Listener Mail: Year End Wrap-Up, Part 1

since August or so, it's been a while one. So we figured this would be a great way to close out the year to share some messages from fans of the show, like you. All right, so we're gonna summon um. What's our mail bot in the show name? We've forgotten the name. It's Malos. So it's Melos. Yeah, modeled after Taalos, the Bronze automaton, and this is the mail bot Melos. Say hello Melos. Okay, now I remember it, now, I remember it? My bad all right, So we have some

listener mail. Let's dive right into it. These are again going to refer to various episodes of the show, some recent some not so recent, but it's all good stuff. Yeah, it's going aways back. And this one comes from the series we did in October about coffins and caskets, all all the different kinds of inventions in that world, like to prevent your body from being removed from a coffin or casket when you wanted to stay in there, to help get your body out of a coffin or casket

when you wanted to get out. Uh So, this one comes from our listener, Katherine. Catherine says, Hey, guys, First, I want to tell you how much I'm enjoying your podcast. I am a former librarian turns stay at home mom with two kiddos, a two year old and a six month old. I really enjoy listening while doing stuff around the house. And I have a story for you that's too funny not to share. I was listening to your

first episode on caskets earlier this week. Since y'all are family friendly, I was letting it play where my two year old e J could hear. I didn't really think she was paying attention, but boy was I wrong. In the episode, you talked about Victor Orion safety caskets and Edgar Allan Poe. Well, I happened to have an Edgar Allan Poe finger puppet on my desk in our office the day after listening to Caskets Part one. I found pose jacket lying in the middle of the office floor.

So I called e j into the room and asked her where Edgar Allan Poe was. She knows who he is because I've let her play with the puppet a few times. She immediately said, oh, and runs over to my husband's desk and retrieves his glasses case. He's dead. She then proceeds to open the glasses case, revealing interred and jacketless Edgar Allan Poe. Then she says, but not really, Yes, my two year old had buried Edgar Allan Poe in my husband's glasses case alive. Needless to say, my mind

was blown. I didn't know whether to laugh or not. I had no idea she was paying such close attention to the episode. Anyway, I thought y'all would enjoy knowing that you have a very young and attentive listener. Keep up the good work, Catherine. Oh, that's wonderful. Uh, you know bidden horrors in the child's head that earlier it's

a real privilege. Well no, well yes and no, but I do find it amuzing because yeah, young kids, Uh, they are very interested in in concepts of death and uh and uh and so forth, even if they they certainly don't have the ability to fully understand these lofty concepts, I mean, the understanding of which eludes adults a lot

of the time. But um, but but yeah, I don't know how many times i've you know, my my my son has been playing with stuffed animals and there's one that his dead or has died you know, or must or you know, and so forth. So uh, yeah, I think this is a wonderful story and and and also it's neat that they applied the you know, the concepts of live burial to the scenario. Yeah, I'm just glad that they weren't listening in to the Guillotine episodes. It's

probably gone sideways on you. Are we family friendly? I guess we are. We're not overtly or intentionally not family friendly, but we cover some mature stuff and we don't cuss per se, you know. All Right, here's another one. This comes to us from Josh, and it concerns caskets as well, hey guys, I'm writing this after listening to the second part of the Casket and thought you might find this

interesting or at least entertaining. My wife and I are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, and we believe in a literal and physical resurrection. I found your discussion of the idea that your body needs to stay intact for resurrection very interesting, mostly because I am an organ downer. I figured that organs taken from my body will somehow be returned when the time comes.

I also figure if people who choose cremation can get resurrected, how hard could it be to just get a harder liver back. I figure someone else should use them while I can't. Anyway, my wife, on the other hand, is of a different opinion. She doesn't like the idea of her organs flying through the air on their way back to her body. I thought you may like that personal take on one of the aspects discussed on the episode. I listened to a lot of podcasts, but yours are

easily my favorites. Best wishes, Josh, Thanks Josh. I wonder how how does this belief square with like fears about how your body is interred. Like, do you have a fear of grave robbing? I guess grave robbing doesn't happen a lot these days as far as I know, I don't know, Joe. Check out the headlines. Um, there's some stories out there. There are new versions of grave robbing that are that are allegedly going on as well. But what in like New Orleans with above ground burials and

crips and no, there was a there was a new story. Gosh, I don't remember which city this was out of, but the idea, no, it was out of out of Arizona. Okay, yeah, perhaps out of Phoenix, I don't recall. But basically the idea that some organ donation places were not operating like on the level and um, you know had like you know, bags of organs sitting around that sort of thing. Don't

let that discourage you know, is great? Yeah, absolutely, Um, but I'm just saying that there if you want to, you may not be concerned about your body being stolen these days, but you can find, you know, to Like my main my main reaction to seeing that story on the news was that, Okay, someone's going to use this as an excuse not to uh, you know, don'tate their body to science or become an organ donor, which I

think is absolutely the wrong move. Certainly, you know, look into where your body is going, you know, be be an informed donor, uh, to the extent to which that is possible. But uh, you know, on the other hand, yeah, I think the the argument that you're not going to use your organs once you're dead is totally solid. Let somebody else use them and uh. And then I do love the way Josh factors this into his belief system.

You know that he doesn't he doesn't let belief in a physical resurrection keep him from doing something, uh that that you know, can help people out and can improve the quality of life and save lives for other individuals. Sure, all right? Should we move on to emails about our episode on Ketchup. We got a ton of feedback about ketch Up. I don't know how covered in Ketchup we want to get here, but it's the logical place to go after organ donation, I guess. So should we look

at this first one from Christian. This is responding to our comments about curry Worst and the role of Ketchup in German food. I think I uh, said that I believed curry Worst was like a type of like cut up sausage that was popular German fast food that was in some kind of curry ketchup mixture. Christian responds, Hi, I'm quite late, but my podcascher is backed up a little bit. So I write to you now about your episode on Ketchup. First, great episode. A second. You weren't

slandering German cuisine at all. Now, that makes me wonder exactly what it was. I said, Um, curry Worst is a German brought first drowned in a secret sauce which is mostly ketchup and curry powder and is widely available as a quote traditional German fast food, invented in the fifties and sixties. Historically it served as a whole worst in Berlin and cut with scissors in my home region in the Ruhr That that is a a squak. I

did not know that I had. That is like cutting sausage with a knife, that's normal, but like the scissors that got into my brain and and did horrible things. I don't know. You gotta cut a sausage with something. I don't know why the scissors feel so much worse. I don't know. I mean, well, I guess it comes back to the idea that a sausage is phallic in form I'm sure he does. Actually, because I found I was also getting grossed out by the idea of just

generally cutting meat with scissors. It gave me the creeps. I mean, we have kitchen sheers, right, Those are sometimes used to take apart, say a chicken carcass, right, I guess they they sometimes are. I used it to take apart vegetables sometimes. Huh, that's not you know, you wigged out with the possibility of using kitchen shears and say, I don't know, celery, I don't know, maybe a little bit more so on the meat. I don't know something.

Something's are going wrong there anyway, Christian continues. It was a long time in the top three most served fast food in Germany until Donor Kebab pushed it out down to the fourth spot. The second most sold catch up in Germany after regular Ketchup is Career ketch Up, with HeLa, the leading brand with a more marked shared than the American Juggernaut. Hines, so eating Ketchup in Germany often comes with curry powder, and while I keep a bottle of

ketchup around my kitchen. I really can't stand curry in my ketchup since I started cooking meals and exploring flavor for myself. Keep up the great podcasting. I hope I can catch up with your podcast soon. With spiced greetings, Christian, Well this is great. I now I really want to try some German ketchup. I feel like a lot of German cuisine since it is kind of unavailable to me

now because it is traditional German cuisine. German. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but yeah, I try to go to a German restaurant in New Orleans very recently, and I just looked at the menu and I'm like, Okay, there's like nothing I can eat here. Um, Like you can get some good potato salad, or it is bacon in it? Oh really didn't or it usually does. I mean maybe they're I guess they're probably variations of German potato salad that don't have meat in them, but my

understanding is that it usually does. Um. And so like the only two things on the menu of an otherwise great looking German restaurant, the two things that were vegetarian, we're not particularly German. Uh, so what was the point of going right? I don't know. I'm sorry, man, but I would I am happy to be corrected by anyone else.

Here has recommendations on German restaurants in the continental United States that can appease my my dietary constraints or likewise, just an information about what what what is it like to uh to eat traditional German fair and be a vegetarian? Yeah, I don't know. Well, I look forward for the recipes coming in. Yeah. Uh, Robert, do you mind if I jump on with this next one about chop because I was already practicing some of these words. Please do this one.

What's long? It's not too long, but it's yeah, it's about where I'm still going to get some of them wrong, I know, all right, So this was also about the ketchup episode. Is from a listener who did not want us to share her name allowed, so I if I

name her, I'm just gonna call her chop for ketchup. Uh. This message seems to be in response to us talking about how tomatoes used to be known as the apples of love or love apples like in French, and how other fruits and tubers and stuff were once named with some kind of apple plus modifier construction, for example potatoes in French or palm to tear apples of the earth and so forth. Uh. And so this was in response to that our listener chup rights. Hey guys, you were

wondering in the catchup episode about other weird apples. So, being the multi lingual linguistics geek but not a proper linguist that I am, I felt inclined to share my knowledge. First of all, apple or medieval Latin palm um didn't only mean apple, but food or crop in general. That's interesting. Uh. This is why various settlers called plants they found in

other parts of the world some kind of apple. The origins aren't always linguistically clear, since the English, French, Spanish, and Dutch all ventured all over the world and often found similar their plants independently in very different places, since they weren't the first people to travel and conquer all over the place and spread crops all over the place. Here are some examples. Pomegranate means seeded apple. The name

is of French and medieval Latin origin. Extra fact, the apple that Adam and Eve share in Biblical tradition was probably originally thought to be a pomegranate, since that was a fruit well known but still considered a delicacy in the lavant region. Of course, paradise isn't limited in any way, and all fruits can grow there. But this is essentially about stories and culture. I know it's in the original text. It is not specified to be an apple, like the

fruit we call an apple. It's just like it's a fruit, and we don't necessarily know what fruit it was supposed to be, so there's a debate about what fruit it was in the garden of Eden. I was like thinking of it as a banana, just because it's it's more funny that way. I think I've heard somebody propose it was a lemon. I like that delicious. Uh. This listener continues in Greek, then Latin and German, English, French, et cetera translations, the pomegranate became an apple, and so it

was depicted in Eurocentric art. Oranges are called apple sign or apple sign in German and Dutch, which means Chinese apple. Uh. Peaches were originally called Persian apples. They're called parask and Dutch and the country as Persia, making it even clearer where the fruit was first discovered by Europeans, even though it originated somewhere in central to East Asia. Like oranges, potatoes are called the earth apple and Dutch art apple, and in some German speaking regions aired app ful. Uh.

Pineapples are a little more convoluted. They're called this because they reminded the Spanish explorers of pine cones with overall shape and scales. Wild pineapples are also about the same size as pine cones. Now in Dutch they say dnan apple for fur cone, but that's basically the same thing. However, pineapples are called ananas. I guess that's in Dutch. Uh. Quince's kintzes. I've never actually um. I guess I was saying quinces. I don't know if I was saying correctly. Okay,

Quinces are called Sidonian apples or variants of that. They spread from West Asia through the Mesopotamian Empire to Greece, where they entered European culture, and Sidonia was a city on crete. Maybe it was also a quince that Adam and Eve supposedly eight uh. And she says that's all I can think of, but also a few other things. Peppers are some etymo logic variant of pepper in most languages, as far as I know, she says, and then she also has some comments about curry worst as curry works.

Curry Worst is usually vealed or fine pork sausage, and it's common street food sold on markets, permanent sausage stands and carnivals, mainly in Berlin and the Rugabyte, both regions claimed to be the origin. In Germany, we only have McDonald's Burger King in some KFC in recent years as fast food chains. Instead, there are these hole in the wall kiosk style places that sell all kinds of sausages. Curry ketchup can be bought anywhere, and it's very good

with fries. Oh yeah, but you probably know this. Fries originated in Belgium, and Belgiums are very proud of them. Always happy about the foodie episodes. Thanks for the hard work, detailed research and quality entertainment. Have a great week. I I do want to come in real quick since we're talking more about about German food. UM, I do not mean to imply that I think Germany is a monolith and that everyone in Germany just eat sausages, sausages and

where's the later hosing or whatever. Obviously they're multiple different cultural cultures are represented in Germany, and not everyone is Certainly not everyone is eating traditional German cuisine, especially as it is recognized generally and by American audiences that are going to German restaurants. But so my question is more specifically, what would modern day meat uh seek out to eat in order to scratch the same itch that meat head

the German American restaurants offered when I was a kid. Well, you know what I would say, Actually, perhaps my favorite thing in German cuisine is not a meat. It is completely vegetarian. It's their pickles. I love wonderful that this is true. I do still eat sauer kraut, and I do frequently have sauer kraud on um, like the veggie dogs and whatnot. So, I mean, maybe I'm already practicing the answer, but I but I want, I want more answers than that. All right, you've got your assignment, folks,

right in with vegetarian German food for Robert. I should just say, by the way, that we heard from a lot of like European listeners about the Ketchup episode I don't know why that is. Maybe it's a coincidence. But like multiple listeners from like Austria and Germany about ketchup, I don't know what's going on there. That's great, im I want more of it. All right, here's another one. This one comes to us from David and uh here

he goes, Hello guys, another great episode. As an Australian listener, I just wanted to share some differences in the way we refer to the food items and sauces mentioned. First of all, Australians up until fairly recently did not have a product in the supermarket that was called ketchup. What you would call ketchup, we simply called tomato sauce. For an Australian ketchup is thought of as a thicker sauce. I believe this maybe because Hines sells both a thinner

tomato sauce and a thicker ketchup. It is also quite interesting that Hines is so associated with the red sauce in the US. In Australia, Beans means hinds quote unquote is a big advertising campaign. Always makes me think of that album by The Who That's got the Hines Big Beans on it um. David continues, they are the baked beans company to most of us, and this ketchup thing is only probably a thing in the last five to

ten years, maybe a little longer. I would imagine that the numbers you used for worldwide sales includes our tomato sauce as ketchup on our condiment and sauce profile. We are not big on the mustard. On any family table a restaurants, you are more likely to see tomato sauce

and barbecue sauce as the two main sauces. Strange, we have hot dogs with the Frankfurt, but Australians are more likely to have a sausage sandwich that has a clear skin sausage that is cooked on the barbecue in a single piece of white bread with or without cooked onions, and the sauces are either tomato or barbecue barbecue sauce everywhere. Yeah, it sounds like no buns for its bread instead of bunk, right, like a white bread with the with the grilled items.

I mean that that's sort of a thing in American southern barbecue tradition. To David continues, Australians call French fries chips. It is a strange thing that we have two products that are referred to as chips. They are the fried potato and the thinly cut cold product that you call chips, and the English called crisps. The way we differentiate is to say hot chips, but that is only when we think it will cause confusion. So that's interesting. They kind

of took chips. It's like the chip, the aprickin chips and the British ships. Uh and and they just use both. Yeah, very economical hot ships. David finishes up here and says, anyway, just thought that I would share this because throughout the episode I was continually having to translate in my own mind as you were using these terms. I don't know why. I am always very interested to hear what other people call food items and how they talk about them in

different cultures. Oh yeah, I mean it's it's a wonderful way to to share and share alike with another culture. It's like talking about what does a you know, what does a chicken say in your language? What do you call this food item that you inevitably have over there as well? And if you don't have it, well, then that's something we can relate about as well. What do you have instead? Uh? Yeah, the kitchen table is that the dining table in general, that's the place where where

pieces made between otherwise differing people. Right, all right, it's time to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more. Okay, So we are back next for moving on to respond says we got to our series about the invention of air conditioning. I would say this one got probably the most feedback of any episode we've done. There was a huge amount of email about air conditioning. Uh, there is no way we'll have a chance to read it all. We can do our best to give a

decent sampling here. So first I wanted to start off with a message from Adam. This one was a correction about something we said in the air conditioning episode. So we were pointing out that a regular fan does not actually cool the air in the room. In fact, a fan might slightly increase the temperature of the air in the room, and instead a fan, we were saying, cools the body by causing air to move rapidly over your skin, which cools you by speeding up the evaporation of water

from your skin. Uh. And that, of course is true. But here's Adam giving a fuller and clearer picture on the issue. So Adam says, Hey, Robert and Joe, I've written into stuff to blow your mind a few times recently, but this is my first time writing into invention. I'm a mechanical engineering student who did very well in my heat transfer class, and I spotted an incorrect statement in your air conditioning episode. Knowing how much you love corrections,

I thought I would provide this one. Hopefully it is not too dry. While evaporative cooling is certainly a factor in fan cooling, it's only part of the effect. The rest is the result of different modes of heat transfer. To start, heat is transferred from the skin to the air through conduction. In non moving air, the air that has just been heated forms a graduated layer around the body,

which insulates you and makes you feel warmer. This air becomes buoyant and rises in accordance with the Chimney effect. The warm air is thus gradually replaced with cool air, and the cycle continues. This is known as natural convection. In moving air, the warm layer of air around your skin is wicked away by the flow of air around you, reducing the size and effectiveness of the insulating hot air boundary.

This is known as forced convection the heat transfer coefficient, and therefore the heat transfer rate of force convection is greater than that of natural convection, which in this case means that moving air will draw more heat away and cool you better, regardless of whether or not you're sweating.

The reason why the temperature reading of Joe's thermometer did not change when air was blown on it before being wrapped in a wet towel is because the thermometer was already the same temperature as the air, and therefore there was no heat transfer with the air regardless of flow speed. However, for warm blooded creatures like us, we are almost always experiencing heat transfer. Some interesting results of this concept are cold blooded animals are not effectively cooled by fans unless

they have recently been basking. A side note, radiation is the third form of heat transfer, along with conduction and convection. There's a high theoretical temperature where moving air will actually heat you up faster than stagnant air. Uh And of course you can imagine that by just upping into a convection of it, right is blowing air on you, But it's certainly not cooling you off. Right. Also, don't step

into a convection of it. Um, Adam continues. Although, due to the evaporative effects of sweat that Joe talked about, this temperature is well above your body temperature. So you can get a fan blowing on you even if the air is above nine degrees and it will still cool you off because of the sweat evaporation. But whatever, This theoretical temperature is where the blowing of a fan would actually heat you up instead of cool you down. Adam

calls this the anti fan temperature. Also, Adam says, running in the same direction and speed as the wind is an incredibly strange and uncomfortable feeling. Uh I wonder if I've done that before. As I have, I've certainly experienced this um on a boat before, where you know you're going against the wind on say like a hot day, and if you're going against the wind, yes, it's just heightened uh wind, you know, and air moving past you, and it's very cooling and liberating. And then you have

to go back the other way. Um, you you might find yourself in a more like heated environment. You're like, what am I doing now? I'm actually like really breaking a sweat here. Yeah, I hope that this mini heat transfer lesson was interesting. I wasn't able to continue listening until I cleared this small air up. Keep up the great almost entirely factual podcasting best regards, Adam, Well, thank you,

that's our thing, almost entirely factual podcasting. But no, obviously we uh we we we want to be corrected if we get anything off on the show. Yeah. So the main just there that there is something a fan does to help cool you apart from just helping evaporate sweat, and it's just moving more air over your skin, which helps you conduct heat into the air faster. All right, here's another air conditioning one and this is this one's really good. I I'm glad we put this one on

the list. Here. This one comes to us from h Ay. I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly. Uh. They write in and say Hi, Robert and Joe. I'm a big fan of Invention and st have to blow your mind. I started listening to both of them when Invention started, but I liked them so much that I've gone back and listened to a few years worth of stuff to blow your Mind episodes. I decided to write in after

listening to the air Conditioning part one episode. I grew up in India, spending a lot of summers in Kerala, which is a hot in humid state, and have been living in Austin, Texas for the last four years. Most of my family in India do not have air conditioning, although they probably could now, so the episode made me

reflect on living with versus without air conditioning. You mentioned sleeping on roofs, but I don't think you mentioned the more obvious solution, sleep on the floor or use thinner mattresses. Sleeping on the floor is a lot easier than in a bed in hot weather because the floor will be cooler. It gets better if you wet the floor and let it dry a couple of hours before sleeping, or shower

just before bed. Also, a cotton mattress which you can't sink into as much, and cotton sheets, which are more breathable, are much better for the heat compared to the kind of betting which is more common here in the US.

I've resorted to all of these strategies and if all else fails, sleeping in damp clothes when I had a tiny dorm room in undergrad in a hot human place with no A C. Although I have become somewhat spoiled after coming to the U S, I still find that I am more comfortable with a higher temperature and a table fan pointed at my face than a low A C temperature for sleeping. One thing I haven't been able to understand is the extent to which sweat bothers people here.

For me, it's just a It's been a normal part of life, and I actually find it harder to handle dry heat than some level of humidity. I also find that my body just feels better due to cooling from evaporation, while an unnecessarily cold A C just makes me feel a little ill. One last thing. Initially, when you mentioned step ponds and wells, I was a little surprised because I hadn't heard of the term, and I was wondering

how come I did not know about this. From the description, I realized that I did know about them, but just hadn't appreciated that there was anything special about them. Thank you for helping me see them in a new light. They're fairly common in temples in Kerala, but as these are usually not very welcoming of tourists. I can see why they haven't been seen as much. It's also easy to imagine how the need for space in cities may result in these being filled or taken over. It's definitely

happened with lakes in Bangalore. Thanks again for awesome podcast, Ashwaria. What a great message. Yeah, yeah, thanks so much for sharing this. This reminds me real quick. We'll come back to this. But another listener sent in some pictures that he took. A listener named Alan just of some stepwells in India, and I just wanted to emphasize again how

weirdly beautiful and counterintuitive they look. They look so much like optical allusions to me, the steps zigzagging down the walls really somehow seemed to defy the normal rules of perspective, and I want to understand what's going on with that. Yeah, indeed, there's some there. These are these pictures who were sent in were pretty amazing, and there have been some wonderful of photographs that have been been made over the years of them. I think we discussed in the show how

they are. You know, for for a while they were kind of forgotten to a certain extent. And there's been a you know, sort of a renaissance and and reevaluating them, reappreciating them and sharing images of them with the world, which is wonderful because, like you said, they there's nothing else quite like them, you know. They The best way I can think of them is it's like an inverted zigarade. Yeah,

but also a sawaria. I really appreciate you sharing all these sort of like hacks for temperature at night, uh, like like wetting the floor so that like the evaporative heat of the water evaporating off the floor actually cools the floor right before bed. Uh. And I wonder how hard you have to manage like the timing of that and stuff, because I assume you wouldn't want to like lie down while it's still wet, so I don't know. Uh, this was really interesting. Also the fact the fact that

you've had perspective on it, on it both ways now. Yeah, So thanks so much. All right. Also about air conditioning, our listener Tom says, Hey, guys, I was listening to the podcast and you mentioned movie theaters offering a c you know, you said if you were in this position, you would look for the longest movie. However, in the old days when I was a kid. Even after the thirties, movies didn't charge you to watch a movie. They charged an admission. Movies always had short reels and often were

double features. Either way, you routinely walked into a movie at any time, sat through the end, and then watched the beginning until you got to the place you already saw. In fact, you would frequently see people leave saying this is where we came in. Many times we would sit and rewatch the movie. I guess, just take advantage of the air conditioning. Right, Is that the line from the Pink Floyd song that you and I were talking about? Wait, what are you talking about? This is where we came in.

Oh yeah, what's the deal with that? With the wall supposedly like loops somehow? Yeah? So, what a weird coincidence were speaking about that um off Mike earlier, totally unrelated to listener mail. It must mean something. Yeah, all right, here's another one. This one comes to us from David. First of all, love the podcast, but I'm somewhat new to the stuff to blow your mind sphere. But I've

been with invention from its inception. I love seeing the evolution of technologies and how they shaped the world we know today. I was looking forward to this episode and he's talking about the air conditioning episode, because in particular, because I knew you'd be mentioning my hometown of Minneapolis. I also strongly suspected that you'd be surprised to learn that we hosted the site of the first residential air conditioning installation, which indeed we did express surprise at that.

Let me tell you, Minneapolis can get hot in the summer. We have roughly two to three months out of the year that i'd call legitimately hot. This doesn't happen too often, but it's not unheard of us for us to even see a couple of a hundred and ten plus fahrenheit days per year. What what many people forget is that we're positioned fairly centrally on the continent, with Lake Superior in Michigan the only large bodies of water to regulate

temperature swings that are even close. So we experienced very cold days for sure, but pretty dang hot ones to

keep out the great work. David, uh Yeah, I'll admit that my my visions of Minneapolis were largely based on, first of all, jokes from from people who have lived there about the cold and having only and having ventured there only once during the winter for like twenty four hours, and having to get out on you know, and walking around and travel at one point point to another, and so on some level, I just imagine that Minneapolis is just always really cold, except for maybe like a month

or two in the summer where they experience something called summer, but surely not as hot as something that we would have down here. What's the TV show that's set there? Is Mary Tyler Moore something maybe, so yeah, it always looks cold. It's kind of the reverse of the the

effect you see with television shows shot in Toronto. Specifically, I'm thinking of Kim's Convenience, which is a wonderful Canadian show, and then I think Working Moms is also set there and filmed there, but I get the impression they only filmed the show during the summer or in the you know, warmer months, and so if you were just watching those two shows, you would think, wellow, Toronto looks amazing. It's

just it's just summer all the time. They have no no winters there, nor at least nobody on the show talks about it. So I guess I'm gonna, you know, book my my trip for for November and see what happens. Um But likewise, I think that the talking points for Minneapolis among you know people abroad tend to be about the cold. Yeah. I think you're right on the money there. Okay,

quick message from our listener, Colin. Colin is referring again to the thing I talked about in the episode where you know I held up a thermometer in front of a desk fan. The temperature didn't change, but then when I wrapped it in a wet towel, the temperature went

way down, and that was because of the evaporative cooling. Um. So, Colin says, Hello, I just finished part one of air Conditioning and wanted to draw your attention that Joe was obliquely describing a sling psychrometer when he spoke of using a wet cloth thermometer and desk fan to prove the cooling properties of evaporation. A sling psychometer is a rudimentary meteorological device composed of two bulb thermometers connected by a string. The bulb of one thermometer is wrapped in a wet

cloth and the other is not. The thermometers are then swung around circularly for several seconds, and then the temperature of each is recorded. The difference in temperature reading can then be entered into a table which will provide you with the relative humidity. The more arid the ambient air is, the greater the temperature discrepancy will be. Anyway, it's a it's a term from fourth grade Earth sciences that is always stuck with me because it's fun to say. Love

the show, cheers Colin. Alright, on that note, we're going to take one more break, but we'll be right back with more listener mail. Alright, we're back, so we're gonna read some more air conditioning listener mail. This one comes to us from an individual name Christian. I feel, I guess a different Christian. I'm not a different one. We don't want to imply that they're like just two listeners and they just just happens. We just get multiple listeners

at the same Yeah. Yeah, there, and and certainly we love hearing from from repeat listener mail offenders as well. But Christian rights in and says, hey, guys, I enjoy the air Conditioning podcast. As an architect. There are any number of rants about poorly designed buildings I could break off into, but I thought it might be more beneficial to introduce something critical to heating, ventilation air conditioning design. This tool is the psychrometric chart with the comfort zone

for humans highlighted. Oh yeah, so this would connect to what we were just talking about, the psychometer detecting like relative humidity levels. Yeah, the comfort zone illustrates that seventy degrees in Atlanta with humidity feel is hot, yet eighty degrees in southern California with fifty percent humidity does not. The big takeaway humidity control can be more important than temperature in our comfort. In the South, air our air

conditioners remove moisture from the air while cooling it. When our buildings have the humidification systems, which operates separately from the air conditioning systems, we can be more comfortable over a wider range of temperatures, thus saving energy. Typically houses aren't constructed that way, but probably should be, especially in the hot, muggy South. That's really interesting. I've never thought

of that before. That, like you could use less energy achieving a comfort zone if you take into account temperature and humidity separately instead of just running in a c to do both all the time, so you can have one device stuck in one window and then another one in the other window, and then you have two devices, which uh you know this is I do think this gets to the heart of why you you don't see this utilized in a home environment. All right, what else

do we have? Joe? Alright? This next message came in response to our episode on the invention of the hypodermic needle. H this comes from Dan. Dan says, Hi, Robert and Joe. I was listening to your most recent listener mail episode and was surprised that the letters you received about the hypodermic needle lacked any input from type one diabetics. I myself have been managing type one diabetes since I was

diagnosed at age three, almost thirty years ago. Before switching to insulin pump therapy in the mid two thousand's, I spent about fifteen years getting between five and seven injections of insulin each and every day, Additionally, every three months having blood drawn to check long term markers of possible hyperglycemia related damage. As you might suspect, this served as exposure therapy to the extreme for myself and any other

diabetics in the pre insulin pump era. As a child, I had absolutely no trepidation with needles, injections or i V s. My story takes an unexpected turn, however, when I was in college and was diagnosed with cancer at age twenty. I'm happy to say that I've been cancer free and relatively healthy for ten years now, but the traumatic experience of the diagnosis and subsequent treatment manifested in

a surprising manner. During my treatment, I had to regularly undergo CT scans to monitor my disease, which involved an intravenous injection of contrast DIE. This seemed like no big deal at the time, as I was well accustomed to needles and blood draws, but during one of my CT scan sessions, I became extremely dizzy and nearly fainted during the insertion of the i V line. Ever since that experience, I've been very uneasy around needles and often feel lightheaded

during blood draws. Despite my exposure therapy consisting of tens of thousands of injections during my lifetime, I can only hypothesize the trauma of my cancer diagnosis and treatment created an anxious association with needles, but I thought this would be an interesting story of exposure therapy early in life that was surprisingly counteracted by later events. Thanks again for putting together such consistently intelligent and insightful episodes of invention

and stuff to blow your mind. I am a cell biologist working in cancer research, and having well researched and stimulating podcast to listen to both helps me get through some of the mundane and repetitive tasks required to my scientific research and continually expands my perspective. Best Dan, very interesting. Thanks for sharing that with us. Stan, Yeah, totally and h best of luck in your research. Al Right, here's one message in response to the episode we did about

the Turnspit Dog. This comes from someone who identified themselves as gamer checks. We don't choose their names. I think that's their their their God given name. Okay, gam er checks. Gam er check says, love the show. I was listening to your episode on the Turnspit Dog and you talked about the dog being domesticated twelve thousand years ago and brought up how we domesticated the cat later on. This is actually not the case. Cats are the only close

companion who domesticated themselves. God will love the stubborn little chunks. Anyway, in the future, I'd love to see a themed episode on the invention of domestication itself. Thanks gam er checks. Yes, this is a good point and one that I think we have we have discussed on past episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind our other podcast. But yes, there is the argument that that the cat essentially brokered its

own domestication. The cat wanders up and it's like, hey, so you gotta you've got a problem with some rats there. It looks like you've got some some extra food around. Uh, creature like me could really earn its keep around here. And we said, oh, sure, let's let's do that. And

what do you want to return the cats? Like, I just want enough to you know, to wet my beak, and then the cat wants to, uh, you know, live inside your house and on you, and uh and so forth and and yeah, so and certainly anyone who has who has lived with the cat knows that the cat is there on its seems to be there on its own terms for the most part, carrying out nightly missions for the neighborhood. Which, yes, but I I could see

us doing an episode on domestication in the future. I mean, it is it is a human technology, though it also is it's not entirely a human technology. There are examples in the natural world of creatures that have domesticated something, and that would be fun to talk about as well. Sure, yeah, like insect agriculture. Uh yeah, absolutely, yeah. And then also some of the stories of domestication are just so impressive. Um really, I mean there are specific examples that would

that really should be their own episode, like silk. So I've thought about doing this before. Yeah, well, heck, let's do Silk in the new year. Okay, Okay, So I think due to time constraints, we're gonna have to call it there for the first of our year end wrap up episodes of Invention Listener Mail, but we'll be back with more next time. That's right, We're gonna close out the year with another episode of Invention Listener Mail, and then we'll be back with new episodes of Invention in

the new year. But really, the years almost overstop learning, Really, we don't need to keep going to see. There's a lot to learn from these messages. There is. There is a lot for us to learn specifically, and and we do love hearing from everyone. We don't have time to bond everyone, and we don't have time to read every listener mail that we receive on the show, but I do know that we are reading, and so we just invite you to continue to send in your questions, tidbits

from from your life, from your environment. We'd love to hear all of it. In the meantime, if you want more episodes of Invention, it's pretty easy to find us. Were on all those podcast websites. Wherever you get a podcast where you wherever you even hear a whisper of podcasts, we are there. Uh. You can go to invention pod dot com and that will redirect you to a page that has our podcast. Wherever you go, though, just make

sure you subscribe, that you rate, that you review. These are the sacred rights that allow us to continue huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest topic for the future to perhaps get featured on a future listener mail episode, you can email us at contact at invention pod dot com. Yeah. Invention is production of

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