Listener Mail: Satellite Anthem Icarus

want to write about, that's fine too. Send it on in contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. What you got going on right now, Rob.

can have the proper viewing experience. And I have to say, it's a very interesting tea. I was a little frightened at first when I smelled just the pure smokiness of the dried tea, but the taste is a lot more subtle, and yeah, I think I'm growing to like it.

and some of that complexity. But I find when I just smell smoked paprika by itself, it is an overpowering and unpleasant aroma. It's only good once it goes into the mix with other things.

It is the computer hard drive. There is, of course, the surface level comparison, wherein hard drives are erased and overwritten repeatedly as you use your computer, but the similarities go deeper than that. For instance, when you delete a file on your computer, the actual data is not a raise from the drive, only the reference to that data that tells your computer operating system where on the drive

the file is located in order to access it. On a mechanical hard drive or HDD, I am not sure how applicable this information may be to newer solid state drives or SSDs. The actual data comprising the file remains on the drive until the computer needs that space for another file and only then is actually overwritten. Even then, the overwriting is not perfect, and it is sometimes possible to use special software to recover old data that is

underneath newer data. At least partially for this reason, there is even security software available for computers which use sensitive data, which constantly overwrite the empty portions of the drive with junk data to ensure that any deleted files are truly obliterated and not recoverable. It is somewhat akin to scribbling on and then erasing a chalkboard over and over to ensure that everything that was once written on it can't

still be read. Finally, your discussion of what I'm going to call open minded skepticism involving being highly skeptical of any claims that such and such has done by aliens, while still being open to the possibility that one day evidence of alien intelligence may be discovered, reminded me of a saying often used on the PBS Spacetime YouTube channel when discussing new and strange observations in astronomy. The saying goes,

remember it's never aliens until it's aliens. Thank you for doing more than your fair share of encouraging curiosity and reminding us all of the importance of open minded skepticism.

So palimpsests came up in our discussion because we were talking about how, like, so an ancient Egyptian inscription, you know, there might be one set of hieroglyphics on it at one point, and then there would be you know, that would decay over time, and then there would be a process of maybe partially plastering over that and then putting new inscription, like new information in it, maybe new hieroglyphics or illustrations of things on top of the old one.

And this would happen on maybe the walls of a temple or like a monument or something like that, and the result was that you could get these sort of illusory emergent mixtures of the two different inscriptions, so you could have the part on top decaying, and then heart of the hieroglyphics represented there would sort of bleed into where the hieroglyphics below were revealed, creating these symbols that

aren't actually part of the language. They're just sort of like, you know, these random emergent bleed through kind of creations, and some of them look like weird stuff, like a

helicopter or something like that. Anyway, So I wonder if by way of this analogy with a computer hard drive being like a palimpsest, you could get similar things like in the future, will there be people looking back in time at like a preserved computer hard drive, or maybe the data image of a preserved computer hard drive and see things emerging, see illusory like sentences or something emerging because of splicing together of data from different points of overwriting.

I don't know if it actually works like that, or works in a way that would give rise to that sort of thing, But I don't know that's interesting.

know yet if you read it on the air. In the interim, I have now listened to your previous listener mail and the discussion about the difficulty of traveling between stars making visitation by aliens unlikely. I share Joe's view that I don't find any supposed difficulty particularly convincing when we're presumably talking about beings with more advanced technology than

we have. By the way, for people who don't remember that previous discussion or didn't hear it, my point was that I wouldn't rule out the possibility of alien visitation on Earth based on saying, Oh, it's just too difficult to travel between stars, because my view now is just that I don't think we know enough to say whether that's too difficult or whether it's possible or not. That's just an open question. But that doesn't mean I think aliens have been visiting the Earth. I just think that

that is not a particular reason I would rule it out. Instead, I would just say, where's the evidence. But Ian comes back to say, once again, PBS space time has become relevant. Specifically, the episode is Interstellar Travel Possible? That episode discusses the dangers and difficulties posed by traveling to another star and

investigates whether they are solvable. The oversimplified version is that traveling from one star to the next should be doable, if not exactly with our current technology, then with technology only a little more advanced than we currently possess Essentially, from a physics standpoint, we know the problem is solvable, and achieving it is what I like to call an

engineering problem. Granted, actually solving that problem would be a massive undertaking for our current civilization, and it certainly wouldn't be easy, but there's no reason to think it couldn't be done. As Matt. I guess that's the host of PBS Space Time. As Matt sums up in the episode, the universe may be trying to kill us, but it's

not trying quite hard enough. That's good. So, given that traveling from one star to another is conceivably achievable in the not too distant future technologically at least, resource allocation being an entirely different matter, just like how no one has gone back to the Moon since the seventies despite us clearly having the technology, A civilization, even a few hundred or thousand years more advanced than ours, should be

able to do it without too much trouble. Certainly not so much trouble that it serves as an explanation for why UAPs can't be aliens or as a satisfactory answer to the Fermi paradox. Personally, I find Akham's razor a far more convincing argument against aaian visitation than any specific practical objection as to why it's impossible. As always, thank you for your wonderful and enlightening podcast. Ian, Well, thank

you for both emails. Ian, and I would say regarding the second one, Yeah, I think you're right on the money. I would agree with you here. I don't see any particular reason to rule out the possibility of alien visitation. The stuff about the difficulty of traveling that doesn't seem like a prohibitive consideration to me, though it is something I guess we should consider, you know, arguments of that sort,

but that's not enough to rule it out for me. Instead, it's just the dearth of good evidence, like we've been

talking about in these episodes. It's just like you would expect at some point to have good evidence that it's actually aliens and not just one of the millions of things that you know, we've seen over and over again being mistaken for aliens, like balloon and camera artifacts and airplanes and birds and natural geological formations and animals of various types and all kinds of weird looking natural phenomena and pieces of human technology always being mistaken for aliens,

and then when you get more information, oh, oh, actually this is what it is.

such that the human imagination cannot contain it. And I thought that was a well written little phrase there, to sort of sum it up, like it is just so big that even when we think we are understanding the scale we're talking about here, we're only sort of summoning up a placeholder of how truly vast it is, and how small we are, and how insignificant we are in terms of both location and also duration. All right, shall we dive into a little stickiness?

or water block is placed. Since the metal surfaces aren't perfectly smooth, a thermal paste must be applied to fill all the tiny air pockets before the cooler is screwed down. This ensures adequate heat transfer, but better cooling means more performance, so people will take it to the extremes. I saw an enthusiast who had lapped the integrated heat spreader on

his CPU. He employed the quote Whitworth three plate method, which involves three metal plates labeled A, B and C. With the aid of an abrasive, they are used to polish one another in alternating pairs A and B, then B and C, than CNA, and so on. The plates smooth one another out and can then be used to

polish other objects to very high degrees of smoothness. After lapping both the ihs and the underside of his water block, he achieved such high polish that they fit together perfectly enough to effectively leave zero trapped gas to act as insulation. What he discovered after the test fitting was that the CPU adhered to the bottom of the cooling block. It was sticky enough to pull the CPU from the socket

when he lifted the block. I now realize this must have been due to the Van der Waals force, as the atoms of the two components were close enough to act as if they were in a single piece of metal. I saw the Action Lab exploring a similar phenomenon in this video about gauge blocks, and Kenny includes a link. I'd meant to send you a topic idea, but this turned into a pretty lengthy email, so I'll save it for next time. Thanks for everything you do, Kenny.

polished flat piece of metal. So like even without an adhesive, you just like touched them together and then they get stuck as if they are glued, And that would make sense that I want to be clear that I don't feel confident to judge what are the operative forces here, especially since like even experts in this area sometimes disagree about like what are the most operative forces in why things are sticking together? But Vanderval's force, from what I know,

does seem like a plausible explanation. So like normally things don't stick to one another. Dude to Vanderval's forces because not enough of their atoms are actually getting close enough together for Vanderval's forces to activate. But that's like how the gecko feet work.

each other, just can't get that close. And so it sounds like that could be what's happening with these highly polished pieces of metal, though I would wonder also if there is if there's a suction cup thing going on here, Like if the gas between two things is evacuated in some sense, but there is some kind of cavity between them, if it's kind of like pushing a suction cup onto a piece of glass or something. I don't know. I don't know, maybe if the polishing wouldn't really leave enough

pockets for there to be voids with negative pressure. I don't know.

House Cinema. And this comes to us from Chalk. Chock says, Hi, guys on Weird House Cinema on September first, and as an aside, this would be talking about the Devil's Men aka Land of the Minotaur. Chock continues, saying, you said the priest and comrade went to the church to get weapons, specifically a crucifix and some holy water. Apparently the filmmaker was also lazy about checking facts. Holy water is just water blessed by a priest. He didn't have to go

looking for it. He could have just made some because he was a priest, right, Yeah, he is a priest, so he could just get some out of the tap, I guess, and less sure, but Chock says, well, what doo anti climactic? Probably anyway, thanks for all your shows, Chock. You know, this is a case where I think it was just more important to be dramatic than to be factuals.

They wanted to send him to a roadside chapel, kind of kind of decaying scenic roadside chapel to get the holy water and get all the tools of holiness, which, by the way, I don't even recall them using the holy water in the movie. Did they use it? I think dub pleas he just says some Latin and they all blow up.

keep them coming in. If you have thoughts about current, past and future episodes of stuff to blow your mind, you have any thoughts about the various movies we've discussed on Weird House Cinema on Fridays, you know, also just responses to other listener males or our short form artifact in Monster Fact episodes, or the thoughts about where else the monster fact artifact concept can go, like is there something else or some other kind of fact to be born?

I was thinking like, oh, you know, crime, true crime is all the gauge. Should I start doing the murder fact? Probably not. I would vote against against the murder fact Okay, but your brain. We're brainstorming here, so all you know, all ideas are valid.