Stuff To Blow Your MindOnce more, it's time for a weekly dose of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and Weirdhouse Cinema listener mail...
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. Listener mail. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Monday, the day of eachweek that we read back messages from the Stuff to Blow Your Mind email address. If you have never gotten in touch before, why not give it a try. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. All kinds of messages are welcome. We especially like feedback to recent episodes and if you have something interesting to add to a subject we've talked about. But whatever you want to send, send it on contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. We got a great mail bag today. Let's see rob Do you want to kick things off with this message from Nathan about future Shock?
Sure? Yeah, Nathan rides Dear Robert and Joe, your episode's about future Shock. Particularly the third episode, brought to mind the original nineteen seventy eight series Connections from science communicator James Burke. Over the course of the series, he gives an alternate view of social changes and scientific progress instead of the Great Man theory of history, where a lone genius invents a new device out of nothing. Burke posits that each innovation throughout history came about because somebody merely put existing pieces of knowledge and technology together in the right order. In the final episode, he sums up four potential responses to technological change in a manner similar to the Tofflers, and then raises questions about each response. One scrap everything, go rural, two selective research only, three stop making new things, share what we have now, and four keep going business as usual. The full series can be found on the Internet archive in the links below Centism links, and the final monologue appears in the game The Witness. I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it before. Even though the technology he discusses, like the computer has changed dramatically since the original air date, the lessons he draws from them are still as relevant as ever. Thank you for your surprising and refreshing range of topics as always, Nate.
Well, thanks Nathan. I've never seen the full series, but I've seen segments clipped out into individual videos, and I've read parts of the book version of Connections. I actually have a nice, well worn used copy here at the house that we got somewhere I don't quite recall, but it was a good used bookstore find at some point. But Rob, I know you're a big fan of Connections, right, Yeah.
I watch Connections as a kid, as well as episodes of the other series he did The Day the Universe Changed, and I have both book versions, and we've actually turned to these books for his analysis on past episodes, specifically certain episodes of Invention. I forget which ones in particular, but yeah, I've long found his view of technological change and evolution somewhat captivating.
I agree, and I will say in general, I think it's really good to be skeptical of the so called great Man theory of history, or maybe, to be less prejudicial, call it the great person or great genius theory. And of course my skepticism of this model applies not only to what is normally called history, you know, like political history and stuff, but to the history of science and technology as well. One reason I think it's good to be skeptical of the great genius theory where a you know, the the idiosyncratic special quality is of a particular person come around, you know, come around at just the right time and change the world. One reason I think we should be skeptical of that view of history is because I'm worry of the danger of fundamental attribution error, which is a concept in psychology. We've done some episodes on in the past, if you want to go look those up to get the full story. There are some mixed results about this finding, but basically it seems that especially in more individualistic culture is in the United States would be one of those. We have a tendency to overemphasize the explanatory importance of internal factors like personality and intellectual ability and things like that, and underemphasize the role of external factors like situation and context when explaining the behavior of people and the you know, the reasons that events unfold in the way they do. So, I think, at least in the individualistic culture of the United States, I think we're probably way too biased in the direction of rating the importance of factors like the personality and genius of famous people, and we probably underestimate the importance of circumstances and context and trends and so. To come back to Burke, yeah, I think a lot of major turning points in the history of science and technology arose not just because of the personal genius of specific inventors and scientists. So of course that is a factor too. You don't want to say like, oh, Isaac Newton wasn't smart, But I think we should consciously force ourselves to pay attention to the importance of situations. I think it's really important that there were situations in history where a lot of knowledge and material wealth and talent was being brought together in a context that maybe allowed for experimentation. And when we look back at history, we probably do have a cognitive bias, this fundamental attribution era that makes the genius seem more decisive and makes us ignore the relative importance of situations in context. And yeah, so I have perceived in the past. One of the goals of Burke's work in the History of science and Technology was to show the ways that it's a story of intersections and connections certain pieces of pre existing knowledge or know how technology, particular needs or questions, all happening to come into contact at certain times and places in history leading to progress, and not just like oh wow, this and genius changed everything. That's my take.
Yeah, no, no, this is this is I agree with all of this. Yeah, you know, you have to fu factor in things like market forces, communication between different cultures, urban as they I mean, there's just so many different elements that go into the the alchemy of any given innovation, invention, et cetera. Even in our Weird House Cinema episodes sometimes we refer to it as such, but certainly in our notes we always call the section that gets into cast members, directors, writers, et cetera. As connections. And I often think about about about about Bert's work as one might apply it to cinema. You know, it's it's not just you know, oftentimes you do have like one really important individual that's you know, this is their vision and this is their talent manifested on the screen, but to varying degrees. And I think oftentimes it's it's more of this case. I mean, you have all these different talents coming together, and circumstances is aligning them that make the movie exactly what it is.
I think that's well said, And you know, people don't often apply this lens as much to like art and entertainment as they do to I don't know what we were just talking about, history of science or technology or politics or whatever, but I do think it applies there as well. I mean even in the realm of b movies. On the show before you Know, we've talked about how different a Roger Korman movie. One Roger Korman movie is from another, depending on circumstances like what was Coorman's budget, how long did he have to make it, what kind of actors did he have access to? And this leads to incredibly different results. It's not always just you know, the loan genius at the top of the organizational chart, the of the film deciding whether something is good or bad by their individual personal qualities.
Yeah, yeah, real quick. I'll mention. When it comes to James Burke's work, I had to look up his film again because I know there had been rumblings about him doing another Connections book and or series to sort of bring things into our modern time. He is still alive, still active. There was also a Connections three that came out in the late nineteen nineties, so I'm not sure where what he's working on at the moment of that project is in the works, but I hope it is because I would be very interested to see the Connections approach to the modern state of technology.
I think I recall one thing being about connections actually having some overlap with the predictions of the Tofflers in Future Shock, which is I think he predicted an ever accelerating rate of change and development in science and technology, and then downstream from that in culture, primarily in his view because of the increase in connections, because the improvements in communication technology make connections happen more frequently than they ever did before, and this is what he thought was going to was going to keep accelerating the technological change.
Anyway, solid listener mail Nathan, thanks for writing in Okay.
This next message is in response to our episodes on the Ignobel Prize Ignobel Prizes from twenty twenty three. This is from Sam and it is about the twenty twenty three Geology Prize, which was awarded to an essay about eating and tasting fossils. Sam says, Hello, Robert and Joe. I am a recent geology graduate from the University of West Georgia. I just finished your first episode of the Ignobel Prizes and I have an answer to your question of what does the Eocene Epic taste like? I asked this at the end of the episode. Yeah, Apparently Sam has the answer, Sam says, I work as a clay tester for a kalanite mine in middle southern Georgia, and some of our clay comes from the eosine, and as a geologist, I of course had to give it a thorough examination by tasting a small amount. The eosine age clay has an acidic and bitter taste, with undertones of vanilla and a texture like powdered peanut butter or protein powder. This may seem strange, but it is common for practicing geologists to taste minerals, fossils, and even plain dirt to clarify properties both chemical and physical. For example, I have been taught to taste the difference between the mineral halite, which is in ACL, and sylvite KCl, which appear identical. Halte tastes salty as it is salt in a in the formula that's sodium sodium chloride, Sam goes on, and sylvite tastes bitter due to the potassium content. Another example is the quote toungue test on fossils, where putting the tip of your tonge on a potential fossil will help identify fossil from rock. Fossils being poor us will stick to your tongue more than rock and sometimes require conscious effort to unstick your tongue. Oh, that sounds kind of scary. We even taste a small amount of soil samples to tell between clay and silt. Silt has the consistency of toothpaste and clay like creamy peanut butter. Love the podcast, Hope, I provided an interesting and entertaining answer to your question. Sam. Oh, thank you, Sam, you absolutely did. This is one of my favorite kinds of listener mail.
All right, does The next one comes to us from Jeff. Jeff says, this is Jeff with one F greeting science humans in the altanin Antenna episode. I think it was Joe who mentioned manganese nodules and passing. I believe this would be an excellent topic for a proper.
And just for clarity, I was gonna insert a note here to describe these manganese nodules, which are I've also seen sometimes called ferromanganese nodules or polymetallic nodules. Are these mineral concretions that form slowly over time at the bottom of the ocean. So if you ever see like deep sea Rover camera footage of a you know, a submersible going over the seafloor. Sometimes you will see them scattered all about, looking like weird gray metal turnips through these strange little spheres or balls on the ocean floor. And they're formed out of a variety of metals. Manganese and iron are common ingradients, hence ferromanganese nodules the name there, but they also sometimes contain other metals like nickel and cobalt too. And a cool thing about these nodules is that they form by accretion of concentric layers around a nucleation point, which might be I think like a It could be like a grain of clay, or like a dead organism or something. There's a little nucleation point and then it starts a creating these metal layers around it. So they have rings like a tree trunk. I think. One estimate I came across was that they tend to grow about a millimeter every million years. But because of the way these rings form in layers, you can cut a manganese nodule in half and analyze its structure to get information about seawater chemistry going back millions of years. Another interesting thing is that they somehow tend to remain at the top of the ocean floor sediment layer over these millions of years, instead of getting subducted, you know, instead of getting buried and incorporated into the rock beneath. So somehow they stay on top there while they're accumulating all these metal layers. So anyway, that's manganese nodules. Back to Jeff's message.
In the original Star Trek episode featuring a monster in a mining colony, I think I've seen this one. By the way, the miners discovered a bunch of odds spheres made of mostly silicone and had been destroying them because they figured they were just guardage. They didn't can connect them at all to the mysterious attacks on their workers. The reveal was that a silicone based alien creature was lashing out trying to protect its eggs from the humans. When I saw the episode, I thought there was no way humans encountering something so peculiar and suspicious would just dispose of them without curiosity, particularly while miners were being killed on a regular basis. But given that similar nodules exist on Earth, the Federation had probably run into many naturally occurring phenomena like these on other planets with no association to living creatures. So I suppose it's not so strange that a corporation would think nothing of clearing the way of unprofitable rubble. A second example was the Epcot attraction Horizons, in which there was a scene depicting a robot on the ocean floor picking up manganese nodules, as well as a huge system of vacuum tubes sucking them up into floating collection units on the surface. Apologies for the zibruder like quality of the attached photos, the attraction was demolished before the age of the smartphone camera. The scene is not directly referenced or explained in the narration. It was just an awesome extra throwaway detailed to experience. At the time, I thought it was silly fantasy that anything so ridiculously useful would be sitting in convenient chunks easily accessible on the ocean floor. I chalked it up to excessive optimism on the part of Disney ride designers. But these nodules were discovered in the nineteenth century, so they clearly knew what they were doing.
To borrow a joke from Mystery Science Theater three thousand. These photos of the EPCOT Horizon Center do look like someone's last known photograph.
Yeah, they're pretty cool. I've seen a recent documentary featuring prototypes that are remarkably similar to what the Disney people imagined in the nineteen eighties. Given that these metals are now in high demand for electric vehicle and mobile device batteries, there is now talk of and controversy about mining the nodules on a massive scale. In both these instances, my dismissive smug response was purely a result of my ignorance. The world is simply cooler than I thought pop. Now that I think about it, perhaps you guys could also do an episode on the unreasonably beautiful and artificial looking crystal caves on Earth. They also seem like impossible creations of Hollywood set designers, but are in fact just nature doing its thing. I wonder if the guys who built Superman's Fortress of Solitude vacationed underground in Mexico. Thanks again for your continued pursuit of the strange and wonderful Jeff.
Well, thank you for the great email. Jeff. You know we we did an interview years ago. I think this was the interview we did with Diva Aimon about where we talked about some of the controversies about ocean floor mining. But I don't recall if that was specifically with reference to manganese nodules or to something or about something else.
Yeah, I don't remember if that in particular was pointed out, but you know, I'm sure if we'd known to ask her about it at the time, we could we could have. But yeah, that was a great interview that was back there in the archive somewhere. All right. This next one comes to us from Adam. Adam says, hey, guys, on the newest episode regarding the Ignobel Prizes, the horror manga author Junji Ito has one called and I may be pronouncing this wrong, Geo. It's Gyo. That involves necro mechanical implications. Really great story. Check it out.
So the necro mechanical connection would be that one of the Ignobel prizes we talked about from this year was awarded to a team that had done research on how to turn a dead spider into a gripper claw with just fluid pressure.
That's right, and so perhaps not so surprising. It sounds like young g Ito has explored this territory as well. This is kind of a fun coincidence because the day this email came in, Joe and I were over at the Museum of Illusions in Atlanta getting some updated photographs, photographs taken of us and look out, you'll get to see these, uh in the near future wherever photos of us are appropriate. And the we were talking with the marketing manager there and she recommended Junji Eto. I forget exactly how it came up, but she she she brought up this particular artist.
I think she said she had listened to our episode about melting and uh, was that what it was?
Yeah? Because he's so I haven't read any of his full works, but I'm familiar with him by reputation. I've seen various stills. You know, a lot of his stuff is very I wouldn't say maybe meme worthy, but it shared a lot because his work has this real visceral, nightmarish quality to it, where a single image is just instantly more horrifying than most illustrations you've seen from a comic book or a manga. It's at His work has also been adapted multiple times, including the Long Run in long running Tony film franchise in Japan, as well as the two thousand film spiral. I was looking around. It looks like he's also done some guest art for Magic the Gathering. Joe included some screenshots of these Magic the Gathering cards that unity Eto did. They're pretty horrifying. It's like black and white manga style, and again, all sorts of strange body horror type things occur.
Oh boy, it's sort of hard to tell what I'm looking at the pictures. A little shrunken? Am I seeing a skull with peacock feathers? Is that?
I'm not sure? Yeah, not a detailed shot of this particular magic card. But yeah, something something horrible or wonderful happening to flesh. It's hard to say.
It's always one or the other, isn't it.
Yeah? So yeah, yeah, I should at some point, if I have the if I'm brave enough, I should probably pick up up some of his original work and dive in and see how how my brain takes it.
Okay, you want to do one last message about Weird House Cinema here?
Sure, what do you got?
I'll do this one from Chelsea. Chelsea says, Hi, guys, just listen to Your Stickiness Part three episode where I think we asked for examples of sticky monsters because we came up with fewer than we expected to find, and Chelsea says, I have a sticky monster for you. When I was in elementary school in the nineties, I was plagued by Gooey Gus, the purple chewing gum slime monster from the TV show Ghost Writer Rob. I had to look up a picture of Guey Gas. I put it in the outline for you if you want to scroll down and see him here. So he's like purple and very melted. He looks like a melted crayon man. But he's wearing a pink turtleneck and what looks like a black leather jacket like the Fawns.
Weird. Yeah, and the purple coloration reminds me of another nice uzy creature from media of Yesterdyear, the Power Rangers villain Ivan Ooze, played by the great Paul Freeman.
I don't remember what Ivan Oohs looked like, though I remember the name he is.
You know, he's purple and uzi and you know it looks like a Power Rangers villain.
I remember Rita Rapulsa. What was the relationship of Rita Rapulsa to ivan Ooz was one the other's boss.
I guess he must be a boss. I'm not really sure about how everyone's connected in that universe. But of course, Paul Freeman for those of you that don't recognize the name of hand, but of course played Bellock in Raiders of the Lost gar so tremendously fun actor. And I don't know if I've ever watched the Power Rangers movie that he's in in its entirety, but I'm assuming he has some fun with this role.
Okay, Well, I don't know which one came first, so either Guey Gus or ivan Uze might have to to the other one for stealing a stick. But anyway, to pick up with Chelsea's message here, Chelsea says, some of the other girls and I believed he lived in the storm grate in the corner of the playground.
Oh boy, that is that's so good.
We spent at least a few recesses putting grass clippings and dandelions down the grate as an offering so he wouldn't ooze out of the grate. And in case us all in bubblegum. I love this because this is a this is a bull's eye of like a childhood behavior. It's like, yes, I did stuff like that, this is what kids do. But it also describes the invention of religion. Chelsea goes on to say, side note, I'm shocked that you all made it through the discussion of glutenous rice that was in the Stickiness part one episode without mentioning its uses against jung she as featured in Mister Vampire, which was an excellent Weird House episode. Thanks for all the great discuss Chelsea. Chelsea, you're exactly right. You know, I thought it would come up. I'm pretty sure when we were planning the episode, it just never did.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess we have plenty to talk about without touching on that. Also, I'm not I'm not sure if the stickiness has anything to do with its vampire fighting powers. I could be wrong, but I always thought it was more of the dry rice. But I would not be shocked at all of some cultures ascribe productive qualities specifically to cook sticky rice as well. It does seem like that would have the you would have the advantage of it sticking to the vampires when you pelded them with it.
I do remember it being a plot point in the movie that it had to be the glutinous rice, right, Like the regular rice was no good because he went to the rice dealer and the rice dealer tried to scam him by charging out for sticky rice but giving him regular rice.
Yeah, he either gave him regular rice or he cut it with another rice. So yeah, that was a fun part of a Yeah, a really fun movie.
I feel like we I only barely remember now we may have gone into this in the episode, but like why, yeah, why was it? Why did it need to be glutenous rice to have the magical effect? Like why wouldn't regular rice work?
Yeah, I'm not sure if we specified Yeah.
Okay, do you think that's enough emails to appease Guey Gus?
And I think so.
Yeah, definitely from taking our souls.
Yeah, look up a photograph of Guey Gus. If you get a chance, it's worth It's worth the trip. It's everything you're hoping it'll be. So Yeah, if you want to write in, if you have thoughts on anything we've discussed here today, recent episodes, possible future episodes of stuff to blow your Mind, weird House, cinema, monster fact artifact. It's all fair game. We'll just remind you that listener mail occurs in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed every Monday.
Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact that Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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