Listener Mail: Spoonman

this comes from Amy, she says. Hi, all, I just finished the second episode on Brain and Head Theft today and thought i'd drop you a note. When the episode started, I immediately thought of the strange afterlife of Albert Einstein's brain. The pathologist who performed the autopsy on Einstein took Einstein's brain without permission and kept it for decades, and then

she attaches a BBC article for us to look at. Yeah, we made a brief reference to this in the episode, but it didn't go deep on this one because I figured this story was better known than many of the other ones we talked about, like Hayden and Ish and uh and all those and so so I wanted to focus on the lesser known ones. Also, I remembered when I was actually looking into the story about Einstein's brain,

I encountered some like just discrepancies in the accounts. I don't remember all the details now, but I think they were like conflicting accounts of like whether or not there was permission or what form that permission took and so forth. Yeah, the article they sent is The Strange Afterlife of Einstein's Brain by William Kramer for BBC. So, yeah, if you want to look that up, that's where you'll find it.

Amy continues the second thought, I wanted to share concerns how is She's brain was eventually returned to his tribal descendants. I was an anthropology major focusing on physical anthropology in the early two thousands, and the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act or nag PRO was important to learn about in light of how human remains and other artifacts were collected.

The return of is She's brain was likely nag PRO related. Finally, my research for my master's thesis in forensic anthropology involved looking at head trauma in people buried in a London church crypt versus former British sailors buried at a naval retirement home. No surprise, sailors were more likely to have

head trauma than the average British population. Both groups thought they were being buried in their final resting place before being uncovered during church renovations and archaeological excavations at the sailor's home, and didn't expect to be used for research a hundred plus years on. Thanks for all the fun hours of listening enjoyment. Amy, Oh, that that's neat, but we may have to look that up. I love a

good study involving uh historical head trauma. I remember there's a really good one about gladiator um head trauma that we we looked at a while back. Is that for an Invention episode or for I think it's maybe come up a couple of times, but probably for invention. Yeah, at one point we were talking about helmets. It came up. Yeah anyway, yeah, thanks me. All right. We also heard from folks about Halo's and mirages. That was kind of a I guess like a three episode spread of content

that we did. When comes from Robin, they say, hi, Rob and Joe and Seth. Listening to your latest email round up, I thought I would just send you a real life example of sun dogs encountered in the wild, quite a common sight in the winter here in Edmonton, Alberta.

Notice these while waiting at the bus stop. You can see two sundogs to either side which are continuous with a faint rainbow slash halo around the sun, the topmost part of which is a little brighter, and then new to me that day, there was also a little segment of a reversely arched rainbow further up, almost directly above the sky. If you look closely, you can also see what looks like glitter saturating the sky, small ice crystal sparkling.

Cheers Robin. Yeah, this was really interesting. So Robin at shched a video file for us to look at. And so you see the sun dog, and the sun dog of course has the sun in the middle, and then it's sort of a ring around the sun with uh with sort of flaring second sun nodes at what looked like the nine d degree verticy is around around that ring.

And then if you pan the camera up, which Robin does from the from that initial ring, there is another inverted arch above so like I guess if you were to shift along like the z axis nine d degrees up from that roughly, it's like there's another circle and you can see it reflected, but but in the mirror image,

which was really cool. And this also reminds me of an experience I just had a few days ago when I was using the hose in the yard, uh, and I had that experience of making a rainbow around your own shadow with the spray of the hose. You ever you ever noticed this, Rob, Yeah, this figs about now that you mentioned it. This is another interesting optical phenomenon here that has to do with the fraction and reflection of sunlight through different types of like droplets or crystals

in the atmosphere. In this case, it's a mist of water droplets in the atmosphere. You can make a rainbow around your own shadow because because if you're standing out, you know, in the yard, in the bright sun, uh, the rainbow is always going to form around your anti solar point. So so like if you imagine a line going from the sun through your head then down to your shadows head, that's sort of like the the line that will form the middle of the ring of that

you're going to see a rainbow forming around. So if you if you squared a bunch of water up in the air around that point sort of around that your shadows head, you will probably be able to see a rainbow in the bright sunlight. And it's the same principle that causes a rainbow to form from your point of view in a you know, in a storm that's going

on in the atmosphere in a distance. Uh. And this is an interesting reminder of why you can never actually get to the end of a rainbow, because a rainbow is not a thing that has a fixed physical location. Like plenty of other optical phenomenon in the sky, a rainbows apparent location is actually determined by the sort of

convergence of several different things. It's the location of the sun which shines the light, and then the location of a bunch of water droplets somewhere in the atmosphere, and these water droplets or would bend and reflect the light back toward us, and then your eyes, which perceive the frequencies of light broken apart into their individual colors when they refract through those water droplets and then come back

and hit your eyes. So you could roughly say that the rainbow is from your perspective wherever that water that's doing the reflecting and refracting is. But if you were to approach it, the rainbow would no longer be there because it's a product of your point of view, your perspective when you're looking at that water, so it wouldn't

be there anymore when you got there. It's the natural place for lepre cons to send you though, in search of their gold, because they inherent tricksters, and they of they love sending humans, sending mortals on fruitless errands in pursuit of their greed, but educating you about the behavior of light in the process. Yeah, they're really into optics alright. This next message comes to us from Diana. This is

about the Moses ilusion. Diana writes, Hi, Joe and Robert, I'm listening to your episode on the Moses Solution, and it made me remember this sort of dumb prank one of my older cousins would play on me when we were little. Uh mind you that this played out in Spanish. We're from Peru, but it went what color was the

white horse of Simone Bolivard. I'll try to do the Spanish deck colore era El Cabayo Blanco de Simone Bolivar, and about Simon Bolivar, Diana writes he was known as the Liberator as he led armies and revolutions against Spain for the independence of several countries, including Venezuela, Columbia, and Peru. So he is a well known historical figure in South America.

And when I would say I didn't know, she'd laugh about how she gave the answer in the sentence She'd pulled the same prank on several members of our family, and no one ever caught on. I wonder if that could be classified as the same effect or something similar to the Moses solution. Perhaps it works better in Spanish since it's noun plus adjective, unlike English, where it's adjective plus down. Your mind goes to the horse first, and

its color goes right over your head. That's in I was just thinking about that, looking at never since I have them both here in front of me, and the listener mail, Yeah, we get to the color first in English, but it's secondary in the Spanish. Right to repeat again, In English, it's what color was the white horse, but in Spanish it's what color was the cabayo blanco. Yeah, anyway, Diana says, just my two cents to add to the weirdness of human language and understanding. Love the show, and

my mind is constantly being blown. So thank you best, Diana. Yeah, thanks for this message, Diana, This is really interesting. I'm not sure whether this would technically constitute a form of knowledge neglect like we were talking about like the Moses illusion is one example of knowledge to neglect, because I guess the question would be whether the problem people have with noticing the color being given away in the sentence uh,

is like where that error arises? Is it that the color is heard and processed and then subsequently ignored, or is it whether people are somehow prone to hear the question without ever processing the color in the first place,

Like does it just not even enter your mind? Yeah? Um, And then I wonder I can't but also wonder on this one, if you're if you're more familiar with the with the figure historical figure of Simon Bolivar, you would you might be more inclined to stumble in this one, you know, because I think we've we've touched on this in the episode before, like some of these that they involve a historic person, you end up immediately like doing like a flash presentation in your mind mind off of

all the history you know, all the sort of trivia facts you know about them. And sometimes I feel like that can do railists from from something like this. But even the punch line of a joke, like when we we mentioned on a recent episode the whole where did General Washington keep his armies? Yeah, I mean, there's no reason you should anticipate that the answer is in his sleevies.

But but you still, you're you're automatically going to going to like facts stored in your knowledge bank, and thus it I think that is one of the reasons that it's especially funny if it is funny to you when the answer is just a silly like way of pronouncing

a word. Yeah, the joke is actually that you have been thinking about answering this question on completely the wrong level, right, Yeah, I mean, and also I mean with with with questions like this, I mean, yeah, it's not a question that is in good faith because it because the answer is hidden in the question. Um, and you're you're and if you interpret it as being in faith, you you just

assume that the answer is not blatantly present in the question. Yeah. So, whether or not this is technically a form of knowledge neglect, I do think it's still really interesting. It does tie into that general experience that happens every day and seems totally mundane. But when you think about it, it's actually pretty strange. Uh. Like we talked about in the episode, that you are able to get the gist of sentences correctly without really retaining all of the information in the sentence. Like,

how do we do that? How do our brains manage so quickly to extract and retain the global meaning of a statement or of a question, but not notice major information contained inside it? All? Right, here's another one. This one comes to us from Charlie. Charlie writes hello science boys, and they spell boys bo i sum, which I think ultimately that works better in print than it does out loud. Um, But anyway, that's what they write. Then they continue Short

time listener, first time emailer. I have listened to the whole archive, and don't worry, it only took me a couple of years. I like to speed up my podcast. Y'all are the only podcast I got up to. Um uh three time speed on and you had over a thousand episodes, no human way to listen to them all normally. I finally weaned you down to one point eight times speeds. Since I got caught up, this raises the number of

questions for me. So first of all, I mean I always kind of cringe a little when when someone tells me they've listened to all the episodes they went back to the beginning. Um, you know, just because that's that's from all, that's a white ways back and and when we started this thing out, we had no idea of what we were doing. So so I mean I would generally advise people to start from the present and and and work and you know, maybe work back a little bit that sort of thing. But you know, to to

eat your them. You know, you don't have to listen to the album in the or or that the artist gives it. You can put it on shuffle. Who are who are we to argue with that? But then on the speed point, uh um, I mean I admire anyone who can listen to a podcast at three times it's normal speed. I feel like when I'm if i q A and episode of our show before it goes out, I'll bump it up to one point five and that's about my limit if I do. If I go much higher than that, then when I'm done, I feel like

I'm I'm kind of having a slight nervous breakdown. Like it's kind of like my mind speeds up to it, and then I can't take it anymore, Like I get out of it, and it's kind of like this whiplash of reality. Oh. I sometimes listen to podcasts in audiobooks at an accelerated speed, and the problem is actually that after I have done that, now regular talking speed is

intolerable to me. Like if so I do that and then I hear myself talk at a normal speed or someone else talk at a normal speed, and it sounds like everything's happening in slow motion. Yeah, I mean, I definitely prefer to listen to us at uh one point five speed because it sounds just a little different, you know, on my own voice especially, sounds just a little bit different. So I can almost appreciate, say, an episode of Weird How Cinema as if it were not me, uh, in

a weird way. But yeah, if I go too far up it, it feels like a nightmare. Voice, I don't know, and then it starts unsettling me. Yeah, folks out there, if you if you never tried it, it is hard to listen to yourself. We have to listen to ourselves constantly to preview these episodes before they go out. And man, that that's just consistently a tall order. All right, Well, they continue with the email anyway, I was listening to your episode on the Moses Illusion, and I realized that

I had an experience that seemed related. Apologies if you end up discussing it later in the episode. I am sending this part of the way through. It was the end of my eighth grade year and my science teacher had us doing Jeopardy esque game with buzzers and everything. I remember very little about that day, only that I knew the to a question who was the first person to receive a lobotomy. Now, this is something that happens to me frequently where I will think one thing and

then say something different or related. So while my brain told me that the answer was Phineas Gauge, my mouth shouted Nicholas Cage in response. Um, I mean I could see Cage as Gauge in a biopic. Uh, anyway they continue Q thirteen year old means intense embarrassment, to the point that I could not even correct myself. My team

obviously did not win those points. I most frequently experienced this phenomenon with numbers, where I will be writing a number and do it correctly, but when I have to say them out loud, they frequently are in the wrong order. I used to work a job that required me to read credit card numbers back to people over the phone, and somehow never was able to train my brain to do it consistently. Anyway, I just thought you might find

this interesting. Love the show Weird al Cinema has brought me so much joy, and I can't wait to watch Santo in the Treasure of drag Uh. Thanks Charlie. Oh, thanks Charlie. Yeah, that is a great example. I guess that that's somewhat different than the Moses solution that I guess that would constitute a form of knowledge neglect, Like your outward behavior is not, for some reason able to perform the thing that you do know is stored in

your memory correctly. Obviously, one of the factors here seems to be a sort of the pressure added by a public performance I actually remember very vividly and experience I had kind of like this where, uh, Rob, did you ever do a public spelling bee at school where you know you're in front of everybody and you're trying to

spell words? And no, I never thought, Yeah, I I did this one time in middle school, and I remember I spelled a word wrong, even though I was like a hundred percent positive that I knew how to spell it right. And the way it went was my word. I was up at the microphone and I had to spell waltz and I said waltz w a lt z, and then they were they were about to say, like that is correct, and then I went E. I don't

don't know why I have. No. I did not think there was an e at the the end of the word, but I was just compelled the Obviously, there's something about being in front of an audience and having that kind of pressure that suddenly that makes you just act out in strange ways. Sometimes walt see walt say all right. So this next message comes to us from Ryan. This is also about Moses illusion. Ryan says, Hi, Robert and Joe, I'm a longtime listener writing in for the first time.

Thank you for all the intelligent and well researched discussion on topics that I would otherwise never encounter. Uh. The way you discussed and draw connections into religion, philosophy, psychology, and weird movies is unique and wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Ryan, Ryan says, I am a middle school band director, or at least I will be when we are allowed to play instruments in a room together again.

Last week, I was listening to the Moses Illusion episode and I began to see some connections to learning and memory as they relate to music education, specifically to practice habits. During the episode, you mentioned the idea that hearing incorrect information can cloud the memory of information that we know to be correct. This instantly brought to mind the way that I teach students to practice music. I strongly encourage students to break down a difficult passage as they practice

so that they are always playing it correctly. This can mean putting your instrument down and clapping a rhythm you are having trouble with, or playing a passage one note at a time, or simply slowing it down. The idea here is to make the music more simple so that they are less likely to make a mistake. This would mean that every time they hear it and play it, it is correct. Contrast this with a student who simply tries to play the passage straight away, and maybe they

do this correctly six out of ten times. That means they now have four incorrect versions of the passage in their mind. Now, there are some differences between the linguistic and musical examples, but I think the core idea of information interference supplies when the first student goes to perform the piece, there is only one version of it, the

correct version in their mind. The second student, on the other hand, has a handful of different versions of it in their mind, and this student must now actively choose the correct one. This is significantly more mental effort, which happens to be something in short supply when we are nervous on stage. Here's stage performance again. I never thought of this concept in such an explicit and direct way, but once you put a name to it, the idea was already there in my mind. Learning like this is

what helps make me a better teacher. I look forward to going on more weird journeys and learning more with both of you in the future. Thank you, Ryan, that's great, and I m I certainly admire anybody who can who can and you know, not only uh, maintain their sanity, but excel as a is a is a junior high band director. I remember, even as a junior high kid, and that's usually kind of an oblivious state to be in. I remember, you know, looking at my director and been thinking, man,

this this guy really puts up with a lot. I was an awful, rambunctious band kid in middle school. We we essentially turned our middle school band class into the ww E. Back then it was the WWF and it was the attitude era. So everybody wanted to be stone cold or the undertaker or whatever, and it was a it was a free for all. Oh man, that's got gotta be rough on the tubas. There's another point that comes up here that is something that I have thought for years and has come up in the context of

all kinds of skills like writing and stuff. You know, there is I think often a an attitude among many people that you know, practice is always good, Practice makes perfect, and you know, you want to get any good at any skill, you do have to practice it. But I do think it is entirely possible. To practice yourself worse set things. Practice is not always good. You need to be practicing in the right kind of way because sometimes

practice if it. You know, if you are practicing counterproductive habits, they can really take over and sort of prevent your growth in the skill in the future. All right, here's another one. This one comes to us from Scott. Hey, guys, love the show Slash Shows. Thank you. In the most illusion episode, you touched on the idea of how we know stuff but can't relate details on how the thing actually works. This reminded me of a story I read

long ago. In it, a NATO soldier stationed in Iceland is mysteriously transported back in time to the Viking era. He struggles to adapt because while he has great knowledge of wonderful things from the future, he cannot explain how to produce them with the with the existing level of technology. Worse, he is woefully lacking in the basic knowledge of how to survive without them. He cannot hunt, farm, make fire, build shelter, or the myriad of other skills that even

the youngest members of the clan would do. A poignant line is that quote, you don't have the tools to make the tools to make the machinery to make the things I can use. He eventually perishes because while he is smart and accomplished in his own time, he lacks the resources modern civilization has come to depend upon. Standard closing. Thanks, keep up the good work, etcetera. Scott, Thanks Scott, Yeah, I looked up the details here since you didn't have

the name and author. I think the story you're talking about is called The Men Who Came Early by Paul Anderson. I'm not familiar with this writer, but just a quick

googling does make it look like. One of the themes that's visited in some of his science fiction and fantasy writing is that of people in in modern, technologically advanced societies really underestimating so called primitive people who have less access to technology, and overestimating how clever and powerful they are just by virtue of existing in a society with more access to technology. And I think that's a very

good point. I mean, one way of looking at technology is that it can greatly increase the output of human labor, but it does that by requiring us to have fewer and fewer general skills and to go deeper and deeper on like highly specialized skills that are increasingly alienated from the raw materials and processes of production that that make

life possible. Yeah, isn't it funny that oftentimes that are, especially our post apocalyptic science fiction, you have you have these cases where we present some sort of post high tech civilization, primitive society worshiping a piece of like some relic of the technological age, be it a you know, an atomic bomb or you know, or I don't know,

some darelit computer or something. But really this has more in common with the way we interact with a examples of advanced technology, you know, like we are the ones who know hasn't have no idea how they work, and for us it is just magic. It is just a gift of the gods. Uh. And granted it would be that way for our post apocalyptic descendants as well, but you know, it's it's not like we're not already there. Yeah, but I think this really narrow minded way of looking

at things. Uh, This sort of like implicit superiority complex among people in tech technologically advanced societies is absolutely there and is absolutely not justified. I mean, people who did more with less technology had like had to have way more skills. It's mind boggling how much like intelligence and skill it is necessary to just like build a house

without power tools and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, um, you know, there's one example of just uh like of sort of forgotten technological advancement that I've come back to a time and time again. But I don't remember exactly who wrote it. Maybe it was George Garrett in one of his Elizabethan novels, but it was talking about the sailing ships of old and about how not only could everybody on the ship tie every knot that was necessary for the rigging, but they could do so in the dark, in the middle

of a storm, um, which I don't know. I was always found that rather rather interesting commentary on like on on the level of personal knowledge that was required to to keep it ship running at that time. Yeah. So, am I really a genius because I can write some JavaScript? I'm not sure. Try tying three different knots. Let's see how that goes, much less a whole page worth of them. Okay, now we got some messages having to do with our

episodes on Spoons. This first one comes from Randy. Randy says, Hello, Robert and Joe, I just finished listening to your spoon episodes and I found them both fantastic. I love hearing how mundane objects in our lives have such interesting histories and stories behind them. Uh, you've done a great job of researching these mini mouth shovels. One thing that I don't recall being mentioned was spoons and forks to being

used as a control to prevent left handedness. My father told me that when he was a kid, he was forced to use a spoon with a bend at the neck, so the bowl I guess that, meaning the bowl of the spoon pointed to the left, thus making the spoon only usable with the right hand and forcing out any

tendencies for using one's left hand. Since using utensils is such a social norm that we expect children to learn in certain societies, having them work to force preferred eating behaviors could absolutely be seen as a tool for control. The alternative would be to eat with the wrong hand and be seen as a heathen. Can you imagine as an adult my father uses his right hand for his work and daily tasks. But I can't help but wonder if there is another dimension where my father is left handed.

Thanks for the great show. Randy Rob Have we ever done an episode on on this kind of thing, like the demonization of left handedness, because I remember hearing about this from adults when I was a kid, that like if they were coming up in schools where they were essentially taught that being left handed was evil and you had to be like worked out of you, you know.

I don't remember exactly. I feel like I did something on left handedness, maybe with uh with Alice In louder Milk, the original co host on the show back in the day. I think we did something on left handedness. Um. But it's one of those things I'd love to go back to because I'm sure there's more, there's more literature on the topic now it would uh yeah, it's worth another dive.

And I'm not sure we really got into the the evilness of it so much as the the way that left handed people sometimes um um, excel in a right handed world, especially when you're looking at things like sword fights, you know, violent conflict, but also sports. Oh I see, man, we would get so much lefty mail left yeah, lefties would love it, and and right these maybe not so much. I don't know, but there are the lefties are the ones who wanted on your side because they're the ones

who are good in a knife fight. All right, we have one left. It's not a weird house response usually to the weird house stuff at the end um. This one does relate to a movie episode that was that you know, in many respects kind of a kind of a weird proto weird house episode. It has to do with the star lac um. This one comes to us from Eric Hi, Robin Joe, and producer Seth. I was listening to your recent Listener Maile episode, so this is

a listener male about listener mail. Anyway, when you read the listeners comments about the star lac digesting people for a thousand years, it occurred to me that the only person I can recall who died of old age in the Star Wars films was Yoda, who was nine years old. Everyone else who died was killed, as far as I can recall. What if Yoda was not abnormal for his longevity. Maybe everyone lives for the better part of a millennium,

or would if they weren't always at war. Just a random idea, but I don't think it's too incongruous with anything in the films. Although I can't speak for the whole expanding universe. Keep up the great stuff or keep the great stuff coming, Eric, Uh, this is a this is a great question. It's making me think back on the various deaths in the Star Wars films um of non combat related deaths. The only two that are really coming to mind are, Yeah, Yoda dying of old age, uh,

pad Me dying due to complications with childbirth. Trying to think of there any others. I think the Rank Corps Handler died of a broken heart. That that would have been like off screen, probably a short story that that part is always sad. Yeah, that's the worst part of Return of the Jedi for me is when the Rank Corps Handler starts crying and I'm just like, oh no,

Luke is the villain. Yeah, plut I had that action figure of the Rank Corps Handler, So it kind of made it sadder because like I had here, like I had his physical manifestation and the Rank Corps um. Yeah, it was it's sad to think about um. But so this is very interesting. Now. Of course you could look at this as it is a product of just sort

of the storytelling conventions of adventure fiction, right, that. Uh. You know, in the same way that people in Star Wars don't stop to go to the bathroom, they also don't die of old age because it's just not dramatic. But the other thing I was thinking about was how well this would actually be if this were true, that in the Star Wars galaxy, you know, people just don't

die of old age. They only die violent deaths. Isn't that explicitly true of the elves in in Tolkien, like that they don't die of well basically they live forever unless they're killed in battle. Uh maybe I don't remember specifically, you get into that whole business of them sailing off to the other land and all. Um, if they live long enough and they grow bored enough. Uh, and you know, based on what, given what they're based on, you know, the ideas of fairy folk and and all that, that

would make sense. Yeah. Um, I don't know. With Star Wars though, I you know, you could certainly point to the high degree of medical technology that is in cybernetics, that is that is possible in this world. But at the other hand, there's great inequality in the Star Wars universe, so you know, everybody's not benefiting from that technology, so that alone cannot account for um for extended lifespans. Not everybody gets to become more machine now than Matt right

the bank the bat. What is at the back to tank? I believe it only seats one. You can only have one diaper clad JETI in there at the time, um regrowing their their their skin. So uh, yeah, it's an interesting thoughts experience, though, I'll have to uh, I'll have to ask ask my son about it. He he ultimately knows more about Star Wars at this point than I do. He's always correcting me on uh the specific names of individual vehicles and whatnot. Okay, here's what I bet you

have the answer too, because you're in that headspace. Now, what's the deal with like four see people who when they die in Star Wars, they just completely disappear, like they just vaporize. Happens to Obi Wan, happens to Yoda? Don't when Yoda dies of old age, he's just like it's just blanket there now, no Yoda. There's some sort of trick about becoming a forced ghost, and I don't remember all the details about it, but it comes up in the Clone Wars series. Um that it yeah, it's

it's like an ability you take on. I think, Okay, so that disappearing is not something that happens to you, but something you do. Like if you you die, you can develop a skill maybe if you've practiced and honed it over time, to disappear upon death and become a ghost. I think it's like this is um what I've absorbed through cannon and this is also fifty percent me to

spit balling. But I think it's like if you were able to die with the serenity, like the sort of thinking about you know, uh, Tibetan Buddhism and all the idea of of putting yourself in a headspace to to navigate that pathway between our life and the next. Like if you're able to to to do that correctly, if your trajectory is sound, then yeah you can. You can live on as this forced ghost in the next life.

But you've got to you kind of have to get into the into the right frame of mind, you know, you have to sort of enter that moment of calm like Obi Wan does before he dies, that sort of thing. Oh yeah, I just remembered in the middle one of the New trilogy, Luke also he just disappears, it's just to the winds. Yeah, and I believe he has like a meditative state before that. So yeah, uh, you know,

I like that that motif. I like that idea. Um that you know, if you're, like I said, like a lot in Star Wars, it kind of squares up well with with at least some models of Eastern religion and philosophy. I think that's a wise and serene place to end today, if you're ready. Yeah, it this plane of existence. Yeah, but we'll be back though, uh and in in force ghost form to watch over you. Uh. We'll be back next Monday, in fact, with more listener mail. So in

the meantime, right in with more listener mail. Respond to listener mails, respond to responses to listener mail, respond to new episodes, old episodes, weird how cinema, artifact, episodes, you name it. Let us know what you're digging, what you're not digging. We're always open to, uh, criticisms, corrections, and

just in general just added information about the topics we cover. Uh. You know, that's always the most delightful thing when when when when the listeners share things from their own life and their own experience Uh. Even my mom got in on this after we did the spoon episode. Uh spoon episodes. I knew she was gonna dig these because she's really into utensils. So I was receiving a number of different photos from from various spoons in her collections. So um.

So yeah, you you listeners, you can send in your spoon pictures as well. In the meantime, if you want to listen to other episodes, just find Stuff to Blow Your Mind and Stuff to Blow your Mind feed wherever you get your podcasts. 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 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 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.