Listener Mail: Das Gravy Boat

What what do we have? Okay? This first message is about our episodes on spinning, and this comes from Jenna that it actually came in before we recorded the episode, so it'll require a bit of backtracking. Jenna says, hello, all, I've just been listening to your listener Mail episode from November nineteenth, and you were talking about ballet dancers dancing on point and suggested you may do a future episode on spinning humans and the related centrifugal forces. Please consider

pole dancers if you do pursue this subject. While working on a spinning pole, the speeds achieved in the length of time spent spinning in a single direction at a time are considerable, all while expected to dismount or land gracefully, midspin and continue without looking like you're about to face plant. I enjoy hearing your episodes whenever they come out, along with the Stuff you Should Know podcast, equipping me with very random facts which I revel in relating to my

friends and colleagues. Keep up the good work, Jenna, Well, Jenna. Unfortunately we recorded the episodes about spinning before I read this message, but I decided to UH to look it up and see if there were there was anything interesting I could find about pole dancing physics, and wouldn't you

know what I came across a really good article. There was one by Jennifer Ulette that was in Gizmodo published in twenty sixteen, called The Simple Physics of pole Dancing, and this actually does get into some very interesting stuff that you might not think about. Obviously, pole dancing is going to require massive amounts of like core and upper body strength. It's a real athletic feat, especially the more like athletic you know, competition style people do that I

was seeing some videos of in this article. But it also apparently involves the careful management of friction, which is kind of funny but also really interesting. So there's this section in the article where Lett is speaking with Valerie Jamison, who's a content director for New Scientist and who has a PhD in physics, and so Lett writes, quote, you need friction, but not too much and not too little. It depends on what move you're trying to execute. Quote.

In some of these moves, people are hanging upside down by the crook of their knee and then they slide down, says Jamison, just thinking of that as terrifying to me. Um, But the dancers can pull it off because they have such fine motor control. They contract their muscles and press into the poll to stick, then loosen their hoole just

enough to slide until they need to stop. The skimpy outfits can be a boon in that regard, because bear skin has the right friction coefficient to help dancers stick to the pole, perhaps with a light dusting of resin on the hands and thighs to keep sweat at bay. And there's also a note about the selection of footwear affecting what you can do in pole dancing, because apparently, like different materials on your shoes will help you get

a better grip on the pole. With your foot if you're using that to hold yourself up in the air while you're doing something else with the rest of your body. Um So anyway, Yes, I I am fully impressed by the the athleticism of this, just as I am with with ballet and skating. Interesting. Yeah, I wish we'd had had this one on hand when we'd done those episodes, but that's getting to discuss it here on listener mail. That's that's close enough. Yeah, uh, Rob, do you want

to read this message about anti metaboli. Yeah, here's one on anti metabolis from Christopher Christopher. I hello. As someone whose bachelor's degree was in linguistics and psychology, the topic of anti Metaboli's on your Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast was a nice treat in my daily playlist this morning.

Thank you for that very much. As someone whose masters was in human factors engineering and whose pH d was oriented around topics of situated cognition, I felt compelled to try and write into a podcast host for the first time. I typically listened to podcasts while I walked my dog twice each day, so maybe it was an easier connection for me to make, But I was surprised your discussion did not approach any of the physical aspects that might

well coincide with your explored topic of human proclivities. For A, B, B, A patterns, before humans could write, they could walk, and assumably most successful walks bring the walker back home again

in the same path. In reverse, when you set off, you might encounter things in a specific order A, B, C, D, E, and then when coming back, the bread crumbs can lead you home in a comforting and secure matter e, D, C, B A. In the most simple terms, I go from here to there A than b, and then return from there to here be than A. I am the same person in the same place, so I feel complete, satisfied, accomplished, etcetera.

So this primitive spatial dimension might easily be associated with an intuitive feeling of comprehensiveness when exposures are experienced in

a reverse order. Moreover, time and some randomness has passed between in a unidirectional manner, between the start and end of the walk, or between successive days of similar routines, so the opportunity for change is also there, such as with an A, B, B A pattern that presents a negation or change in meaning e g. The journey is the destination I am not exactly the same as when I started out, and isn't that sometimes of interest and importance.

My interests in pursuits and situated cognition as another perhaps they're extended or advanced paradigm of cognitive psychology e g. Behavioralism than cognitivism, than situativism. Challenge me to imagine and explore how cognition and thinking does not really only simply exists slash reside within the brain, but also outside of it, in the body and its movements and environments through various artifacts, technology, cultures, etcetera.

My profession in human factors and user experience tends to reward more holistic study and understanding of operations and environments in which usage based interfaces and designs succeed in respects to given constraints. So again, thank you for your interesting discussion, and I hope these above thoughts may bring you new and exciting ones. Cheers, Christopher. This is really interesting, you know, Joe, because this uh discussing you know, returning in reverse order,

the backtracking to come back. Uh. This reminds me of our recent episode on foraging and the one paper that looked at potential differences in the division of labor between hunters and foragers, and how the forager would would would be more likely to return along the exact same route, whereas the hunter would go out to kind of a winding track trailing, you know, trailing the prey, but then would have to make it They couldn't retrace their steps

because it was such a winding trail. They would have to make a direct bee line back to camp. Interesting. Yeah, I don't know if that has any any real role

in this discussion, but but it made me think of it. Yeah, that's another It's one of those things that I think it'd be difficult to demonstrate this, but it's definitely an interesting idea that something about uh, you know, basic types of foraging and exploration activities would have psychological relevance even to abstract concepts like the words and the sentence or ideas in a list. Yeah, and the the A B,

B A thing too. Like it makes me think of the classic sitcom format, right, you must always in your journey at the beginning again, you know, uh, there there's something comforting in that that you must come back to the same place and then the next episode will be another departure and a return. Yeah. Oh, because in the sitcom nothing ever changes. So are you ready for the next message? Let's do it. This is from Akhmed. Ahmed says, hey guys, longtime listener and stuff to blow your mind

lover here. Your episode on anti metaboli and its frequency in old Middle Eastern texts made me think of the kali Vala, which is absolutely jam packed with similar repetitious turns of phrase. I think the kali Vla might make for a rich subject for you to do an episode on. For one, the religion slash myth of the pre Christian Finnic people's is very interesting and relatively neglected compared to Greek, Norse, Egyptian,

etcetera myths. The story of how Elias Loan wrote, a nineteenth century physician went about collecting scraps of oral tradition stories and putting them, sometimes with the seems very much showing in a front to back order. Is also neat and reminiscent of the hard task that other compilers of folk tradition like Avid have also had to do. Lastly, there are cool echoes of the kala v Ala in

modern culture. For example, there seems to be some evidence that the Call of Vla is Demi god protagonist Vina Moynan contributed greatly to Tolkien's creation of Tom Bomba Dill or Gandalf. Anyways, keep up the great work, Ahmed. And I looked up Vina Moyn and uh, I hope I'm saying that sort of close. I listened to a pronunciation

and that that's about as close as I can do. Um. He is like a figure who was born of this like ocean creature, and like when he was born, he was already an old wizard with the knowledge of the world. Strange magical figure. There's a scene I was reading about in the in the epic poem where he has to build a harp out of fishbones. Is pretty cool. But I also looked up some quotes from the Kla Valla and these are some passages I found from the John

Martin Crawford translation that I wanted to read. So this first one he goes like this. Thus the ancient Vina Moinen in his copper banded vessel left his tribe in Kali Valla sailing or the rolling billows, sailing through the azure vapors, sailing through the dusk of evening sailing to the fiery sunset, to the higher landed regions, to the lower verge of heaven. And so there I think you see some of those repetitious phrasings that Ahmed was talking about.

But then also there was another passage that doesn't have the same stylistic effects, but I just liked it. Quote. Thus the wise and worthy singer sings not all his garnered wisdom. Better leave unsung some sayings than to sing them out of season. Oh that's beautiful. Uh. You know, you know one of the things about this character, if I am not mistaken, this is the primary character in the Day the Earth Throws, which was uh you know the Russo Finish film from ninety nine that was featured

on Mystery Science Theater three thousand. You know, the saga of the Sampo. Oh, I don't know if I've seen this one. Oh, it's it's quite good. Um, I'm sure it's also quite beautiful and like an undegraded uh you know copy of the film. But yeah, you also you look up this character and you see various illustrations of him, say, defending the Sampo against herpet type creatures. Uh so, so yeah, this this, this character is the real deal. Nice all right.

This one comes to us from Jennifer. Jenniver, says Robert and Joe. I enjoyed your recent episode on anti Metaboli's. A couple of years ago, I was comparing a few of the chi asthmas in the Bible and began to wonder if that was a literary device that was still used today. I found, as you did, that the A, B B A anti metaboli is quite common, but the longer chiasmas is more difficult to find. Key asthmas kai asthmas. It's a, it's a It's gonna be a tough one.

We keep I was thrilled, thrilled to run across the website. Pasted below on it, the author maps a thirty point chiasthmus in the Back to the Future trilogy and suggest that some of the greatness of the franchise comes from its use of chiasthmus to bring the viewer to a satisfying ending thought. You might enjoy taking a look at it and watching the trilogy again while watching out for it. Thanks for what your podcast teaches me and for what

I teach from your podcast to others. This is a great point, and a lot of really structurally satisfying fiction does exactly this. It It takes the form of a broad structural chiasmus that's sort of like goes from A to Z and then back from Z to A. Okay, This next message is about Thanksgiving food, specifically gravy. This is from Matt. Matt says good Day, Robert and Joe,

Good Day. Regarding gravy and its historical slash cultural importance and origins, I'd like to highlight the importance of fat in neutral Shan. Gravy in its traditional form, anyway, is fat. Fat was in many ways a most important component of nutrition, or at least it was for some people based on the conditions in which they lived e g. Traditional Inuit diets come to mind. Though I'm no expert. It's the taste and the energy just as important as the meat itself,

perhaps more so in some cases. I would propose the reverence for gravy historically stems in part from the recognition that it is a highly valuable energy source, essentially an extension of meat itself, a highly valuable food food source historically waste, not particularly when the energy factor is so high. This might be a hot take, but worth reiterating. I think thanks for the episode, Matt. This is a good point, Matt, and it made me think about one of the important

functions of the invention of pans for cooking. Now, you could cook meat that you you know, if you you caught and killed an animal, you could roast its meat over an open fire. But if you think about it, you could actually be losing a lot of energy, like just dripping off into the fire and burning up and creating smoke. Once you have a pan to cook in, you can catch everything, so you really don't don't lose

a drop. Yeah, and it it allows you to create those those secondary products that are that are often Yeah, it's extremely tasty, all right. This one comes to us from Eric. Hey, mind blowers, that's us, I guess um, He says, I was delighted to see that you did an episode on one of my favorite topics. Venus so much interesting stuff to say about it. First of all, you speculated that it would be easier to get a rocket to orbit from a balloon than from the surface.

This is absolutely true on Earth, and there have been several attempts to design balloon launched rockets or raccoons, most notably a Spanish company called Zero to Infinity. But when it comes to Venus, that is a mind boggling understatement. Assuming we could build a rocket that could actually survive on the surface of Venus, which is not possible with current technology, a rocket would have to push against that absurdly thick atmosphere, which is hard enough on Earth but

is ninety times as hard on Venus. We would have to land a Saturn five rocket on Venus, fully fueled with machinery to keep the the cryogenic fuel below negative a hundred degrees celsius in six hundred plus degrees celsius temperatures just to get something like the mercury capsule into orbit. That might actually be an overestimate estimation, as I haven't tried to do the math. I can't stress enough how

horrible Venus is atmosphere fear is for space exploration. You have to go up to fifty kilometers just to get to earth like pressures that high up on Earth, and you're almost in vacuum. I don't remember you mentioning uh this, so my apologies if you did. One difficulty with balloons on Venus is the sulfuric acid clouds. I don't recall offhand at what altitude these clouds form, but it means that any balloon not made of glass will have an

operational lifetime much shorter than on Earth. Balloons might not last long enough to make the return to Earth window for crude missions. One thing you mentioned off hand was whether it was safe to have balloons floating in the tops of gas giants owing to radiation. In fact, it's

actually not as dangerous as you might think. One thing the Juno probe discovered is that Jupiter's ionosphere, which is the cause of most of the radiation in the region of Jupiter, actually has a lower limit, and it doesn't extend below a certain altitude. They modified the probes planned orbit to pass below this level to boost its lifetime. The real problem for a balloon on a gas giant

is lift. Since gas giants are mostly composed of the lightest possible gas, hydrogen, there isn't anything lighter to use as a lifting gas except warmer hydrogen. That is, unless you can build a rigid balloon that can hold a low pressured gas or a vacuum, which is not technically feasible yet venus is much better for balloons be since its atmosphere is mostly CEO two. Even oxygen or nitrogen will work as a lifting gas. So in the future we could have habitats not just suspended under a balloon,

but housed within one. Sorry for it such a long email, but as I said, venus is a very exciting topic for me. Best wishes and I hope to see thousands more great episodes from you, Eric, Eric, You're gonna see thousands more great episodes for us in the next two months, well certainly before the before two thousand, um and twenty one is done. Yeah, there will be what I guess, there'll be a thousand more episodes plus right, I can't do math in my head right now, it's getting late

in the day. OKAYET, fantastic email, Eric, Thank you very much. Okay, this next message comes to us from Kate. It's about our ice episodes from earlier in the year, about pike crete and stuff like that. Kate says, Hi, Robert and Joe, thanks so much for all you do. I'm a research scientist to the National Renewable Energy Lab and your show is my go to listen for when I have routine

housekeeping work around the lab. You keep me entertained while making buffers, preparing samples are running simple but time consuming experiments. I wanted to write in and say how much I'm enjoying the Weird House Cinema and suggest that the nineteen eighty four classic of the Ice Pirates should absolutely go on your list. My husband and I rewatched it recently and it is as wonderfully bad and hilarious as I

remember from my youth. I also wanted to tell you how much I've enjoyed the episodes on ice that you've done in the last couple of months. I'm a little late to this party, I know. I wanted to suggest a follow up in this vein with an episode on cryogenic electron microscopy. This technique involves flash freezing samples in such a way that they form vitreous ice, meaning a lack of hexagonal structure is formed. This preserves the structure

of biological molecules dissolved in the sample. In the past decade or so, this technique had a huge impact on structural biology, as it has allowed visualization of cellular, subcellular, or and even individual protein structures while avoiding the difficulties

and limitations of more traditional X ray crystallography techniques. There there is a deep pool of interesting topics to be found here, including the details of vitreous ice and how it relates to people freezing, slash reanimation WOA, the AI of the analysis software that sorts through the higher number of images collected and determines the orientations that were captured

in each. Why older X ray techniques are limited parentheses, A lot of proteins can't be crystallized and or only certain conformers form into crystals, and the new insights that have been made with the technique. Hope this email inspires you to consider this topic and keep up with the exploration of ice generally, because it is a fascinating topic and water is so central to our understanding of life

as we know it. Thanks for all you do, Cheers Kate, And then she's got a PS says you guys should also revisit the electric micro bland topic you did a few years ago. I dug it up for a re listen because I reviewed several grants on this topic recently, and there is a ton of new and exciting work in this area, including some of our Lab. If you're interested, I'd be happy to send you references. Okay, so yeah, thanks for getting in touch, Kate. I think that's a

that's a really great idea. Plus, the Ice Pirates um maybe worth considering. I don't know, I don't have a strong memory of Ice Pirates, but it has a great cast. There are a lot of fun connections with it. Is Dick Miller in it? Um not? I don't know. I don't think Dick Millers in it. But you got pretty much everybody else Robert Rick, John Carradine, Ron Pearlman, Angelica Houston, Bruce v Launch, Ian Ambercrombie. It's it's pretty yea, it's stacked. Okay.

Do you want to wrap up with a few listener responses to Weird House Cinema? Yeah, yeah, we're already talking about it a little bit. Let's let's go all the

way in. Okay, here's one from Forest Forest says you guys briefly mentioned mar Joe Gortoner in a recent episod, so, emphasizing what a befuddling figure he is, was wondering if you're aware of the documentary mar Jo, It's actually incredible, made in nineteen seventy two before he started acting, kind of an expose slash heist film about how he was manipulated as a child, etcetera. Yeah, thanks for this note for us. So Marjo came up when we were talking

about Star Wars rip off movies. I guess this must have been in the Weird House Cinema about Message from Space, because Marjo is in Star Crash, the one with with David, uh, what's his name? David Hasselhoff, and mar Joe is like he's a sidekick character in that movie. There's this amazing scene where somebody says, like, no one can withstand these deadly rays, and then Marjoe responds, these deadly rays will

be your death. And but mar Jo, before he was trying to do a sci fi you know, be sci fi acting career, he had been a child tent revival preachers. So I don't know what what age exactly, he like seven or something and doing these revival sermons. It's it's really astonishing to imagine. But he later did a documentary about all of the techniques that he would use in his preaching to get people to hand over money and

stuff like that. It's a I've actually never seen the full documentary, but I've seen some big clips from it, so someday I gotta sit down and just watch the whole thing. All right, here's another one. This one comes to us from Chris. Chris says, Hi, Rob and Joe writing in today to let you know I'm really enjoying the new Weird House Cinema episodes. I'm not a classic movie buff. We're big into old movies, B movies, but

I do very much enjoy a good bad movie. After listening to your first two episodes of Weird House Cinema, I had to write in and give you a recommendation based on my own weird movie watching experience. The year is two thousand and six. I'm living in an apartment with two other guys. During college. We splurge and get HBO for the summer. Between working odd shifts and making just enough money to make rent, we spent much of the summer on the couch watching every movie that HBO

had to offer. In particular, one movie caught our eye, uh and after one watch, we knew we couldn't turn away. That movie was two thousand fives A Sound of Thunder. I've seen this one. We got to finish the email first, then I'll talk about it. It was so hilariously bad and weird that one watch was never going to be enough. We subsequently watched it about once or twice a week while it was available on HBO that summer, But once we realized its run had come to an end, we

knew what needed to be done. After some searching, three copies of the movie were procured, one for each member of are now a Sound of Thunder movie cult. To this day, we will text each other every so often and remind one another that it's time for a rewatch. It's a fun way to bring back some good memories and get lost in some bizarre mid two thousand sci fi. It might be too recent to make the cut for weird, how sent not, but I hope you enjoy a watch of it. Either way, All the best and thanks for

continuing to blow the mind. Get out of here with that talk about two recent I have seen this movie. It is it? Yeah? I think it's totally worthy. It is so strange now, of course it's it's based on the Ray Bradberry short story that we've talked about on the show before. I think that came up in a previous episode. We did one one of our Halloween episodes about the Simpsons Time and Punishment episode. I think that was because that's based on Ray Bradberry a little bit.

And so the premise of the story is that there are these people who go back in time and hunt a dinosaur, and then that leads to these horrible changes in the future because of the butterfly effects rolling through time. But in this two thousand five version, it's just hard to describe how how bizarre and awful this movie is. It's got these c g I velociraptors with baboon faces. It's it's really special. Has been Kingsley in it though. This is a time when Ben Kingsley was getting paid

for work. He was collecting some checks and this was one of those checks. Wow, well it I mean maybe worth checking out then, Yeah, because I love the short story and I have fond memories of the Ray Bradberry theater adaptation of it, which you know, I guess it was a little cheesy because you know, it has dinosaurs in it. But um, but yeah, I'm I'm I'm kind of curious now to exactly exactly what direction they go

in with this. Yeah, It's been a long time, but I would be happy to revisit that one so that that may go on the list. Thanks Chris. Okay, let's wrap up with one more Weird House email, this one from Lindsay. Lindsay says, Hey, Rob and Joe, hope you all are doing well. Longtime stuff to blow your mind. Listener and fellow atlante in here, I've been really enjoying the Weird House Cinema series, even though I actually don't

watch move bees at all. Very often. Often joked that I've never seen a movie from before the year two thousand because I basically happen't WHOA. That's okay, Well, most of the good movies were made before two thousands, so you're doing all right. A post two thousand weird movie that I'd love to hear you'll cover is Jennifer's Body two thousand nine, a supernatural horror slash black comedy where Megan Fox plays an unwilling succubus. It's kind of a

cult movie among feminists and so bad. It's good movie enthusiasts alike, and I think it's right up the stuff to blow your mind. Cohorts Aali let me know what you think, lindsay, Well, I gotta say I watched this one a few years ago because it looked like it was going to be extremely bad and a good, you know, funny Friday night movie. But I actually ended up thinking

that it was extremely good. Interesting. I remember seeing the box art and I think I was afraid to watch it because I thought it might be I don't know, I was afraid it might be something kind of sleazy or something. You know. Um, I think I never really looked into it. My memory is that it's it's very clever. Um, so it's good to hear. I don't know. I mean, maybe I would feel differently if I watched it again,

but I think it's good. Cool. Well, we'll we'll put these on the list because, yeah, I feel like a lot of the movies we gravitate to our from before, you know, the turn of the millennium. But there are plenty of weird films that have come out these last twenty years. Uh, you know, so some I think that we even have on the list already, So we should make sure that we cover, like all the decades of cinematic history. I'm not sure where we are and that that that yet. I need to. I need to have

like a punch card for decades. Um Oh. I should also point out I think we had had a listener right in about the Battle for Indoor episode pointing out a couple of mispronunciations, one of which, um, I believe I said, uh, Cyan Phillips, It is Sean Phillips. Uh So, my apologies to the people of Scotland for doing messing up on that one. The other one is Warwick Davis, not Warwick Davis, um for you know, the beloved actor

who plays Wicked. Though on that one, this is not much of an excuse, but I have to say, even when I hear people say Warwick Davis without stressing that that that W in the middle of it. I some for some reason, I hear the W in the middle of the name. I don't know if it's just by virtue of having read it, I still hear the W. I have no, like I said, not a good excuse, but uh but that's what's going through my mind. Just wait till they get to how we've all the different

ways we've said Edinburgh. I think they may have mentioned that as well. Um So, again, our apologies to the Scottish people, um will come back and do another Highlander movie? Um in penance for that? Yeah, maybe one said in glass Go, how do you like that it doesn't? Does people really angry? I wonder what the best truly Scottish weird film is, like, not like Outsider Scotland, but like true Scottish weird cinema, Like what is the what is the pick? I wonder? I don't know. Well, we'll just

have to have people clue us in. I thought I had one for a second, but then I realized it was not Scottish. It's Australian and I was thinking of a different Russell mukahe movie. Oh yeah, yeah, not even close. Yeah. Oh and I don't want to imply that Warwick Davis is from Scotland. He's from what Surrey, England? So anyway, um, I guess that's it. That's all the listener, man, We have time for today? Huh, that's this week, but hey, keep in touch, that's right. Yeah, we already have some

good stuff lined up for next week as well. And so yeah, the idea is, since we're gonna be doing these weekly now what every Monday, they we're gonna be able to have more of a correspondence with listeners. That's the goal anyway. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, if you want to check out other episodes of Weird House Cinema, you'll find it all in the Stuff to Blow your Mind feed, which you can access wherever you

get your podcasts. Uh. You know the deal, Stuff to Blow your Mind. You just sign up for it. You you rate, you subscribe, you give a review if you can if the platform allows it, and you can check out core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind on two season. Thursday's Weird House Cinema is on Friday. Uh, then we have some other stuff to sprinkled throughout the week. You're just gonna have to discover it and figure it out for yourselves. If you want to access as quickly,

go to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That will shoot you over to the I Heart listing for our page, and there's a store button on there. You can check that out. We have a bunch of merchant there. You get a T shirt with our logo on it or a monster on it, and as of this recording, we already have one fan created shirt in there that is the the Pandora's box opening on unleashing all of these fabulous things. That's a really cool design. You should

check that out. And I believe we have another UH fan created design coming soon that will feature a certain woodland being that we recently discussed on the show. Oh nice, I don't think I knew about that. Yeah, well, it's it's coming. I've seen a preliminary sketch. It's it's looking great. Obviously you have the secret leshy knowledge. Okay, UH 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 I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.