Listener Mail: Bowling Alleys On The Moon

music and memory. All right, So Manuel starts off by saying some nice things, and then he also, this was the weird part I didn't quite understand, but he says that sometimes Rob, when we're explaining something, we remind him of Hugo Weaving from the Matrix. I don't quite know what this means. He assures us that he means it in a positive way. But I'm a little confused. Okay, fair enough, which one of us do you think is more like Hugo weaving? Is that you were at me?

M I don't know. Do we get to choose, I mean, do get to choose different Hugo weavings from different films? Is it a broader selection or is it just uh? I think it's just the matrix, just the matrix. So I don't know. I I leave this to the the listeners to decide. I have no opinion on this. M Manuel says, I recently listened to your episode Music and

Memory and really enjoyed it. One thing that I feel you forgot to mention is something that seemed to be taught to all of us back in elementary school in the early nineties, the fifty States song. To this day, I can recite this song and thus mention every state in the US. However, if I were tasked to write down every state's name without referencing the song, I'm ashamed to admit I would surely miss a handful of states.

H Manuel, I don't think that is anything to be ashamed of because I this this may be super embarrassing, but I think even as an adult, there have been times when I've been trying to alphabetize things in my mind, and I know I have mentally referred to the alphabet song in order to remember. Wait which comes first? K or L or J. I don't know how does this song go. I don't know that I learned this song.

Oh yeah, it's it's to the tune Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star A, B, C, D E, F G M okay, j K, element o P. Surely you know that one? Oh no, okay, so you're just talking about the alphabet song, not a specific alphabet song for the wait, okay, I'm talking about the fifty state song. I know the alphabet song. Oh sorry, yeah, to be confused, I was talking about the I have as an adult. I know for mentally referred to the alphabet song. Yes, I do. I also fall back on that crutch, But I don't know that

I learned the fifty States song. I don't think I did either, though I've talked to Rachel. She can still sing the fifty States song, which is funny because this may just be that she's not, you know, a singer. First. I don't really it doesn't sound like a song to me. It just sounds kind of like shouting the names of states to a rhythm. Maybe maybe if I heard the tune it would be a little bit different. Rachel overheard me.

Are you listening to mer record? Apparently it's called fifty nifty? Okay, Yeah, well, I'm pretty sure I was not introduced to fifty nifty, but I wish I wish I had, it would probably helped a lot. Manuel goes on, I feel like music absolutely aids in memory and learning. My wife is learning English and always asks to explain what a song is saying, lay out the lyrics, etcetera. It clearly helps her with learning new words and more importantly, how phrases work in

the English language. She's willing to learn English, but isn't exactly motivated to, and music definitely helps with this. My guess is that most people will enjoy a good song or melody and be eager to learn what it says or means, as opposed to reading a paragraph. Again, this taps into something we we sort of guessed about in in previous talks about music and memory, about how the music element may in factor just help is a motivational tool to repeat and rehearse the verbal content, which may

help people remember and understand it better. But men Well also says for me, music absolutely plays a part in tapping into old memories. I can listen to very old Mexican music and it will instantly take me back to my youth helping my grandmother clean the house on a weekend while singing along to these songs. Even music played in movies. I'll hear a song which reminds me of a favorite movie, which in turn takes me back to when I watched the movie. The intro song to die

Hard with a Vengeance is burned into my memory. I don't know who plays it or what the song is called, but if I hear it, I can play those scenes in my mind, and it reminds me of the long summer breaks when I would binge movies we had on tape. Well, I haven't seen die Hard with a Vengeance, but I just pulled up a list of the like the soundtrack, and if these are in order of appearance in the film, then maybe it's Summer in the City by the Love and Sponful. Oh yeah, hot Town, Summer in the City,

back of my neck, getting dirt and gritty. I don't think i've ever seen all of the third die Hard movie either. This is the one with Jeremy Irons. Yes, yeah, Well anyway, Manuel wraps up, says some nice things about the show and signs off. So, yeah, thanks for getting in touch man. Well, and it's great that we had a chance to mention the fifty and fifty States, because I know some other listeners have written in saying something

about that too. Alright. This next one comes to us from from from frequent listener mail participant Jim in New Jersey, uh, in response to our episode on the Silarian hypothesis. Jim rights, Robert and Joe. While the Earth is too active to preserve ancient technology, I suspect that the Moon would preserve it quite nicely if ancient technology were to reach the Moon. I'm sure evidence would exist for a very long time. How long will the remnants of the Apollo mission remain

on the Moon? And then he he shares a particular article with us here right. It is citing an answer given to ABC Science Focused by an astronomer named Alistair Gunn from the University of Manchester, and this is the quote. While the constant bombardment by energetic micro media, rights is likely to gradually erode this this being the Apollo mission material over time, current research suggested could survive for up

to a hundred million years. This is I believe this is part of the plot line in the original two thousand one of Space Odyssey, right, Um, I don't recall this is mentioned in the in the movie, or if this is in the novel or a subsequent treatment, but the idea of there being some sort of us, some sort of lunar presence, right, Well, it's a monolith on the Moon, yes, which I think is not human technology

but alien technology. Right. But yeah, but it's like if you wanted to keep an eye on Earth, that's where you put your monolith, right. Oh yeah, yeah, it's something can just sit on the Moon for ages and not much happens to it except I guess impacts from space. All right. On a similar note, Wayne rights In, Hello, Rob, Joe and Seth. I enjoyed your episode about the Silurian hypothesis quite a bit. It's a fascinating question. Could we tell if there had been an industrial civilization a hundred

million years ago? And also could the eventual inheritors of Earth a hundred million years from now know of our existence. Evidence on Earth has a hard time persisting because this is a geologically active planet with a lot of weather. There's very little we could build that could survive millions of years of these processes. But what about the other places that we have left a mark in recent times which don't have these processes, namely the Moon or space

in general? We've placed satellites in orbit around the Earth and the Sun and left artifacts and footprints on the surface of the Moon. Could we assume that any other civilization that reached our level of technology would have done the same thing. I think that's a reasonable assumption. The final frontier must have a universal appeal for any intelligence

speace these that can look at the stars. I'm guessing the satellites wouldn't last long because of orbital decay and other interactions, but maybe there are some places where we could place an artifact that would last many millions of years. The surface of the Moon, however, seems like an ideal place to put something that we want to last for a very long time. It has no weather or geology, but is subject to radiation, micro meteorites, and larger impacts.

According to any links to space dot Com article by Dennis chow Uh quote, in human terms, it may seem like forever, but in geological terms, probably there will be no traces of the Apollo exploration in let's say ten to a hundred million years. But I think they are talking about erosion of footprints. A A large solid object like the Lunar lander would probably last for longer, depending on whether it could avoid a larger impact. According to and in this case um the author here sites another

space dot Com article by Charles Q. Chow. By examining pairs of photos taken at different times of areas of the Moon, researchers have found two hundred and twenty two new craters of between ten and forty two ms across. These pairs of photos had intervals between a hundred and seventy six and one thousand, two hundred and forty one days. Let's simplify this and say every seven hundred and eight days, two hundred and twenty two craters of a size twenty

six ms across a peer, obliterating everything below them. This works out to about fifty nine thousand square meters per year. The surface area of the Moon is thirty eight million square kilometers. If we make the simplifying but incorrect assumption that the meteor strikes never overlap every one hundred million years, only one sixth of the Moon's surface will have been hit.

I don't know if we've done a comprehensive survey of the Moon's surface looking for artifacts of unknown origin, but just looking forward a hundred million years, I think it's likely our traces on the Moon will still be preserved. Thanks Wayne, Well, thanks, and that's interesting. Yeah, and that

that adds more context. I guess the only thing I would say is, I don't know if I'm sure that all intelligent species will eventually want to travel into space and and end up leaving artifacts on on the moon of their home planet. I don't know. Is that a uh that that's one of those kinds of assumptions that seem that feels right, but it's hard to know. Well. And then also this reminds me of our past discussions

on moons in general. Uh, you know, are we looking at a scenario here where a given advanced civilization will have access to moons and other bodies that are are reachable within the span of time that they have the ability and the interest in doing so. Oh yeah, well that that's another thing. Like um, access to space is not the same for all planets, especially planets with a higher surface gravity, will have a lot harder time getting

getting people off that surface into space. And there, I mean, at a certain point you get to a place where traveling into space becomes incredibly unpractical, impractical, it's already pretty difficult for us. But if our surface gravity were higher and the delta V were greater, I don't know exactly at what point you hit like you just can't do it. You can't go to space, can't go to your moons.

But you do reach that point at some point. But yeah, maybe if something bad happens to us, if you know, there's intelligent octopuses or whatever and a hundred million years on Earth and they end up traveling to the surface of the Moon, maybe maybe they'll find our artifacts and wonder what we were like. M Okay, Rob, I gotta bring up this email because I don't understand it. It's an email from Rolf that I think the text of

it just said Rob exclamation point. And then it's a bunch of pictures of something called chainsaw man, which is a guy wearing a tie who has chainsaws coming out of his arms and his head. I think I speculated in our chainsaw episodes in passing that there must be a chainsaw man, that there must be some fantastic vision of someone that's just made up of chainsaws, not merely like having a hand replaced with a chainsaw or using

a chainsaw as a sword. But they just should just be some sort of chainsaw human entity, some chainsaw human hybrid. And I think I might have actually speculated as well that it could be kind of kind of a like. It seems like the kind of thing that somebody working in the world of Japanese cyberpunk or inspired by that world might have created. And I don't know who created these images, but these images that were sent to us by Rolf seemed to indicate that, yes, chainsaw Man exists

in some fashion, in some sort of comic format. Just did a quick Google search to confirm it, says the Wikipedia says chainsaw Man. It's a Japanese manga and it is written and illustrated by Tatsuki Fujimoto. Nice. Looks like they may have made a or they're making a TV series of it. I don't know. I see something and IMDb that has a twenty twenty date on it. So maybe we're living in the age of chainsaw Man and chainsaw Man is about to be upon us. Yep. I see stills of him in this. Yep, it's the Age

of chainsaw Man. Two thousand twenty two, the year chainsaw Man went mainstream. All right, Rob, should we do some weird House Cinema messages, I think we should take your pick. Al right, um, well, let's see. I guess I'll do this one concerning The Lift. Hi, Rob, Joe, and Seth just listened to the Weird House Cinema entry for the apparently bonkers movie The Lift. It sounds amazing. This is from listener MP. By the way, I had a couple of things that might interest you, especially Joe with his

comments about how elevators can't possibly be so complex. I work in medical device software quality and in job interviews with candidates that haven't been involved with the medical world before. An elevator is often the stand in for a complex system for testing. It involves hardware, algorithms, and safety, all

critical components of medical devices. When a candidate can articulate how they would test an elevator in a building with a given number of floors and other elevators, you can get a good idea of their thought processing and how they may look at med devices. Also, I was struck by a segment in Veritassium's video on self driving cars in which he compared the attitudes towards self driving vehicles

with those towards automated unattended elevators. He points out that when elevators routinely had attendance, it was unthinkable that logic circuits only could take over for them, and that in fact, historically there was pushback on removing human operators from them. I find this kind of historical research fascinating. As to me, I found it odd that elevators ever needed a human

to work. Right on reflection, it seems obvious that the first iteration of the invention would necessarily need the quote unquote brains of a person in order to be safe and useful. Anyway, as always, keep up the great content in P. But thanks in P. It sounds like you're pushing back against something I said offhandedly. I I in the episode. I was like, I'm not sure if the Lift's idea that like you need supercomputer logic circuits to manage elevator traffic is really true, and so if I'm

wrong about that, I'm wrong about that. But I still wonder. I mean, I don't know how many variables are there, So there's like three shafts that each have one car x number of floors, um, I don't know. I mean maybe maybe maybe things were different in the eighties, all right, We got one more message also about the Lift. This is from John. Uh. It concerns bowling score tables. You remember that thing in the lift they went to what was it called. It was like Klauss fun House or something,

Klaus Potty House. Yeah, it's just a bowling alley and we were like, whoa look at those those overheads, like overhead projector style of keeping score? Right, John says, Hi, guys, John from Salt Lake here, long, long time listener, occasional writer. Uh, just listen to the Weird House Cinema show on the Lift. During the show, there is a scene in a bowling

alley that had score projection tables. Remember this is uh, unlike the screen the monitor screens that were used to Instead, they were I think projecting transparencies up on the ceiling or John says, yes. This was the standard scoring method for league and tournament bowling for many many years. The house meaning the bowling lane, would get plastic rolls that held dozens of pages of plastic clear score sheets. Each sheet had room for two teams of five players to

bowl three games. The games were also color coded. The first game was green, the second was yellow, and the last was pink. Or red. The score was kept with soft, grease like pencils. Corrections were impossible to make without leaving a noticeable mess. The bowlers, as well as well wishers and spectators all needed to see how they and their team is doing. I spent many hours either sitting at the score table keeping score or straining my eyes to see how many more pins I needed to get to

achieve some goal. In my younger years, I trained to be a pro bowler. I bowled on the amateur circuit. I was starting to get sponsors and was ready to earn my pro card. Then life stepped in and changed all that. During competitive league play or tournaments, the bowlers would pay someone to keep score for them. I paid for many bowling excursions by keeping score for quote the Big Boys League. I love the shows. Keep up the

great work, John, Oh, that's that's wonderally wonderful. I was delighted to hear about this from some folks who had the knowledge, because I, like I said, I don't think I ever went to a bowling alley that had this level of of technological score keeping. The ones I went to either were a step beyond or they were a step behind. Like having you know, just pencil and paper or they had that, you know, some sort of a

modern system. Nowadays it's so fancy. It makes me wonder, like, what was it like taking children to bowling alleys in the day? What would they mess around with and change? You know? Nowadays they I feel like kids spend half the time changing the format of the electronic score keeping. You know, what's going to happen when somebody gets a turkey? Will the we a cartoon turkey? Will a turkey explode? Like? These are all vital choices to be made with bowling.

All right, We're gonna go ahead and close the mail back there, but we'll be back next week next Monday with more listener mail, so keep it coming. Your thoughts on current, past and future episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, as well as Weird, How Cinema, Weird, How cinemas are time to set aside most serious matters and just talk about a weird film. That air is on Friday. Our core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind are on Tuesday and Thursday, and on Wednesday we do an

artifact short form episode. Oh yeah, and we have Vault episodes on the weekend. Those are reruns 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

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