Listener Mail: An Un-remembered Dream

talked about, or a question about the subject matter. Corrections are welcome as well. Any of that. Just send it on in. Or if you just want to say hello, tell us how you listen to the show, where you're from, and so forth, that's all fair game too. Send it on in contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Let's see, Rob, do you mind if I kick things off with this message for Steve about our series on the on Horse Hooves.

we're not wearing name tags. Steve goes on. Though quite interesting, this revelation did not surprise me because it seems like I've read about similar discoveries regarding the development of embryos and all kinds of different animals, not specifically about fingers, but a general pattern of growth that seems to repeat known evolutionary developments, beginning from the very simple and progressing to more complex forms, almost like a reenacted history of

a given animals deep evolutionary past up to its present physical paradigm or morphological configuration. This possibility is fascinating, but I don't know if there's a biological term for it, or if it is something that has even been rigorously examined as a legitimate part of the gestation slash growth process of embryonic science. I'm not a biologist or a scientist, but I have been a student of human anatomy and

how it affects external form. Having professional experience as both a biomedical designer of three D printed titanium surgical guides and as a figurative sculptor. From this perspective, I can imagine how there might be structural slash shock absorbing advantages to merging five fingers together from one in your example of a horse hoof, if some traces of the other

four remain integrated with the whole. This is a crude analogy, but if you try to break five sticks in a half, it can be more difficult than breaking one, because there is potentially more flexibility in the separate thin sticks than

one thick one. At the risk of betraying my profe ignorance, I also wonder if there is some kind of potential energy conservation in the storage of DNA derived information used by nature to control embryonic development from simple to more complex states inherent in the DNA simply stacking revised versions of itself on top of older versions. Thank you as always for the fantastic content, and congrats again to Joe on being a new dad. Happy Father's Day, Steve. Oh,

thank you Steve well. Regarding your question about animal embryos sort of repeating their evolutionary history as they develop. We could come back one day and do a deeper dive on this, but I'll try to do the very short

and simple version. There is actually an obsolete hypothesis in the history of evolutionary theory, no longer held to today, associated most with the German naturalist Ernst Heckel, that proposes that as an animal embryo develops, it essentially goes through all of its ancestral forms from quote lowest to highest. So a developing horse embryo would at some point to sort of become a fish and then become a primitive tetrapod,

et cetera. This idea was summarized in the slogan that quote ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny ontogeny meaning the development of an individual organism, phylogeny meaning its evolutionary history. We note today that as a blanket statement, this hypothesis was not correct. In fact, it seems that while Ernest Teckel was a great illustrator, he probably fudged some of his drawings of animal embryos to make them better fit with his hypothesis.

But a few general comments about this idea. First of all, in evolution, there is not actually a higher or lower. You can order your ancestors or the ancestors of a species chronologically, but that progression is not actually like climbing a mountain of sophistication or refinement to quote high higher forms. At each stage, the organism is simply adapting to its environment and whatever pressure has happen to weigh upon it

at that point in time. But even more importantly, scientists have discovered that ontogeny, the growth of an individual organism, is something that itself evolves like, so how an organism grows is something that can be selected for, and different organisms go through different kinds of developmental stages that are

selected for the needs of the species. But it is true that organisms in development often do manifest particular features that look like the embryonic forms of distant ancestors, even if those forms are not found in adults of the embryo's own species. Hence, you get horse embryos with five distinct toes before they vanish and then become more like the horse hoof that it will have when it's after it's born, or you get things like a rob You mentioned this example, when it came up in the episode

Untold Nostrils and Dolphins. Dolphin embryos will first have a more frontally positioned nostril that gradually moves to become a top facing blowhole as the embryo develops. But this kind of thing is contingent. These are isolated examples of where that happens, and as a general rule, an organism does not have to go through all of the past stages of its evolutionary history during growth. Sometimes it shows some of them, and so the interesting question becomes in the

cases when it does. Why is that? I don't know enough to comment on your idea about like the efficiency of information storage in DNA, whether it's more efficient to just like stack the new plan on top of the older I couldn't say, but it could be interesting to come back and look at that someday.

tells us, dreams our messages from the deep. I wonder if Herbert was drawing in this as in so much of the Doom series on Islamic tradition, in which there is a long history of the interpretation of dreams. In fact, there is a hattoth Or tradition in which the prophet Muhammad is said to have said a good vision is from Allah and a bad dream is from Satan, with various later scholars developing methods for distinguishing good from bad dreams.

If this sounds very similar to Homer's Gates of Horn and Ivory, I think that's probably because, rather than being some kind of opponent or negation of classical antiquity, much of early Islamic thought and civilization was actually a continuation of it. Looking forward to the next installment, best wishes, Jamie, Well, thanks for Jamie where of course, we're always up for any questions or comments concerning Dune And now this particular quote.

Joe and I were just talking about this off mic before we came in here, but this quote is from the recent Part one movie adaptation, but does not occur in the actual Frank Herbert novel.

like dreams. So I think likely with this quote that they put together for the film, they are you know, they're hinting at both of those.

next to each other. One of them is passed on by Abu Qatada, which says a good vision is from Allah and a bad dream is from the devil. If any one of you sees something which he dislikes, he should spit on his left three times and seek refuge with Allah from the devil, then it will not harm him. And then there's a second recorded similar to the second

half of that. This one is attributed to the version told by Jabir that says, if any one of you sees a dream which he dislikes, then let him spit three times on his left side, seek refuge with Allah from the devil three times, and then change his sleeping position. And the interpretive material with it says that this last piece of advice probably means if you're sleeping on one side,

roll over to the other side. And it struck me as interesting because the advice attributed to the prophet here for repelling a nightmare, which may well be from Satan, is a mix of the sacred and the mundane, like it says to take refuge with Allah to be protected from the devil, but also to roll over onto your other side. Oh yeah, and also to spit three times

on the left side. So yeah, scholars of the Hadith or Islamic history, if you're listening, you've got any contexts on this kind of advice, I'd be curious if there's anything more to know about this.

with the task. AI also failed. But then we read the message out and it turns out that one of the listeners who got in touch with the potential answer was on the money. Michelle says, thanks guys, and Chris. Chris was the listener who wrote in about this. The Creation of the Humanoids is the movie I was thinking of. This was the one from the nineteen sixties, was not in black and white as she originally said. I think this one is in color. But Rob you said this one looked like it was worth a look.

a strange fascination with Wesley Snipes. So when these movies came out, and when we subscribe to mail order Netflix in the following years, my mom insisted that her children watch them with her. Now, my sister and I are neither quite thirty years old yet, so this places us in the under ten category when these movies were released. This may not seem strange except for the fact that I was raised in a very Christian conservative household where

Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code were banned. I was shocked when you describe the amount of cursing in the movie, as in our household, even euphemisms for such as darn or frick were off limits. Anyways, I guess it goes to show you how much influence Wesley Snipes has in the world. Ps. I also had a garage TV growing up with that my dad would often watch while working on cars, tractors, et cetera. I believe it was the style that they built in VCR.

It sounds like it's off to they keep changing who's involved in it, and there have been some shakeups with it, but I mean, at hard it sounds like they're going back to some of the core material concerning this character. And yeah, I'm fingers crossed that it's great.

The Magic Journeys three D movie at Epcot in the early nineteen eighties, Epcot was still a place of wonder and cutting edge tech. I was fascinated by the touchscreen GUI interface. I guess that's gooey gooey interface on the world key park information Kiosks, which did Google Maps tricks years before the first Macintosh, was a thing, offered a search engine, played video, and operated like a modern website. You could also make restaurant reservations via video phone parentheses.

Pretty Much every conversation began with the Epcot representative explaining that yes, I am a real human, and yes I

can see you just like you can see me. While Blade Runner and other films were telling us that the future would be nothing but boundless misery, Epcot attractions matter of factly explained that in the twenty first century, you'll go to school at the bottom of the ocean, call your friends terraforming the desert via three D phone, visit your relatives on holidays in suburban space stations, etc. Everyone would be living the dream, a fulfilling life with plentiful resources.

Integrated into all the fantasy was real life, impressive tech that actually worked. Magic journeys was featured in the Journey into Imagination pavilion in the now corrupted and renamed Future World section of the park. Isn't that the name of the sequel to Westworld?

the halfway point turns decidedly creepy and weird. House. One scene in particular featured a witch shooting lightning bolts from her fingers directly at the audience, and to my eyes, the bolts seem to end just inches in front of my nose. Usually at least one small child would start crying loudly at that point. I've never before or since seen an effect that seemed to jump so far out of the screen. And then Jeff provides some links to like a podcast I think about this three D film

in a video showing samples from it. Jeff goes on the eight millimeter film to YouTube conversion leaves a lot to be desired, but I assure you the visuals were stunning. The deliberate slow pace created the feel of altered consciousness, although this does not translate at all in a crappy two D resolution, and you might be tempted to hit the two X speed button. However, the music is worth

experiencing properly. It was similarly bizarre, featuring rich eighty synth and freaky lyrics about quote splashing in the stream of an unremembered dream end quote, the atoms that repose in the heartbeat of a Rose. Disney would never make anything so meditative and aggressively weird these days, and then an unrelated Jeff also recommends an Amazon Prime video series called Jean Claude Van Johnson, which is about Jean Claude Van dam quote. The premise is that JCVD, the actor, was

also a secret agent in real life. It's an action comedy that is both a parody and a celebration of the actor in his movies VANDAM is hilarious in multiple roles and a surprisingly effective actor and good sport. You can easily binge the whole series in a weekend, and then he goes on to say some things. Apparently it

also ends in a cliffhanger. But to wrap it up, Jeff says finally, in regards to attempts to conceptualize distance between the planets discussed in the Urinus episodes, on the Washington Mall in DC, beginning near the Air and Space Museum, there is a one to ten billion scale model of our solar system. The Sun is about the size of a grapefruit, and following the trail along the sidewalk, you quickly run into the inner planets, with information stations and

size comparisons at each one. By the time you get to Neptune, it's easy to forget why you were walking in that direction in the first place, especially with all the exciting distractions in DC. Thanks for continuing to present us with diverse information pour into our brains while stuck in traffic and doing otherwise tedious chores. You are appreciated, Jeff. Well, thank you. Jeff. I had never seen this movie. I think I went to Epcot as a young child, but if I saw this, I don't remember it. So I

looked up like a YouTube rip of this film. Obviously, as you say, you can't really get the feeling of what it would be like with three D. But the Witch was extremely funny. She's kind of like the you know, she's like the Wizard of Oz Witch, like green makeup and the long fingernails and stuff. Beyond that, I did get to the part you were talking about with the masks flying out of the screen. There's like an onny

mask asteroid that blasts at you. Later, there is also a clown segment that has strong resemblance to when Trumpy does magic things in Pod People, but with clowns running out of the screen and screaming at you. And also, I don't know if this is like a sign of a neurological disorder on my part, but when I watched this movie, I could literally smell cigarettes. I don't know why.

is going to make everything brighter. I also thought about it a lot when we were discussing the black Hole. Like I say, I guess it's the imagineer's fingerprints on that one, but I feel like it has strong epcot energy, even if it's ultimately telling a darker story away from Earth. They don't really talk about Earth much in that. They're just like, oh, you know, things are the same, it's going great. But what what what they mean by boring

is like amazing. You have no idea. It's just it's only boring to them because they're used to all the flying cars and so forth.

Monster Fact, other episodes of listener Mail. It's all fair game, so sent them in and you'll find these episodes on Mondays in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feet.