Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey you wasn't just stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I am Christian Sager, and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we bring you yet another listener mail episode. In this case, we've been combing through and what seems like an infinite library of listener mail. That's nice, going back to your guys Library of Babbel episode. Yes, our inbox contains not only all listener feedback, but all possible listener feedback, from the positive to the negative, from the sensical to the nonsensical. Uh. Sometimes it does feel like that we get a ton of listener mail, but I must say that we also it's it's basically Crimson Hexagon stuff, and that it's almost all really good stuff. I would say we we we hear a lot of great feedback from y'all out there, and so we have to say, as always, we get uns of mail. If if what you sent us was not included, please don't take that as a slight. We we love reading whatever you get to send us, and we like to respond when we get time, but we often don't. But we're going to pick a few today. We won't be able to go through the whole barrel, but maybe we'll be able to not scrape the bottom of the barrel, but scrape some of the sides of the barrel near the top. Luckily, we have a fourth entity here to do any scraping that's necessary. And that's, of course, our good friend Carney. If the mail. But ah, yeah, hey, Carney, what's going on? I've noticed that Carney has taken on what seems to be a somewhat melancholy suicidal aspect since we entered this vast library of all possible email. Well, it's a lot to sort out, even with his his high processing. Even Carney only has so much ram ram. Oh why is it funny to talk about ram? Now? Ram used to be a thing you talk about all the time, not anymore. All right, Well, on that note, let's let's let's jump into it. Let's call Carney over. Carney, will you bring us our first bit of listener mail? Hey, let's see. Okay, This first one is in response to the episode that Robert and I did about flying fish, jumping fish, flying fish, breaching sharks, sleeping mullets, all the fish that do the equivalent of us jumping into outer space momentarily. Uh. So this first one is from Mona and she if you remember from that episode Robert and I, we talked about a couple of species of Asian carp. They are known for occupying North American river waters, jumping out of the water when your motor boat goes by, and in some rare cases breaking your face, yes, or or worse yes. Yeah, and so, as we discussed, there's this Chinese cultural concept of the carp that leaps over the dragon gate right, literally, a mythical concept that if a river carp can leap over a certain waterfall, it's going to transform into a dragon. So it's a magic carp turning into jidos. Uh. This is exactly what the email is about. It had no idea about this, but yeah, Mona writes to us to say, hello, Robert and Joe. I just finished listening to the Leaping Mullets, Flying Fish, Breaching Sharks episode of the podcast. I just wanted to give you a fun fact about the Chinese mythology of the leaping carb turning into a dragon. If either of you have played or no of Pokemon, the video game or the popular TV show. I think that's funny. She specifies popular. It's still popular after all these years, is it. Yeah, people still watched the Pokemon cartoon. Oh yeah, my wife used to work at cartoon Networking. It's a huge hit over there, so that's amazing. Yeah, they constantly are putting out new seasons of it. Really had no idea they're making more Pokemon. It's been around since I was in my twenties, so it's got to be like what They've been working on it for probably like almost twenty years, and that's the thing. It came. It really emerged after I was out of the main demographic. Yeah. I was just immature enough to play the video game and watch the car a little bit in my twenties, so I know way more than thirty nine year old man shout about Pokemon. Okay, well I didn't know this, but anyway, Mona continues, Uh, if we know about Pokemon, you'd be aware of a Pokemon called Magic Carp. It has always confused my friends and I. How this pretty useless fish. I guess that means not a good fighter. So in the game, Magic Carp is like the worst possible Pokemon. It can barely do anything, but if you level it up, okay, she says, yeah, it ends up evolving into a completely overpowered dragon type Pokemon. Giara dossise, this Pokemon is actually inspired by the said myth that you mentioned in your podcast, which gives this evolution a lot more since I know mind blown and and then she says, thanks for making quality episodes, regardless of how weird they get. Sometimes love each and everyone, my favorites being the X Files episodes and the Mystery of the myth Fleshed Fossil, looking forward to more. Well, thank you so much, Mona. That is very kind of you to say. And we also got emails from a couple other listeners on the same topic. Jeffrey rode in to let us know the same thing about Magic carp and Jared do Yeah, I had no idea. Oh man, yeah, I wish I had known. Jaredos was like one of my favorites. Like when I would play the game, I would always get a magic harp and like keep them in reserve, level them up slowly, and then once you get geared does it's awesome. Wait a minute, you said you played the game a little in your twenties. This sounds like you played a lot. Uh. Yeah, I had a game Boy and would just play what is it? Pokemon Gold I think was what it was. And then my roommates and I got Pokemon Colosseum, which is the one where you can plug your game Boy into your Nintendo six or four and fight your Pokemon against one another on the TV. Oh boy, Yeah, yeah it was great. That sounds brutal. Okay, it looks like Carton. As my father in law says, no adult man uh spends time catching Pokemon. Clearly a false statement. I have to turn in my adult man card. Uh. So, as I mentioned, Carney is holding something out here. What is it? Oh, he's got one. Uh. That is about cyborgs and trans humanism, which is something that Robert and I have been weaving in and out of over the last gosh three months. We've done various episodes that tie into this theme. And this actually came to us in May. I wish we'd read it earlier. Uh. And he originally this isn't his whole letter, but he originally wanted to ask us about doing an episode on GMOs based on the organic food episode that we did, but he tied into the cyborgs episode that we did, which was the first of I wanna say like three or four episodes where we talked about sort of the future of changing the human body. And he says, in your Cyborgs episode, you touched on the ethical quandaries of performing surgical enhancements before a child is born. I thought you might find it interesting to know that, in a way, this does already happen. My son has spina bifida, a birth defect wherein the spinal column fails to close properly. It leads to permanent parrela us and often brain damage. He actually underwent surgery before he was born to repair the defect and minimize the impact. He still lost some nerves, but probably saved enough nerves above the knees that he's able to walk, or he'll be able to walk with braces to make it weirder. Another benefit of the surgery is reversal of associated hind brain herniation, which if left unchecked, leads to hydrocephalus and malformation of the corpus colossum. A downside in my son's case is that he was born extremely premature twenty six weeks two pounds, a significant risk to the surgery and about ten percent are born early. This caused a stage four inter ventricular hemorrhage, wiping out most of the left side of his brain. Young brains can recover from this to some extent, but science does not yet understand how exactly it does. This a good lead is the subject of neuroplasticity and neural reuse. See the book after Phrenology for a rather technical intro. So my point is by saving his ability to walk, we also repaired one part of his brain and damaged another, so in at least two ways fundamentally changed the architecture of his brain and the type of person he will become. The surgery was highly experimental just a few years ago, but is now considered routine, albeit rare. I think he was number one fifty to get it since the experimental study ended. In all the discussion of ethics surrounding the surgery, which is what Robert and I talked about in the show, mainly in regards to cyborgs uh and and babies uh and. There's many conversations about the ethics. The primary concern has always been ensuring that the benefits outweigh the many risks involved with opening up a womb, pulling the kid out, putting him back in again, and closing up. Mom. Jeez, that sounds horrifying to me, like not being a parent. That sounds absolutely terrifying to me. The question of whether it should be done at all versus letting nature ticket its course ever, really crossed my mind, and to my admittedly limited knowledge, did not seem prevalent in the medical community. This may change as laparoscopic versions are perfected, minimizing risks, and surgery moves from mere repair to potential upgrades. So that's that's from Keegan. He went a weigh in on that, and he actually, you know, we we talked a little bit more over emailing. There's a lot here. Actually I'm not going to read a whole lot more, but we had a nice conversation with him, and he's continuing conversation with us about this. But it's just really interesting to hear about this real world example where you and I based on Oh I can't remember off the top of my head the name of the um of the theorist on cyborgs who came up with that idea, but basically they were very scenarios in which would it or would it not be ethical to transform someone into a cyborg, and and what does their identity become afterwards? And one of them was what if you change a child before it's born. Um, so this was a nice real world example coming back to that, and with lots of science in it. I was unaware of any of that. Yeah, that's fascinating that that. Uh. People think of this as a purely future concern, right, Like they don't think of right, they don't realize that it's happening in present day. Yeah, I mean, like, I genuinely we did that whole episode. We've been talking about transhumanism, bio hacking, all this stuff. I did not realize that you can, as he puts it, take a baby out of its mother, change it physically, and then put it back in. That's no pun intended for the show. Mind blowing. Alright, it looks like we've another bit of listener mail here. This one comes from listener raw raw right soon and says, hey, guys, I thought this was very topical. I enjoyed your recent show on great flood myths. You may be interested to know that the latest edition of Science August five, sixteen contains an article with evidence supporting a Chinese Great Flood myth um was the title of it, and he says the team used a range of compelling, compelling measurements of sediment compositions and radiocarbon dating to argue that it was very plausible there was one of the greatest freshwater floods of the Hollo scene in the Yellow River, coinciding with the transition of the civilization in the region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. In case you're you're interested enough, I've attached a PDF copy of the paper. Enjoy. Thanks for the show. Um So, as luck would have it, we starved receiving a number of different comments about this because it is very exciting. We had just done this episode on great flood myths and and then there was this really cool study that came out out of China, and the main professor on this is NN Ginge Normal University geology professor woo Ching Long, and it actually actually wrote some copy and did a video about it for Housetuff Works now, which I'll include a link to on the landing page for this episode. But as Raw points out, it's it's really fascinating because it's uh, I mean, it's actual supporting evidence for UH for essentially what would have been um A an earthquake oriented UM damming of the river, like there's a collapse of of rock uh closes off a portion of the over Hell River and then floodwaters build up behind it until they reach a breaking point and then crashed through with I believe like five hundred times the normal of uh, you know, flow strength, resulting in this uh, this flood that is actually very important. I believe we discussed a little bit about it in Chinese mythology because it's uh, it has to do with the rise of You the Great, who's the first emperor of the Shah dynasty, which is China's first dynasty, predating the second millennium BC Shan dynasty. So it's uh, it's a it's a it's a fascinating topic because you see mythology, you see geology, UM, and history all sort of coming gather in this one. Yeah. Yeah, which is what we saw with a lot of that flood stuff. And I think the geologists that we spoke about their work on in that episode there they were probably fascinated by this paper coming out. Hey, I gotta ask a tangential question, uh, not related to floods, but related to Chinese myth. Have you seen the trailer for this new movie, The Great Wall, Yes, I have. What are your thoughts on it? Um? Well, when I first saw it, I thought, well, that looks like a bit. I tended to think about it in terms of, like the business side, like, clearly this is a like an international production. They're going for a large Chinese audience as well as the US audience by having that damon in it. But I didn't really think much about it beyond that because I'm like, I can't see what the monster looks like. I'll decide whether I'm interested or not when I see a picture of the monster. But then I I ended up running running across the commentary from from actress Constance Wu. Yeah, yeah, of course, most famous, I think to to our listeners for being on the sitcom Fresh off the Boat. Yeah, and she had a lot of you know, start criticisms. I would imagine, Yeah, that's a particular story. So for our listeners, if you don't know and Joe, you haven't seen the trailer yet, it seems the from the trailer, but it looks like it is a story about why the Great Wall was built with a fantasy angle to it, that the secret history of the Great Wall is that they were like monsters or dragons or something like that. That sounds yeah on the surface, that sounds great, but but Matt Damon is the hero. Thatt Damon and the guy who plays uh Um, one of the Dorn guys on Game of Thrones, are like these like monster killers that they bring in to help them. So it's been it's like an all Chinese cast except those two guys who ostensibly saved the day. I guess that sounds pretty Hollywood. It's a little whitewashy and problematic, but I can I can absolutely see from a business perspective why it's made the way it is. It's it's like Netflix Marco Polo, which I've watched and enjoyed, but it's like you, it's like you have this uh this this Western figure at the heart of the drama to anchor it, you know, Western expectations, and then that at times that feels really yeah. Yeah, I just I don't know. When I see stuff like that, it immediately made me think of our episode on Flood myth and how like we're we're building mythology today still with movies like this, right, but they're just not Instead of explaining the flood, they're sort of quasi explaining the history of the Great Wall in a in a fake fantasy way, you know. I mean that's kind of fun, Like I don't mind, I don't know that that sci fi revisionist history. But but in such a way as this, it seems weird. Yeah. Well, speaking of going back and looking at old myths and and and reinterpreting them in light of what we know today, we got a great, just awesome email from our listener Katie but responding to both the flood episode and Robert and I are episode on geomethology and monsters. Yeah, we've been hitting the mythology hard. This is a couple of core themes over the last few months. Yapology, bioacking fish fish. Yeah, we have done a number of episodes. You know, we had a Mara Heart come back on and I didn't think about that as a theme, but yeah, okay, Well anyway, Katie writes, quote love your show to pieces, especially the geo mythology episode. In the last episode about flood myths, when you guys were talking about the old Norse flood myths. You were talking about the emir who made all the world, as you guys say, very metal. Yeah, Yumer is totally brutal. There's gotta be some metal band out there named anyway, Katie continues, there is another mythological flood in old Norse mythology that comes from the poem vols Bo, And she says, vols Bo is a poem found in the poetic Edda, wherein you get everything about Norse mythology. For some context, the volvar where the female soothsayers, and the poem, which translates to the seeing of the year, is meant to be a recitation of a volva uh that she gives to an unnamed audience about the forthcoming Ragnarok the twilight of the gods. That she didn't you just record an episode about that before I walked in the studio. We just talked about talk about yeah uh. But anyways, she writes, Among the many awesome epic verses are several at the end that described the world falling into the sea. Now we can't read all of these, She's put a bunch in there. Really cool. I just want to read one, she says, quote or she doesn't write this she copies in the translation of the head. Yeah. Um, the sun turns black, Earth sinks in the sea, the hot stars down from heaven or world fierce grows the steam and the life feeding flame until fire leaps high about heaven itself. Nice. That sounds like some man o war lyrics right there. Oh that is so much better than man o war lyrics and would be more about brave things with the hammer. That's awesome though. I love that how that stuff plays out in present present context and the mythology of it too. Oh yeah, So anyway, Katie quotes more of the poem, and she goes on to say, so, a giant flood comes and destroys the earth in a very Noah's Deluge type of way. Stars fall in this flood. Uh like possible comets coming to Earth that was referenced in the episode, but the falling stars seem more to set the cataclysmic stage rather than recording any cause and effect occurrence with commets like the pished Him and Noah's floods. The world emerges from the waters, renewed, and the gods come back to their halls and everything is beautiful and growing again. In this poem, However, the world ends again when a dragon flying up from the earth, bringing uh forth darkness and destruction. You guys talked about dragons in the geomethology episode, and I forget if you had made any kind of speculations about dragons being connected with volcanoes or not. We only very briefly mentioned it, but we did. Is this dragon she's referring to the mid Guard serpent, I'm not sure, but as part of the ragnar Yeah, but she says the poetic edit was transcribed in Iceland, where they definitely have volcanoes. That's certainly true. Skipping ahead just a little for time, she says, it's a pretty cool thing to think about, especially because this dragon brings darkness that destroys men, like clouds of ash that have been known to cover Iceland in northern Europe in ash clouds that block out the sun and caused the summer to be basically winter. On a sort of related geomethology note, in the eddic poem and I'm going to do my best here, vath prude Nis small Odin is discussing how humans will survive fimble Winter, cataclysmic winter that proceeds Ragnarok. There were a series of extreme weather events in five thirty six or so that scholars believe were a historical fimble Winter where Europe basically didn't have a summer for a while and tons of people died. In or Old Norse religion, there is a distinct difference between an earlier religious period where human and bog sacrifices were made, complete with distinct artifacts, and a later period where Odin, Thor and co. Are tramping around killing giants and whatnot, and where the customs found in archaeology changed. People think this separation of practice came about because of social dislocation that happened because of this fimble winter around the five thirties. Going back to the Voluspo In earlier verses, they talk about the war between two sets of gods, with the group belonging to Odin being victorious. Some of the older gods, Freyer and Freya of particular note, were taken as prisoners by Odin's groups and were assimilated into their pantheon. And then she gives some verses about it, uh that are also cool, But for time, I'm going to skip on to the end of her message. Here she says, quote, I love this theory because there's geological evidence that there were extreme weather patterns around the time. The archaeological evidence shows a dramatic change in customs, which resonates in the mythological poems that trickled down. I'd be happy to go in more depth with the evidence, but this email is getting so long. Anyways. I hope you guys enjoyed this, and I would highly recommend reading the vels BO if you haven't. It's the poem where the stuff with Emir comes from, along with the creation of the world and its destruction during Ragnarok War into the world by flood, rebirth and destruction again by dragon. It's a pretty badass poem in all sixty six stanzas should be read with lots of notes because there are tons of names for the names of God's keep up the good work. Well, thank you, Katie. That was an excellent email and we really appreciate all of you educating us on the totally the horrors of the North. I think it's also one thing that I got out of this that I liked is mentioning like multiple flood myths within the North tradition. And you know, indeed, not only are there you know, multiple flood myths from around the world in different cultures. Within cultures, you have multiple version. Chinese culture alone has has several different flood mythologies. Uh. And the one that we talked about in our episode and that I alluded to earlier is just like the most dominant. Yeah. And I you know, like after that episode and after hearing her reading her letter, I kind of wish I could take like a a course on Norris mythology now, like I have like a passing familiarity with it, and I'm sure like I could do like a sort of self guided deep dive into it on my own, but I'd really like somebody who understands it to kind of walk me through it. Like you wake up on a on a ship, you know, thatched freezing ocean and if your studies begin, yeah, nice, like a wilderness adventure slash Norris mythology they use they blood the keel with your body and this is how you learn. Well. I got one here from Dr Britt M. Starkovic, who is a professor at the University of Tubingen in Germany. I believe is how you pronounce it. Looks like she is an archaeo zoologist professor, and she writes to us about our our episode on academ Gora Doc. She says, Dear Robert and Christian, I love your show. You really caught my attention in your academ Gora Doc episode when you talked about the Russian domestic foxes. I teach archaeology, okay, archaeology at the University of Tubingen in Germany, and this is one of my all time favorite topics. I specialize in the human use of animals in the past, what humans eight, what different species were domesticated, etcetera. I wanted to send you a link to some videos of foxes interacting with people. These these are the specific boxes from academ Gora Doc. She says, I find the quote aggressive or normal wild version a bit depressing, but the tame one is absolutely absolutely adorable. They're cool videos. I recommend checking them out. They're hosted on Illinois University's website. She also says, you mentioned in your episode the different coloring patterns. I assume in your research you saw it's called piebald, which is also coloring that shows up in a lot of other domesticated animals, border collies, jersey cows, tuxedo cats, spotted picks and horses. The physical changes in these foxes, given that they were only being selected for behavioral traits, has totally caused us to rethink how we understand domestication and the modern diversity found among different breeds of animals. The last thing I wanted to mention is that for a time, this is awesome. There was a guy in the United States who would help arrange the import of one of these domesticated foxes to Europe or America if you had an extra nine thousand dollars lying around. So if you wanted to get an academ GOORADOC fox, some shady dude would get you one. Uh. And she says his website hasn't been updated in a few years. She provides a link, and she says, I'm not sure what the deal is. I'm a huge pet lover, but find it unethical to keep a non domesticated animal as a pet. These little guys have enough genetic changes, though that I dream of someday having one. Well see, that's all well and good until the fox gets too big and people flush it down the toilet, and then they'll become mutant sewer foxes. Is it gonna be academ gera dock fox the movie? Is that? Is that what you're pitching here, Joe? Thank you very much, Britt that that's really cool to learn. I didn't, I mean when we talked about it. I think I may be casually said as an aside, I wonder if you can get one of these foxes? Um, But yeah, I'm sorry, I'm still working on this. I think it's your teenage mutant academ goa doc Foxes? Oh nice? Well, you know? And in the teene mut Ninja Turtle comics there is a fox ninja there hang out with it. Is it a lady Foxes? It is? Yeah, the Fox Spirit? Yes, yeah, yeah, totally. What's her name? I can't remember the name of it. It begins with an a. She's like a white fox with some markings and stuff. But she's occasionally an ally of the Teenage Ninja Turtles. And yet again showing how much I know about eighties cartoons, is there a fox Pokemon? Yeah, there's multiple fox Pokemon. What how do you not know this? Alright, here's another one. This one comes to us from Sarah. She says, longtime listener, first time writer, I'm a huge fan of the show and listen to every new episode as soon as I can. Your episode about incomplete art was incredibly fascinating, But of course you weren't able to include every unfinished project. But I wanted to point out a noticeable piece of unfinished art, the musical Rent. I didn't know this. The writer of the musical, Jonathan Larson, died the night before the show was to start preview performances. According to the production staff, the show still had a lot of issues that needed to be worked out, but they were hesitant to move forward without the show's creator. They chose not to write anything else, only to rework the existing material. The shows that exist today is only a portion of the vision that Larson had for the show. We will never know how the show could have changed if Larson had been able to finish it, but what we're left with maintains Larson's legacy while being a highly popular and hugely influential production. This is important because it shows how I work can be finished without betraying the original ideas of its creator. I can't wait to see what else shall have in store for your podcast, and hopefully y'all will never be included in the list of things that went on unfinished. Thanks for blowing my own mind with every new episode. Well, I will have to say unfortunately, I think by nature we will have to be unfinished. How can we finish talking about all the things that will blow your mind? Well, speak to yourself. I believe we can. We can complete three of our minds into Carni and we just continue talking for eternity. Oh it's true. Once we process the entire library library of Babel, we will have exhausted synchronicity. Yeah, uh so was the I'm curious now if the version of Rent didn't have five hundred twenty four hours six hundred minutes, did you I think the numbers are probably wrong. Yeah, that's all I know about round. It's yeah, I I have to plead ignorance on on the product. But it's interesting to learn about it though. Um. I want to mention real quick as for us incomplete works go. This is one that I learned about researching the episode that Joe and I uh just put together that has to do with rapture and utopian trans humanism but apparently average averaging. Um, there's a work. An incomplete utopian novel by Sir Francis Bacon UM six six or so titled The New Atlantis UH that deals with a post trans human proto trans humanist, utopian society on the island of Ben Salem, where there's no slavery, slavery or poverty and everybody's ruled over by a group of religiously tolerant scientific elites. So it's interesting. It's interesting that was apparent. Yeah, that was the published I think a year after his death UM, but a very early proto trans humanist work, but also complete. Picking up on that, I can offer a couple of ideas about Incompleteness that we heard back from listeners are our listener Jim in New Jersey, who often emails us with with great email and awesome feedback. He wrote us about the Incompleteness episode and I can't read his whole email. He talked about the TV show Nashville, but he also big hit I believe with the um Smithy ladies, they're huge nash I didn't know that. But anyway, he offers some psychological feedback on the idea of why why we stick with incomplete works of art? You know, why we've got to know the end, even maybe if we're not loving it anymore. I I used the example of Lost, how like I I got to the point where I don't think I liked the show anymore, but I had to keep going because I wanted to see how it ended. And then I was very disappointed. But anyway, Uh, Jim says, quote, sticking with something you've invested in falls into the sunk cost fallacy. This is the economic my idea, that you stick with something wasteful only because you've already invested a lot of resources into it. I think of someone remaining in a bad relationship because they've already invested five wasted years into it. I think this is a good example. Once you've already put the time in with something. And our relationships with media are in many ways kind of like our relationships with people, even if you know they're not really changing based on our behavior, we sort of feel like it's transactional. Uh. You feel like, well, I've put so much into this, I've got to know how it turns out. So even if you know you're at season five, episode four, and if that's the first episode you saw, you probably wouldn't continue. Now that you've watched everything that came before, you're stuck with it psychologically. But then he goes on to say the related term to this is the lost opportunity cost. By sticking with a failed endeavor, you're not available for something better. So the person who's stuck in a bad five year relationship because of sunk cost is also missing out on the opportunity to start a relation and ship with their soul mate. And I think this also applies to media. You know, we we've got limited time in our lives to to read books and watch movies and and experience all the great stories that we want to interact with and and have informed our brains. You can't, You can't experience at all. So it kind of sucks to realize that you spent a lot of times stuck with a story that you didn't really love because you were motivated by the desire to see how it ends. And here's one more about the Incomplete Unfinished episode uh and and Unfinished workspart from our listener Taylor. Taylor says, uh, dear, stuff to blow your mind. I was just listening to your episode on Incomplete and Unfinished Works, particularly your discussion of TV shows and book series that are unfinished, and I was surprised how little you discussed fandom. I think we did mention it a little, but I think it a little bit. We didn't get very deep into it, I guess h Taylor writes. When people come across the series where they have to wait for the next installment or when there will be no more installments, many times they finish it them selves. Huge communities online around fan art, fan fiction, and other fan works thrive, especially for source material that is unfinished. Fan creators at the Firefly Serenity community. Oh yeah, Taylor continues, fan creators will also complete, quote quote complete the source material by adding elements they feel should have been in the story or would just like to see in the story, even if it's completely unrealistic. They'll get characters together that did not end up together in the Cannon, revive characters that died in the Cannon, sometimes completely replaced the universe the Cannon exists in altogether. The episode also reminded me of my own worst experiences with unfinished works. I do a lot of cooperative writing and role playing, and I can attest that the story ended prematurely is all the more painful when you had a hand in creating it. I have even taken to writing shorter stories to avoid that feeling. That's interesting anyway, Taylor's think we've all been there, all of us who write fiction. Yeah. Uh so, I'll just finish up, Taylor says, I want to thank you in the Whole House Stuff Works Podcast crew, I haven't written in before, but I've been following this in a few of your other podcasts, like Stuff You Should Know and Stuff They Don't Want You to Know for a while. I always feel as if I'm smarter, have more topics for conversation, and I'm better suited to analyzing things when I'm done listening. Good luck, and I have a mind blowing summer. You can tell this came from a while ago. But thank you so much, Taylor. That was a thoughtful and very nice email. Yeah. So, like, I'm very interested in this topic, as you guys know, Like I have a background in cultural studies and did a lot of work on fandom in particular, Henry Jenkins has a whole basically established a whole discipline on fandom. So it's interesting to hear their perspective on this. That might be something fun to tackle in the future. Yeah, you know an author that I really enjoy and I know you've been reading some of this stuff recently. Michael Shayum, I love him, I I love how some of that. I think his earliest, if not his first novel was uh, basically an unofficially fiction, Yeah, basically fan fiction. He was a big fan of Jack Vance's um books in the Dying Earth series, and he caught him up. They wrote him and said, hey, I'm right, I've written this, uh the sequel, uh, a book that would go on to be published as in Yanna as the title, and it's a fabulous Jack Vancy adventure that has it has, you know, a distinctive Michael Shay twist on everything. And he he was basically Jack Vance uh said well, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna read it, but you have my blessing. Go, you know, get it published whatever. It's amazing. It never happened. Yeah, it's hard to imagine happening now, but in this case, you know, it launched this guy's career. He went on to write a number of this wonderful books that are very much distinctively his. If you haven't heard us sing his praises before on other episodes, are especially on our summer reading episodes. Michael Shay is fantastic. And uh, I'm actually borrowing the incomplete and if the Lean stories from Robert right now, and it's I read a couple of pages every night before bed. It's just so good. It's the best fantasy, Like the smartest fantasy I think I've ever read. He could just construct these amazing worlds. Yeah, okay, So this next one is from Rowan, who is local to us here in Atlanta, and I'm going to try to it's a longish letter, so I'm gonna try to edit it down a little bit. Um. He just lets us know that he's a bio nerd and he's written into us before, and he used to work in an HPV lab and is in love with the d I Y bio hacking community. So when he heard us doing episodes about trans humanism bio hacking, he got excited. So he wrote in to tell us this regarding the man who developed e V and this is in relation to our tree Man Disease episode. E V as the shorten name for tree Man disease after cutting his knee as a teenager. That makes sense to me. Wounds are great for introducing germs. HPV, for instance, usually infects mucous membranes like genitalia, mouth, throat, et cetera, not places like your knee where there's a thicker barrier, but a wound could circumvent that barrier and let infection get a foothold. I don't have time to dive into the research, but I wonder if there's some correlation between people getting the infection in unusual places and people developing extreme symptoms like tree man disease. Who knows the HPV strains you guys listed off are not super common. They it might be part of the reason that it's so rare if it requires a rare strain and a rare genetic mutation plus sunlight and mysteries, which is yeah, and they just don't have real answers yet to what's going on with it. Another thing about HPV infection usually have more than one strain. It would be interesting to know if particular combination showed up more often, or if different strains interacted with each other somehow. None of the ones you listed are in the vaccines, but they're working on a more general vaccine that would protect against all HPV streams. It wouldn't help people who already had the disease, but it could prevent any more cases. A bit of hope for your depressing episode. Last fun fact about HPV, you guys said, it's super common. It's so common, in fact, that we have a hell of a time finding negative controls for our tests. It's hard to find anyone who hasn't been exposed to HPV. That's comforting. Most of the negative controls end up coming from children's samples. And then he gets into bio hacking. Okay, he says, bio hacking. The episodes that we did were pretty needy, says thank you very much. As a kind of not really bio hacker myself, I enjoyed them, though. I'd like to note that trans humanists are just a tiny section of the bio hacking and d I Y bio community. Anyway, I happen to be local and thought that you might want to know that at least two maker spaces hacker spaces in Atlanta are trying to get a bio hacking scene going. Maybe we'll be like, we can, we can get together with these guys and get some magnets. Putting our fingers, I am a member at Freeside, Atlanta. We're in the process of setting up a lab. We have a class on engineering glow bacteria, which will run again as soon as I get things together. I'm editing that he mentioned some other ones that are around town. For people who aren't local, you probably wouldn't be familiar with the suburbs of Atlanta. Um and And says that there's some people working on brain computer for computer interfaces, uh and teams that are building an e G from scratch. So it sounds like Atlanta's got a burgeoning bio hacking community. Yeah, so that's very interesting. He's plugging for that. So if you are out there, you listen to our bio hacking episodes and our trans humanism episodes and you thought that sounds like it's something for me, you might want to look into this, he says. Says that the spaces have public events that are listed on meetup dot com. You can check those out. UH. Side note, a friend of mine, unrelated to us doing those episodes, became interested in getting mag magn 's put in his fingers and went out and found h tattooist I guess or a tattoo artist who performs that function. As well, So he's getting the he's doing the magnet thing. Yeah, alright, Well, here's a one more piece of listener mail. This one is a quick one. And oh this one comes. It's another one from Jim. I hate to read one too, by the same author, but this is just a real quick one with a book book a recommendation in it Robert Joe and Christian As for synthetic meat and or cannibalism and fiction, I have two suggestions, pursue at your own peril. Um. So the first one he mentions is The Food of the Gods by author C. Clark, which I read decades ago in the Wind from the Sun, a book of short stories, and I really mean short stories. I think each story was no more than a page or two long, so like flash fiction before it was called that. I've heard of this story, but I haven't read it. He says. This short story addresses the very questions you brought up in your synthetic meat episode by Clark d plus years ago before the technology existed, um, which we're basically, would you eat synthetic meat or would you eat synthetic human meat? Yeah, like if it was it was synthesized human flesh. Would you eat it? The problem? Yeah, that's what I said. I mean, I said, I'm a vegetarian. The problem with eating human meat is that it comes from it had to come from a human. Yeah, well so, so easily have more. He said, there was a second one. There's a second one, and this one. I imagine we we have probably all three. Read The Survivor Type by Sephen King with an entry Yeah, and also book of short Stories pretty just pretty. It's pretty disturbing in a Stephen King kind of way. I think. I I think I read a quote from Stephen King where he was saying, like, I think my favorite types of stories to write are the really nasty, grizzly ones. But on this one, I think I went too far. There's also been and I didn't add this to the listener mail, but several people have written into us, both over mail and on Facebook about because I mentioned Wolverine on that episode and whether he cuts his own skin off and eats it at any point because he can just regrow his own flesh. And they pointed out that there's an issue of X Force that I forgot about that I've read where Deadpool, the famous character who just had a movie this summer. Uh, does that to himself and feeds bits of himself to another character who's like dying and starving. So he cuts off his own skin and little chunks of arm flesh and feeds into him. Gross where the mask come from? Like, he's really not even beginning to obey. Basically, Oh, I think Deadpool it's yeah, I mean it's not fiction. But he's like Wolverini regrows. Why is he fighting good crime or superviance when he could be feeding the masses. He's not Deadpools a mercenary. Now alright, he's got an outfre Sorry we shouldn't we We just went off in geek territory. We we didn't explain what happens in the story. Yeah, very brief synopsis. There is a drug smuggler who has a bunch of heroins terrific, Yeah, but has a bunch of heroin with him. He got stranded on a desert island with nothing to eat, so he realized he's starving to death. And he realizes that, well, you know, I could just drug myself so I don't feel pain and then cut my foot off and eat it and that, and it proceeds from there. Yeah. Yeah, I guess in that scenario, I would probably odon the heroine before I would uh just use it as a pain cut off my own limbs. See, the thing is he found a pamphlet from the airplane that says, um, auto cannibalism is it for you, and it's all about surviving a plane cracks through auto canniba. That would be amazing if stewardesses had had to explain auto cannibalism to you before a plane took off. It's it's definitely a disturbing one. And want to remember well from from when I read it the first time I can Junior, Yeah, I read it when I was a kid too. Okay, So on that note, you probably wrapped things up on the auto cannibalism. No, yeah, that that is only just a slice of the vast listener mail, um flesh chunk consume for you today. Yeah, we only were able to cut a little bit off and chew on it for forty five minutes. Sorry, but we will get two more in the next couple of months. Yeah. And like I said before, if if we didn't get your to your email, please don't take that as a as a slide against the wonderful feedback that you send us there. There's just too much good stuff for us to get to use. Podcast is just reading letter mail. Yeah, so so please keep sending it. We we love to read what you'all out there have to say. So maybe you're listening and you're thinking to yourself, Hey, I didn't know that I could get my messages read on a podcast that I like listening to all the time. How do I do that? Well, there's a number of ways that you can do that. You can always reach out to us on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram. Although I would not recommend that you write us a letter on Instagram. That's gonna be a bad format for it. But you can see lots of cool pictures on there from us, uh, all of those we are blow the mind. Write us there, you can write us messages. You could follow us and see all the things that we post, not just our own content, with the weird, bizarre science oddities that we find throughout the week. Where else can they find his boys, Well, you can head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mother ship. That's where you'll find all of our videos or podcast episodes, blinks after those, social media accounts and more, And of course you can always email us directly and blow the mind at how stuff works dot com. Well more on this and basands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com