Listener Mail: At Length Did Cross an Albatross

over us. UM. You know, one of the things I did while I was out is I finished rereading Dune by Frank Herbert, and then I reread Dune Messiah, the second one in this series, and I did want to update for anyone out there who cares about this as much as I do. UM. One of the things that I ended up doing an artifact episode regarding is the idea of donkeys of Dune, because it's it's mentioned in UM in the appendices for for the first Dune novel that that's still that there there had there are donkeys

on the planet Iracus. They are sometimes outfitted in still suits, and they're they're used either too, you know, for mild carrying of things around and they're sometimes used for milk um as as a dairy um animal. And so in that Artifact episode, I speculated on why this could be. You know, part of my thinking was that, well, it doesn't seem like like Frank Herbert ever did anything in his Dune novels without a lot of thought going into it.

So it couldn't just be a random choice that there are donkeys on Iraqus, but there don't seem to be camels on Iraqus. Um. You know, both are are animals that are that are adapt at at desert environments. But but why the donkey and not the camel. So I

talked about that for a little bit. And then when I reread Dune Messiah Lo and Behold, there's one little passage in there which is kind of as a as an off handed remark that mentioned that the fremen of Iracus would not know about the camel, like the camel is specifically mentioned as being an animal of the Golden Age of Earth. Uh So, still I don't have any you know. He there's no little note there where Herbert describes why in great detail he decided to go with

the donkey rather than the camel. I expect that it might line up with some of the ideas I presented, but he does seem to double down in Messiah on there being no camels whatsoever on the planet. Well, glad to get that information, But wait a minute, no, are your ideas that? What? That? Would it be that the camel is extinct by the time of of the Dune novels or that or that what like the Benny jesse

At have conspired not to let knowledge of the camel spread. Basically, my my critique was that based on some some really excellent sources, there have been whole books written about like the role of uh, you know that, the history of the use of of of the donkey, the history of

the use the camel, and it's all you know. You know, you can also get into various comparisons about how they good they are energy wise, but basically it seems like the camel is more useful for longer distances and greater cargo. And it seems like on a rack, as you know, first of all, you're dealing with with an age in which you have things like ornithopters and you can fly around. You you have more, you have other means of transportation

that are available to you. Also, you can't just while the camel would be perfect for moving across long distances over the desert, you can't very well do that if you have sandworms around, because unless you have somehow taught the camel to walk with no rhythm, it's just gonna wind up in the belly of the sand worm. Well.

One of the other arguments that is often made in comparing camels and donkeys is the camel is a more extensive animal, so if you have to go with one, uh, like, the cost of the donkey is less than the cost of keeping a camel, or so it seems. I accept. And then I guess you've got to somehow get enough camels too, Iracus to begin with, I mean camels or donkeys, So maybe that's part of it too. Um, you have

to factor in how many are you bringing. I don't know, there's a there's additional computation you can make on it. But like I said, I was excited just to see it mentioned again. I didn't remember this from from my previous reading up doing Messiah. So uh, here's hoping that the Children of Doone continues this trend and offers more

juicy tidbits about donkeys on the planet Iracus. Yes, here's hoping. Well, Rob, if you don't mind, I guess I'm going to jump right into our first message from a listener with this email from Renata. Let's do it, okay, Renata says, Hi, Rob, Joe and Seth short time listener, frequent emailer. I started listening in the summer of one and have been working

my way back through your catalog. I have a story to tell about water tasting, but first I want a shaff phenomenon I recently came across that reminded me of the Moses Effect. I guess water tasting would tie into our episodes on Thursday, and the Moses effect was something

we discussed in a recent Vault episode. Now, if you haven't listened to the episode, the Moses effect is uh is an example of a type of type of phenomenon known as knowledge neglect, where you can ask somebody a question like how many of each type of animal did Moses take onto the arc? And most people will say too, even though they know that it was Noah and not Moses who took animals onto the ark. They're just like, they just ignore that semantic error in the question and

answer it as if you had said Noah. And they're all kinds of interesting little implications of knowledge and neglect. But Ronata goes on to say, there's another type of linguistic allusion called the comparative illusion. Most people report that they understand a sentence like this one. Here you go more people have been to Berlin than I have. Understand. That just kind of breaks my brain to to to hear that. I mean, it's the kind of thing that if you're asked to focus on it, yeah, it sounds

wrong because it's actually a nonsensical sentence. But if you if it just came quickly in a conversation, it would go right over me. I would just be like, yeah, I understand what that means. I mean, I guess they're trying to say, like, more people within my circle have been to Berlin than I. It still breaks my brain. Sorry, even that wouldn't make any sense, would it? Really? Okay? So Ranada goes on to explain, She says, but this sentence makes less sense the more you think about it.

At first, blush, I interpret the sentence to mean I have not been to Berlin. Most other people have. Um, yeah, no, that doesn't make sense. She says, I'm curious if it means something different to you. To understand the issue with the sentence, an example of a well formed comparison sentence may help. Quote more people have been to Berlin than those who have been to Fiji. The first half of the sentence A is the number of people who have

been to Berlin. The second half of the sentence B is the number of people who have been to Fiji. The second sentence is saying A is greater than B. However, in the first sentence I gave while A is the same, the second half of the sentence isn't referring to a set of people. And if I understand the grammatical explanation, that's where the problem arises. The sentence is almost a Yogi barra is m When you stop to think about it, you're saying that the set of everyone who has been

to Berlin is greater than yourself. It's a statement either so obviously true that it's uninformative, or it has no meaning at all. Maybe we can come back to more about this after the emails done. But I also wanted to read so Ranada has comments on water tasting. She writes this is in response to your series about thirst. Coffee making is another profession that pays close attention to

the composition and taste of water. My partner is a barista and one of the things he likes to do is organized coffee tastings where he makes the same coffee with the same method of preparation and every other variable controlled except the water source. He'll use local tap water, distilled water, and water with different mineralities, and the results

are staggering. My partner has trained his brain to identify subtle differences in flavors, but even to the novice taster like me, the coffee tastes entirely different based on the water, mostly impacting acidity and bitterness. We live in Wisconsin currently and the water is extremely hard. Any coffee nerd living in Wisconsin knows we have to make our own water for coffee. My partner and I distill our own water and add a mixture of minerals to produce the proper

concentration per gallon. Fortunately, you can now buy preportioned mineral packets. Wow, that that is dedication to coffee. When they said we have to make our own water for coffee again, apologies, I've just been reading a lot of dune recently. I was just imagining like the frem and coffee, and you're having to use like a still about to prepare. It doesn't matter that it was once tears and an armpits wet.

It is clean now. I mean it has an all water been tier in armpit sweat at some point, Yes, every glass of water you drink is full of water that was once dinosaur urine, dinosaur feces, somebody's diarrhea. It's it's all the same water. By the way, there is a recipe for friend and coffee in the Dune Encyclopedia, so at some point I'm going to fire that up. Okay.

Going back to the email, Ranada said, Okay. So she said she and her partner live in Wisconsin now, but a few years ago they moved to New Zealand, and she says, distilled water isn't readily available to buy, and we didn't have a distiller ourselves. At first, we were distraught that our coffee would taste bad, but it turned out that our tap water was actually quite close to ideal.

This fascinated and excited my partner, so when he saw an advertisement for a water tasting event, he just had to go, thinking he would find they're like minded flavor enthusiasts like himself. She you're enough. They brought waters from around New Zealand and the world and had participants guests the origin. But he was moldly embarrassed to learn that this was put on as a joke and the organizers weren't going to educate him on why the waters tasted

the way they did. And then she attaches a news article about the event, and then one final question, she says, did you know that there was an NPR piece on the science of drinking? Uh? This is drinking water, not drinking alcohol, the science of drinking that was published at about the same time as your episodes. Coincidence or were you inspired by this research? And then she links to an NPR piece and finally says, love your show, wish you and your family is a great two. Thank you

for bringing me and so many others joy all the best. Renata, Well, thank you so much for not a great email. Uh okay, I guess to take things in more or less random order. You know, when you said the water tasting event was a joke, I thought, surely the joke was going to be that all the water actually came out of the same hose round back outside the restaurant. But I didn't see any obvious indication of this in the article. Maybe maybe I missed it somehow. Uh So, so I'm not

sure what you're getting at there. What seems like the like New Zealander humor can be a little a little dry, right, Yeah, Sometimes it's hard to It may be hard to get to to to to catch on too, if you're you're looking in the wrong direction. I know people have done that before, like you know, selling people on the idea of here's various fancy bottled waters, but it all came out of a hose. Oh yeah. And then of course

they're they're various wine experiments. Uh. But meaning to come back to that on the on the show, because I know we have like there was like an old episode where we very briefly talked about one of these studies where they're you know, they're kind of doing a gotcha moment by saying, ah, you were not you know you

you you were just confusing. You confused red wine with white wine, uh and uh and so forth, which I mean some of that I think can be illuminating about you know how much you know, language and and priming we put into our experience of taste sensations at a

glass of wine or a beer or anything. But but on the other hand, like all of that is important, Like you can't I feel like it's kind of cheap to discount like knowledge of where something came from, or the history that went into the culture, the traditions that went into it, and just bloil it all down to just this pure sensory experience, because that's you know, that's

not how we work with our our food culture. Oh sure, yeah, yeah, I wonder about I know some of the studies you're talking about where they like give people cheap wine and ask them to do tasting notes as if it's super expensive, and then it's like, oh, you didn't even know this was cheap or whatever. I don't know, I think that

I don't know. I I don't want to be too critical because I'm not actually looking at those studies right now, but I remember looking at some of that stuff and thinking that it was kind of leaving out some important factors of of like the experience of tasting things in general. Yeah, but anyway, yeah, well we can come back to it.

We could definitely look at that. Uh So, As for the question about the timing of thirst stories on our show and on NPR, No, I didn't have any idea, and I think the episodes were my idea to do so, Rob, I don't know if you heard this at the same time,

but this just happens sometimes. I remember people used to ask us about this, especially when it would happen on different How Stuff Works podcasts, Like occasionally stuff you should Know would cover the same topic as us in the same week, and people would ask if we did that on purpose. Uh No, I mean, we don't collaborate on on like planning topics out or anything like that. And honestly, I think if we could predict that in advance, we would avoid it since we have a lot of audience overlap.

So it just happens, like generally, if there if I hear something really cool on NPR or certainly on another podcast, and I don't listen to a ton of podcasts, but occasionally, you know, I listen to something and um, and if I do hear something cool and think, oh, that would be a cool topic for us to explore, I would The added part of that is explore and maybe you know, three to six months. We can't really jump on it right now because I feel like they just they just

did a great job with that. What what could we contribute at this point? Yeah, actually the same here. I would say that, um, you know, ultimately, everything I suggest to cover on the podcast is pretty much necessarily because of something I read somewhere else. Ultimately, but uh, there's usually a bigger time lag. It's something I read months ago which kind of ferments in my brain for a while, and then I eventually come back around to it. Yeah. Yeah.

The main exception to this, I would imagine would be when when we occasionally have guests on and sometimes those guests have a book coming out, and so uh yeah you hear Mary Roach talking about her new book on our show, and yes she's also talking about the new book on this other podcast or on this NPR shows that you know, obviously, all that ends up landing around the same time publishing timelines. Yeah. Yeah. But finally coming back to your idea of the comparative illusion, and it's

it's similarity to the Moses effect. I really love this. I think it's really interesting. It's it's just another indication that there is something so much more to verbal communication than just a literal reading of the words in each sentence we speak or here, since we can so often say things or I think especially can pose questions that are literally nonsensical as phrased, and yet somehow most of

the time people understand what we're trying to say. We understand what we're hearing, and we just take it in stride and respond as if the person phrase the question correctly, which you know, we assume is what they were trying to ask. Right now, I want to come back to the the idea of of different waters being selected for

the brewing of coffee. Um, somebody should take this and run with it, like pick a particular water and make that be like the guiding principle behind your your coffee franchise. I'm thinking like Florida Water Coffee. That can well, you can to just take the world by storm with that. Oh Man. To revisit a recent show topic, heavy Water Coffee company, it's all you know, you get your du tier. Um, it's it's a it's a risky it's a risky lifestyle, but it's the heaviest Okay, Rob, do you wanna let's

see do you want to do. This message from Brett connecting to some older episodes we've done about the ant parasite fungus Opeo cor deceps. Sure Brett writes in and says, Hey, Robin Joe, I know you guys have touched on zombie ant fungus many times, but I don't recall you mentioning this study from Apparently the researchers discovered through electron microscopy that the fungus weaves into and around muscle fibers throughout

the body, but doesn't invade the brain. To quote the paper quote, fungal cells were found throughout the host body but not in the brain, implying the behavioral control of the animal body by this microbe occurs peripherally. Additionally, fungal cells invaded host muscle fibers enjoyed together to form net works that encircled the muscles. These networks may represent a collective foraging behavior of this parasite, which may in turn

facilitate host manipulation unquote. So the question I post to you too is this what is scarier at parasite living in your brain and turning you into a zombie or the parasite leaving your brain fully in tact so that you are forced to observe the horror of your body being driven to an involuntary death. Uh. They include the quote the link to the paper. Love the show, It's genuinely the best podcast out there. Don't ever stop Brett. Oh thanks Brett. Yeah, that this is a question for

David Cronenberg. I mean they're both. They're both horrible fates to behold, right, the losing control of your body or losing control of your mind. I mean really, and I think we all think about this probably all the time as we get older. Right, Um, you know which what what is more dear to me? Uh? You know, and preferably you'd want to hold onto both and just the parasites leave you completely alone. But uh you know, uh not if the parasites have anything to do with it.

As for the particular paper here in this revelation, I do remember covering it in some form, but I'm gonna loss to remember how if it came up in a particular episode, or if I did a blog post about it back when blog posts were a thing. I do remember reading it because it's certainly, you know, turns the tables on our on our on what seemed to be our understanding of this scenario in the past. Well, yeah, and I know we have covered OPEO court a SPS.

So if if it was not this paper we were looking at, I wonder what else it would have been. So yeah, I'm not sure, but anyway to give the full reference in case you want to look the paper up for yourself. It's published in P and A s INEN by Frederickson at All and it's called three Dimensional Visualization of a Deep learning Model Reveal complex fungal parasite networks in behaviorally manipulated ants. Alright, This next message is

from Matt. It says, Hey, Robert and Joe. I thought I would drop you a line on the topic of thirst because I seem to have a weak thirst impulse. What I mean by this is I often don't have, or at least rarely notice myself being thirsty until I'm quite far along the way towards dehydration. It's often to the point that if I forget to drink, I will

develop migraines from dehydration. In response to this, I find I often need to schedule out when I drink, such as drinking and glass during every even hour throughout the day, or I will drink between each appropriately timed task, or carry a water bottle with me and just constantly sit at it when my activities at work are well suited for that one thing that I think is interesting about

my situation. Though I don't though I don't have a strong thirst impulse, I do experience the satiation after drinking, even if I didn't feel thirsty to begin with. It's when I forced myself to drink. My brain goes, oh, yeah, I forgot to mention we were thirsty. Thanks for that. And this is interesting, Matt, because it seems to totally go along with some of the findings of that thirst research we were looking at, which was one of these findings was that thirst is not sated by the reverse

of the process that created it. So you know, the thirst is created by this osmolality sensing sensing mechanism in the brain that detects dehydration and it tries to get you to drink. But then when you drink, that good feeling you get from swallowing the water is a different process. It's not just reversing the process that made you thirsty, because it actually takes like ten to fifteen minutes or so or maybe even more for your body to actually

become hydrated from that water you drank. Yeah, it's not as simple as like a thirst meter in a video game, where it's like, oh, well, my character is thirsty, you better drink a bunch of water. Uh, And then you just remember to keep looking at it to tell uh what you need more or if you're good right. And this is important for a number of reasons that we

got into in detail in the episode. So if you haven't listened to our third series yet, you go back and check that out and then you'll know what we're talking about. Oh. But then back to Matt's email. Matt suggests a topic after this, which is that he thinks maybe we should look into the idea of using indicator plants and insects as in a garden to understand the

condition of the soil and environment that exists there. And he he says, I'm not sure the best way of describing this, but I will try to give you examples. One would be when you see a large number of dandelions growing in the garden, I mean a lot, not just a few here and there, you can infer one or more conditions is true about the soil, such as the calcium levels are low and or the soil is very hard slash compacted. I have no knowledge of this myself,

but Matt, I will trust you're on the right track there. Anyway, He attaches some videos and links to a book about this idea of these indicator plan and an insect species that that are supposedly signals of soil health and so Yeah, I do think this is an interesting topic. Soil doesn't get enough of a look, does it, rob We we could we could definitely talk about soil. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I know we've we've touched on soil a little bit, but it's uh, you know, a soil is alive. Soil

is is a rich and complex thing. I think One of the things we've touched on before is like vampires in legend the especially especially saying the novel Dracula, where they have to bring their grave soil with them in order to continue to thrive like they ultimately in that in these cases anyway, vampires know what's up. They know that the soil is essential and if life is to thrive, the soil has to be has to be maintained, cared for, and uh and provided all right, Well, I thin guess

we've chatted enough here. We're gonna go ahead and close the mail bag for now, but we'll be back next week with more listener mail. So hey, keep writing in about current episodes, past episodes, future episodes, episodes that don't even exist yet, episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, episodes of weird House cinema, uh, you know, any anything in between. It's all fair game. 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 a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.