbers, for example, by maybe feeling 0:01:18.000 --> 0:01:21.920 more positivity toward even numbers on average, or by having 0:01:22.000 --> 0:01:25.680 an esthetic preference for odd numbers in visual art, as 0:01:25.720 --> 0:01:29.200 reflected in the conventional rule of thirds and rule of 0:01:29.280 --> 0:01:32.480 odds in art theory, which we discussed in some detail 0:01:32.520 --> 0:01:34.760 in that episode. But then we also brought in some 0:01:35.080 --> 0:01:38.880 questions and counter evidence about the real world validity and 0:01:38.920 --> 0:01:43.040 alleged universality of these preferences for odds in art. In 0:01:43.080 --> 0:01:45.679 part two of the series, we talked about a research 0:01:45.760 --> 0:01:49.840 paper on the cognitive psychology of number parity, which advanced 0:01:49.840 --> 0:01:52.800 what I thought was a really interesting argument that despite 0:01:52.840 --> 0:01:57.200 the fact that all positive integers are mathematically defined as 0:01:57.240 --> 0:02:01.320 simply odd or even and nothing in between, our brains 0:02:01.400 --> 0:02:05.080 may in practice treat some numbers as more even or 0:02:05.080 --> 0:02:11.000 more odd than others, mentally transforming these definitionally discrete categories 0:02:11.040 --> 0:02:14.280 into a semi smooth gradient. And this could be due 0:02:14.280 --> 0:02:18.600 to multiple factors, involving mathematical properties like the ease of divisibility, 0:02:19.080 --> 0:02:23.079 and also linguistic properties about how easily we process different 0:02:23.120 --> 0:02:26.560 words and their associated concepts. We also talk some more 0:02:26.600 --> 0:02:30.120 about even and odd groupings in visual art, specifically in 0:02:30.160 --> 0:02:33.240 religious images such as that of the ten headed demon 0:02:33.320 --> 0:02:37.280 king Ravina in Hindu mythology, and we also talked about 0:02:37.320 --> 0:02:40.880 preferences for even or odd groupings on food plates. I 0:02:40.919 --> 0:02:44.520 think the conventional wisdom favors odd numbers of food items, 0:02:44.520 --> 0:02:47.760 but the research maybe paints a slightly more complicated picture. 0:02:48.280 --> 0:02:50.200 Yeah, I think in either case, what does what does 0:02:50.240 --> 0:02:56.040 a plate of food and the multi headed incarnation of 0:02:56.040 --> 0:02:58.639 a Hindu god? What do they have in common? It's 0:02:58.680 --> 0:03:03.160 that there are other things involved and how you're ultimately 0:03:03.400 --> 0:03:06.959 going to perceive this image. Either religious iconography is going 0:03:07.000 --> 0:03:10.120 to be trying to relate other concepts to you the viewer, 0:03:10.200 --> 0:03:13.400 the intended audience viewer, and the food imagery is of 0:03:13.440 --> 0:03:16.520 course showing you something that on some level at least 0:03:16.680 --> 0:03:17.560 you want to eat. 0:03:17.919 --> 0:03:21.800 Yeah, exactly. So we're here today to finish off this 0:03:21.880 --> 0:03:25.280 series with a few more things about odd and even topics. 0:03:26.040 --> 0:03:28.200 So I just wanted to mention at the top of 0:03:28.240 --> 0:03:30.760 the episode here a few more interesting ideas I came 0:03:30.800 --> 0:03:35.080 across while reading about events and odds. Previously, we talked 0:03:35.200 --> 0:03:39.480 about some evidence that at least in certain contexts, people 0:03:39.960 --> 0:03:43.880 like some numbers more than others. For example, they may 0:03:43.960 --> 0:03:48.400 have more positive emotional feelings about even numbers, or at 0:03:48.480 --> 0:03:51.360 least about numbers that are easily divisible because one of 0:03:51.360 --> 0:03:55.640 the studies we talked about in Part one apparently found 0:03:55.640 --> 0:03:58.960 that people had more positive feelings toward even numbers and 0:03:59.240 --> 0:04:03.200 numbers to visible five. Coming back to the question of 0:04:03.320 --> 0:04:06.840 certain numbers feeling more even or less odd than they 0:04:06.880 --> 0:04:10.160 really are. So a great example is that twenty five 0:04:10.440 --> 0:04:13.000 is an odd number, but why does it feel like 0:04:13.040 --> 0:04:15.760 an even number? To me? I would say the ease 0:04:15.840 --> 0:04:18.359 of divisibility by the sub base of five is a 0:04:18.360 --> 0:04:21.160 pretty good guess. And this sort of brings me back 0:04:21.200 --> 0:04:24.560 to an idea I first encountered in a couple of 0:04:24.560 --> 0:04:26.760 the articles that we were talking about in Part one 0:04:26.839 --> 0:04:31.279 by a British author named Alex Bellows who writes newspaper 0:04:31.279 --> 0:04:34.520 columns about mathematics and puzzles sometimes, but it also written 0:04:34.520 --> 0:04:37.640 a book addressing some of these topics. And in these 0:04:37.720 --> 0:04:41.479 articles he talked about people's feelings about odd and even numbers, 0:04:41.920 --> 0:04:44.400 and the idea he raises that if it's true that 0:04:44.640 --> 0:04:48.520 people sometimes feel better about even numbers than odd ones, 0:04:48.920 --> 0:04:52.200 what if that sense of liking for even numbers is 0:04:52.279 --> 0:04:57.480 related to the concept of processing fluency. Now, this is 0:04:57.520 --> 0:05:00.840 a psychological concept that has come up the show before. 0:05:01.440 --> 0:05:03.760 The gist of the idea is that a lot of 0:05:03.760 --> 0:05:08.120 the judgments that humans make, from whether we like something 0:05:08.279 --> 0:05:11.440 to whether we trust a piece of information or believe 0:05:11.560 --> 0:05:15.640 something is true, a lot of these judgments are influenced 0:05:15.720 --> 0:05:20.400 by our subconscious reaction to how easy it is for 0:05:20.480 --> 0:05:25.279 us to mentally process the stimulus in question. There are 0:05:25.320 --> 0:05:27.760 a lot of studies looking at this. I remember this 0:05:27.839 --> 0:05:31.839 came up when we were discussing the illusory truth effect, 0:05:31.960 --> 0:05:36.920 the idea that if a claim a claim may have 0:05:37.000 --> 0:05:39.240 no real evidence for it, or you may have no 0:05:39.360 --> 0:05:42.880 particular reason for believing a claim is true, but if 0:05:42.920 --> 0:05:45.760 you hear it repeated a bunch of times, it starts 0:05:45.800 --> 0:05:48.800 to feel more and more true to you. And one 0:05:48.800 --> 0:05:52.039 of the popular explanations for this effect is the idea 0:05:52.080 --> 0:05:57.800 that hearing a hearing a claim on subsequent exposures increases 0:05:57.880 --> 0:06:00.960 its process in fluency because it's more a miliar to you. 0:06:00.960 --> 0:06:04.159 You've heard it before, so it's easier to take in 0:06:04.200 --> 0:06:06.680 the second, third, fourth, fifth time you hear it, and 0:06:06.720 --> 0:06:10.599 thus it because it has increased processing fluency, it just 0:06:10.720 --> 0:06:13.719 feels more right, It feels more true. One of the 0:06:13.760 --> 0:06:15.600 key findings that already came up in some of the 0:06:15.640 --> 0:06:18.400 papers we talked about in Part two is that it 0:06:18.480 --> 0:06:22.840 seems even numbers are on average more easily processed than 0:06:22.920 --> 0:06:25.800 odd numbers are. You know, when it's easier to think 0:06:25.839 --> 0:06:29.440 about even numbers, we can more quickly classify them mathematically 0:06:29.560 --> 0:06:32.720 as even numbers, it's easier to think about doing mathematical 0:06:32.760 --> 0:06:37.480 operations with them. Odd numbers are just they're introducing friction 0:06:37.640 --> 0:06:40.200 to your brain when you have to consider them. And 0:06:40.360 --> 0:06:42.279 if this is the case, it could be a major 0:06:42.320 --> 0:06:46.359 contributor to these particular situations where people seem to like 0:06:46.560 --> 0:06:50.039 even numbers better than odd numbers. But of course we 0:06:50.120 --> 0:06:52.960 don't always like even numbers better than odd numbers. And 0:06:53.360 --> 0:06:56.599 this comes back to the issues of these additional bits 0:06:56.680 --> 0:07:02.159 of context and cultural associations happen to pin onto these numbers, 0:07:02.400 --> 0:07:04.839 and whether at the time of us having a feeling 0:07:04.839 --> 0:07:07.039 about a number or making a judgment about it, these 0:07:07.120 --> 0:07:11.480 other associations become salient. So anyway, that brings me to 0:07:11.680 --> 0:07:14.840 another line of research that I stumbled across when looking 0:07:14.880 --> 0:07:17.680 into this, that I thought was curious and sort of 0:07:17.720 --> 0:07:23.880 funny also, which is the apparent association between number parity 0:07:24.320 --> 0:07:28.840 and the social concept of gender. Now in much the 0:07:28.880 --> 0:07:32.360 same way, it seems absurd that without any context, in 0:07:32.400 --> 0:07:36.440 other words, without quantifying anything in particular, specific numbers whatever 0:07:36.480 --> 0:07:39.880 feel good or bad to people. It also seems kind 0:07:39.920 --> 0:07:43.480 of absurd that anyone would think of standard Arabic numerals 0:07:43.520 --> 0:07:47.880 as masculine or feminine. But there are some experiments in 0:07:48.440 --> 0:07:52.000 which researchers claim to have found that in some contexts 0:07:52.040 --> 0:07:56.240 there is a pattern of gendered associations between odd and 0:07:56.320 --> 0:07:57.800 even numbers that emerge. 0:07:58.320 --> 0:08:01.360 This is interesting because I I was thinking about gender 0:08:01.760 --> 0:08:05.800 numbers earlier in the research process for this series, because 0:08:05.920 --> 0:08:08.600 I ran across an interesting skit about the number one 0:08:08.640 --> 0:08:09.520 on Sesame Street. 0:08:10.120 --> 0:08:11.480 Oh care to elaborate? 0:08:11.760 --> 0:08:14.120 Oh sure, sure, So in this sketch, this is from 0:08:14.240 --> 0:08:16.080 nineteen ninety seven, so this is not one that I 0:08:16.120 --> 0:08:18.880 was originally exposed to as a kid. But we have 0:08:19.080 --> 0:08:22.160 number one, which is of course a muppet. It is 0:08:22.320 --> 0:08:26.320 the numeral one, and it is a she. So the 0:08:26.720 --> 0:08:30.800 number one she is feeling really down about herself because 0:08:30.800 --> 0:08:34.080 she is such a low value number, like you know, 0:08:34.120 --> 0:08:36.719 it's just she's it's one and then zero, like all 0:08:36.760 --> 0:08:41.440 the other numbers are more potent than her, more important 0:08:41.520 --> 0:08:43.880 than her, and she feels she's really feeling down in 0:08:43.880 --> 0:08:46.240 the dumps about it. Well, who comes up to cheer 0:08:46.240 --> 0:08:50.319 her up? But the Count? Oh, And the Count proceeds 0:08:50.360 --> 0:08:54.400 to sing an entire song for her about how important 0:08:54.440 --> 0:08:57.719 she is numerically, and then afterwards he's like, do you 0:08:57.760 --> 0:09:00.360 feel better? And she's like, well a little bit, and 0:09:00.360 --> 0:09:01.920 he says, well, I'm going to sing it for you 0:09:02.240 --> 0:09:06.679 one more time. But it got me think. It's like, well, 0:09:06.720 --> 0:09:10.600 you know, I didn't think about one being male female, 0:09:10.679 --> 0:09:12.960 what have you? I didn't think about the gender of 0:09:13.000 --> 0:09:16.520 the number one. I just considered it like a number. 0:09:17.200 --> 0:09:19.200 But now I'm thinking of it. I just can't help 0:09:19.240 --> 0:09:21.840 but picture it with like the big full lips and 0:09:21.880 --> 0:09:24.440 the beauty mark here from this nineteen ninety seven Sesame 0:09:24.480 --> 0:09:25.120 Street sketch. 0:09:25.480 --> 0:09:27.960 Well, that is adorable. I like the Count. I hope 0:09:27.960 --> 0:09:30.720 that the Count can help any number feel better about itself. 0:09:30.840 --> 0:09:34.080 All numbers are important, but one is really special. 0:09:34.240 --> 0:09:35.840 Yeah. I think the Count is going to be the 0:09:35.840 --> 0:09:38.960 biggest fan, the biggest supporter of any number. He's not 0:09:38.960 --> 0:09:41.640 going to pull a Harry Neilson and talk about how 0:09:42.040 --> 0:09:44.120 crappy the number one is and how number two is 0:09:44.160 --> 0:09:47.239 also no good. He's a big fan of all of them. 0:09:48.080 --> 0:09:50.199 I like knowing you can count on the count for 0:09:50.280 --> 0:09:54.560 emotional support, so anyway to mention A couple of these 0:09:54.600 --> 0:09:59.920 studies apparently finding this association between gender and number parody. 0:10:01.120 --> 0:10:03.240 A couple of the ones I came across were by 0:10:03.320 --> 0:10:06.839 a pair of researchers named Wilkie and Bodenhausen. One of 0:10:06.880 --> 0:10:09.400 these papers was from twenty twelve in the Journal of 0:10:09.440 --> 0:10:13.240 Experimental Psychology, another one by the same authors from twenty 0:10:13.320 --> 0:10:18.240 fifteen in Frontiers in Psychology, and these papers published the 0:10:18.280 --> 0:10:22.160 results of a number of different experiments about the gender 0:10:22.200 --> 0:10:25.640 associations of odd and even numbers. Now, some of these 0:10:25.760 --> 0:10:30.520 experiments involved explicit judgments, just asking people straight up whether 0:10:30.600 --> 0:10:34.400 they felt like specific numbers were more masculine or feminine, 0:10:34.760 --> 0:10:39.360 and other experiments looked for indirect associations, like people's tendency 0:10:39.480 --> 0:10:43.840 to interpret the faces of babies or unfamiliar foreign names 0:10:44.240 --> 0:10:48.000 with different genders when they were labeled with different numbers. 0:10:48.480 --> 0:10:52.200 And to note that this indirect measure here does rely 0:10:52.360 --> 0:10:56.360 on implicit association tests, which have been subjected to various 0:10:56.400 --> 0:11:01.000 methodological critiques over the years. They've undergone some refinements over 0:11:01.040 --> 0:11:04.240 time to try to improve reliability. But there's still sort 0:11:04.240 --> 0:11:07.280 of debates about how they can be depended on and 0:11:07.320 --> 0:11:10.520 in what context. So anyway, caution on relying too much 0:11:10.520 --> 0:11:13.439 on the implicit parts of these findings. But the authors 0:11:13.440 --> 0:11:16.920 say from the totality of their experiments that on average, 0:11:17.080 --> 0:11:21.080 for some reason, people from sample groups within the United 0:11:21.120 --> 0:11:25.360 States are more likely to say that odd numbers are 0:11:25.440 --> 0:11:29.800 masculine and even numbers are feminine. And while that's the 0:11:29.880 --> 0:11:33.240 general trend, there are some exceptions and caveats. While they 0:11:33.240 --> 0:11:36.160 say that this pattern was on average true for everyone, 0:11:36.280 --> 0:11:40.520 the association was stronger among women, So on average, women 0:11:40.559 --> 0:11:43.720 were more likely to view odd numbers as more masculine 0:11:43.760 --> 0:11:48.360 and less feminine than even numbers. Weirdly, this is where 0:11:48.360 --> 0:11:51.600 it starts getting funny. I thought the numbers in when 0:11:51.600 --> 0:11:54.760 the numbers involved were two digit instead of one digit, 0:11:55.200 --> 0:11:59.760 men started to drift away from this parody association and 0:12:00.040 --> 0:12:03.720 started to say that all numbers were masculine, regardless of parody. 0:12:05.520 --> 0:12:07.800 So I don't whenever we look at studies like this, 0:12:07.920 --> 0:12:10.400 By the way, I always like raise caution because I 0:12:10.480 --> 0:12:12.880 just know from experience a lot of people get real 0:12:12.960 --> 0:12:18.319 excited about like gender differences in responses to psychological experiments 0:12:18.360 --> 0:12:21.760 and then start overinterpreting, thinking it explains everything about men 0:12:21.800 --> 0:12:24.200 and women. Oh, you know why my husband or my 0:12:24.240 --> 0:12:26.760 wife acts a certain way, et cetera. And so I 0:12:26.760 --> 0:12:29.000 will raise the same caution here. You know, it's just 0:12:29.080 --> 0:12:31.080 a few experiments. We're not sure if this is a 0:12:31.080 --> 0:12:34.240 super robust finding, and even if it is robust, it's 0:12:34.240 --> 0:12:36.280 easy to get carried away just reading too much into 0:12:36.320 --> 0:12:40.840 little psychological quirks like this. However, I could not resist 0:12:40.880 --> 0:12:44.400 finding it hilarious to imagine a guy looking at numbers 0:12:44.480 --> 0:12:47.960 higher than nine and being like, thirty four. Huh, that's 0:12:47.960 --> 0:12:50.000 a big number. That's a macho man. 0:12:50.880 --> 0:12:52.880 In between thoughts about ancient real right. 0:12:53.160 --> 0:12:56.320 Yeah, so in reality it's probably not that simple, but 0:12:56.400 --> 0:13:00.880 I was laughing for several minutes after I read this. Anyway, 0:13:01.080 --> 0:13:03.640 the authors of these studies, so they're making an argument 0:13:04.200 --> 0:13:09.360 not that there actually is something objectively or universally gendered 0:13:09.480 --> 0:13:12.400 about even and odd numbers, and instead they're sort of 0:13:12.440 --> 0:13:15.839 making a case about what they call, quote, the pervasiveness 0:13:15.880 --> 0:13:19.960 of gender as a social scaffolding for generating understandings of 0:13:20.040 --> 0:13:23.559 abstract concepts. So the way I take that is they're 0:13:23.600 --> 0:13:26.839 sort of saying gender is such an important concept to 0:13:26.960 --> 0:13:31.520 people that we subconsciously apply it to categories of objects 0:13:31.520 --> 0:13:34.840 that have nothing to do with the primary understanding of 0:13:34.880 --> 0:13:39.040 masculinity or femininity. It's just like a major way of 0:13:39.160 --> 0:13:42.280 making category distinctions that the brain kind of defaults to, 0:13:42.440 --> 0:13:45.559 even in situations that don't have anything to do with 0:13:46.920 --> 0:13:49.400 biological sex or with the social roles of gender. 0:13:50.080 --> 0:13:53.319 Right right, So yeah, it wouldn't be like the hypothetical 0:13:53.520 --> 0:13:56.880 male in question is making a conscious effort to think 0:13:56.920 --> 0:14:02.000 about all higher numbers as men. It's a little more 0:14:02.000 --> 0:14:05.480 new as a little more subconscious than that. 0:14:05.920 --> 0:14:09.040 Now I mentioned that those studies were done on us 0:14:09.080 --> 0:14:12.400 test subjects. I came across an interesting variation with respect 0:14:12.440 --> 0:14:16.120 to culture. So there was a twenty twenty one study 0:14:16.200 --> 0:14:20.760 in Frontiers and Psychology by Jordan Yakani and Sheen which 0:14:20.840 --> 0:14:25.480 found some consistency and some variation across cultures regarding the 0:14:25.840 --> 0:14:30.640 perceived gender of numbers. These researchers tested whether the same 0:14:30.720 --> 0:14:34.400 patterns of association between number parity and gender would show 0:14:34.480 --> 0:14:38.560 up among Arabic speaking people native to the UAE, and 0:14:38.600 --> 0:14:41.960 their top level findings were that there were patterns of 0:14:42.000 --> 0:14:46.840 gender association with number parity, but on the implicit association 0:14:46.920 --> 0:14:50.080 of numbers with faces, the subjects in the UAE were 0:14:50.120 --> 0:14:54.480 more likely to associate even numbers with their own gender, 0:14:54.680 --> 0:14:59.280 whichever that was so, men seeing even numbers as more masculine, 0:14:59.320 --> 0:15:03.400 women seeing even numbers as more feminine. And these findings 0:15:03.440 --> 0:15:08.600 indicate that it may be cross culturally common to associate 0:15:08.720 --> 0:15:11.160 even in odd numbers with gender, at least in some 0:15:11.240 --> 0:15:13.720 weekly held way, to make some kind of weak association 0:15:13.840 --> 0:15:18.040 of that kind, but that the association can vary from 0:15:18.080 --> 0:15:20.840 culture to culture, which actually makes a lot of sense 0:15:20.880 --> 0:15:23.400 to me that I think the idea would sort of 0:15:23.440 --> 0:15:27.240 be that gender is a category lens that we're very 0:15:27.320 --> 0:15:30.800 quick to apply to all kinds of phenomena outside of 0:15:30.800 --> 0:15:35.120 its primary cultural meaning, but exactly how we apply it 0:15:35.160 --> 0:15:38.800 probably depends on a lot of subtle influences that can 0:15:38.800 --> 0:15:42.200 easily vary person to person and culture to culture, though 0:15:42.200 --> 0:15:45.640 apparently within a given language culture, one way of making 0:15:45.720 --> 0:15:49.800 the association is probably more common than another. So anyway, 0:15:49.840 --> 0:15:52.280 all the warnings I gave up top about not reading 0:15:52.320 --> 0:15:54.280 too much into these kinds of findings, but I do 0:15:54.320 --> 0:15:57.680 think if this is basically on the right track, it's 0:15:57.720 --> 0:16:00.760 an interesting example of the way that we we just 0:16:00.880 --> 0:16:05.840 kind of recklessly apply category distinctions across every domain of life, 0:16:05.880 --> 0:16:09.960 whether it really makes direct sense or not. You know, 0:16:10.040 --> 0:16:12.120 I think we if we ever talked about the idea 0:16:12.120 --> 0:16:13.840 on the show before, some people seem to think like 0:16:13.960 --> 0:16:15.680 dogs or boys, cats or girls. 0:16:16.080 --> 0:16:19.920 Yeah. I have caught myself falling into that trap as well, 0:16:19.960 --> 0:16:22.840 Like I kind of on a default level assume cats 0:16:22.840 --> 0:16:26.360 are girls and dogs are boys until I know differently 0:16:26.360 --> 0:16:29.960 concerning individual cats and dogs, and I don't know. One 0:16:30.000 --> 0:16:32.160 reason for that is probably that I've only ever had cats, 0:16:32.240 --> 0:16:34.680 and those cats have always been girls. I don't know, yeah, 0:16:34.760 --> 0:16:38.600 female cats. Sorry, some of them have been very old ladies. 0:16:39.000 --> 0:16:42.040 Then again, at least cats and dogs are like animals. 0:16:43.520 --> 0:16:45.960 You know. It's I guess it's even funnier thinking about 0:16:45.960 --> 0:16:50.080 the way that we we just wantonly apply these categories, 0:16:50.240 --> 0:16:55.280 possibly even to things like abstract numbers and symbols that 0:16:54.800 --> 0:16:57.920 that don't even have like you know, bodies or minds 0:16:58.040 --> 0:17:00.200 or anything. Yeah. 0:17:00.240 --> 0:17:02.320 The only the other prime example that comes to mind 0:17:02.400 --> 0:17:05.800 is when especially a ship but sometimes other vehicles or 0:17:06.160 --> 0:17:07.080 gendered as female. 0:17:07.400 --> 0:17:09.920 Yeah, that always seemed funny to me. 0:17:20.160 --> 0:17:22.760 All right, Now for this next little bit, I wanted 0:17:22.800 --> 0:17:26.119 to talk briefly about the word odd. I was looking 0:17:26.160 --> 0:17:28.000 at other angles on odd and even, and I came 0:17:28.040 --> 0:17:31.639 across this excellent write up on Websters, and it points 0:17:31.680 --> 0:17:35.240 out that the word in English comes from the Old 0:17:35.359 --> 0:17:41.000 Norse word audie odd i, meaning point of land in 0:17:41.040 --> 0:17:45.719 the geographical sense. So it's like the point of a triangle, 0:17:45.960 --> 0:17:49.399 and so it eventually came to mean triangle, and it 0:17:49.440 --> 0:17:52.359 also came to mean odd, as the point of a 0:17:52.400 --> 0:17:56.280 triangle triangle must always oppose the two other corners, so 0:17:56.320 --> 0:17:58.800 it's like the two other corners are an even pair, 0:17:59.600 --> 0:18:02.720 and if they were to leave, then the audi is alone. 0:18:02.840 --> 0:18:06.720 Wow, that's almost poetic. That's like a beautiful etymology. 0:18:06.960 --> 0:18:10.480 Yeah. And eventually from here the term transfers over into English, 0:18:10.800 --> 0:18:14.000 and by the fourteenth century it was written down, so 0:18:14.119 --> 0:18:15.680 you know, it may have made the journey. It probably 0:18:15.680 --> 0:18:17.480 it definitely made the journey earlier than that, but that's 0:18:17.520 --> 0:18:20.800 when we have written evidence of it. And initially the 0:18:20.840 --> 0:18:25.480 word odd meant without a corresponding mate, so it was 0:18:25.480 --> 0:18:28.960 still like tied up with this idea of like to 0:18:29.080 --> 0:18:31.199 leave and leave one. But then it comes to mean 0:18:31.240 --> 0:18:35.639 irregular or non conformist, and Webster's notes that during the 0:18:35.680 --> 0:18:39.439 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this usage of odd in English 0:18:39.520 --> 0:18:41.880 language was a good thing. It meant you stood out, 0:18:41.960 --> 0:18:44.400 you know. It's like, oh, look at that odd character there, 0:18:44.520 --> 0:18:46.160 We've got to go chat him up. He has lots 0:18:46.160 --> 0:18:48.639 of interesting things to say as he drinketh from his 0:18:48.680 --> 0:18:52.679 skull and walketh is bear. But then by the seventeenth 0:18:52.720 --> 0:18:56.879 century it comes to lean more toward the eccentric and 0:18:56.920 --> 0:18:59.679 even dare we say, the weird, in the sense that 0:18:59.680 --> 0:19:02.640 you might be like, let's stay away from the guy 0:19:02.680 --> 0:19:05.080 with the bear and the skull. Lord knows what he's 0:19:05.119 --> 0:19:09.240 going to talk about. Let's keep a distance. Wow. 0:19:09.240 --> 0:19:11.760 It almost invokes like a story in the sense that 0:19:11.840 --> 0:19:14.000 if you imagine there were three people and two of 0:19:14.040 --> 0:19:17.040 them left, and now one is odd. Why did the 0:19:17.080 --> 0:19:21.680 other two leave? Were they driven away by the behavior 0:19:21.720 --> 0:19:24.159 of the first one? Or could they just not handle 0:19:24.200 --> 0:19:24.840 the genius? 0:19:25.320 --> 0:19:29.280 Yes, and my apologies to Lord Byron Fans, since he's 0:19:29.640 --> 0:19:33.640 barely covered in the centuries reference there. But Webster's also 0:19:33.640 --> 0:19:36.040 points out that the use of the noun odd for 0:19:36.119 --> 0:19:38.480 a point of land seems to have crossed over a 0:19:38.640 --> 0:19:43.720 second time into English during the nineteenth century, though more 0:19:43.720 --> 0:19:47.280 exclusively to northern England and Scotland. Oh and one more 0:19:47.320 --> 0:19:50.280 little bit here that I ran across. Audi is also 0:19:50.320 --> 0:19:54.800 the name of a town in Iceland. And well, I'm 0:19:54.800 --> 0:19:58.120 not as sure about the direct linguistic connection here between 0:19:58.160 --> 0:20:00.400 what we're talking about and the name of the town 0:20:00.720 --> 0:20:04.200 I did run across. The picture of a statue of 0:20:05.000 --> 0:20:08.679 Salmon the Wise hitting the Devil, and the devil may 0:20:08.760 --> 0:20:10.280 or may not be in the form of a seal 0:20:10.320 --> 0:20:14.679 here with a bible. This was I found this a 0:20:14.720 --> 0:20:16.760 photograph of this on a blog post by eric O 0:20:16.880 --> 0:20:20.320 Scott on the website The Wild Hunt. And this ties 0:20:20.359 --> 0:20:24.320 into a past episode because in our series on Shadows 0:20:24.320 --> 0:20:28.560 from last October that is going to re air this October, 0:20:28.720 --> 0:20:30.760 we talked a little bit about the shadow wizard and 0:20:30.840 --> 0:20:36.680 priest semond or Semonder, the Wise, who has various encounters 0:20:36.680 --> 0:20:38.920 with the Devil. I don't think we talked about him 0:20:38.960 --> 0:20:41.480 hitting the devil with a Bible, but there is an 0:20:41.480 --> 0:20:44.560 episode where he ends up having his shadow stolen by 0:20:44.560 --> 0:20:45.000 the devil. 0:20:45.520 --> 0:20:48.200 Right doesn't he go to like the Devil's College or 0:20:48.240 --> 0:20:51.680 the Devil's School to learn the learn the magical arts. 0:20:51.680 --> 0:20:53.879 But then the devil is supposed to grab one of 0:20:53.920 --> 0:20:56.240 the students at the end of the semester and keep them. 0:20:56.760 --> 0:21:00.560 But semen, they're various tellings, but semen find some way 0:21:00.600 --> 0:21:02.159 to kind of trick the devil and escape. 0:21:02.400 --> 0:21:04.680 Yeah. Yeah, and he like goes to snatch his soul 0:21:04.840 --> 0:21:07.480 and gets his shadow instead and so forth. So I 0:21:07.520 --> 0:21:11.040 don't know, I'm drifting drifting off topic here, but we're 0:21:11.119 --> 0:21:16.399 still somewhere in the neighborhood of a lot and even now. Next, 0:21:16.480 --> 0:21:19.560 I would like to turn to evens and odds and biology. 0:21:19.920 --> 0:21:24.040 This is an area that, uh where you can you know, 0:21:24.240 --> 0:21:26.040 I guess with any of this you have to, especially 0:21:26.040 --> 0:21:27.720 when you're playing in to biology, you have to think 0:21:27.720 --> 0:21:31.399 about like the relationship between numbers and reality, and you 0:21:31.400 --> 0:21:33.160 can get, you know, kind of go do a fair 0:21:33.160 --> 0:21:35.480 amount of navel gazing on that in and of itself. 0:21:36.000 --> 0:21:38.280 But you know, just as we see a tendency for 0:21:38.440 --> 0:21:43.199 external symmetry and biological organisms, we at least to some extent, 0:21:43.480 --> 0:21:48.200 see a tendency toward even numbers. Again, huge caveat here. 0:21:48.280 --> 0:21:50.440 It kind of it can also depend on exactly how 0:21:50.480 --> 0:21:52.239 you want to cut it, because you know, you can 0:21:52.240 --> 0:21:55.320 take a quick survey of your own body, and chances 0:21:55.359 --> 0:21:58.159 are you're going to find some even numbers in play. 0:21:58.280 --> 0:22:03.560 You know, two arms, to let, four limbs total, ten fingers, 0:22:03.600 --> 0:22:07.080 ten toes, two eyes, two nostrils, and so forth. On 0:22:07.119 --> 0:22:09.080 the other hand, I mean, yes, you do have one 0:22:09.119 --> 0:22:12.399 mouth and so forth. But you know, the still of 0:22:12.440 --> 0:22:15.440 course lines up with the basic idea of bilateral symmetry. 0:22:15.600 --> 0:22:17.880 Divide a creature down the middle and you have two 0:22:18.040 --> 0:22:21.320 equal sides, though of course we also have to throw 0:22:21.359 --> 0:22:23.439 in the other caveat that the average human being is 0:22:23.480 --> 0:22:27.400 not perfectly symmetrical, and artificially symmetrical faces tend to read 0:22:27.400 --> 0:22:28.680 as uncanny to us. 0:22:28.720 --> 0:22:32.879 For this reason, we actually did a series on biological 0:22:32.920 --> 0:22:36.720 symmetry and asymmetry a couple of years back. I don't 0:22:36.880 --> 0:22:39.240 recall it was that the series called The Lesser of 0:22:39.240 --> 0:22:40.640 Two crab Claws, where. 0:22:40.560 --> 0:22:44.119 I think the fiddler crabs mm hm, yes, Because you know, 0:22:44.200 --> 0:22:46.480 there are plenty of examples too in the biological world 0:22:46.480 --> 0:22:48.640 which we get into in that series, where there is 0:22:48.760 --> 0:22:52.080 a glaring asymmetry. So anyway, it would be a gross mistake. Though, 0:22:52.320 --> 0:22:54.000 coming back to odds and evens, if you were to 0:22:54.040 --> 0:22:56.720 say that you only see even numbers and organisms. That 0:22:57.000 --> 0:23:00.000 is absolutely not true, and they're ultimately far more common 0:23:00.040 --> 0:23:04.000 place and satisfying ways to apply numbers more universally to nature, 0:23:04.080 --> 0:23:07.360 such as say the Fibonacci sequence so forth. But it's 0:23:07.359 --> 0:23:10.080