What's the largest snake that has ever existed?

Snake and Jungle Book trying to eat mowgli. Um, you can't help it be fascinated with the seductive power of of any kind of serpent, right, and then the possibility they can swallow you whole and it and just how inhuman the creature is, no arms or legs, just slithering around. That's funny you bring up a jungle Book because related Ricky, Ticky, Tavi, Nag and nagaina some of my favorites in action there, but also the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad from Kill Bill

Volumes One and two. Oh yes, which was more like the human embodiment of snakes. Yeah, but yeah, certainly just the symbolic power of snakes throughout human history can't be denied. But because they end up representing so much, you have, like your cosmic world serpents in so many different cultures, the idea that there's some gigantic primal snake that plays

into the creation and or destruction of the world. Yeah, exactly, Yeah, which we we did an entire episode on which I'll include a link to that on the landing page for this episode. But but even in popular culture, um, modern pop culture, we see giant snakes continue to pop up. We we can't help but be fascinated by the uh you know, the struggle between stay Conan the Barbarian and a giant snake in in Bulsa Dooms Dungeon. That was certainly when I was enjoyed watching up. That's only one

I always enjoyed watching as I was growing up. Um Or then, of course there's Anaconda in which digested John Voight falls out of the monster serpent. There's also Beetlejuice. Oh, yes, with the the sand worming creatures. Well, actually Michael Keaton turns into a snake, giant snake on the banister. But yes, at the end of the movie or near the end,

he's consumed by the sandform. And I think Freddy Crueger also turned into it like a big snake in eight one of the victims in three or four I can't remember, dream Warriors maybe. And in terms of mythology too, you'll see that Groutslan is an Afrikaans word meaning great snake. And by the way, this is from the Mental philost article eleven Legendary Monsters of Africa and the monster of that name grouts Lang lives in a cave called the

Wonder Hole and the area of South Africa. And the story is that the original broots groots Long was found to be too powerful, so the gods subdivided the animal into two species, the elephant in the snake. Yeah, however, Groups Long or two escaped in we'd have to have two, right, and uh, they reproduced. So that's the idea of this, and that this monster could grow up to sixty feet long. And supposedly it's cave is full of diamonds, but nobody

knows for sure because Groups Long is guarding it. Yeah, who's gonna the only way you're gonna wind up in that cave? I guess you. You pass through the other side of the snake. Well, And what I love about this is that there's this idea that I have on my mind, this romantic notion of back in the day, everybody's sitting around the fire and talking about groots long, this giant snake growing to sixty feet long, indeed so tall, tales of of of what snakes can consist of and

how big they can get. Yeah, getting to the heart of our question today. Yeah, indeed, what is the largest snake that has ever existed? So obviously, by the way we phrase this question, they are kind of two areas where going to explore. The first question being what's the largest snake alive today, which, as you'll explore, is a little more complicated above a question than you might think. And then what is the largest snake that has ever lived?

Taking into an account the the fossil record and what we know about large serpents in prehistoric times. And you know, what do you mean by large? Do you mean weight or a link? That's right? So, uh, to that meet this criteria, which you could call. The largest snakes in the world presently living are the reticulated python and the

green anaconda. And in both the cases we are definitely talking about the females of the species, because the females are larger in both the reticulated python and the green anaconda. Now it's worth noting that on March six of this year, the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the reticulated python and the green anaconda as two of four injury US Wildlife pieces and will prohibit import of the snakes into the US and its territories, as well as transport across

state lines. Uh this is because not only are these these two snakes some of the largest living snakes, they are also traded commercially as pets. And what that means is that sometimes these really powerful snakes have been intentionally

released into the wild, while others will escape enclosures. And so if you look at Florida, for instance, where you've seen the Burmese python taking over parts of Florida, you'll see that the native wildlife is really at risk because these snakes, their sides and their strength they make they make them apex predators in the environments that they're already

indigenous too. But put them in one where there are lesser predators around, you can see how they would run rampant and to just give you an idea of the kind of strength that they're sporting. Here, I mean to turn to this account by Todd Mexico, writing for an multiversity dot Org, he says, um, with reticulated pythons, if the antlers, because they go after unculates, are small enough,

they are simply ingested and digested. However, if the antlers are too large on the animals trying to take down, the snake can actually break them back to lie alongside

the body and then consume them. Um. Then he says that sometimes, very rarely, that the snake that particulated python actually swallows the hind quarters and then when it works its way to the antlers, it stops and it allows its digestive acids to break down the animals flesh until the antlers actually become weak and drop off, essentially decapitating the creature with your own digestive fluids. I love that this is such a wonderful, grotesque ou thing that I mean,

that's the reason. Uh, you know, you can't help but but love these giant serpents, you know, particularly the constrictors. Yeah, it's grizzly stuff, and and yes you're attracted, but also repulsed by them. Yeah, I'm even when you go to the pet store, it's like you don't really want to see the cute little mouse eaten by the snake, but you can't look away, and yet you probably don't look away. All right, So let's uh, let's look at these two

species and a little more detail. Uh. First, we have the Asian reticulated python, Python reticulatis, so called for the geometric color pattern on its body. They thrive and steamy tropical rainforest throughout Southeast Asia. Uh. They need water, and they need tropical environments with temperatures in the range of eight degrees fahrenheit, so they're like it hot. Uh. They're non social, solitary creatures. They ambush their prey frequently waiting

in trees. And that's gonna be key when we start talking about their their their length and weight, because obviously the creature has to crawl up into the into the trees. It's not gonna be just super heavy. It has to have a certain amount of lightness on its inside. They tend to feed on birds and mammals, and as far as the mammals go, the smaller ones, the younger ones are gonna eat mostly rats, but as they grow, and they grow throughout their life, they're gonna shift to larger mammals,

so porcupines, monkeys, wild pigs, mouse, deer uh. And Now, like all reptiles, they have a low metabolic rate, which allows them to go without food for a long period of time. So it's not a situation where they're having to eat a monkey every day, but they score a monkey every once in a while. They're good. Right. Um. Again, the females grow the largest, and they usually lay twenty

five to eighty or so eggs. Uh. And they also they they provide a certain amount of care and protection for the eggs until they hatch, and then once they hatch, there on their own. Now, as far as how big these uh, these these gals get. Field measurements in survey averaged a little under twelve feet or three point two meters in the jungles of southern Sumatra, maxing out at just shy of twenty eight six point one. Um. You'll find less reputable accounts they hit the thirty three and

forty mark, but we'll get to those shortly. For the most part, however, you're going to find the longer reported measurements with the reticulated Now in the other corner here of the ring, we have unixte miranus, that is the green anaconda, and though it's not as long as reticulated python, it is the uncontested heavyweight champion of the snake world

according to the National Zoo. In captivity, they can grow to twenty nine ft long, they can weigh more than five fifty pounds, and they can have a diameter of more than twelve inches. Now, most documented instances of anaconda's weights are more in the two hundred to four hundred range and grow to about twenty feet in length. So well, we can say that this long and fifty is at

the outer limits of its morphology. Now they're a member of the Boa family and they can be found in swamps, marshes and slow moving streams in Trinidad, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, northern Bolivia, northeastern Peru, and French Guiana. And no surprise here.

The anaconda is a great swimmer, super stealthy in the water, and part of that is because its weight is being held up by the buoyancy of the water, right which it allows it to go much faster and it can remain underwater for up to ten minutes at a time. So anacondas like crocodiles, have eyes and nostrils that are designed to poke above the surface of the water, and that really helps them to strike very quickly and efficiently.

So on land they're not so elegant and stealthy, but they can sidewine and they use these large j shaped coils to pull themselves along, which I think really speaks to how incredibly muscular they are. Now they are non venomous constrictors. They coil those those muscular bodies around captured

prey and they squeeze until the animals phyxiates. They can unhinge their jaws to stretch their mouths around the prey, eating the carcass whole, and they have four rows of backwards facing teeth on their upper jaws to help grab

prey really fastened and swallow it whole. They dine on wild pigs, dear birds, turtles, caymans, even jaguars, and on occasion, white tailed deer, which can grow to be about a hundred and fifty pounds or more in the wild, which makes you go, oh, a hundred fifty pounds, and that that's kind of on par with humans, So would they go after a human? And despite the premise of the show Eating Alive, in which naturalist Paul Rosalie offers himself to be swallowed whole by an anaconda, there are no

verified reports of anaconda's ingesting a human being. Yeah. I mean, it's just it's gonna be a harder kill to make, write, a harder ambush to pull off. And are there a lot of humans around in their immediate environment? Um? Now, when it comes to maximum sizes for both of these species, you might think it would be easy to just find a good ballpark figure about how big these these these gals can get. Uh. But but you'd be wrong. And I found this out when I was putting together an

article for for How Stuff Works. Um It. It quickly becomes a game of like whose figures do you trust? And whose whose figures are they trusting? Um And if you want to really thorough breakdown of the different accounts of maximum size of both the reticulated python and the green anaconda, UM, I would recommend you check out John C. Murphy's website on record snake Sizes on clue to link

to that on the page for this episode. UM, because you basically, when it comes to these these reports of giant snakes, which themselves are rare occurrences in remote locations, often tended to by untrained individuals, you see local hearsay at times, you see second and third hand accounts. You see mere sightings where someone just saw the snake and they're giving you an estimation on how long they think

it was. Um. Certainly just exaggerated accounts, just sort of like the I cotta fish this big situation, and it grows with the telling right questionable measurement techniques. In some cases, they'll be questions about, well did you measure it from you know, the from snout to tail or are you dealing with the with the decapitated body? Is this the hide and it is the hide? Are you stretching it out when you're measuring it? And how are you measuring it?

Are you just walking alongside it and doing paces? Are you using rods? Are using measurement tape? Um? All these questions end up coming into play. And I would imagine too that it's not like going to your vent and just dropping your dog on the scale. Right. If you're trying to weigh a snake. There's a lot more to it, I mean in terms of going to get a handle on this and then accurately weigh it. And again, these are encounters that are occurring often in remote locations, again

with with untrained individuals. UM. I'm gonna just roll through a couple of encounters that Murphy outlines on his website. One is an alleged thirty three foot reticulated python UH that was mentioned in the ninety Natural History magazine story and the story itself was about a nineteen twelve siding and UH. As Murphy points out this, this stat, this thirty three foot stat continues to pop up in articles on giant snakes, despite his continued efforts to try and

uh and kill it. Um. Here is what the author of the original piece, Harry c Raven, wrote, and you can tell us how reputable it sounds. He says, I left the schooner and went inland a short distance to camp on the mountains, which were covered with virgin jungle. The white men at the mind told me of a huge python one of their relatives that killed a few days before of my arrival, and showed me a very poor photograph of it. Taken after it had been killed

and dragged a camp. Though the print was dull, you could see a man standing on the huge body, which was about a foot thick. A civil engineer told me that it was just ten meters long. I asked him if he had had I asked him if he had taste off its length, but he said no, he had measured it with the surveying tape. So here you see a number of factors. Right, it was witnessed by other people killed before he arrived. And as Murphy points out on his website, where do you get a photo to

alot that quickly? In nineteen twelve, Sulawesi okay, so photograph, hearsay, I'm not sure if the methods entirely Yeah, what could go wrong with that? I know? And still, as he points out, you still see that's that that that length of that record length showing up in various articles and wiki pages. Another record length that continued to pop up throughout the later twentieth century came from the Done Lehman

record of a green anaconda. So the way this one broke down is in nineteen forty four, herpetologist immit Ray Read Done published an article on the reptiles of Columbia, and it included a statement from his friend and geologist Robert Lehman, who was working in the area for an oil company. Lehman claimed to have killed and measured an

eleven point five meter anaconda in eastern Colombia. Raymond Gilmore of the US Fish and Wildlife Service later investigated this record in nineteen fifty four, and the results were less encouraging. Lehman later stated in a in a letter about his encounter with the snake. He says, if memory serves me right, it required almost three lengths of the rod to obtain the dimensions. But I could not swear to this in that it may have just been almost two lengths of

the rod. So again you see somebody's sort of faint recollection of how it went down in in a remote location, uh, dealing with the un endeavor outside of his field of expertise using a rod as a measurement, Yeah, for a dead snake. So so hopefully this helps to illustrate just a little bit of the problems you get into when you're dealing with these these often old accounts of particularly large specimens. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break and we get back. We're going to venture into the

sarajn rainforest. Alright, we're back. Alright, Julie, let's jump into the time machine, take us back to the hopefully safely, to the Sarah Jean Rainforest. Well, the Sarah Hone Rainforest once hosted the largest snake that ever existed, or that

we know about so far. And the reason why we know that is because sixty million year old fossils of the titan Boa sajus were discovered in a Colombian coal mine by a paleontologists led by Jonathan Block of the University of Florida and Carlo Sierramo of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. So, what we're talking about here, and we won't go into too many specifics right now, but we're talking about a snake that was longer than a great

white and bigger than a hippo. Now, the Titan Boa was sustained by a neotropical rainforest that would have come into existence in the Paleocene epoch, shortly after the extinction

of dinosaurs. But according to Scott Wing, a paleontologist from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the rainforest had a really low plant diversity, and he chalks this up to well, it could either be because of a new type of plant community that still hadn't had time to diversify, or it was still recovering from the events that caused

the mass extinction of dinosaurs sixty five million years ago. Uh. But of course, even though this was a huge creature, that does not mean that it didn't have competition, because in two thousand and eleven, University of Florida researchers discovered the fossils of a twenty foot extinct species in that same Colombian coal mine. And this is a freshwater relative to modern crocodiles. It is the first known land animal from Palatine New World tropics specialized for eating fish, meaning

that it competed with titan boa for food. And it's the second crocodila form that was found in the same cave. But of course the the other one was the diet was more generalized, so it wouldn't have been competing with the titan boa. So although this twenty ft long relative to the croc would have been really formidable, uh, it's it's a much smaller and more vulnerable offspring. Probably would

have shown up on Titan BoA's dinner plate. Yeah, they were kind of co apex predators in this uh this really steamy, dangerous world, tropical environment full of car size turtles on one hand, and then twenty ft uh hell crocks on the other. And I say hell crocks because they named the species after one of the rivers and Dante's inferno. Um. But then the Titana Boa itself uh palon tagists estimate it's tip tip to tail length came in into whopping forty two ft or thirteen meters, and

it weighed more than a ton um. It would have looked something like a modern day Boa constrictor, but it would have behaved more like the water dwelling anaconda that we described in in the first half of this episode. So again, it's it's massive weight is is is supported by the buoyssey of the water, and it's using that

as a means to ambush its prey. Now, palont Is really kind of hit the jackpot in actually discovering fossil evidence of the Titana Boa because for one thing, you, as we've discussed before, the whole fossil game is kind of a game of chance in some respects, you know, are the conditions going to be just right for the preservation of the fossils so that we can actually get a glimpse of what what kind of skeletons these creatures

and primordial age had. Well, in this case, they got really fortunate because they found an entire skull, which is which is almost unheard of, an entire snake skull, The entire Titanoboa skull uh not broken into pieces, but just completely contained. They're preserved in the shale mud of this environment. And then they were able to collect some vertebrae as well.

And then by comparing the size of the preserved vertebrae fossils with the vertebrae of existing large snakes, they were able to extrapolate just how large it would have been. So again, forty two ft long, more than a ton. Virtually the king and or queen of the of the environment. They're unrivaled. Once it reached its adult form, yeah, and

consider this an order to eat its prey whole. Titan Boa had jaw bones that snapped apart and flexible ligaments for opening its mouth almost one hundred and eighty degrees, which led some very clever people at the Smithsonian Channel to wonder because, by the way, the Smithsonian Channel has a documentary on the Titan Boa, but it made them wonder t Rex versus Titan Boa, who would come out on top? And that's because the t Rex this we know, has a ferocious bite, a bite force that's twice um

of a great white m guess. I mean it comes down to who has a home turiff, I guess, and which one is using the time machine obviously right because they didn't exist at the same time. But it's it's kind of fun to think about. Yeah. I think it goes down in a like a B movie kind of way where time travelers go back to check out the Titana Boa, they get eaten. Titana Boa clowns into the time machine, accidentally knocks the controls, and then it travels

through time battling various creatures. That sounds oddly like the next alien movie in the franchise, perhaps, yeah, I say, bring it on. Yeah, alright, so how could it have gotten so big? We don't know exactly, of course, And by the way, prehistoric largess is not exclusive to the Titan Boa. For instance, the plant eating Argentina Saurus is thought to have measured more than one hundred feet long and weighed over one hundred tons, and the ground sloth

was the size of today's elephant. Can you imagine? I I love to imagine it. We have a one of those giant sloth replicas at the local Firm Bank Museum here in Atlanta, and every time I get to look at it, I'm just like, what would it be like to smell this creature in her life? And I always think of like, it looks like a rejected Muppet character for me, and I love it. It's got that what looks to be a smile alright. So one idea for the largess is that when the ice ages occurred, warm

blooded animals increased in size to retain heat. Cold blooded ones favored large bodies in warmer climates to better insulate them from overheating, and as we see with the Titan Boa, it was living in a neotropical rainforest, so that would have made sense. Another theory requires that we look to the dinosaurs living in the Cretaceous period. Carbon dioxide was a lot more prevalent than today, and as a result, the temperature was much higher and in some areas of

the world were carpeted by vegetation. So what does this mean. It means that it's a kind of all you can eat buffet um and the limits of morphology at that time could have been expanding because it's no longer a game of okay over time and evolutionary terms, the morphology of these creatures has to shrink so that they require less food and less energy. Nope, there's plenty of it

for everyone. It's a buffet. Indeed, when we're looking at the size of Titana boah or the green anaconda or the reticulated python, the maximum size has everything to do with ambient environmental temperature, metabolic rate, and how much stuff is there for them to eat. And if you travel back to a steamy your time with a little more biomass around, you're gonna get bigger snakes. Apparently a steamier time. That sounds like um romance, Boustier bus star. Oh yeah, well, hey,

you know the Adam eve snake. That's all there, right, yeah, and snake charmers. Yeah, this doesn't have to do with the world's largest snake, but we thought we would roll this up for you. If you live in you know, South Asia and your snake charmer, you want a king cobra. So although they can hear, they're actually deaf to ambient

noises that the flute would make. Right, So when you see them responding to the snake charmer, it is really just to the flute, to the movement to the flute, and if the snake charmer is actually keeping a beat with his foot on the ground, and so they're also using those cues to move around. So it has nothing really to do with the music of the flute, just the shape of the flute, movement of the flute, and the sound of the thumping on the ground. Yeah, that

music isn't that enthralling? All right? You know, we got a few minutes here, Let's call over the robot and do a little listener mail. All right. We received a great bit of listener mail from a listener, Steffen, who

is a certified neurological music therapist. But he had an interesting account of of sleep paralysis to share it with, which is we've discussed in the past of sleep paralysis is you know when you're you're you're waking up and your body still on lockdown from dreaming and you're kind of been. You're in the state in between that's really prone to hallucination. Uh, he says. Periodically, since I was eighteen, I've experienced sleep paralysis, which you mentioned on the podcast. However,

I've come to learn how to control it. I have had many different hallucinatory experiences, including door swinging open, evil presences, strong winds entering the bedroom, etcetera, but none compared to the tipping point in the summer of two thousand six. I returned home in the summer after my sleep paralysis reutal freshman year at college. I was taking a nap with my girlfriend when I when I became conscious and

could not move. Here we go, I thought to myself, as the hallucinatory experience began completely, black demons with glowing yellow eyes entered the room and surrounded the bed. I threw myself out of the bed, only to be lifted into the air by invisible forces and thrown back into the bed like an apple core being tossed out of a car window on the freeway. The demons began sinking me into the bed as I was forced to suffocate

my own girlfriend. At the same time, I began shouting wake up, wake up to my girlfriend, hoping that she could wake up and stop the nightmare. I threw myself out of the bed several more times, only to float higher above the bed and sink deeper. When thrown back down, I came within what felt like inches to death as I sunk deeper and deeper into the mattress. Eventually I

closed my eyes and awoke from my nightmare. I asked my girlfriend if she had heard me screaming or moving or anything, and she told me no. At this point, knowing nothing of sleep paralysis, I actually thought I was possessed. Immediately, I went to the computer, began researching, and quickly found out that I was experiencing sleep paralysis, typically induced in periods of transition in life, stress moving to college being one.

Of course, I was comforted. I've been fascinated with possession in high school and had many debates with my religious friends on the concepts of demons and exorcism, so this experience was already hiding somewhere in my subconscious. Therefore, when I woke up and couldn't move, I became frightened and uh. And because I was frightened still in rim sleep, my

hallucinatory experiences were frightening in nature. As time went on, I continued to experience sleep paralysis, but I was no longer scared of the experience, and I learned how to control my hallucinations. Thank you for reading, and hopefully this story will help someone who may be experiencing the terror that is sleep paralysis have a wonderful weekend. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I just terrifying. Have you had

it before? I have not had it, but I've I've read enough accounts of it, and certainly Oliver Sacks goes into it at depth in his book Hallucinations. And yet even if you only experience one k to it in your life, and uh, statistics very I think goes high as of people have experienced at least one case. Yeah, I've had it throughout my life pretty sparsely, um in

the last ten years. But my husband has been a little bit freaked out before because he said that I was completely still once, but I was going I wasn't opening my mouth or anything, but he could hear sound being made inside my mouth, and in my dream I was full on screaming with my mouth open. But yeah, it can it can be a little unsettling, all right. We have another listener email here from Brent. He says, Hello,

I'm a very big fan. You guys do a wonderful job explaining the topic you take on in your podcast. I was listening to a podcast on hallucinations. My family suffered from sleepwalking. As far back as I have been able to track, my family, particularly the males, have had sleepwalking issues. As I have aged now sixty, my sleepwalking frequently has decreased a very seldom, but my son, who

has thirty, still sleepwalks every night. I've had episodes of sleepwalking that I remember struggling with what I was seeing and what my mind is telling me I should be seeing. When I'm sleepwalking, I see everything and everyone that I would if I was awake, except my mind creates more images and or smells, textures, and sounds. I could write

a book about my sleepwalking experiences. My understanding is the mind is lost between normal sleeping mode and awake mode, allowing the brain to create the show normally done when asleep, but allowing the person to talk and respond to people and things around them. The person's eyes are open and can carry on conversation with people. Would like to hear what you can tell me about this, and I've gotten my queue and it's been in there for a while.

I need to get to it. I believe it's called Sleepwalk with Me, And this is the account of the guy who has had some like extreme sleep walking um situations throughout his life where he actually has to sleep to h zip himself up into a sleeping bag to try to prevent him from escaping. Yeah, that's that's some extreme parasomnia for sure. All right, let's do one last listener mail. This comes to us from Benjamin. Benjamin says, Hi,

I stuff to blow your mind crew. I'm a relatively new listener coming to your podcast from Other House Stuff Works podcast, and I love it already. I recently listened to your episode could You Outrun a Fireball, which was great as always, but covered the possibility about running wildfire or explosion. I will admit reading the title, I had imagined a slightly different subject, rather than explosions or wildfire, outrunning an actual ball of fire or more precisely, plasma.

Early in my life I worked as an electronics technician aboard a warship in the U. S. Navy. In the course of my work, I periodically had to work in the vicinity of energized gear live bus bars carrying extremely high voltage and high current since operation. Since operation is key for a worship worship, we do not always have the luxury of turning off the power to conduct repairs

or maintenance. My crew always took ample precautions for this, But Navy ghost stories were common about the dreaded plasma ball. As the story goes, a worker near one of these high voltage panels accidentally dropped a larger wrench, which touched two of the bus bars and caused a short. At voltages this high, the arc vaporized the middle of the two inch thick steel wrench and created a cloud of

superheated metal particles of plasma ball. Not only are these things extraordinarily dangerous, as they are in order of magnitude hotter than any normal fire. As the story goes, it chased a man as he ran for his life. The explanation they give is that when you run, it creates an eddy current or an area of lower pressure behind you that the floating ball of plasma is drawn into. Though this coutionary tale has a rather gruesome end, I thought it would make for a great follow up topic

about fireballs. I cannot vouch for the scientific accuracy of the claim, as it is just a story passed around, but the exclamation seems plausible to me. I would love to hear your take on it. Thanks, and keep up a great show. Been from Virginia. Well, that sounds fascinating. I would love to look into the into into the possible existence of of plasma balls about aboard navy vessels. Plasma balls I mean chasing down unfortunate sailors and burning

them the embers. I love it. You love the idea of the not a lot, but I love the idea, the idea of the plasma ball. All right, Hey, in the meantime, we've you want to see what other episodes we've covered, blog post videos, links out of social media? What have you head on? Over stuff to Blow your mind dot com? That is the mothership. That is uh that's the homepage. And if you have thoughts we want

to hear them. You can send them to us by emailing us at blow the Mind at house to works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot Com