Listener Mail VII: Fill Your Ears

sort through and read. So he's just continuing to to sport out this massive pile of a dot Matrix printer. And guys, I know this is an inconvenience, but it really does make sense because when Carney gets infected with malware, it is a bad scene. Yeah. I actually heard that somebody hacked into Carney through the Internet of Things in order to commit a di DOS attack. Really yeah, against what against what I believe is the targets Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Yeah, they turned our own

listener mail robot against us. That's vile. Yeah, it's just real despicable guys, these hackers, and not quite as well as the people who sees the baby monitors but it's close, all right. Well, well, without further ado, let's see what we've got here. We haven't done one of these in a few months, and we've received a lot of listener mail, a ton, yeah, of some wonderful stuff, and sadly, you know, we're not gonna be able to get to all of it here, and we're not able to directly respond to

a lot of it. But we do appreciate all the wonderful takes, all the wonderful tidbits, all the wonderful bits of feedback that you send in on each and every week. Okay, And first off, our listener, Kelly writes to us on Facebook in response to our episode about being eaten by a giant spider, And just a note on that episode, We did have to publish that one twice because first time it came out maybe that was during our di Dos attack. I don't know, Uh, something happened with the publishing.

And so if you saw that episode show up twice, uh, or if you had a problem with it the first time, you might want to check that that second version of it anyway, right, Uh, So, Kelly writes, Hi, guys, I just listened to your giant spider episode. I was never skittish with spiders. My friend even had the sweetest tarantula that like to cuddle more than a puppy. Somehow I doubt that, but okay, I was always the designated quote spider remover of our family because I thought we had

a great symbiotic relationship. And Kelly, you are exactly right. Humans and spiders peas in a pod. The we're friends. They're not our enemies. But Kelly, Kelly does have a little case of friendly fire to mention to us. Here, Kelly writes about a decade ago, I woke up with the left side of my face so swollen. Just by looking out the corner of my eye, I could see my cheek. I sleep stumbled into the bathroom to find huge bloody sores from my forehead down to my nose.

I got an appointment of my doctors that day. He informed me that I'd been attacked by a brown recluse in my sleep, and also let me know that if I hadn't come in so quickly, the venom would have likely eaten through my skin and muscle and started to ulcerate my skull. Wow, that sounds horrible. Months of medication later, plus a few glycolic face peels to soften the scarring from ulceration. I'm almost normal. I do refer to myself

as Scarface to give myself more street cred. By the way, and we get some pictures, you can still see my spider scars on my forehead and nose, although they're blessedly just a fraction of the original sizes. Well, I hope you out there listening will not take this as justification for global spider panic. We still stand firmly against spider panic. But if you can avoid being bitten on the face by a brown recluse, that is something to to do.

I grew up in New England and that the brown recluse was like always the um the scariest thing that you could run into up there. Like we don't have scorpions or you know, poisonous snakes or anything like that, but about like a New Hampshire county with a shotgun. Well those, yeah, I mean I guess technically, yeah, I was always on the lookout with more than two legs? Is the scar Yeah, is a brand reclusive problem down here in the sound? Yeah, yeah, you could brown problem

if they do exist down here. Well, one, it only takes one to be a problem, right, It really gets in that whole scenario, like to to what extent is it an actual problem, just to the perceived threat of the brown. Yeah. For example, I I follow on Twitter a spider researcher who named Catherine who I believe she

works out of Canada. But she does a whole thing on Twitter that I've seen never do before, which is just like hashtag not a brown recluse, which is going through people's pictures that they put on Twitter and say, look, I found a brown recluse in my house. And she's like, that's a wolf spider. So you know, it's easy to to get too worked up about a spider that's basically brown. Yeah. I thought you were going to say, I follow spider on Twitter. That would be great. I would love to

see a spider's Twitter account. It's just like it's all fake news exactly. Okay, what else has Carney got for us? Well, we received an awful lot of email related to our Only Child Syndrome podcast episode. Yeah, we got there was a lot of mails, So thank you all for sending that. A lot of people telling us their experiences being an only child, or being a parent of an only child. There were so many that we couldn't possibly read them all,

but we did pull one or two for today's episode. Yeah, and this one that I'm about to read actually comes from someone who has some experience with the one child policy in China. Okay, so this bit of listener mail here is from Betty. Betty rights in and says, Hi, guys, just listen to the Only Child Syndrome podcast, which was great, and I thought i'd share some experiences from growing up

in China as an only child in the nineties. Growing up, we all knew the one child policy was out of the norm from a global and historical standpoint, but since almost every kid we ever met was an only child, not having siblings just felt like the norm and very few people found it weird. And of course, my friends and acquaintances from school ranged in personalities just like everyone else in the world. I can't speak for other only children, but I was raised in a way that would have

been pretty difficult to result in spoiled bratness. I had to do many household chores every day from age six to moving out of college. I was a default laborer for all home reno and home improvement projects. Renovation not not going to reno. Uh. If I wanted to buy anything like toys or games, it was limited to my Chinese New Year money, which was like ten to twenty bucks a year, or I had to do extra chores to earn it. When I turned six, team my parents also told me to get a job. In addition, it

was mandatory to do well in school. Of course, at the time, I did not appreciate doing all those things, but in retrospect it kind of worked out. By the time I moved out for college, I knew how to cook, clean, dow, laundry, and all kinds of other household tests. I knew how to get a job, got a job, and already had money saved up from it. And I was the go to handy person my dorm because I was one of the only few, one of the few people who knew

how to use power tools and fixed broken equipment. I live in Canada now, but whenever anyone discovers that I am an only child, their first reaction is, oh, I

would have never guessed. But from what I can tell, it's nearly impossible to guess if a person as an only child anyway, since who they are largely depends on how they were raised and what kind of environment they grew up in with things have been different if I had siblings, It's possible, but my parents wanted to raise me as a capable, hard working, independent person, and there's no reason they wouldn't have wanted the same for all their children if they had had the opportunity to do more.

Thanks again for the great podcast, Betty. Yeah, that definitely thank you, first of all, Betty for sharing the experience with us. But that seems to line up with what we uh, the conclusions we came to in that episode, which is it seems like only child syndrome is not a psychological issue. Uh, it's more of like a sociological factors how you were raised, what type of home you're raised in, what tree you were raised in, what the norms were there. You know, everybody I know who fits

the stereotype of the only child is actually an oldest child. Yeah. I don't think I mentioned that on that episode, but yeah, I have the same experience. Yeah, yeah, the the episode. In the episode, we explore the idea that only children are spoiled or they're lonely. I mean all the various ideas, they just won't go away culturally despite all of the evidence to the contrary for like over a hundred years now, because of just that one guys bad methodology and a

psychological report. Yeah, but this is a great bit of listener feedback though, because it it highlighted both the just just the the only child aspect as well as the one child's policy a bit. I think it's always interesting to get a different perspective on that. Yeah. So this next letter comes from someone who wants to talk to us about an episode from I think it's over a year go, but this is a really interesting message, so

I wanted to address it now. It's from the episode that Robert and I did on the Unlanguaged Mine and Feral Children. Uh, and if you haven't heard that, please go back and listen to it. We had I wouldn't say fun with that episode, but it was very educational for us learning about this sort of history behind that, and we got a lot of good feedback about Yeah. Yeah, so, uh, she says, Hello, Robert and Christian. My name is Candice. I just recently discovered your podcast and have been going

through the archives. I stumbled upon and listened to the two episodes titled The un Language Mind. I found the information you presented and your perspectives fascinating. Those two episodes resonated with me because I am a teacher of the deaf and heart of hearing and have come into contact with Unfortunately, multiple students born into hearing homes without access to American Sign language. Several of these students resulted in developmental, social, behavioral,

and academic delays because of the lack of language. One student in particular, who I have been working with for the past three years, is the closest I have come to a feral child. He was not locked away in a room, but he did miss the critical periods for learning language. When he entered the school system in kindergarten, it was clear that he had no language, no respect for social norms or rules, or any desire to communicate

with other humans in a truly meaningful way. To communicate his needs, he resorted to pointing, mimicking, gesturing, and violence. Multiple other team members and myself have been punched, kicked, cut bitten, scratched, and had our hair pulled by this student. He has thrown feces at our staff and urinated on classroom floors intentionally. However, with intense language, academic, and social intervention, the student has improved and matured by leaps and bounds.

He is now functioning in a classroom with typically hearing peers while using an a s L interpreter. He is still learning to express himself in a s L and is using two to four word phrases. He now values relationships with adults and peers and under dance how to nurture and keep those relationships, and is currently eight years old. Thank you for shedding light on this difficult subject and informing the public of a humans dire need for language.

So that's really interesting to me because I know it's been a while since we did those episodes, but I don't remember coming across specific examples of children, uh, in present day scenarios where they were they unless they were like totally neglected, but in this situation because they're deaf, it makes it even more difficult. Yeah, it's been a long time since we we looked at the research to data there, but yeah, I don't remember a specific case

like that. Yeah, but this was really fascinating. Thank you for sharing it with this Candice and I'm really glad to hear that this this kid is is getting so it sounds like world class treatment and help so that he can adapt better with his peers. It is amazing. You know. One thing I actually recently was thinking about your episode on The Unlanguaged Mind because of a movie I just saw. They came out. Did y'all see Arrival yet? Yes? In Arrival they we're not talking about the one with

was it with the Sheen in it? Right? Not? Martin. Charlie Sheen was in a movie called The Arrival. I know you're talking about heron silver in it that I've seen. There's actually two of those. Those are about the aliens with the backward legs. This is just Arrival without of the in front of right, the one with Amy Adams Whittaker. Yeah, it's about It's a movie about language in a lot of ways. And they discussed the sapire warf hypothesis, which

actually plays into the plot. I don't want to give anything away, but they talked about the sapiar warf hypothesis and I was like, oh, yes, the un language Mind. Arrival is a movie that I feel like is made for us and for listeners who like stuff to blow your mind. Like it's like such a great sci fi movie that really latches onto real world concepts and we're dealing with ideas, Yeah, and works them really well into the story. I really enjoyed it was. Yeah, I was

so impressed. The one based on the novel by Ted Sang. Yeah, it's a short story, I think, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, you'd love it. You gotta check it out. Cool, Yeah, it's on our on our list, So I will, I will.

I definitely look forward to seeing that one because I actually I am just finishing reading finally The Three Body Problem, which which deals with some similar themes, you know, communication with an alien uh species and what the what what the what the the the ramifications of that communication might be. In the meantime, we should all go back and watch those Charlie Sheen movies. I didn't realize there's more than one. Should we watched The Wraith? Did that have Charlie Sheen

in it? I don't know, but that is but The Arrival, Wow, that movie had an effect on me. Yes, The Wraith, it does have Charlie Sheen and I just looked it up. Okay, he plays like a guy. I think he gets killed in a drag racing accident or something, and he comes back for it. Is it Soultaker? Essentially? It sounds very soul Taker. Soul Taker might be a remake of the Wraith sense like, we need to do some coverage on

both of these. This this reminds me, Actually, it's a good opportunity to point out casually that we've been doing some Facebook Live experiments where we've been showing movie trailers of movies related to the episodes that we're doing that week. So if you're on Facebook and you have time to watch Facebook Live, you can hear us talk. You guys did one about spiders, right, Giant spider movies. That was

the the second one. And we're a bit disrupted by various holiday occurrence is right now, but we'll hopefully get right back into the back of the regular routain with that. Yeah, Okay, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we will hear from our listener Jen. With the holidays almost here, you don't have time to go to the post office traffic parking. It's gonna be packed and everyone's gonna be mailing off gifts and packages, so you need to do what we do. You need to go to

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So don't wait. Go to stamps dot com right now before you do anything else, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in stuff that stamps dot com inter stuff and start mailing things. So our listener Jin got in touch with us over Facebook, and she's responding to our episode. The episode Robert and I did a while back about Undead Jenes, so brief

refresher from that episode. Some researchers made public a paper on a pre publication server claiming to show that some certain genes in the bodies of dead animals were still transcribe being RNA after the organisms died, meaning that you'd have whole body death right organismal death. The organism is dead, but on the molecular level, some life, or some version of life is still going on. The genes are still encoding for for RNA. And so Jen gets in touch

with us about this. She says, hey, guys, I love your podcast and finally had time to listen to last week's Undead Jeans episode. As a molecular biologist, I was really excited for an episode right in my wheelhouse. There were a couple of things that stuck out to me while listening that made me go hunt down the paper. I assume you left out some detail to keep things more accessible to amateur nerds versus those of us who do things for a living. But I noticed in the

paper that they have left some glaring holes. I'd even venture to guess that these holes could be the reason while we're reading the article from a depository depository and not a high impact journal. But I digress. The main point I wanted to make, while acknowledging that you, as the host, may already be aware, is that RNA is

a extremely sensitive to degradation. The notion that you can plunge a fish into an icy death pool and then just PLoP it back into some normal seventy ish degree fahrenheit tank and then come back days later and get good quality RNA is literally unbelievable to me. Have you ever had a fish go belly up and not noticed right away? I don't know if I remember fish going belly up? Do you guys keep fish tanks right now? But luckily, so far, so good, nothing's died. So I

had that experience as a kid. Yeah, Jen says, it gets stink stinky fast. Do you agree? Yeah, my dad collected like exotic fish in a tank. Yeah, she's right, all right. So she says, of course, the authors did not give any data about the RNA integrity, and she says a standard thing would be a one to tend scoring system. So she says, my guess is that what they are seeing as an upregulation, and that was their term of, you know, RNA transcription appearing to take place.

So my guess is what they're seeing is as an upregulation of new genes. May actually be transcripts that are for some reason fairly stable but in low abundance, so they're missed in freshly dead samples but seem to appear in longer dead samples only because more abundant transcripts have fallen away due to degradation. So does that make sense what she's saying, Like, there's all this RNA there, some

are not very common but fairly stable. When you test the organism right after death, you don't see a bunch of these. But then when all the other RNA decays and these fairly stable RNA molecules are left, that's what you have left. And it makes it look like more of this is being created after death. So it sounds

like more research is required. Yes, uh, And she says it could be that or some other factors she hasn't considered, but anyway, she says, I know that their claim is that these are truly new RNA molecules, so degradation is not a factor. But that is a huge leap for which they do not provide support. I just wanted to add a large dose of skepticism on top of the healthy bit we should always have. This concept is still fascinating, but the study is too flawed to add to the

conversation in a meaningful way. Anyway, Love what you guys are doing, and always look forward to what you have in store next. Have a great day, Jen, Thank you so much. Jen. This is the kind of email I love to get because it's from an actual expert who has some some direct knowledge of the kinds of research that we covered in the episode. So uh, those of you out there who heard that episode, please take Jen's considerations into into consideration. I wasn't when when thinking about

this research. I wasn't on that episode, but I I love UH messages like this because I think it's so important for us to critically evaluate the um the sources that we're bringing into the episodes that we do and and some people have asked us this before, and it's worth reminding we are not experts in these fields that we talk about, right. We we do the research, we immerse ourselves in it, and we try to bring it to you the listener in the best most accessible way possible.

But we're not always able to, for instance, like a judge whether or not the r N a methodology of this study. Right, we don't have the knowledge of a working microbiology exactly. Yeah, and so I really like to hear that kind of feedback. All right. We have another bit of listener mail here. This one comes to us from Kristen and she is responding to our episode on a Chinese practice of ghost marriages though the right of minghome that we discussed. Yeah, yeah, that was an interesting episode. Uh,

Chinese and also sometimes Japanese practice. We we got a lot of email about it. Uh. One in particular that I remember that's not on here was from a man in Taiwan letting us know that the red envelope practice that we mentioned, he was totally unaware of it, yet his wife, who was also Taiwanese, was aware of it. Yeah. We also heard from a few different people who are in the Church of Latter day Saints because we discussed the celestial marriage practice a little bit and its comparisons

to this, uh, this Chinese practice of ghost marriages. And that's where this particular listener comes in. She writes it and says, I really love the recent episode about the Chinese practice of ghost marriages. The entire time, I listener was absolutely fascinated. When I got to the end of the podcast and you mentioned, uh, the Church of Latter Day Say It's my eyes almost rolled out of my head.

I'm a recent transplant to Salt Lake City from Washington, d C. I'm Jewish, and it has been incredibly difficult to adjust a living in the city that is the seat of the letter the Church of Latter Day Saints.

So the uh the writer here Christian. She goes on to talk about how essentially by thinking about this uh, this Chinese model and then the and the some of the ideas wrapped up in UH in the in the right of man hun, it forced her to reconsider these practices that were much more immediate and some of the belief systems who were much more immediate um in utah uh. She she summarized and says, when I got to the part of the podcast discuss saying uh the LDS, I

initially rolled my eyes and scoffed. I began to write it off as quote, just some other weird things that Mormons do unquote and as the podcast ended, well it struck me. I sat there an hour, fascinated, open minded, and ultimately understood the purpose of ghost marriages and had a respect for the practice. But as soon as the word Mormon was mentioned, I became dismissive and closed minded, ready to let my own bias get in the way

of furthering my understanding. And I really analyzed, analyzed why that was an inappropriate reaction to have. How could I sit there and listen to the entire show with an open mind but justify being so dismissive at the end. I appreciate that you do a podcast that is all about information, and you do a great job of pushing your audience to open their minds and hearts to other

cultures and beliefs. I believe you guys initiated and epiphany in me I really needed to have and ultimately will help help me as I continue to learn about the ld S faith and enjoy living in this beautiful melting pot of a city. That again, for the great show and for leading by example on being open minded. High

fives Kristen. I really appreciate that. Um I especially I guess like something that's worth highlighting for the listeners is like, sometimes we approach these episodes and maybe have our own either misconceptions about cultures or we're just totally unfamiliar with them because their lifestyles outside of our territory. I guess it's the best way to put it. And for this episode in particular, I was really fortunate in that I have a friend who is who is Mormon, who's a

member of the Church of Latter day Saints. He really role modeled for me that there were a lot of misconceptions about that faith, and so when we approached this episode, I just thought of him in the back of my head the whole time, and and and how he would approach talking to me about it, and that was very helpful to me. So it's always it's always nice to

have people in your life like that. But then again, when we approach episodes like this another one we're gonna talk about later, we Robert and I did the episode on combat stems in the military. I don't have of any experience in the military, and it's it's completely outside of my uh lifestyle experience, but it was really nice to hear that people who were in the military and did have experiences using these drugs in the field. Uh, seemed to resonate with what we what we talked about

in that episode. Yes, so much of what we cover here, especially when it is a psychological or cultural in nature. You know, it's it's about it's about putting trying to put ourselves in another person's worldview and another person since experience and uh, and that can that can be challenging at times. But I also think that's that's one of the core mission statements of the show, right, But it's about finding ways to open ourselves up to alternate modes

of of sense experience and of end of reality perception. Um. You know, we're a science podcast, but uh, but but I feel like that's a core aspect. Ever, Like, if you know, we're called stuff to Blow the Mind, Blow your Mind, I feel like if I could change the title, it would probably be more like stuff to expand your mind or a slow motion explosion of the mind, rather than just sort of the the pop that the name implies.

I definitely agree. Um, And to that point. Actually, we received another email that's related to that episode about ghost marriages, and this time it was from somebody who belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. His name is Michael, and he says, hey, guys, I just finished listening to the episode on ghost marriages, and I found it fascinating. I've never heard of this practice before

your episode. I belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and I want to applaud your accurate description of celestial marriages. An interesting point about ceilings is that they are only performed in elds temples like the one near you. He means, us in Sandy Springs, Georgia. So for those of you who aren't from the Atlanta era, Sandy Springs is a suburb that's what north of the city by about thirty minutes, he says. A temple is a building that is not open for worship on Sunday.

It is only open during specific hours of the week. And we believe that ordinances may be performed for those who have died as well as the living. We believe that those who have died then have the opportunity to accept the ordinance performed on their behalf by those who

are alive. That is a reason that our church is big on doing family history and provide services such as He lists a website here called family search dot org in order to learn about our ancestors and perform ordinances for all who did not have an opportunity to perform them in this life. It's an amazing topic. I would be happy to answer any questions that you have about this practice. I enjoy the show. Thank you for the information that you are able to beam to my mind

as I commute to and from work. If only we could literally use beams, well, we might get there soon. I don't know. It's some new Uh. Can we use em drives? Now that that's been announced, can we start beaming information to people's brains with them drives? Speaking of being critical of research, that's the thing that I ever end up talking about that. I'll be very curious to

say what skeptical scientists say in response. So, now that the md I have paper has been published, Yeah, well, I just wanted to thank Michael um I think for both Robert and I going into that. I mean, we researched that practice, but certainly we had not experienced it before, so we were doing our best to try to represent it. And it's encouraging to hear that we we didn't offend anybody. Yeah, alright, we're gonna take a second break, and when we come back,

we're going to dive into more listener mail riches. Brought to us, of course by Carney. Hi. I'm Lauren Vogelbauma, host of the new House to works Now podcast. Every week, I'll be bringing you three stories from our team about the weird and wondrous developments we've seen in science, technology, and culture. Fresh episodes will be out every Monday on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, and everywhere else that fine podcasts are found. Carney,

what have you got for us next? Oh? Well, it looks like we are getting some of the massive mail bag that we got in response to the episode Robert and I did on Fire. Oh yes, yes, World before Fire. So Robert and I did a couple of episodes on Fire about how sort of the conditions on Earth, the geological conditions and atmospheric conditions that make Earth the fire planet and as far as we know, uniquely the fire planet. When you guys were researching, did you only listen to

Ngay Momstein's Fire and Ice. I don't know what you're talking about, but just a continuous loop of of what Metallica's fight fire with nice? Nice? Okay, that's better. Oh man, I remember that one. You know, my favorite Metallica song back in the day was four Horsemen. Yeah we're really and yeah I love Master Ofpuppets. I don't know where

we're going with this, but okay, okay, uh yeah. So anyway, we we heard from several people, and I'm gonna try to get a few messages about this couple of episodes because we got a ton. But we heard from Julian one who said, hey, there, Robert and Joe might ears just had the awesome pleasure of being completely enveloped and soothed by your latest episode. That's embarrassing but also doing some um some SMR. I hope not. But okay, So Julian says the episode was a world without fire. Uh

please excuse my strange intro. Somewhere in this episode you mentioned that wildfires can occur outside of hot, dry climates like the jungle. I figured i'd write in and fill you in on a recent fire we had here. I live in Belize in Central America, and last year we had a hurricane passed just south of us. The jungles here are too lush in the atmosphere too humid to have a wildfire from an unchecked camp fire or spark. However, when this hurricane passed over, it did some damage to

the vast jungles. Although never strong enough to completely knock down everything, hurricanes do damage to the canopy, breaking off the tops of trees and high branches and leaving a blanket of dead foliage on the canopy. And this is what happened last year. After several weeks, the dead foliage dried, and it is believed that a lightning strike ignited this,

causing a forest fire on top of the jungle. A strange and scary event, indeed, but it does happen, and this sort of connects to I definitely didn't see it in the jungles, but we talked about the ideas of crown fires, right, the fires that become very hot and

spread from the tops of trees. Picking up with Julian's email, another thought that came to my mind during this episode came after you guys mentioned how a civilization or life form would ever be able to advance without fire for cooking, smelting, metal works, etcetera. I immediately thought to myself, we have fire to thank for our advancement as a species. But

is there an element? Is there a substance or a certain reaction like fire that another species on another planet has used and thanked for its advancements that we have yet to discover or may never discover at all due to differing planetary and atmospheric conditions. Uh. This is sort of one of the questions we talked out, and so Julian says, really wish I could have gotten this to you in time for your second episode on the topic.

Thanks for the great podcast you guys do. I know you must hear this plenty, but I have to mention it as well. You guys do amazing work. It's always a joy listening to you. And also, Julian ads that we must pass on the praise to Christian. Oh that's thank you, Julian. I hope that my voice also soothes Julian,

you are you are incredibly soothing. I try. I was just going to mention in relation to this, uh, this letter that we here in Georgia have been what is the terminology that they're using, like red alert or we've had smoke conditions. So just last week we were in Atlanta, the city was enveloped in smoke. Yeah, you couldn't even really walk outside. It was like a beautiful day, dude. That was the thing. I was gonna work on my front porch. But you go outside and it's just breathing

in this yeah awful fume. Yeah yeah. And uh and this apparently came from fires up in northern Georgia. There were forest fires because it's been so dry, so very very much related to what he was talking about in Belize. It sounds like, uh, well different there because it's not naturally dry there, but that the dead foliage can become dry if it gets all ripped off of the trees due to a hurricane. So quick personal aside on this.

Uh So, they've been telling us here in Georgia that we should be, you know, concerned about the possibility of fires just starting in like your yard or something like that. It's not the weekend to have a bonfire. I have. Um, there's a house that's empty behind me. You guys know this. I think I've told you, and there's been some people squatting in it. Just the other night they started a

bonfire in the backyard of this house. And I was really worried, like I don't want to rat out on these folks, you know, like they it's cold out, they need a place to stay. But at the same time, I also don't want them to start a fire that burns the neighborhood down. I mean, put that it, put it in a barrel. That's why we have barrels, right, steel drum. Yeah, yeah, but this is like a like concern for a lot of people in the area right now. Yeah, Okay, Like I said, we've got a bunch of email about

the fire episodes because we asked. We asked the listeners, like, could you think of another chemical reaction alternative to fire that could take place on one of these worlds where fire is not permitted? That pops into my mind is plasma? Did you guys talk about that at all? Well? Plasmas? What do you mean? I mean, like, plasma is a phase of matter. But how would you create um? Couldn't you use plasma for some of the same things that you use fire for? How would you create it? That's

the problem. Yeah, But I guess you'd have to imagine an alien civilization where they have access to it, And that's the that's the one of the problems is that increasingly you have to employ a rather robust imagination factor to fill in the gaps, uh, to make up for the lack of fire. But anyway, we postulated that the idea. We don't know that it's true, but we said, you know, it could be that you can't have advanced civilization in this universe without a planet that allows for fire. And

we talked about one paper where a guy makes this case. Um, and so one listener got in touch with us. Our listener named Tapan got in touch with us to say that essentially this idea that you might need fire as a necessary pre requisite to advance technology. And the main idea we had there is that you can't create metal tools without fire as far as we know. Uh. Tapan says,

we essentially should be more open minded. So I so I sent to Pan a list of modern technologies and was like, okay, well, I want to see your imagination. How could you come up with these things without fire or metal tools? And to Pan's responses were interesting to me. So for instant long distance communication, the suggestion was sound travels through all solids, not just metal. So I'm trying to imagine like wooden or stone telephone wires. I don't know,

but maybe okay. But then I said, what about rapid land transportation? Japan says, wouldn't spring catapults with landing pair shoots like woven out of natural materials? Okay? I was like, okay, what about video recording and playback? That's got you gotta have metal tools for that, right Uh? And to Pan suggests a record movement using a fast solidifying semi solid Oh. Okay,

so like gel type materials. Maybe maybe so the the if you're recording, say a roadrunner running across the street, you would have to have it run through the gel and then you would have like this gel material I don't know what we're using, vast would only playback if you were within proximity of the gel. Okay. So uh. For aviation, the suggestion was, of course a hang glider, but of course a hang glider doesn't gain altitude on its own. Um. For optics and astronomy, to Pan suggested,

I thought this was smart water lenses. That's actually I could see that being a possibility. Um maybe maybe who knows. For radio depends suggest loudspeakers, I don't know about that one. Uh. For computers, we get the suggestion of a difference engine built with wood, which you could build. I guess the question there would just be size, Like you could build a giant wooden structure that works to essentially be a

binary difference engine computer. I think to do that, you know, to make even a simple computer, you might need a structure the size of a state or something. I mean, it would be gigantic. In the three body problem, it's it's brought up at one point that you could you could have a computer where it's basically individuals setting around waving flags. Yeah, I mean, any any anything you can use in nature to create a consequential series of on

off switches could be turned into a computer. Giant Turing machine. Yeah, it's just gonna be so big. You know the thing about semiconductors, as you can pack them into this tiny space. Uh. And then of course with district needed power grids, I was like, how would you get that? Well, Japan reminds me any container with electrolyte will transmit electrons, So maybe you could have like a salt water pipe based power grid or something like Well, this came up in our

Frankenstein episode to talking about voltaic batteries. Yeah, um huh, yeah, that's interesting. Uh So anyway, I I'm not buying it yet. I'm not I'm not convinced that you can get to advance technologies without fire and metal tools. But but I really really admire the imagination in these responses. I think they're very smart, even if maybe implausible. Well, this is how we get cool movies like Arrival, right, is like

these thought experiments. All right, So this next one comes to us from Chris, who works at the JPL for NASA, and this is related to our episode about the Osiris REX mission that recently launched. Chris says, Hi, gentlemen, while listening to your recent episode on the Ossiris REX mission, I was thrilled to hear you mentioned the three sites gold Stone, Canberra, and Madrid. I know I'm pronouncing Canberra around because we got got emails about that. In the

fire episode, I mentioned Canbra. Is that Yeah, it's Canbra, Canbra all right, sorry, but I pronounced it Canberra Okay. That will be receiving signals and data. These three sites make up the Deep Space Network d s N, which is a system of thirteen antenna's managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The cool thing about the DSN is that every spacecraft American or otherwise otherwise further away than the

Moon talks to the Earth through these antennas. Voyager phones home, it's calling the d s N. Juno sends a picture through the d s N. The d s N is one of NASA's oldest continuous programs, but it doesn't get a lot of love because it's like the cup holder in your car. You're so used to it being there, you don't really notice it unless it stops working. But really it's fascinating and exciting, both for its storied history they supported the Apollo program and it's importance to modern

day space exploration. I do have one correction to make. You said that the antenna can talk to spacecraft up to the size of a pizza box box. That fact, TOID is actually as small as a pizza box, and it's meant to illustrate how powerful and precisest equipment is. Imagine aiming at something that small just one mile away, let alone a billion. Our DSN operators do that twenty four hours a day, three d and sixty five days

a year. Anyways, thanks for the fantastic podcast for making me a little smarter every day and for mentioning one of my favorite NASA projects. I would love to hear a future podcast on the DSN itself, because I think there's lots of good material there, or even the history of the Jet Propulsion Lab, which is, in my humble opinion, the coolest NASA center. Keep up the great work. Is there really a coolest NASA center? So all cool? In my heart? They do yeah, and and we at how

stuff works. Just have a general fondness I think for NASA and and love doing stories related to it. I will say Robert and I are looking into doing an episode related to the history of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory because we're talking about doing an episode on Jack Parsons, who was instrumental in starting the JPL and coincidentally thought himself to be a magician occultist. Have you not heard

of Jack Parsons? No, I don't know anything about this. Yeah, this is awesome, a lot of fun uh in there, we're we're talking about to put it together, right. So he was interested in getting in touch with the outer horrors through space exploration. So I don't know if he and he had a really interesting history parallel to l

Ron Hubbard. Yeah, I guess the question we're sort of asking is, at this point, do we want to do an episode just on Jack Parsons, his science and his uh extra scientific beliefs, or is it something in which he is a part if we're like looking at more of connections between modern scientific investigations and sort of new age ideas. So we're still figuring that one out if

you're interested in the meantime. Once upon a time, when I first started at How Stuff Works, I think my first video I ever did here for our Stuff of Genius channel was all about Jack Parsons. So I did a little four minute Jack Parsons video. I'm sure if

you google Stuff of Genius Jack Parsons that should come up, alright. So, in discussing our episode on combat Stems combat steems better Warriors through Chemistry, we discussed how you know, so often in our video games there's all this horrific violence, military combat going on, and to them, for the most part,

you don't have to deal with the psychological effects. Uh. You know, sometimes, like in a game like x COM, you can have characters that end up panicking and they run off or they there's a friendly fire incidents something like that, but for the most part it's easily dealt with. So we reached out to all of our gamer listeners and said, hey, do you have any examples of games that actually take PTSD into account in any way, shape or form, and we heard back from some people. So

this one came to us from Matt listener. Matt writes and it says, Hi, Robert and Christian love the podcast. It keeps me company and informed on the way to work on your combat STEMS episode. You wondered if there are video games, specifically shooters to deal with PTSD. I'm not sure about shooters, but there is an excellent game called Darkest Dungeon where the toll the that the horrors of adventuring take on your mind is just as dangerous as the monsters. Based on discussions on past episodes, I

feel this game is right up your alley. Picture a side scrolling dungeon crawl said in a love crafty in Hamlet and drawn in the style of the hell Boy comics. Stress comes into play during each mission and between missions, your characters developed quirks, agrophobia, I fear of the dark, fear of blood, holy ravings that need to be addressed.

You keep a stable of about fifteen adventures on hand, but if you run out of gold for treatments, sometimes you find you've got to send in a group of paranoid, abusive drunks, send them into a dungeon and hope for the best. Enjoy and keep up the awesome work. Matt in Toronto And uh, yeah this. I have not played this, but I had to look it up after receive the email, and it came out from It was published by Red Hook Studios and it looks like it's available for Windows, H, Linux, UM,

PlayStation four and PlayStation Vita. If anyone out there has those systems I do not. Yeah. And also in relation to that, we received I would say a good dozen emails of people recommending a game to us called spec Ops the line, which apparently also incorporates in some way or another dealing with PTSD in battle. But almost all of our listeners who recommended this to us said that it's like a it's a really important twist as part of the games story, so they didn't want to reveal

to us how it played into it. They all recommended the game entirely they said. They said that it was really great, So, yeah, that maybe something that I'll looked to play down the lip. Yeah, I looked this one up. It came out, and it sounds like it was probably maybe a little ahead of its time, or you know, maybe it's it's it's trying to make So what is it a shooter? It is. It is a shooter. It's a third person shooter and it was developed by Yeager

Development for two K games. Uh to Interact make a Battle Born and u uh Borderlands. Yeah, so it it sounds to me from materials I was looking at about it and I have not played it that yeah, that it was just maybe a little to advance for what people really want to I guess people wanted the escapist call of duty and shoot everything without consequences kind of game point play, and this was developing something a little more deeper and maybe maybe a little less fun in

the process. Well that was what we were asking for. I don't know about the less fun part, but what I was saying in the episode was I would think it would be a more immersive storyline and so and it it definitely sounds like from everybody who's played this that they think so, so it sounds like it's worth

checking out. Yeah, you guys might have mentioned this in the episode, but it does certainly make me think that exactly that concept runs counter to what I think a lot of people are trying to get out of a video game experience. I mean, I think a lot of people are like they want a rush without actually having

to experience any lasting trauma or anything. It's kind of the same way as like a horror movie or a roller coaster or something like that, something to to, you know, give you adrenaline, focus and get the get the high, get the experience, get the relaxation benefits you get out of that, but without actually having to do anything dangerous or scary. It's funny that you mentioned this because I was thinking about the episode that you guys did on Tetris. Yeah,

that came up. Yeah, And and uh, I've been uh lately playing a lot of the shooter game Destiny. I don't know if you guys have played this before. Uh no, No, it's like an mm O slash first person shooter. This is the one whatever. It has like weird faceless film its yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, uh and I have found that even though I'm kind of bored with the game itself in the storyline, that I'm just repetitively playing it, almost like I would play like a puzzle game like

Tetris solely just to kind of calm down. Like I'll play it for like thirty or forty minutes. It's totally mindless. I don't really get anything, Like, I don't even get like any adrenaline high out of it. It's just kind of like put the bullets in the heads, it's flow. Yeah, that's the whole thing with with Tetris. I mean, suppose

we talked about this in our episode. Is creating a state of a task that's um that's just challenging enough to keep you engaged, but also easy enough that it never becomes frustratingly simplified reality too one with definite definite goals, definite limits, clear clear goals, clear achievable goals that you can just essentially a set of parameters where you can just continually achieve success over and over without it becoming

too easy to be boring. Yeah, and certainly, as we discussed in those episodes, Tetris is a game that never becomes too easy and inevitably becomes too hard. I think that that's probably what I think. Bungee are the developers of this game, and that's kind of how they've figured out to keep you addicted to it, you know what I mean. It's like there's always some like next stage to get to with it, and there's not too much

thinking involved. The thing that's weird to me is like it you know, we talked about this in the Combat Stems episode that like you and I, mainly if we're playing shooters, we don't we like them to be fantastic or sci fi, and this is like very sci fi aliens people don't really die that can reincarnate as like digital forms of their bodies. But like there's something inherently weird about like calming down while just like blowing away like fifty year sixty aliens. You know, I don't know

about you, guys. I I fail to see the appeal of these military shooter again. I know they're very popular, but I cannot see what's all that fun. A lot of people love them. My brother really likes playing them, but like we said in the episode, for for me personally has to be some kind of uh fantastic element involved in it for me to not feel like I'm

just replicating like horrific real world violence. Yeah, I do have to say that I haven't played one in a while, but I used used to really enjoy playing World War two aviation simulators with my dad. Uh And but I wonder if that has more to do with your love of planes. I think so, Well, the thing is too they're the planes, and then there's that distance from the human reality because it's ultimately it was ultimately like these

breathtaking digital models of planes interacting with each other. And yes, it's representing encounters that would end we end in human deaths and casualties and sometimes bombing incidents. But but still there was a there was a it was a little more removed. Um that being said, I know we have some listeners out there who play an early end of these military stimulation games, So I would I would love

to hear you guys. I don't want to, you know, just completely judge you guys, and you're the games you're into. I'd love to hear your feedback on it and how you think about it. There's got to be something to it that that I feel like I'm missing because they're so incredibly popular. But also related to that episode, we got a letter from Joseph and he has personal experience in the military and wanted to weigh in on what we talked about with combat stimulants and other drugs in

the military. He says, I'm writing in response to your questions posed at the end of Combat Stems is a four year veteran of the Marine Corps. I found it extremely interesting. First off, I'd like to say that I loved your fallout references and that you approached the subject of PTSD, killing, etcetera very well and I think everyone will be happy with it. My experience with drugs in the military, specifically the Marine Corps, is one of deep involvement in at every marine I ever knew was part

of it. Drugs are in the culture. We promote heavy drinking and even heavier use of stimulants. One drug you didn't cover was nicotine, which I think has an impact second only to caffeine. That's a really good point. I didn't even think about that during the episode. Possibly a third of all Marines I ever met smoked or dipped, and during deployments or training operations that grew to easily half and not without good reason. Deployments and training operations

are exhausting. Hell, even normal days in state side are exhausting. An average day would begin at oh five hundred, waking up than exercising with the platoon at oh six hundred. After that we would work until often as late as seventeen thirty, but it could go longer. That's roughly a twelve hour day, and doing that five days a week is exhausting to cope with. Even that, Caffeine is impossible

to avoid, and nicotine is hard to say no to. Hell, I dare to say I owe my life to Copenhagen twenty four hours, no sleep, driving thirty five miles per hour on a desert road, with more than a little more than candlelight, no exaggeration to see the vehicle in front of me. It's impossible without nicotine and caffeine. A common breakfast among the Marines was something called an m R E, a cigarette and a can of Monster. Of course, if you could get it, which I could, Adderall was

a godsend. We did talk about Adderall in that episode. I don't know if it's clear from the message, but does that mean does that mean sanctioned by the military authorities or illicit use of adderall. So we talked about this in the episode. It depends. I think for pilots it may be sanctioned, but adderall for marines I don't think would be right. It's I think what you're encountering here is is likely similar to what you're encountering in so many lines of work that are not even military based.

Is that you have you know, individuals within these uh these lines of work that have access to it, and then that access is shared, and ultimately you're talking about a brain boosting power up that that improves focus, that improves energy. Uh yeah, it's gonna get used. Uh yeah. And so maybe like a culture of permission, even if it's not explicitly on the situation. Yeah. Um. And going back to what he says, he says with that with adderall, one could easily work eighteen hours days, pass out and

keep going. Personally, I could keep this up for a week before I began to feel tired. Now I was no pilot, he says, just a dumb guy. You don't sound like a dumb guy from this message, man, But uppers are the savior of the modern military. Painkillers are also very commonplace. There's a running joke that the longer you're in the more pain killers you take in the morning. Concerning steroids, I know a few guys who were on them, but it wasn't to make them better killers. They just

like to look big. Did it help in fights, absolutely, but it wasn't the purpose because they were illegal under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I didn't partake, but if I could have legally, I definitely would have, because not being extremely strong is not something your buddies take well. Okay, so Joe a stuff. Actually there's a lot more to his letter here, but I don't think we have time for it in this episode to read the whole thing. Suffice to say, he provides us a look at a

day in the life of a marine. He also talks about PTSD and and uh. He liked our reference to minimaxing again video game terminology in terms of being in service. I also want to throw in here that we received some feedback from few listeners who pointed out some World

War Two era uses of meth amphetamine. In particular, I think Panza's chocolade came up, as well as a stucco tabletin, and those were on the German side of Yeah, and there, but there are some other examples from World War Two as well, So that's something we might come back and look at in more detail at some point. Uh really look at sort of the the the World War chemical rise of methamphetamines. It might also be interesting to look

at drugs at the top of the Nazi chain. I know there's a lot of interesting stuff now about about like Hitler and top Nazi commander is in their and their drug use habits. Yeah, yeah, Herman Goring pills and uh, I seem to recall talk of intravenous methem fetamine used by Adolf Hitler. Is that right? I I can't vow for the better remember seeing some speculation on that at

least worth revisiting in the future. Okay, we got one more for you, and it is one coming in from our listener Stephanie, in response to the episode we did way back, Christian and I did a two parter about the failings of forensic science. Yeah, a lot of people wrote into us and actually asked for more, So maybe that's something will revisit in the future. But if you

recall that was a while ago. The basic idea was that um that there is a lot of research now indicating that some of the major uses of forensic science in the justice system in the United States have been not so great that sometimes in valid methodologies. Yeah, like some methods used to produce evidence that supposedly scientifically solid evidence to defend people or convict people is actually just based on you know, mythology of the culture of the

fire investigator or something like that. So there's a bunch of stuff like that, and that's what we talked about in the episode. There's a bunch more we could have talked about, but anyway, here's where Stephanie comes in. She says, Hi, Fellas, I'm catching up on your recent podcasts, and the ones regarding forensic failings caught my attention. I'm an experimental psychologist and I graduated from the University of Wyoming with an

emphasis in psychology and law. Needless to say, it is a fascinating and fruitful area of research, some of which focused specifically on the failures of eye witness memory. And we did mention that in the episode. How bad eye witness memory is, She says, since you mentioned the Innocence Project and that's a uh an advocacy group that we

mentioned in the episode. She says, since you mentioned the Innocence Project, I'm sure you already know that over seventy of their exonorees were originally incriminated using eyewitness test money. If you haven't already, I recommend reading quote Picking Cotton by Jennifer Thompson, a rape victim who misidentified her attacker and Ronald Cotton, the man she misidentified and who spent

roughly eleven years in prison while innocent. To be fair, there are some procedures that may assist in lowering systemic causes of misidentification. Some of these, and again the Innocence Project, has a website containing great information, include the following lineups. Selecting fillers for lineups that actually match the description of the eye witness. There are cases where people of different races were used as fillers, which only serve to highlight

the suspect. Also, having the lineup administered by someone who do who does not know who the suspect is as having verbal and nonverbal clues, may lead the eyewitness to an individual. The instructions given during a lineup are also crucial and eye witness her victim, as in the case of Jennifer Thompson, is under a great deal of pressure

to identify the attacker. Saying something as simple as the perpetrator may not be in the lineup can help relieve that pressure and give the eye witness permission to not select someone. The Innocence Project also suggests getting confident statements from the eye witnesses having him her rate his or her level of confidence in the selection of the individual from the lineup. However, research indicates that the confidence one

feels does not always positively correlate with accuracy. This holds up from a lot of stuff I've read where people will sometimes misidentify someone in eye witness testimony and say, yep, that was him, I know it. And also we've done brain stuff episodes on how confident people think they are about things, and they often report themselves as feeling very confident in things when they have the least amount of

expertise or actual confidence participating those I forget. There's a terminology for are you talking about the dunning Kruger Effe's dunning cruer. Yeah, that has to do with like, the lower your level of skill in a particular task is the higher you rate your skill I could see your relation here. Possibly you don't know how little you know about how to do it, but anyway, uh So, continuing

with Stephanie's email, she also mentions photographs. Photographic lineups, she says should also follow the same suggested procedure as in person lineups. Additionally, however, the pictures should be shown consecutively rather than concurrently as we often see on TV. This reduces the chance that the eyewitness will make a relative judgment, meaning one individual looks the most like the perpetrator, so

that must be the guy. As an aside, my dissertation, which I hope to publish soon, was on the accuracy or inaccuracy as I found, of memory in the elderly. It was formatted after Steve Chechi's famous mouse trap study in response to the daycare scandals of the nineteen eighties, in which he asked children simple questions, some of which were implausible. Over the course of many weeks, he found that children would start to form memories of the events

specified in the questions. Similarly, I found that after only a few weeks of asking those over the age of sixty five similar questions, I had them telling me their memories of events that did not actually happen to them, e g. They were struck by lightning while riding a bike in a rainstorm. So this ties into the Satanic Panic episodes that we did well back. But both that and our episodes where we've been recently talking about how memories are formed and how we're every time we're recalling

a memory, we're rewriting that memory. I also have read separately about totally different research along these lines, where the experiments where if you can just get people to say they did something, over time, they will start to remember having actually done it. So you get some students to say, like, just read these prepared statements, you know, I have fallen in love with a dictionary. Um, And then later you ask them like do you remember falling in love with

the dictionary? And they'll be like, yeah, yeah, that I guess that did happen. It's heartbreaking. Did you guys watch Making a Murderer? Yes? No I didn't. I don't want to say anything, but it's related to that. Well. Yeah, so anyway that the whole thing is Yet again, this comes up over and over on the show. Our memories are just not as good as we think they are.

We're really really prone to to false memory implantation and recall. Um. But anyway, so Stephanie continues evidence that protocols must be put in place to prevent, to the best of our abilities, faulty eyewitness identification. I could go on. There are many suggestions, including areas such as interviews and even protecting eye witnesses from the suspecting court. I'd be happy to assist should you want to do an episode on eyewitness memory. Keep

up the good work. So thank you, Stephanie. UH and that is that was an awesome message. Yeah, this is certainly a topic that we're interested in, and I think that there's going to be more and more research coming out in contemporary academic glitter nature. That's finding newer and better ways to do forensic science, but also that's evaluating the methodologies that are currently in place. Sure, hopefully we'll

return to it in the future. All right, Well, you know, I don't want to cause any alarm here, but Carney appears to have finished his self virus scan. He appears to have rebooted and may have rebooted in uh in combat mode, So we might need to clear out of here. What are these pop ups saying we have to import a credit card number before we can properly load the operating system. Who. I wouldn't argue with him right now though, better better pull out to either of you have some

jet that I can take. Um, I think Carney has some jet, but I don't know if you want him to administer it. I don't know, Psycho Jetta. All right, Hey, if you want to check out the episodes that we talked about here, look up old episodes, new episodes, etcetera. Head on over to stuff of All your Mind dot com. That is the mothership. That's where you'll find all the podcast episodes we've evercord it. You will find videos, you'll find blog posts, and you will find links out to

our varied social media accounts. Yeah. In fact, those social media accounts are where some of these letters that we read today come from. So if you want to reach out to us on those that's your uh, your your poison. Reach out to us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler or I don't know. It would be tough to write us a long letter on Instagram, but you can give it a try. Uh. We are available on all those platforms as Blow the Mind, And if you want to get in touch with us

directly by email. As always, you can hit us directly. I just said directly, you can email us. That blow the mind. At how stuff Works on dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com? Many is jointed or part prop