Listener Mail: Crab Walking Down Human Street

Prizes for So this first message comes from Karen. Karen says, Hi, Joe and Robert, in response to your IG Nobel Prize grab Bag episode where you've discussed collision avoidance in crowds. I live in Australia and the last time I visited the US, I noticed I kept walking in the way of others, even when it wasn't crowded. At one point it occurred to me that I would keep to the left hand side of any path or head to head,

presumably cause in Australia we drive on the left. Once I made a point of correcting and keeping to the right, I was suddenly less in the way. Interesting, UM, I wonder if this means that collision avoidance works differently in like international airports, where there is more of a mingling of people from from different countries of origin with different

side of the road preferences. Oh yeah, that would be a whole experiment there where any kind of like pre programming for this side or that side UM is just totally out the window, like a news Maybe maybe it works better because a new system has to emerge UM, you know, on its own, and you can't just depend on the dominant culture to be the guy that everyone falls in line with. Right, So Karen goes on on

an opposing note. Sometimes I play a walking game called Don't get out of Men's Way and watch them freak out just by walking along in a straight line and not being the one to automatically change course when a man is approaching from the other direction. A woman can really blow their minds winking face emoji. Thanks for the great show. It's one of the key reasons that I

listened to a podcast about is my main catchphrase, cheers Karen. Well, thanks Karen, and actually regarding not getting out of men's way on the sidewalk as a as a game women play. Karen was not the only person who wrote in. A listener named Ginger shared an article on this very subject

which the article calls patriarchy chicken, which I found very funny. Though, I I started to think about this actually, and I was wondering how, assuming this is true, how this interacts with the general finding from these studies, like that study out of Japan that collision avoidance is a collaborative, emergent product that requires constant monitoring and coordination from both sides. Remember the studies about how how jammed up across walk

would get if only a few people were distracted. So if it's true that there are also gender norms about collision avoidance, how do they fit into the equation? Like would it be that more often women are expected to make the first move in diverting pathways? So so this is another thing actually that made me laugh at first, That made me think, yeah, yeah, I mean, without a doubt, you do have some some gender dynamics, uh, you know,

cultural dynamics playing in there. But you know, we were talking about we're mostly talking about grown ups here though, We're talking about grown ups walking down the street and crashing or not crashing into each other, usually not crashing into each other. But you know, you throw kids into this scenario and things I wonder where the research would go.

Because I was thinking about this this morning because every morning I walk my my son into his elementary school or you know, close to it, and a lot of parents are doing the same thing, and there are other kids coming on and coming in on on their own,

and uh, it gets crazy. It's like, you know, kids today it was rainy, said, Kids with umbrellas swinging around, giant umbrellas almost babies in the face, and their parents trying to dodge, and parents who have dropped their child off trying to then go back up the same street they came down. Um this time, you know, with a with greater ability to dodge incoming children and adults. But uh, it's a you certainly can't have your phone out during

all that you just plow right into multiple children. Yeah, I think kids totally change things. And actually I can observe that instinctually in myself, because I don't know if you've had this experience. Um, I think I tend to find that when I'm in a space where there are little kids moving around, my movements become much more conservative or curtailed. Like, uh, if I'm trying to go down a grocery aisle and there are kids in the grocery aisle.

I will I will move much more slowly, I think, just on the understanding that kids might suddenly get in my path unexpectedly. There it's far harder to judge exactly where they're going to go, And I think maybe that that increases the shorter they get and the younger they get. You're like, I'm not sure which way she's going. I think I can predict her path, but I might not be able to. So I'm gonna slow down. I'm gonna

go into the defensive mode. Um. But then on top of that, I feel like kids my my son's age there at that point where they're they're really good at dodging in and out of of pedestrian traffic, you know, They're they're really good about about weaving their way through a crowd. Uh and uh. At the same time, it's easy to assume that they are about to just plow directly,

you know, into you. Um Uh. There many times just in the house where I'm trying to move from from point A to point B and the boy comes running through, and I'm just convinced we're about to collide. Uh. You know, I go into like full defensive mode, like you know, cover you know, any sensitive parts so I don't get get injured. And he's like, what, I wouldn't gonna run into you, and then he moves on. So yeah, kids

deplicate everything. It almost makes me wonder if they're like kid lesion avoidance norms and adult collision avoidance norms and that they can sort of have trouble interacting the same way that left lane and right lane traffic would. Yeah, yeah, all right, Robbi, you want to read this one about

the igno bells from Chad concerning cats and beards. Yeah. Yeah, this had to do with the study um about the hypothesis that beards may have evolved the male beard may have evolved as a way of of softening the blow of incoming punches. But also about cat chittering. Oh yeah, we got a little cat chittering, a little cat talking here as well. So this comes to us from Chad. Chad writes, one of my cats frequently chittered at prey

animals when she was younger. This seems like an odd instinct to me, as it seems like it could give a predator's position away. What I also thought interesting is that she would just barely raise her head above the window sill in order to see the birds or squirrels. He her ears flat, as if to minimize her visible profile, but at the same time she would noisily chitter. Uh. This is interesting and um, you know, thinking back to what I was reading in the for the ignoble episode. Uh,

it my interpretation, and who knows catch or mysteries. This could be wrong, but my interpretation, based on some of the theories out there, is that it's kind of like the cat is still preparing to jump, but knows it cannot jump, cannot reach, cannot actually attack the prey, and that is where the chitter kicks in. You know. It's like that that uncontrollable like just outburst. Uh, that the need to bite the neck, but the inability to reach

the neck. So in this case, if this is correct, the chittering would not be a naturally evolved hunting behavior, but it would be a reaction to the fact that the hunting behavior is being thwarted. It's some kind of

displacement behavior. Yeah, I guess. And it's again it's it's hard to apply the cat realm to the the animal to the human realm, but I'd like to imagine if I had like my favorite sandwich, favorite sandwich in the world in my hand and then you know, I'm I'm bringing it up to my face and I can only bring it within like half a foot. Like what kind of frustration? What kind of sound would I make? You know? What? I would just go like, you know, in sort of

a frustrated attempt. Uh, you know, not even an attempt, but just an outburst at not being able to reach the sandwich, a chittering of anguish. Yeah. But it's you know, even more than that, because for us, like sandwiches are great, um, but are we like highly evolved sandwich eating machines that are maybe maybe not? But I mean, for like the cat, the consumption of the delicious songbird, like that is it's that is its purpose, that it's it's it's holy role

in the ecosystem. Uh, you know, it feels that in its very genes, and now it can't get there because there's this this magic glass screen between it and prey. But Chad had more to say. Chad says, I have a beard and trained in martial arts for six years as a young adult. We we ask any martial artist and Marshall people who knew more about martial arts than us to chime in on this um. He continues, Perhaps beards offer some slight cushioning effect, but they offer a

distinct disadvantage. A beard can be grabbed and pulled painfully. I would guess it to be a weak point, not armor. I agree that I imagine early humans would rely on tools not fists for violence. Furthermore, of evolution was going to protect the head, why not grow thicker bones, store more fat around the face, develop a layer of rigid armor, or add much thicker fur for more noticeable cushioning effect. I agree that saying evolution selected for a beard is

armor from punches is a stretch. Thanks for another great episode. Now I will say some of the suggestions that Chad gets into here. Obviously we're talking about far more expensive adaptations, uh, evolutionarily speaking. So you like, there's a reason we don't have, um, you know, some sort of a rigid armor growing out of our body. Yeah, that's true. And and another thing, of course, is that evolutionary adaptations have to they usually have to have some kind of starting place, like a

like a morphological tool to start with. So in the case of hair on the face, you could say that, well, you know, maybe our our bodies used to be more completely covered in hair all over, and instead, what you're talking about is cases where on certain parts of the body, hair that used to be all over the place is retained where it was lost elsewhere, and so there's some pressure causing it to be retained in those places. And again with the beard, we don't know exactly what that

would be. So so anyway, I guess you could say that it's easier to get to a beard through a string of mutations than it would be to get to I don't know, some kind of like big cage of bones around the jaw. Uh. But yes, also it might be much more expensive to make something like that in terms of energy and so forth. But yeah, so I agree, chad Um. I remain open minded about more more fist punching centric views of human evolution, but mostly pretty doubtful alright.

This next message comes in response to our episodes on the history of chainsaws. This comes from Shana. She says, Hello, Robert and Joe, I wanted to share a funny moment that happened well when listening to your episode about chainsaws and particularly y'all trying to remember the color of the chainsaw used by Leatherface in the Texas Chainsaw Masker films. My husband works in the prop department of a major theme park Halloween event. His job title is Captain of

Bodies and Gore. Over the years, they have done numerous TCM themed mazes, he intimately knows the color of the chainsaws used in the films green because the screen accurate chainsaws no longer come in that color way. The prop department needs to paint and gut the machinery out of each chainsaw before they are handed to the scare actors. But this is this is truly some fabulous feedback. But

Shaney goes on along the same lines. The Halloween event he works is famous for the chainsaw drill team that walks around the streets interacting with guests. Those are real chainsaws they use, just with the teeth removed. Even without the blades. The performers have to be careful because hair and clothing could still get pulled into the motor. Oh wow, that that's a scary image. I assume they take all

all appropriate precautions. But then finally, Shana says, she she enjoys these uh, you know, gangs of chainsaw people running around because they add more immersion. She says, uh, the chainsaws are gasoline powered, and the aroma of fuel follows them wherever they go, whether it is purposeful or incidental. The added old factory layer adds to the experience. And Shana m yeah, yeah, I mean that is true that the smell of the of the roaring chainsaws that your

local haunted attraction are very much part of it. What's that It's gotta be the ben zine getting into the bulb. Yeah, all right. Here's another one that comes to us. This is ah this is in response to a Vault episode. I think it was titled Melt with Me, And this is when where we talked about the idea of people melting, both in terms of, you know, the question can a

person actually melt? And and then getting a little into the you know, the deeper questions of why do we keep obsessing over melting and what about people who want to melt? Is that is that reasonable? Oh? And one thing this email picks up on is I think we mentioned the Wicked Witch of the West from one of the most one of the most famous cinematic melting scenes. Um, and if you're and it's impossible to realize that she's melting right because she's saying it as well. So so

this's what Kenneth that is. Say. Dear Robert and Joseph, I use your Sunday names because I have beef. The Wicked Wish of the West was a truly evil character. Falsehoods come easily to her lips, and even her final words were designed to sow deceit. She did not melt. I don't know what she was made of, but her solid parts could not exist as a liquid at standard atmospheric pressure, causing them to sublime like water ice on the surface of Mars. Her fluids also vanished into thin air,

presumably through evaporation. Don't fall for her lies. Great episode. By the way, The toxic goose guy in RoboCop was absolutely haunting. I am grossed out to this day. Kenneth ps staying for shot on the fourth Oh in the next Dune movie. Okay, okay, yeah, I mean I could see it working. I'm I'm kind of hoping they go

in different directions with the with the casting. I think there's there's some room to get some some more actors of Middle Eastern or North African heritage in there, but could but as far as like if if if Staying was the pick, I mean, yeah, Staying could do it. Stings. Stings a talented guy. Oh. I should also mention that in Kenneth's original email, he referred to me as Douglas. I don't know why he said hello Robert and Douglas. But then he immediately uh sent another email to to

apologize incorrect. So what what's with that interpretation? I don't know? All right, this next message actually comes in Rob This is when you brought in from the from the discord right, that's right, there is a discord server for stuff to blow your mind. You have to have like an invite to get in. So just just email us and we'll send you the invite. Um that's the only way, easy

way I know how to do it. So uh, yeah, this was this is something that sent in via the discord server from someone who I identifies themselves as niare lathotep Okay. I think that's some kind of malevolent love crafty and god if I'm not wrong. Um, yes, I like the kind of like also kind of rounds up the gods kind of speaks on behalf of the gods as if I remember correctly. Okay, well, this listener says, Hi, Joe and Robert, I'm listening again to airships over Venus.

I guess maybe we ran this as a vault. Um uh, they say. Discussion of the second planet never fails to inspire my imagination. The idea of a planetary body so close to us, and in so many ways similar, gets my mind into problem solving mode. Surely making use of it as a second home is just an engineering problem, Yes, a giant engineering problem. What are the few resources available

to a civilization in its early stages. Mars, for all its hype, is just a dead rock half the size of Earth, with no active core and barely an atmosphere. It can't be an unsolvable problem to tow our sister Earth out to a more manageable orbit and vent off the excess gases, or perhaps capture them in solid form with engineered life. At least That's what I like to think in my day dreams. Our biggest challenge in space is time and distance. So we actually just talked about

this with with Daniel Wison. Venus. Maybe our only reachable goal anytime soon. Maybe once we build that Dyson's fear will have the energy necessary. L O L. Topics like this have seriously kept me saying through COVID, thanks so much and keep up the good work. Well, thank you, And yeah, I do have to say sometimes when when the life on Earth gets stressful, uh, it is relaxing to contemplate other planets. I think that might have been part of the original, uh, the decision to to look

to Venus. It was just like, oh man, this everything feels a bit stressful. What's going on on Venus. Let's talk about Venus. The Nusian politics are are far less stressful. Oh who was it though, who was making servations of Venus in in the nineteenth century or you know, some sometime in the past, and it was drawing some rather wild inferences about Venusian politics from like they thought that fires were being lit for a coronation ceremony basically on

some changes in the light on the surface. It might have been in this episode that we've gotten into that. If not this one of the other Venusian episodes that we did. I'm slightly less than convinced on that one. All right, here comes the Crabs. This one comes to us from James. Hi, guys, love the show. I've been a listener for years, usually in the car, so I haven't gotten around to emailing you before. I just had

to make time for this one though. I absolutely love the episode on crabs, especially discussion about them wearing algae and seeing enemies is a sort of camouflage armor and ready food supply. How cool is that. I actually had a saltwater crab as a pet for a time, and I was practically on the edge of my seat waiting

for you to mention the pom pom crab. This species actually holds a pair of tiny cnm and ease in its claws, like pom poms, and my understanding is that they use these for mopping up food as well as defending itself. Tool use in crabs. Thanks James, I think you actually had an episode. You did an episode about this a long time ago, right, Yeah, yeah, pompom crabs have come up on the show before. Yeah, they're they're pretty cool. There's there's one study in particular. I remember.

It was about, like, you know, what happens when one crab steals the pom pom of another crab and then they have to like take their pom pom, split it in half, and then they have to pom poms. So it's, uh, yeah, these are great creatures because they're they're wonderful to look at. And then the yeah, the practice itself is is fascinating and indeed raises the specter of of tool use. Well.

This also reminds me of how impressed at least I was in in that episode about the description of the process by which these crabs who wore algae on their on their carapace would would go through to uh, I

guess it was sort of stalks of seaweed. The process that would go through to attach it, like they would clip it off, they would measure it to a certain length, and then they would nibble the snipped end of it to roughen it so that it would cling to the spines on their shell, and then they would position it back and try to attach it and go through this over and over. It's like a surprisingly complex process and

and kind of crafty for a crab, you know. I also loved to that we got to hear from somebody who has or had rather a pet crab. This is the only listener we've heard from that has or had a pet crab. I refuse to believe that there's nobody out there listening to us right now. Uh with with a with a hermit crab in the same room with them. So if you own a pet crab, don't be shy. Send us an email. We want to hear what your

your pet crab eats. Give us all the details. Uh. Statistically, hermit crab owners are antisocial and they do not right into podcast asked, prove him wrong. Prove him wrong hermit raisers. Okay, well, this next email does at least concern hermit crabs. This comes from Simon. Good day, gentlemen. Feel free to share this at your whim. But in regards to the crabby content,

I would thought I would share a quick but amusing anecdote. Recently, I spent five minutes explaining to my five year old daughter that it is hermit crabs, not helmet crabs, before realizing that her version is so much better. Thanks for the amazing and interesting content, Simon. I read this because I feel like I've heard that same thing before. I think when I was a kid, I knew somebody who called them helmet crabs. But it makes sense. It makes so much sense you wonder, you wonder why it hasn't

why that name hasn't taken over. Yeah, I mean especially for young fans of crabs. I mean, you you know what a hell it is. You might not really know what the whole concept of the hermit yet. So it's yeah, it's it's a little more difficult to explain. I mean, hermit crabs are they're in amura, they're false crabs. So actually the helmet would be the more accurate part than the than the crab part. Yeah. And and certainly sometimes the behaviors seeing hermit crabs like you see them mobbing, um,

you know a coconut. Uh, they don't. That doesn't look very much like hermit behavior to me. It doesn't really hold true across the board. All right, we have one more here for you. This one's a weird how cinema message. This one comes to us from Dan, Hi, Robert, and Joe. I am not a doctor, but if I were, I would prescribe at least two viewings a week of Inframan

to compact seasonal effective depression or depression in general. I saw Inframan when I was about ten or eleven years old as an English language dub I had my dad by during a trip to the local Sam Goody store that began with listing all the monsters up front as a precredit sequence and erroneously called the plant monster, octopus monster,

and spider monster Beatle mutant. Uh. This was when the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers were popular, and I remember the description on the back of the VHS box was really trying to pitch it towards that audience. I eat meat. I also found Ciskele and Ebert's review of Infra Man, which they both enjoy because it delivered thrills and actions

without boring dialogue and seriousness. Ebert, who saw it at a Kitty matinee, especially loved the name Princess Dragon Mom and said it was a weird, curiously demented, but totally wonderful mix of sci fi, kung fu and superhero movie with a future as a midnight cult classic. And uh. Dan includes a link to that section of the Cisco and Ebert show. Uh and uh yeah, that's Dan's message

regarding um Infra Man. We also heard just you know, quick snippets from people on like the Facebook group for stuff to blow your mind, the stuff to blow your mind. Us should module people just chining in and saying, oh, yeah, I love that movie. That's a great movie. Watched it when I was younger, etcetera. It's holy. Infra man is is holy and uh and it deserves reverence and and

I'm glad to see it getting plenty. I did check out the This is Clinebra review, which was quite It was some episode of their show from I guess the late seventies, and it was quite funny because it was one of the where like they had to segue to it, I think, from talking about some X rated erotic thriller like straight into uh to Infra Man which uh is just wonderful. Yeah, and you can tell, like ever it's

just gushing about it. They both clearly love it. Um. It again raises the question of why the two point five stars and then when the upgrade, why only to three? He he talks about it like a four star classic. So again I'm going to say that as canon. Oh yeah, apparently yeah, I'm looking at the clip now. Apparently they talk about Emmanuel Guilty Pleasures, Uh, super Fly, the Fury, and Inframan. So I mean, really, I mean that out of those films, you know, I'm going to go to

Inframant first. No wait, I'm reading further. They also talk about the Greek Tycoon and the last House on the left in this episode, So yeah, Infra Man clear winner out of the bunch. It is known. All right, we're gonna go and close the mail bag for this week. But will I guess we're back next week? Yeah? Probably, if not some Monday in the future, we're back. That. Mondays are when our listener mail episodes happen. That's our time to to read your various feedback and questions and

so forth. So yeah, keep them coming. We have our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the stuff to Blow your mind podcast feed. We have a short form artifact on Wednesdays, and on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious discussion and just focus in on a weird film. And then on the weekend we do a vault episode, which is a rerun from the previous year. Sometimes folks asked, why not from years previous to that? Wines, it got to just

be from last year. Uh. First of all, it's easy to keep track off and uh and and second uh more more seriously, Uh, you know we're often dealing with scientific topics, stuff that that is not necessarily going to be average green five green five years later. Uh. So that's always in the back of our mind, and we don't always have time to, you know, to go back and really review those old episodes and see like, okay, if there have been have there been subsequent developments, has

this changed? Um? This is need to be updated. Uh. It's a lot easier just to go back to what was happening a year ago and push that back out again. 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. That's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your

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