Listener Mail: Robot Thanksgiving

you guys noticed. He seems a little hung up at the turkey carving stage, Like he goes to carve and then he stops and resets a bunch of times. I think it maybe he's still struggling with the recent installation of Cartesian doubt that makes me pause when cutting up a bird. Yeah, is the turkey there? Whether it's kind turkey, goose, sparrow. I can just keep naming birds, guys, Yeah, penguin. Have you oll ever eaten penguin meat? Me? Neither? Future episode? Well,

let's let's call Carney in here. Hell, we can't wait for him to cut into that bird all all day long, So get in here. Carney and bring us some listener to mail, because we know it's been accumulating. That's your your primary function is to provide the listener mail for us. So let's see what we got. So, as we have discovered, Carney has collected an amazing, gigantic treasure trove of wonderful email from our listeners. And we have so much great

listener mail we absolutely cannot read it all today. We can't even come close. So we're gonna read a selection of some of the great messages we've gotten from our listeners. It's not going to be everything. If your email doesn't get read, please don't take it personally. We love all the correspondence we get and we will try to work it into a future episode. We will probably have another one coming up around uh around the end of the year on Christmas, New Year's That that that kind of season.

Hey Joe, where where did these come from? Like? Where where do these letters come from? Where do we where do we get them at? Ah? Well, I'm glad you should ask Christian because they come straight to the account. Blow the mind at how stuff works dot com. When you email that account funny story, it goes straight into a wire that runs into Carney's head and that's how

he collects the messages. Unfortunately for us, the wire is often at like human neck height, so when we're walking around the office we can often kind of get our throats lined once or twice. And you know there's another wire two that runs in all of our feeds from Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler, where we are also blow the mind. Yeah, uh so this one actually comes to us from the

mail account, the clothesline wire. This is from Hannah, and she says, I'm an undergrad psychology major, a low key religious person, and a big fan of science except as atronomy. That stuff makes me anxious. I recently took a cultural anthropology course titled Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion. That sounds right up our alley, and one of the documentaries we watched in the class was about temporal lobe epilepsy and the role the disorder played in giving birth to the nascent

field of nero theology. Now I have to wonder if this male is coming in reference to the episodes Robert and I did on Techno Religion. I believe that's what it's referring to. That sun temporal lobe epilepsy is exactly what it sounds like, a type of epilepsy in which

seizures occur in the temporal lobes of the brain. What makes this condition even more interesting than other forms of epilepsy, which are also all very unfortunate for the sufferers, is the tendency for patients to report religious type hallucinations during their seizures. This experience has been reported by both religious

and fervently atheistic patients. She's got another paragraph here. Many historical figures who were prominent in religion, such as Joan of arc and Ellen White, who's the founder of Seventh Day Adventism, have been suggested to have been affected by t l E. Other than the religious visions they reported, these figures were also documented to have fits and dissociative states consistent with t l E. Ellen White's visions actually began occurring after a significant injury to the side of

the head precisely over her temporal lobe. Persengers God helmet, which I believe you guys talked about in that episode. We didn't talk about it in that episode, but it's definitely come up a few different times in the past. Yeah, on the stuff, I feel like we've mentioned it before yeah, okay, persengers. God Helmet is a well known example of experimental exploration of neuro theology, though his work has been criticized and

has yet to be replicated. Neuroimaging in Carmelite nuns and Buddhists and meditative states has also shown increases and activity in the temporal lobe during experiences of religious observance. Those who are interested in neuro theology are faced with the question is this evidence that religion really is all in our heads? Or does this show that our brains have an antenna for signals from deities? And then she says that she finds it fascinating from so many angles and

thanks us. Well, that's an interesting question because you kind of get you get back to that idea, right, If there is a divine force from outside the universe reaching into our reality, then the hand of God, the hand of the Gods, whatever it has to make some sort of stirring of the visual universe, of the of the

observable universe that we can observe. So I don't know, you could I could see someone try and make an argue to an argument to say, yes, this neural activity is a sign of such a force reaching in or the other side is just a compelling just a compelling Yeah. In general, I wonder what this means for people who who would take some religious experiences to be off dick. Like, let's say you accept these results and say, okay, there are there are definitely things you can do to the brain.

Ways you can stimulate the human brain that cause experiences that seem, at least from descriptions to be very similar to the religious experiences people have of God's or visitations from angels or uh, you know the apocalypse is revelations from heaven. Uh. And you you say, okay, you can cause that with stimulation to the brain. Can you say, well, sometimes it's caused by you know, physical action in the brain.

Yet other times the similar experiences are truly caused by intervention from divine forces or you know, God's Yeah, I mean when you start bringing in the supernatural, I mean it becomes increasingly difficult, right. I mean, if you're gonna, if you're going to acknowledge the existence of the supernatural force, then what are the rules for that supernatural force? I'll play molder on this one. What if it's both so? Well, yeah,

that's what I'm as writing. I mean with some people say, yeah, okay, you can stimulate the brain and cause experiences this way, but some very similar experiences are for real magic. Yeah. It reminds me of Philip K. Dick's later work, especially that book Vallas. Have you guys read that before being contacted by an outside force? And uh yeah, and there's there's quasi scientific explanation for it, but it's also kind

of like is this in his head or not? Yeah, I mean it all comes down to interpretation and and you know, you often hear the example brought up, but when it comes to auditory hallucinations and that you hear

voices and how you're not supposed to respond to the voices. So, you know, any kind of supernatural, supernatural occurrence, paranormal experience, even though the the cause is very rooted in the natural world and a natural phenomenon, if you answer the voice, if you heed the call right, then that's all it necessarily takes. Yeah. Well, I think Hannah's proposed a potential new top back for us to maybe go down the

rabbit hole with. Yeah, we should do have an episode or more than one episode on the god Helmet and experience theology in generals. Yeah, I have really been wanting to revisit Techno Religion because there was so much I wanted to say in that episode that we couldn't even fit into the two parts we did. Yeah, it can be an ongoing series if the folks are interested. Yeah, please let us know if you want to hear more

on the electro mechanical Messiahs of the World. Now, Joe, the robot is trying to hand you another piece of mail in trails, so I think you managed to cut into that bird because Base kind of menacing with that electric carving knife in the same hand. But okay, here we go. Hi. I heard your recent podcast about echo borgs, and I was surprised that in your discussion of serenoids that you didn't really go over the reality TV hidden

camera shows. So a lot of those are all about someone talking in your ear telling you to do stuff. Some of them, like what would you do, are just instructing actors for scenes to try to get reactions out of the surrounding people to test social ethics. Others are like repeat after me, or maybe a famous person or something has an earpiece and is told to do crazy stuff to unsuspecting people. I think for most of the celebrities, people just think that they're eccentric famous people or something.

I've never seen a reality TV show like this, though there's a faint bell, but yeah, I've never seen it. There is a certain way in which reality TV does almost almost tickle the boundaries of of profound weird insights on what real behavior is. Yeah, I mean, I guess, like I'm not familiar with these two shows that she mentions, um, and I wonder actually if they're not available in America because I think her address looks like it might be overseas.

But anyways, Uh, first of all, I like, I think, as just media literacy, it's important to be aware that, you know, reality t V as always narratively constructed, just as much as fictional television is. But but also this reminds me of are you guys familiar with a comedian Kurt brownh Hohler. He's pretty funny guy, and he does a podcast for nerds called the Khole. Uh and uh. He he has this a new bit that I recommend

our listeners and especially Elizabeth go listen to. That's about how he used to be one of these people on a reality type show in which he would sit in a diner and they would set up potential dates, like blind dates, and they would come in and interact with him, and he would have a ventriloquist dummy in his lap and would talk to them only through the dummy. And apparently this one woman he interacted with was deathly afraid of dummies and just lost her mind and ran out

of the restaurant crying. And then, as reality show producers are wont to do, they said, chase her. Uh so he chased after her with this ventriloquist dummy. He is this much funnier version of the story, So I recommend that you go listen to it. But it sounds a lot like what She's what Elizabeth here is positing legal

consequences for chasing somebody with a creepy doll. No, because if you this is my take on fear of any kind of puppets or marionettes, is if you were afraid of a storytelling medium as ancient as puppets, then you deserve to be chasing the streets. Well, the funny bit is that at the end, like maybe five years later, he goes to a party and this woman's at the party, and she just like freaks out all over again, and she says that's him, and everybody knows who she's talking about.

Oh that's great. Oh wait, hold on, it looks like Carney has a message for you, Robert, and it's covered in sand. I know what this say is? This comes to us from Kelly. Kelly writes and says, hey, guys, just wrapped up your two part series on Dune, referring, of course, the science of Dune. How that we did a two party on great job, Awesome picks for music too. I'll be honest. Was never a big reader growing up,

and have never read the Doune novels. My introduction to Dune was originally through the movie that I recently rewatched. After the movie, it was a computer game, Dune To, developed by Westwood Studios and released in what I had never heard of. This like a command and conqueror style game. It is, yeah, because it was only loosely based on the novels. The game is fantastic for its era, and I've even found a browser version to play in recent months.

It was a real time strategy game where players would select from one of the three how houses a tradees Harconan or Ordos. Each house had a specialty units and weapons. The goal was to defeat the other two houses and control all of Dune and her Spice by growing your base and defeating the enemies. Some say this was the spawn of real time strategy games, and I'll admit I enjoyed many that followed, including Command and Conquer, the Command

and Conqueror series also developed by Westwood. Yeah, when when we were putting together a lot of this material, I ended up looking up some of the old Dune games, and these were fagles because they had elaborate cut scenes, which was apparently a Westwood Studios thing. Elaborate Conquer was the same way, with some hilarious bad acting too, with like early nineties graphics. Yeah, I mean it looked pretty good.

I think it was the full motion video era, so the game would be animated, but then when the cut scenes came in, it was essentially like video and the examples I looked at looked pretty good. Like the makeup was nice. They kind of they went after the look and feel of the Lynch Dune movie, but with some auditions here and there. Um. It also this reminds me

a bit of the board game legacy for Dune. There there was a game that came out in nineteen seventy nine from let's see who was It was Avalon Hill. They put out a Dune game that had the circular map of the planet, and you had all these factions and characters and you're trying to harness the spice market on on a on a Racus and also manipulate other people form alliances. Really complex, needless to say. Since it

was a franchise game, it's long out of print. You can get a copy, it's hundreds of bucks, but the the but print and play services make it possible now to both print and play the original as well as various stripped down fan versions. Uh there's one in particular that came out in the last year called Dune Dice or hilariously the Dice Must Flow, which which looks wonderful. I haven't had a chance to play it yet, but it's dice bace. Do you have the same map, everyone

has to choose a different faction and form alliances. So it's a rich world for gaming, that's for sure. I don't know if you guys talked about this in the Dune episode or not, but you know how Hollywood just loves franchise universes right now, and they really, you know, they they're they're really looking for like the next Harry Potter or the next Star Wars or whatever. Dune is so great, but I also feel like it's the books that are really like the heart of what makes it great.

And and I like both of the movie adaptations, by the way, But I don't know that you could turn it into a franchise like that, But I would kind of love a world where you could just go to the store and buy a Dune board game or or play a Dune video game. Oh. I think that HBO should, in the spirit of Game of Thrones make a Dune TV series. That's fantastic. That that's the problem with the movies, you know, there's just not enough there's not enough room

for it to breathe. Yeah, good point, Joe. All Right, HBO producers that are listening to make it happen. So thanks Kelly for writing in. And we got another one here coming out of Arnie slash Carni that is also for Robert. Also Covered in sand, Covered in Sand and some weird all right, Well, this one comes to us from Peter Peter, and that's p E T E R. So it's not we don't have to worry about this big twisted Peter de Freeze, he says. So I loved your two part Dune podcasts. Super fun to listen to.

Here's my question about read in the book. How do you guys get past the writing style of the book, by which I mean the use of so many common and non futuristic ideas, words, terms, and names like Who's going to be named Jessica in a thousand years? Flapping flying machines sand Trout. I'm just really distracted by sci fi that I that that is supposedly futuristic, high tech, etcetera, but was written long enough ago that it seems silly now.

Even WILLIAMS. Gibson's early stuff seems extremely dated to me, And though I loved reading it at the time, it's impossible for me now. But I really want to read and enjoy doing and I've tried a couple of times. Just curious about how you guys handled that kind of issue, if it's an issue for you at all. Thanks, Uh, you know, I I do have to report that it took me quite a few tries to get going in Dune. But once I got past page I don't know, twenty

or thirty, I couldn't stop. But I tried, I think literally like three or four times to start the book and didn't keep past the first twenty pages. That's the language, though, you mean more so than the scientific concepts, right. I think it's something about how the very beginning of Dune. Uh, there is so much unfamiliar stuff it throws at you right out of the gate there. It's hard to get a foothold at the very beginning, and you're just thrown

right into this state. Doesn't hold your hand. Yeah, you're thrown right into this truly alien world, and alien in a way that most science fiction is not alien, because most science fiction is you have very standard, conventional kind of culture and reference points, and there's just some weird technology or some aliens in it. In this you know, everything that people think is unfamiliar to us. Yeah, I would have to say that in my enjoyment of Dune.

First of all, when it comes to things like, oh, the character's name is Jessica, I just I read enough fantasy and sci fi that I just kind of turned that off. Occasionally I'll remind myself. Oh, well, why would they have this word in their language when that word derives from the Greek they have. Do they have Greeks in this fantasy world? Probably not, but you just kind of have to turn that off in and I'd like

to think, well, this is probably a translation. This is a translation of this other world story into my world, and therefore it must conform to the language of my world. Right, that's a good point. I mean, if it's thousands of years in the future, they wouldn't be speaking English. I mean that this is yeah, this is a translation for us. It's kind of like how you read in the Bible that there was a character named Peter. I mean they didn't say the word Peter ironic because this person's name

is Peter. Right. Oh yeah, but that's like a you know, that's an anglicized adaptation of a name that you know you would have pronounced differently. So maybe maybe Jessica's real name is like Yashika. Yeah, it's just like, well, the

twentieth century reader would read this as Jessica. It makes me think of some of the stuff that Robert features on Stuff to blow your mind, say, all with the retro future facts and that, like, I think all culture is cyclical, right, and potentially authors like uh like Herbert are thinking along the lines of, well, you know, the name Jessica will come back around again a thousand years from now, or or the what was one of the ones you mentioned, the flapping flying machines, like that may

sound ridiculous now, but maybe at the time it would

be some kind of retro version on their future technology. Yeah, and I think, you know, I like that he mentioned Gibson because Gibson is definitely an author where I can't remember what the technology was, but when I first read Neuromancer, like somebody gets a fact or something on there, you know, there's some sort of a bit of technology where you instantly think, oh, wait, this is this is the high tech near future, and yet this is something that's already

uh anequated. He run into that kind of problem far more easier with nearer, nearer future sci fi. But Dune is set so far in the future and following this uh you know, massive Butlerian jaha, during which we've turned earned against so much of our technology, it's like almost anything is fair game. The technologies that we've been forced to revisit. The new technologies than the old, the old ideas that have become new through the development of meta

materials or what have you. Yeah, I think that's one of the fascinating things about doing actually is the the how some things are so alien and some things are so familiar, and like picking out the weird little elements that have survived the ten thousand years in between. I love that their characters named Jessica and Paul. I think that's that's a very curious and strange and I would

argue almost definitely deliberate choice on Herbert's part. It strikes me as unlikely that he just kind of like was lazy and couldn't think of a better name. But I will add that my wife, Rachel was this was one of the funniest parts of doing for her was that they're the main characters named Paul, like Paul on The Wonder Years. Come on. Looks like the next piece of mail that Carney has brought out is uh wrapped in a membrane. Okay, so this we've shaken the amniotic fluid

off of this letter and uh. This one comes to us from Christa and she's writing to us about the birth Call episode that we did, she says, I under or I listened to Born under the Call with great interest. I have only come across one other mention of the folklore associated with this, and I thought you might find this interesting. Forgive me if you mentioned this. I was at work while listening and may have missed this. Uh. No, we did not mention this, and yes, I did find

this interesting. So this is a little bit of a factoid surrounding birth calls, and they're sort of legendary myth. Okay, she says. While studying the records of the Great Inquisition, an Italian historian Carlo Ginsburg read of a group of men from the Fruuli region of Italy who were persecuted as which is from the fifteen seventies through the sixteen forties. I think you would play them within the cunning folk tradition.

We talked about cunning folk actually in our last last um episode on the Summer Reading episode, because Warren Ellis writes about cunning folk in his new nonfiction book. They called themselves the Bennan Dante, good Walkers, or the chemist Seola Born with the Call. These men were chosen only from among those who were born with the Call, which

reportedly they kept with them. They would go into a trance on certain days of the year they believed they left their bodies, went to the field in spirit, and armed with fennel stocks, battled evil witches to protect the harvest. If they lost, the harvest would fail. They also may have practiced healing. Ginsburg's research was published in a book called The Night Battles. Thanks for all the weird and wonderful podcasts. Keep up the great work. Oh man, I've

got to read about that. Ya. I actually think we need to do an episode on cunning folk um because it just seems to be popping up in a lot of different locations lately, and and there's there's a lot of like mixture of uh villagers trying to understand the world through this tradition. Give me the one sentence pitch on cunning folk. They're great Britain's ancient wizards. So this is this is kind of in keeping with Jonathan Strange and uh, I think that right, Yeah, I think it's

along those lines. If you didn't hear them the episode where we talked about our summer reading recommendations. Warren Ellis has a digital book out called Cunning Plans, and I believe it's maybe on Kindle or something like that. And he it's called Cunning Plans as such because he talks about the cunning folk tradition. Uh, and it's relevance to

today and technology and philosophy and culture. And he's also working on a comic right now that's called Injection, and there's a character in that that is a cunning man double soldat it. I recommend checking both of them out. Alright, Well, let's call Carney over here again. It looks like he's progressed somewhat with the turkey uh and is on too working on the cranberries. Well, depends on if you call progress. The legs are on the floor and there's a bunch

of turkey juice on the wall. Well, it's a difficult algorithm to calibrate. Okay, Well there, yeah, we at least have another email from from Carney here. So this is an email from our listener Jack in reference to the episode Robert and I did about the science of slot machines and how they are perfectly designed to steal your money and maybe your soul. But this is what Jack says. Hey,

first time email or a long time listener. The first and only time I had experience with slot machines was one day when my dad had taken me out to the movies and we had about an hour to kill beforehand, so he stuck me into a gaming lounge of the local bar. He said he was going to teach me a lesson about gambling and how you never win. That is a good lesson for kids to learn. That's my comment, not Jack's. But Jack says he started off by putting

twenty dollars into the machine. After about ten minutes, this had been doubled by winning to forty, so we kept on playing. After about thirty minutes, we were on over one hundred dollars, so he decided to quit on a five. He went on to tell me that this doesn't normally happen and not to gamble. That's hilarious. Cheers if you read this. I've been listening for about three years. Love all the podcasts that How Stuff Works puts out. Well,

thank you so much, Jack. But that's funny because, of course, within the great numbers of people who do gamble all around the world, part of the statistical profile of that number is that some tiny few will come out on top. But it's such a tiny few you can't expect to be that person. What if the slot machine has life lesson detection software so that if it feels a life something coming on between a father and son, it pays out maximum. You know what we could I would imagine

that slot machine builders could do that. Nowadays you just slept on like Syria or some Google voice pick up thing. It here's the fathers say, here comes a life life

lesson and it's like, dude, you are the algorithm. You are kidding, But I am entirely serious that I think it's possible that someone could design a slot machine to h to essentially have a camera in it recognizes if the person sitting in front of the slot machine is probably a child, and if it's probably a child, then it pays out at a higher rate than it normally would in order to cement positive feelings and reward associations

within the mind of that child. Even if the slot machine loses on that one gaming session, it'll get it back for the rest of that child's life. It's like dealing drugs on a playground exactly right. You get them

hooked when they're young. The game is the game. Yeah. Oh. One thing I forgot to include but we should maybe read at some point is what we did get a comment on on our slot machines episode from somebody who works in designing slot machines, and he he said that he liked our episode, but that we were unnecessarily harsh about about slot machines, so that we were too hard on them. I don't know, were we too hard on them? Uh?

You know, I could see where one might have that opinion coming from the sort of the you know, from the from the technological side of the slot machine, from even the the artisan side of the slot machine, because this is this is the individual's work, you know. But we were we respect the work you do, for the skill you have. Yeah, I mean the as just pure machines, they they're phenomenal. I mean the technology involved, the way that the technology hasn't really evolved just in such a

short amount of time. It's it's incredible. But their overall purpose is to take money from people. Play to extinction. Yeah. Hey, speaking of extinction, it looks like Carney has another message for you, raw Bird, and this one smells like a corpse alright. This one comes to us from Amy Amy writes in and says hello. One of the way one way of honoring remains, and she's referring to our human remains episode, is having them made into jewelry. I think it's kind of a neat way to keep loved ones

quite literally with them. One company can make them into crystals or store them in small, sealed locket like containers. My friend had a Jewlior jeweler make a small metal ball necklace containing some of her mother's ashes in it. Uh oh. And apparently it's illegal to have your pets ashes mixed with your human ashes, though I have no idea how they enforce it. I also grew up around a lot of church cemeteries with sunken graves and crooked tombstones.

There's a seminary in my childhood neighborhood where there were stones from the seventeen hundreds and the Jesuits that settled the area, many of which were whether to illegibility. Also, there are a few European trees they brought with them, So that's that's enter the whole the creative take the ashes and processing them into some sort of precious item. Uh. I like the jewelry idea. I've also run across. There

was a company at least a few years back. They were pushing the idea of having your ashes used to press a record vinyl record, except, of course, it would be like some version of vinyl which ashes inside it and the record could contain bound of view screaming yeah, more more likely a pleasant message. Or I would think maybe your favorite album, like because what would be better in death than to become your favorite album. Maybe it's a mix of all those things. It's like the voyager

recording your own memorial song for your own death. Have you if you all ever heard chriswells someone walked Over My Grave, the amazing Chris Well. Yeah, the amazing Chris Well from the beginning of Plan nine from Outer Space. If you're not familiar with him, he was a guy wh would go on TV and predict stuff about the future that was always way super super wrong. But he wore a tuxedo so people believed him. But he also

ended up in ed Woods movies. So at the he's at the beginning of Plan nine from Outer Space going like great things, but friends, you are interested in the future. But anyway, he recorded a song called someone Walked Over My Grave it's on YouTube. You should look it up. It's just him talking over some piano music about how someone walked over his grave and disturbed his sleep. Well, what is that? What you'd pick? What would you pick?

If you had to pick one album, I'd make my own version of that, just kind of like ominously threatening people with hauntings if they disturbed my slumber. What if you had to pick your favorite album you had to become that album in death. What would you pick? Uh, we've already established it would have to be dope thrown. Okay, Oh wow, that's a good one. I think it would be like Black Flags Damaged. I would probably go with Boards of Canada's Music has a Right to Children. I

think that's a pleasant album to become. Hey, so I've got another message here coming out of Carney that is also in reference to our Slot Machine episode, and this

is I think a very useful math clarification. So so this comes from our listener Rhiannon and Rhannon says, Hi, guys, longtime listener, love the podcast, but as someone with a masters in mathematics specializing in probability, I had to cringe in the most recent episode on Slot Machines in the episode, you calculate the probability of winning on an eight picture slot machine as one eighth times one, eight times one

eight equals one out of five d twelve. The math is sound here, but only if there was only one winning picture, assuming that you can match any set of the eight pictures and win, so all three of any one alien picture. That's referring to a specific example. I can explain in a minute. There are actually eight ways you can do this, So you need to multiply the probability by the eight ways you can win, which would be eight times one in five hundred twelve or one

out of sixty four. Uh. And so what she's referring to is an example we had in this episode where there's an alien slot machine. It's got three reels one with seven crew members of the Nostromo and the alien on it. And if you want to line them up to win, what's your probability of winning? We said, the probability of getting something like three three Ripley's is one

eighth times one, eight times one eight. But Rhiannon is exactly right that if you're not looking for three Ripley's or three Dallas is or three aliens, but any combination of three. The first reel doesn't matter. You're just trying to match the second two reels. So the probability is actually one in sixty four of any match, as opposed to one in five and twelve of a specified match. Um and she goes on to explain that, as she says, another way to think of it is the first picture

is irrelevant. So the probability of the first picture being a success is eight out of eight, but the second picture is must match the first of the probability is one out of eight, and the same with the third picture, And then she lays out the map again. Wait, so how many people should have survived being astromo incident? Now? Can? It's it's making me you just question everything I saw an alien? Now? Well, you know, there are a couple

of characters who we never explicitly see die. You never know if they survived, though the ship does kind of explode in a nuclear vaporization events. There are two survivors, oh, including the cat Jones. Yeah yeah, Jones is a one, but also so Rhann and finishes by saying, thanks for all that you do and keeping my runs interesting. I'm a professional marathon runner hoping to make my country's Canada Olympic standards have lots of miles to learn. Thank you

so much for that clarification, Rhian. We always really appreciate when are incredibly smart listeners can can correct and clarify if there's something we say that sounds fishy. So we we really appreciate that. And also, I thought it's interesting that you mentioned running, because I do feel like we hear from a lot of people who listen while running. This is a common thing. I listen to podcasts like that sometimes. Yeah. Well I I don't run, so I can't speak of that, but I'm glad that we're air

with people as they run. Rhiannon sounds pretty awesome, getting a masters degree in mathematics and a professional marathon runner, and I feel humbled. Yeah, and possibly which that's a powerful person. Yeah. Okay, so it looks like we've got another message here, and oh, this one has a warning on it that we should not handle it without gloves. Okay, about that, I I think I can guess. Let me

get my gardener's gloves on here. Okay, it says hi, guys, I love the podcast and have been a listener for years. I just finished the wolf Spain episode and wanted to help with Christian's confusion about the Nazi bullet experiment. This is one of those moments usually happens about once or twice an episode where I posit something really stupid scientifically, and then listener writes in and it comes up with a good answer to it. So he says, it all

comes down to the bullet expansion. So what I was talking about was whether or not you could put wolf Spain inside a bullet, because Nazis were doing tests with with Nite to see if they could weaponize it. So he says, it all comes down to bullet expansion. A lot of bullets are engineered with hollow points to help them expand when they hit animals, meet legs, et cetera. This hollow portion can carry a small amount of an alternate substance and not substantially hurt the metals bullets metal

bullets expansion. A tricky part to this is that each bullet has to be designed to expand when fired from the right gun as well. A bullet designed for a pistol won't expand well when fired from a long barreled rifle. The velocity would be all wrong. This is my bet for why the test bullets failed to expand and overpenetrated. On a somewhat lighter note, if you rewatch Jaws now you'll better understand the scene where the police chief pours

mercury into his hollow point bullets. Expanded discussion points include the Geneva Conventions and ethical military bullet design. Thanks for the great podcasts bonus, and yeah, because if I remember correctly, it turned out that the Nazi experiments did not work. It did not They were shooting people of aconite, and there is no other than being shot there would with no poison effects from the aconite. But in it sounds

like he's questioning their their methodology. All right, here's another bit of a listener mail coming into us here from Joyce Joyce Rights, and it says, Hi, I'm listening to your Ghoule's episode and at the end of it, it's about human cannibalism. My uncles grew up during World War Two in China, and my parents grew up during the Vietnam War and food was extremely scarce. They remember seeing people eat dead babies to survive in order to get

around the emotional attachment to the dead child. The people ate each other's babies, So I guess it isn't ancient history or morally wrong given some culture circumstances. War stories they tell me growing up make me very glad and thankful for the semi peaceful times we live in now, keep up the good work. Loved the Sane Insane episode. Referring to the rose, and Han asked, Uh, this is

a great point that Joyce brings up. Certainly, we we got into human cannibalism as the taboo on nonviolent cannibalism, right, why Like we know, it's obvious why there would be a taboo on killing people should eat them. But if somebody is already dead, why do we have a taboo against eating their flesh if it's not going to hurt them, like the alive scenario. Yeah, survival cannibalism, which is an important part of any discussion of human cannibalism history because

that's where you see it pop up. This choice you have to make, well, what what do I do to survive? What am I willing to do to survive? And uh, yeah, I mean if the circumstance. My opinion on this is, yeah, if you're in circumstances where survival kind of cannibalism is the only way to survive. Somehome's you gotta do what

you gotta do. Yeah. So here, Joyce says, one of the things is that they got around I think some of the the emotional distress caused by the violation of this taboo by eating each other's dead children or babies instead of their own. So they I mean, I guess that could help put some kind of distance between you

and uh, the horror of it. I guess. I mean there's the again to her point, I mean, thank god that that you know, we don't live we're not living currently in time, so dire that we have to make that kind of choice and figure out how to compartmentalize it, uh and and make it work for our survival. Yeah. It reminds me of the expeditions that went through the Northwest Passage in the nineteenth century, because a lot of those ships went missing, especially the Franklin Expedition is really

famous for it. Uh. And they believe that not only did the ships think and go missing, in fact, they recently have found evidence of Franklin ships, but that there was cannibalism that went on and it was not survival cannibalism. The bones that they have found of some of the sailors had marked indentations on their bones of cutting. All right, So we got another one coming out of the machine here and it's blowing. It's really I don't know, it's kind of far away. I don't know if I can

reach it, but I think it's for you, Joe. Yeah. This is from our listener Eric, who is responding to the episode Robert and I did in our Halloween season about Will of the Wisp, the glowing light in the bog and uh and what is it. One of the things we talked about in the episode is the fact that Will of the Whisp sidings seem to have sharply dropped off in the past hundred years or so. People

used to report these all the time. Writers from the eighteen hundreds and before talk about it as if it's extremely common, something people would just be familiar with in their day to day lives, and they'd be very likely to have seen it. I've never seen a Will of

the Whisp, and it seems like most people haven't. So and I wasn't on the episode, but I told you guys off air that the only reason I knew what it was was because there was a spider man villain called Willow the Whisp that appeared in the eighties comic I read, well, apparently a lot of people are familiar with it from D and D. So oh yeah, it's another friends point we talked about in the episode. But anyway, we as scar listeners, Hey, have you ever seen the

Will of the Wisp phenomena? And if you have, ride us and tell us and so. A couple of people did. One of them was Eric, who wrote us this very interesting story. Eric says, hey, gentlemen, you ask for anyone who's seen the elusive Will of the Wisp. I have had an experience with such an entity. I live in upstate New York, Nango County, Chenango, Chenango County. I love to hike on the Mini Finger Lake trails, or any

trail that spreads across the woods. The area of land behind where I grew up had several pond marshy areas connected by a series of streams, generally just a wet place, no bog or swamp. Though at the age of fourteen, eight years back or so, I was several miles from home when darkness fell. I know all the woods there pretty well for my copious times wandering through them. It's also hard to get lost. If you walk in any direction for a little while, you will find a road,

not a vast wilderness, for sure. I was casually walking on a trail back with the moon is the only light, when off to my right, about three hundred feet into the woods, I see a bobbing, whitish blue light. I walked, keeping an eye on it, thinking if there were any houses out that way. There were not. Not only that, but it seemed to be moving parallel to me. This is an awesome, creepy pasta. Yeah, I thought to myself. I'm not starving or near a dehydration. I'm not delirious

or mad. But I had a profound skeptical curiosity in the supernatural. I thought it might be a ghost. My neighbor liked to tell ghost stories about people getting lost in the woods by following a large white buck during deer season, or a girl in distress that they could never seem to find. I think he just liked to scare me. I liked it at the buck. That sounds like a more recent take on the same troupe anyways, I followed it off the trail, taking note of where

I was. I followed it, never seeming to be able to get closer than a hundred feet or so from it. But it looked like a dim blue flame, bobbing and swaying in the dark, dancing around trees, egging me on to follow it. Prevaricating my worst thoughts, I kept following it meandered through the woods. I had to walk over many little streams and around wet areas where it became hard to pass through. This went on for about an

hour before I lost sight of it. I walked to where it last was, and it was the edge of one of the old farmer's fields. There are a lot of old fields that are not near any roads or anything, just isolated in the woods. I saw the bobbing light on the other side of the field. I knew exactly where I was and had had enough and decided to walk home. The road was only a little less than

a mile from where I was. I followed the edge of the field to a path at one of the corners in The light followed me, but at some point during this time it split off into three smaller bobbing lights. They never went too far from each other. One would get ahead and the others would quickly catch up. But they went parallel to me till I got to the path and I couldn't see them in the woods anymore. But I glanced back and saw them at the end of the path after I walked a little ways in.

At this point, I began to walk fast, getting more and more unnerved. They never seemed to catch up. Even after I started to run and ran out of breath and stopped to grab my breath, they didn't seem to get any closer, even though I wasn't moving. A few minutes later, I got to the road, I turned to see if they were still following me. I could still see them, but way farther off than they had been the entire time. I watched them fade back into the

woods behind the trees and brush. I walked back home, haunted by what I saw. I never told many people about that, because it obviously sounds crazy. I researched it and came across the term Will of the Whisp in later weeks, but had never seen anything saying there were any sightings in the area. I never saw them again though,

despite many night hikes since then. Well, I thought you guys would enjoy one of my more horrifying memories from my confusing, anks filled adolescent battling with the existential dread of wondering about life after death and other planes of existence. Anyway, you guys are the best. I enjoy listening to you another house Stepp Works podcast. You feed the nerd in me. Uh Ps, Robert, you have inspired me to grow sideburns

the way they elegantly compliment your face. I hope I can pull them off half as well as you do. Always will be listening here here Robert has excellent sideburn he does always jealous. Thank you so much for the story, Eric, This was great. I I don't know, I I'm envious of this. I mean, I know it sounds like it was scary at the time. I wish I could see a will of the wisp and why aren't there stories

like this all over? So? I gotta say, like just the way that he wrote this like it was I was joking about the creepypasta thing, but there was a haunting way that this was written. It reminded me of like a layered barren story or one of those old Algernon Blackwood stories story. Uh yeah, that's creepy. So Eric, I'd be interested to hear what you think it was,

having actually seen it. You if you listen to our episode, we talked about the different hypotheses about what could be causing the will of the whist, but the fact that there's really a lot of difficulty in deciding what it is because we can't like catch one and look at it in the lab and examine it. You're just trying to match explanations to written descriptions of phenomena. Alright, looks like Carney is handing me another listener mail, only he's handing this one to me with what appears to be

a cadaver arm with the strength attached to it. I think I know what this might be about. This must be in reference to our fist punch theory of evolution. Episode deals with the work of David Carrier and his research team into how the human fist might have evolved to punch other humans in the face. Um, which is a fascinating theory explored in that in that episode, And hey is it turns out this bit of email comes to us from David Carrier himself. Wow, that's flattering. I'm

flattered that he listened to the episode. But then what seems to be written here is also go ahead and read it's this comes to m from again from David Carrier, Professor, Department of Biology, University of Utah. Hi, Robert and Christian, Thanks very much for the thoughtful and entertaining podcast and video you did on our recent article. Your podcast provides the best discussion of our work that I know of.

Best wishes Dave, Wow, that really we love hearing from the scientists who actually create the work that we reference

in our episodes. Every now and then we do. I know, we we heard from the person behind the echo Borg study when we did the echo Borg episode, and this one too, and that is I'd say it's one of the most rewarding feelings is when I don't know, as a as a science communicator, I at least often have the feeling of I really hope I'm representing this well and everything, and just having the person who actually did the work get in touch with you and let you

know that, in one way or another you didn't completely screw it up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it feels like our least, if nothing else I was, I was accurate, and I was able to convey the the truth of the study.

So yeah, and this reminds me. Actually, we did receive a few messages, both as emails and through Facebook from listeners who have martial arts backgrounds, and they were adding in that they questioned the relevancy of the fist as the way that our hands would evolve for the best potential way to hit somebody in the face, because apparently the palm strike is known as a much better way

to do so without hurting your own hand. You know, I don't know anything about this, but we heard from several people about it, So I don't wanna inherently criticize people who say that they may entirely be right. But that also sounds a little bit like it could be bro science. Well it might be. We talked extensively about bro science in that episode you came up. I mentioned your your disdain for bro science. Well, I mean bro sciences, bro science. Well, you know, we may just have to

have Professor carry Will talk to us sometime. And yeah, maybe maybe his next thing could be about palm strikes. Who knows, He's He's produced several different studies. He's read like at least four or five for that episode. Yeah. No, Now I want to be clear about that. I'm not criticizing doctor carriers stuff, because if it's real science, I wouldn't call it bro science. You've got good, good methodology

and empirical verification. I don't consider that bro science. Bro science is Oh man, you're doing your protein stack all wrong. All right, it looks like we have one final bit of listener mail here, and this one again is is wrapped in a membrane of some sort. All right, let me see if I can chew it off. I think this is actually a website comment, and hopefully on our next listener mail episode we can get into a few more of the great comments that have been left on

our yeah web. It's harder for us to keep track of those sometimes because we don't get it. It doesn't

paying us when those go up. We have to go back and and if you're if you're unfamiliar with what we're talking about, on the landing page at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com for the page where each episode is embedded, there's a comment section at the bottom there, and I believe it posts to your personal Facebook, but we don't necessarily see it because it doesn't go directly to the stuff to blow your d This means a little tweaking, but we still try and go back and

read them. So by all means, UH, feel free to interact with us there. This was a particularly good one about the birth Call episode. It's from Jenna and she says, I'm a student midwife in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Australia. I feel extremely lucky that my first ever solo birth two weeks ago was an on call birth. I'd like to share my experience. As the baby was exiting the birth canal, we could feel that the omniotic amniotic sac

membrane was still intact. As you mentioned, normally the amniotic sack will burst. However, as the baby was born, I very briefly held it within the amniotic sack like a baby in a big water balloon. It was a thin, opaque membrane, very full of baby and amniotic fluid. I pierced the amniotic sack with my hands and remove the membrane from the baby. Both mother and baby are doing fine.

Thanks for your brilliant podcast. As always, so as we talked about in the episode, It's exceedingly rare to be born with a birth call, but it's even more rare to be born on call, which is your the amniotic sack is completely intact and hasn't ripped or broken at all. Uh this and and and you know, as we've talked about earlier, there are a lot of myths about such babies and the powers that they may hold. Well, let's hope that this baby is imbued with vast and powerful ability.

What I want to know, Jenna, is what did you do with the sack afterwards? Because that also holds power. You know, you can, as we talked about in the episode, you can bury it in the yard behind the house, or you can sell it to a sailor for good luck, can keep you from drowning. There's so many things that that these uh, these birth calls can do. But but to have an entire sack, that's that's useful. Wait wait, I can I assume you're meaning like according to legend?

Are you saying they're like also scientific things that there's just a lot of legends about birth calls. Yeah, lots of legends about different variations depending on the color, depending on how big they are, whatever of the various effects they can have. Yeah, I think the only issue we ran into is that we we wished we could have found more stories from Asia and Africa. Yeah, that was the thing. A lot of the legends were mostly European based.

Uh it Actually Jenna's in Australia, So I wonder what kind of you know, legends may have risen up around birth calls there. Oh yeah, yeah, but thanks for writing in it. Just that sounds like a thing that you would be in awe of. I know people talk about babies being born like that anyways, but like it coming out in the membrane like that would just be like whoa, yeah, hey, guys, Like I think Carney's bringing out our meal. Oh but there's even a little toe furky for me. But it's

the birth call. Yeah, it looks like there's some there's some sand in the center of the Turkey cadaver, and there are some corpse jewelry mixed in stuffing. That's kind of rough, Carney, But I mean, what what else can you do? I mean, it's it's way your programs. Well, I guess we better dig in guys. Okay, so if you want to send more information to us, what maybe you want to respond to some of these, or maybe

you want to respond to some of the other episodes. Well, you can write us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. For more, almost and thousands of other topics is how stuff works dot com.