Listener Mail: The Day Begins

into the mail harvester. And by the way, if you've never written into the show before and you'd like to get in touch to give feedback, corrections, commentary on a previous topic, or if you just want to share something interesting or say friendly hello, you can always reach us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. By the way, Happy New Year everyone. If you are listening from an unsustainably crowded GYM or y m C, A good luck with that. Uh, today's mail bag might

be a little bit weird due to holiday outages. Is I think all of these messages came in several weeks ago now, but we will do our best to get caught up two more recent emails in the coming weeks. All right, First, up in response to our episodes on the reptiles of the Galapagos, specifically our focus on the marine iguana, or, as one great scientists maligned them, those stupid, hideous looking creatures. Lurch rights the following, good morning, gentlemen.

I think it was near the end of part two on the Galapagos reptiles when you mentioned the marine iguanas have slightly webbed feet, but you didn't see an evolutionary reason for the feature since they aren't used in swimming. Yes, or at least in our unexpert opinion, they didn't appear to be used in swimming, so you know, maybe they are in some subtle way. But anyway, going on with Lurch's message, I happened to be out romping with dog

at the time. Uh. And this is dog with capital D, so I think Lurch here is referring to his dog who is named dog. So he's out romping with dog at the time. He listened to that episode as he enjoyed about eighteen inches of snow. Being half mala mute, cold weather and snow are like a birthday party for him every day. At the time he raised the question there was another dog, a German shepherd trying to keep up. He couldn't because he had to wade through an extra

foot of snow the dog ran on top of. While all dogs, as far as I'm aware, have webb defeat what I call snow, dogs seemed to be able to deliberately spread their toes, bringing that webbing into play on snow and of course mud. This has the effect of spreading their weight over a larger area, letting them sink less. I've not seen any studies or anything on this. I'm basing it by comparing dog's footprint on pavement to that in snow. In the snow, his footprint is nearly twice

the size of the one on pavement. How is this relevant? I know next to nothing about the Galapagos Islands, but I wonder if the webbing on the Iguanas might be of use when crossing sand. Well, lurch Uh, I do not recall this observation about dogs having sort of natural

snowshoes ever crossing my mind before. But I thought this was a really interesting observation about dog pause, so I decided to look it up in the zoology literature, and it seems to me like you are exactly right about snow dogs and especially their near wild ancestor, the gray wolf. So I was looking at a book called Wolves, Behavior, Ecology and Conservation edited by L. David Metsch and Luigi Boitani.

This was from University of Chicago Press, two thousand seven, and this is in a chapter by H. Match one of the editors and rolf O. Peterson on wolf prey relations, typically the effects of snow and other weather conditions on interactions between wolves and the animals they hunt. One really cool observation the authors make here. They say that during midwinter thaws, wolves will sometimes sleep through the afternoon in the early evening and then wake up to hunt prey

in the nighttime. Why is this, The authors suggest it's because the wolves are waiting for the temperature to drop at night, which facilitates the formation of a crust on the top layer of snow, which plays to their advantage during pursuit of prey. And so the main effect of snow on wolves primary prey animals is to slow them down and hinder their movements because they're wading through these big drifts. But that's not always the case with the

wolves themselves, and certainly not to the same extent. So here match and Peterson write quote, most prey probably have a heavier foot loading than do wolves, so they would sink deeper and be hindered more than wolves. Estimates for footloading and deer, for example, range from two hundred and eleven grams per cubic centimeter to four hundred and thirty one to one thousand, one hundred and twenty four grams per cubic centimeter, whereas for wolves the estimate is about

one hundred and three grams per cubic centimeter. Ungulates are usually much heavier than wolves and possess hard hoofs that puncture snow much more easily than the spreading, webbed toes of a wolf foot. This difference can tilt the balance toward wolves during predation attempts on animals from the size of deer to bison. So this comes back to that observation that wolves might sometimes sleep through a warmer part of the day in midwinter to wake up in the

dark and hunt. The crust that forms on top of the snow in the cold night air will support a wolf running on it, running on its naturally webbed biological snowshoes, and I think the technical term for the webbing between the toes is interdigital webbing. But a deer hoof will punch right through that crust and get stuck in the snow, so the deer will be unable to run at top speed. And I guess the question is do modern domestic dog

breeds like the malamute have similar abilities. I didn't find any scientific research on this, but it seems to be just common knowledge among dog breeders that Arctic breeds like the malamute and the husky and so forth have characteristics that make them move well in the snow. And I found an article on the American Kennel Club website which does describe the malamute as having broad paws that helped distribute their weight over a larger surface area so they

can run on the top of the snow. So, Larch, I think your observation about your half mallamute dog is probably exactly correct, and also probably not just a breed trait specific to the mala mute and husky and so forth, but sort of an ancestral trade that goes all the way back to their wolf ancestors or wolf like ancestors. Now,

as for marine iguanas, I couldn't say. I couldn't say if movement on sand would have anything to do with it, though obviously I don't think the snow crust principle would really apply to sand, unless there's some kind of sand crusted phenomenon I've never heard of, so I don't know, but the interesting idea anyway, lurches email goes on from here. Lurch rights Iguanas hold a small special spot in my heart.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo nine, as I recall, I spent six weeks in the Virgin Islands as part of an emergency communications team. Nobody had electricity, including the hotel at which we stayed, so we left our doors and windows open at night to take advantage of the breeze. The third night, I dreamt I was being buried alive, rather terrifying, but wait, it gets worse. When I jerked awake and opened my eyes, I was nos to know is with the ugliest face I'd ever seen. The moonlight

decidedly did not help. Teleportation is possible. But when I had stopped screaming, I was awake enough to realize I had been cuddled by three rather large iguanas. One of which had decided sleeping on top of me was a good joke. For the remainder of my stay, I always had at least one iguana share my bed at night. Seriously cool lurch. Uh wow, well that's a great story. Anybody else out there have that experience, Please right in if you've had iguanas crawl into bed with you. I

don't think pets count. All right, This next message comes from Carl. Carl says, dear Robin Joe. Firstly, congratulations to Joe and family on their new arrival. Hope all are well and happy. Thank you very much, Carl, We all are indeed well and happy. In fact, I my first attempt at recording this episode, I had the creature on my chest in the baby Bjorn with me here. I was like, surely we can make this work. You know, she's just sleeping. Uh, she she can be my sort

of silent co host. But the problem was she was not silent at all. In fact, she was she was breathing like Darth Vader, and it absolutely came through on the recording. So rather than have all the Darth Vader breathing and the Goblin snarls and all that, I decided to to wait to record this at at another time. So here we are. But maybe in the future she'll she'll join me on Mike when she's not quite so loud.

Karl's message goes on onto eggs consumed raw. Now this must be related to the episode that Rob and I did on eggnog. Karl writes, when in Peru, maeen we drank many piece cooast sours, the national cocktail of Peru. One was served to us at the first opportunity on arrival and about every chance after that for two and a half weeks. It's made with Peruvian Piececo as the base liquor, UH fresh squeezed lemon juice, simple syrup, ice,

egg white, and angustura bitters. It's shaken to a froth, strained into a glass, and topped with a few drops of angustura bitters. Quite tasty, by the way. The cocktail was invented by an American bartender, Victor Morris, in Peru in the late night in the early nineteen hundreds. Piececo is a high proof, local unrefined brandy that makes up

most of the drink after ice. Maybe there's enough alcohol to kill any salmonella, but we never became ill or heard of anyone else becoming ill from drinking Piececo sours, which were even dispensed from vending machines in one remote area. I decided to serve them at a dinner after we after we returned home, but I used pasteurized egg whites from a carton. I still have the bottle of Piececo

in my cabinet. It's not something you would enjoy over the rocks, say, and has no other uses I know of, but since it's been around before piece Coast hours were invented, it must have other uses. As always, I enjoy your podcasts. It's good to have Joe back. Carl. Well, thank you, Carl, it's good to be back. I've never tried a piaccoat sour.

I will say, I don't know if I would fully count on the alcohol content of a cocktail to kill salmonilla bacteria that might might be present in a contaminated egg, especially immediately, because you might remember they found in one of those experiments we talked about in the egg nog episode that it actually took several days, from several days up to several weeks for a batch with alcohol content

to become sterile. And I think the more likely explanation for the fact that you never became sick after drinking one of these drinks is that you just never got a contaminated egg. Like most eggs are fine. The CDC used to cite an estimate that it was about one out of every twenty thousand eggs produced annually in the

United States that carried salmonella. Uh. By the way, I after the episode, I tried to look up and find the original source of that claim, and I believe it is a paper called Estimating the Annual fraction of Eggs Contaminated with Salmonella in tarot Titus in the United States, and this was by Eric Ebel and Wayne Schlausser published in the International Journal of Food Microbiology in the year

two thousand. Now that number may have changed in the last twenty two years one out of every twenty thousand, If so, hopefully it's even lower, But I have not found a more recent estimate, so as far as I know, that's that's still the most recent guests anybody's come up with. Now, what does all that mean. I'm of course not advising people to eat raw eggs. You definitely do not want to get salmonella. It is awful. Uh so, caution with raw eggs is great, but also I mean, no reason

to be overly fearful. Most eggs are fine. All right, on to the next message. This one comes from Chuck all so concerning egg based cocktails related to our eggnog episode, another discussion of the piececo Sour and our Vault episodes on the invention of the mirror and various psychological effects related to mirrors. Chuck says, dear Robert and Joe, happy holidays and great tidings to you both, and congratulations to

Joe on the new addition to the family. These are the days that will seem so long, and it will vanish faster than you could imagine how true that is. And then Chuck takes a paragraph here to say some very kind things about the show. But then he goes on to say, I'm writing specifically because of your eggnog episode. Personally, I want to like eggnog more than I actually do. Every year I'm tempted by the ingredients and try a glass, but then I find it particularly revolting. Maybe it's the

type of rum that's in it. I do recall, however, that back in the nineteen eighties, when I was a latchkey kid, Carnation made an eggnog flavored powder you put in milk as an instant break fist. Oh boy um. To my little brain, the flavor was amazing, but it could only be purchased as part of a mixed box of instant breakfasts containing vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate flavors. I think my desire to like eggnog comes from that nostalgia. That being said, I will no doubt keep trying eggnog

every year to see if I strike gold. You guys also mentioned a dearth of egg based cocktails. If no one else has said this to you, uh and as you see now, we've got several messages about this. But Chuck says, I'd like to offer up the Piececo sour Piaceco is a brandy from Peru. I was introduced to the liquor by my wife, who is originally from the Peruvian city of cheek Clio. There are myriad varieties of piececo Piasco sours are kind of the national cocktail of Peru.

Though Chile and Bolivia may claim Piececo, they, as my wife says, are wrong. Basic piececo sours are made up of piececo egg whites, sweet syrup, and some lime juice. This is shaken with ice to foam the egg whites and mix well, and then the ice is strained out. When you poured into a glass a few drops of Angustura bitters and you have an amazing drink. I heartily recommend. Chuck goes on to say two asides to set this first one up. It's going to reference a series of

studies we talked about in our episodes on mirrors. These studies identified what has been called the strange face in the mirror effect, which is a phenomenon where if you put people in a room with dim lighting and you have them stare at their face in the mirror for at least ten minutes, the majority of subjects will report strange visual hallucinations and illusions, including everything from blurring and deformations of the facial features to seeing their face as

another face entirely either belonging to another person known or unknown, or changing into a cat or a pig, or an alien or a monkey monster. And basically all UH respondents reported that in some way they came to see their face after prolonged staring in low light, as as other in some way as somehow not belonging to them, or

or had some kind of dissociative experience. So the main study here was called the Strange Face in the Mirror illusion illusion by Giovanni bi Caputo in the journal Perception in two thousand ten, but it's been replicated under a variety of conditions in other studies. Sense anyway from here, Chuck writes one, I read a book when I was

a teenager about exploring your past lives. Oh boy, I can't remember the title or author, but one of the techniques in it was to stare in a mirror at length in dim lighting until you quote see the faces you had in those previous lives. I'd forgotten all about this, but it rushed forward in my memories during your mirror episodes, and I've been meaning to write you to let you know. Apparently the staring in a mirror in the dimness technique was known and written about at least thirty five years

ago by metaphysical believers. It's cool to get the true science about this now. Yeah. That that is really interesting, Chuck. And it's interesting about using the mirror to allegedly see faces of past lives, specifically because of a similar thing

in Caputo's study. A full eighteen percent of respondents in that research reported seeing their own face transformed in some way to resemble one of their parents faces, And of course, seeing like a parent or an ancestor seems maybe to to suggest a similar strain of thinking to like seeing

a past life. But there was another part of the result that was that there was an aggregate category of hallucinations which included seeing quote, an archetypal face such as that of an old woman, a child, or a portrait of an ancestor. Now, I suppose the causation in here,

if there is any, could go either way. It could be that the strange face in the mirror illusion naturally tends to cause a substantial fraction of people to hallucinate their own face as transforming into that of an of a parent or what they believed to be the face of an ancestor, and that could give rise to this idea that you see past lives of your own in

a mirror. Or it could be that if people widely believed you could see past lives by turning down the lights and gazing into the looking glass, that might have in fact primed people to report stuff like this in these experiments. So interesting. I wonder how widely um believe that that thing that you read in the book was Uh. One last thing about the strange face in the mirror illusion. An interesting finding of subsequent studies was that a mirror

was not strictly part of the illusion. Instead, the necessary ingredients seemed to be dim light conditions, time, and a face, though not necessarily the reflection of your own, because there was another study that I think was also done by Caputo in which found similar effects simply by having people stare at each other's faces intersubjective facial gazing for prolonged periods in low light, and that this also produced kind of strange hallucinatory or perceptive illusion effects. Uh, if you

did it long enough. Anyway, back to Chuck's message, and this is the second part of his his two part tangent to probably everyone that writes has a weird house cinema suggestion. And if I may, I suggest Big Trouble in Little China. Not only is it my favorite movie ever, but I know you guys referenced it all the time. Uh, and you've said that you should do a John Carpenter movie. I've seen it so many times I generally failed to

realize how just plain weird the movie is. It was so odd that the marketing had no idea what to do with it. It dealt with themes and characters no one in the West had any deep, non colledge of, and the main character, the awesome Kurt Russell, of course, was actually the sidekick the whole time. I suspect many of your listeners have seen this very quotable film, but a weird house examination would be greatly appreciated. Yeah, Rob and I do mention this movie a lot. It's it's

it's a it's a common it's a house favorite. Uh. Finally, Check says, thank you for taking the time to read this. You guys rock me. Have a great three sincerely, Chuck right back at you, Chuck. Alright. Well, I think that does it for today's mail bag, but we will be back with more of your messages next week and in the meantime, if you're new to the show, you can check out all of our other episodes anywhere you get your podcasts. Monday's we Read Listener mail, Tuesdays and Thursdays

are our core stuff. To Blow Your Mind episodes. Those are usually about science and culture in some way. Wednesdays are our short form episodes. Those are called the Artifact or sometimes the Monster Fact Friday, as we do a movie show, Rob and I just kicked back and talk about a strange film, good or bad, on a series we call Weird House Cinema. Saturday's we haul out an episode from the Vault, and Sunday's we publish nothing at

All Big thanks to our audio producer, Max Williams. 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 a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.