Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday and Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I'm going to confess that this entire John VN episode was really inspired by Eddie Hazard. Yeah. Yeah, because I was remembering when she did the thing. I think it's a dressed to kill. I'm trying to remember which special talking about what Ven must have been like as a child and doing the father. I'm not only in the kitchen, I'm also in the hallway, like straddling rooms. And I don't know why. It's always been so charming and I love it so much, and it just popped in my head recently, and I was like, John Vin gets invoked a lot like Ven. Diagrams get talked about all the time, but we don't really know that much about him. And I had known that he had invented the bowling machine, which I'm like, this is a wonderful human who's like I could do lots of logic and math problems. I also like to write about history, and I invent cricket machines. That's a cool combination of things. Yeah, So I was delighted to dig into his story a little bit. I feel like as I looked at diagrams that got more and more complex, like past the syllogisms, my brain was like, no, ma'am, we have no maps for these territories. I can't do it. Even as you're reading the explainer, I cannot parse this information. Yeah, Like, well, there's where my limit is, I guess. Yeah. But I do also love the other thing that I really like about him, and the reason that I read that kind of longer piece and that other quote from his intro to the first the first edition of his first book is that idea of like, we can't just talk about these heady things amongst ourselves fellow people in this field. We need to be able to communicate these concepts and share them with other people, because that's really where their value lies is in being able to share information. And I do feel like that is I mean, at the time, it was considered quite brazen on his part to basically call to account all of his fellow logicians and people that worked in mathematics and say like, yeah, but what we're doing is no good if we can't tell the average person how any of this works. Why we're doing it. And I love that idea, you know, of someone being an educational communicator. It's just cool. I hope he wasn't secretly horrible in a way I didn't discover in my own That does happen. Sometimes it does. Someone will pop up and be like, yes, but did you find the thing about where he You know, I was about to do another edizard and I poked a badger with a spoon, But I don't believe he ever did. So. I also do really love the idea of taking on somebody's invention and trying to recreate it. Yeah, and especially because it seems very much in the spirit of John Van's own work to be like, no, you guys, math is how a lot of fun things happen here. We will show you. This is an obvious, demonstrable way we can use math, which is just cool. It's very much in the same ideology he seemed to write about, so math. I don't know why I keep taking on subjects I don't understand. Like, let's talk about physics. I don't really get physics. I struggle with it. I try very hard. I don't know if I'm trying to like re educate myself as I go, But there are certainly a lot of people I admire in these fields, so it's worth kind of doing the breakdown for me. But there are times when I also am like, uh oh, yeah, I think there are a lot of subjects where like I reach a sort of ceiling on my understanding. So like they I can do pretty well with things like biology and chemistry and physics up to a point, yeah, and then when crossing that line, I don't understand anymore. Things I've had a big, big challenge trying to explain on the show before have included philosophy. Yeah, and sometimes I'm like, I just I don't understand what's happening right now. And then some of it is stuff like we've talked about. I studied literature in college my entire degree, but when we get into literary forms from outside of like the English language tradition, Oh, sometimes I'm like, I have no idea what this is. I'm very lost. Why does this structure work this way? Yeah, I understand completely what you're training about. Uh yeah, But that's sort of like I mean to me, that's that is for me personal. One of the great benefits of this job is that I can put myself in a position where I'm like, girl, you better learn this. You got to learn it now. You gotta figure this out enough that you can communicate it in a way that hopefully makes sense of everything. I don't know. That's a good I feel like if I didn't have a job where I had to do that, I might get a little stagnant. Yeah, I mean I would hope not, because I am a curious person and I want to know things. But I also know it's really easy to just be like tootling along in your life, especially in our very complex and stressful world. It'd be like, I don't have time for that right now, Yeah, and then that time never comes. So that is my hope in talking about people like John Vin, especially because he seemed to be perpetually curious and want to do new things that were maybe not what you might have expected of him. That's a little inspirational to me, and hopefully other people keep learning new things, keep doing new things. He was quite a match man when he was like, I'm gonna inventive pitching machine. I yeah, and I love it, And he seemed to find great joy in such things. So may we all continue to learn and explore new ideas and challenge ourselves and find joy in that. Fingers crossed, we talked about the Lackey Fisher eruptions. Yes, uh, so you and I have each been to Iceland. Man, I love Iceland. Yeah, me too, I asked. I had no recollection of hearing anything about this at all ever before, including when Patrick and I were in Iceland on our honeymoon. So while I started working on this, I texted him and I was like, do you remember hearing about something called the Lackey Fisser eruptions or the like the Scott defires, And he said no, I remembered hearing about Katla and that one that had just erupted, whose name I can't pronounce. I say, I can't pronounce it because I wrote it into the script the last time we had an episode that was relevant to volcanoes in Iceland. And I practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced for so long, and then when I got on Mike, I couldn't do it anymore. But it was the one that had the massive ash cloud that cut down on like just put air travel to a standstill for a long time. It's possible that we did hear something about this and just didn't retain it. I didn't see any like signs about it in any of our photos. But Patrick and I stayed in Cloister. We stayed at the Iceland Air Hotel in Cloister, nice it. The way that we did our our trip was that we took the Ring Road and we went east and that was the part that was like our easternmost point where we stopped, and then we turned around and drove back to Reykievic to go home from there. And something I didn't know existed until working on this episode is that there is a chapel in Cloister that is dedicated to Jan Steinkerson. Today we did not see that. I did not know it was. There was not a thing that I knew to look for. We did go to a really pretty waterfall that's right in that area. There's also a park that has some of the naturally occurring I think hexagonal basalt formations. We missed that entirely too, So it would not really surprise me if we had seen or heard something about that while we were there, But like I really have no memory of it. The whole landscape of that whole region of Iceland was dramatically changed by this eruption. A lot of it became lava fields covered with that moss that covers a lot of the lava fields in Iceland, which I think is really a like in it is very pretty. Please don't touch it. It's very delicate. I said in my caveat about how difficult I find Icelandic to pronounce that there are some things that I really love about the Icelandic language. Yeah, And one of them is that so many names for things are basically broken into parts, and each of those parts have has a meaning. And so there are so many things with names in Icelandic that sound really complicated, but they end in something that means waterfall or river or any of that. So, like the very long full name of Cloister, which Patrick and I had been pronouncing wrong the whole time, because it is spelled as though you would say it clouister in English means something like farm cloister or farm church cloister. I forget what order it is, and I love that. That was one of the things when we realized that that was the case, we would immediately be like, Oh, this site is for a waterfall, let's go check this waterfall out because we didn't. We didn't make a very comprehensive itinerary. We had our lodging taken care of every night, we had our travel to and from Iceland. We had a list of things that we absolutely must do, and then everything else was just explore love, which I liked a lot. I love everything about Iceland. My list is hot dogs. Yeah, I missed the entirety of hot dog culture in Iceland when we were there. I did not know that was a thing. It's so well, now that you say you were not so much in Reykievic, that makes more sense to me. Well, we spent three days in Reykievic, then we drove east. Now I don't know then. Yeah, because what I love about Reykievic is that it is other than the fact that it's completely walkable, it's not that big. Yeah, it'll so it's I'm like, you must have walked by that famous hot dog place. I think probably we did. It was is kind of like a little just stand that people line up at. It's very small, but it's a free standing little building. Yeah. I love everything about Iceland. I shout out to my friend Adam that I made when I was there because he is a listener to the show Okay, and he was one of the guides on our tour, and we were part of a tour that had quite a number of people, so we were in a few different buses and he had told me he had seen me on one of the other buses and was like, that can't be Holly Fry, what on earth was should be doing on this tour. Then I was on his bus after that and we had a great time and he was wonderful. So shout out to Adam who told me one of my favorite jokes of all time. What do you do if you're lost in the forest in Iceland? What stand up? Because there is not a lot of tall foliage. Yeah, there is a sign, a symbol that is used on signs in Iceland that looks like like sort of a little I can't if it's called a flurtally like the little loopy square that is on mac keyboards as the mac. I knew it was wrong as I was saying it, but I can't remember what that shape is called anyway, that shape that basically designates there's something interesting here. And so sometimes we would just see that shape on a sign and we would go see what it was. And one time when we did this, it turned out to be a museum that was called something like the Land Reclamation Center that turned out to be a place that was really only opened for school groups. But some people who worked there showed up while we were in the parking lot and they were like, we're normally only you know, the kind of place that school kids come, but we will let you in for free if you will QA the English version of our audio tour for us, and we said sure, great. And it was an incredibly interesting museum because it was all about how in the process of settling and establishing farms on Iceland, a lot of the tall vegetation like trees was cut down and this had a cascading effect of the trees that were there. Something that they had done in the role of ecology in Iceland was when the lava flows come slow that down right, So without the trees there, the lava destroyed a lot of other vegetation, led to a huge problem with erosion and dust storms. And so this is an effort to plant a type of grass that I've forgotten the name of that has an incredibly long and really tangly root system, Like once the grass is planted and established, that stabilizes the soil, and then they can start planting bigger things, including trees to hopefully slow the flow of lava when eruptions happened, which I thought was really cool, Love it, love it. We had a great time with that. I ran across something that was so interesting to me during this but also wasn't really related exactly to the subject at hand, so I just put it here in the behind the scenes instead, which is that one of the things that was happening in Europe during all of this was a lot of really intense thunderstorms and a lot of lightning, and a lot of people who died during the aftermath of all of this. In German speaking countries were bell ringers who were in the bell tower, oh, during the thunderstorm, because it's a lightning rod well right still in these places, like lightning not well understood yet, and in a lot of these places it was traditional to ring the church bells to try to deter the thunderstorms. And like this was a belief that was still pretty widespread in a lot of German speaking areas in the late eighteenth century, and there was kind of a superstition that if the bell ringer got struck by lightning and killed during the thunderstorm, it was because he was not doing enough a good enough job. Wait, there's a good blame the victim set up. Yeah, right, And a lot of church bells were inscribed with this inscription that was translated as I call the living, I mourn the dead, I break lightning. I found all of this fascinating and also that it felt like a big digression in the rest of the episode. I'm very excited to go back to Iceland. I am too too. Just in case anyone listening is wondering that is currently full. Yeah, there is a wait list. Yes, you can join the wait list and we'll see if space opens up. Yeah. I peek over there from time to time, and occasionally I see it that it's like two spaces left, and then it goes back to being sold out. So it seems like a known thing with international trips like this is that sometimes people cancel. Stuff comes up in life, circumstances change, whatever, wedding schedules. Yeah, stuff happens. Yeah, So there there's definitely a wait list, may or may not be space that opens up. I'm glad. I randomly stumbled across this topic while just trying to figure out what to do as a Saturday Classic, because I found it really interesting, and I found that so many written things to get to read. We could not read directly from Steinerson's account because translation into English is still under copyright protection, but a ton of public domain stuff written originally in English. I will close our little behind the scenes with something that William Cowper wrote on June twenty ninth, seventeen eighty three. Quote, so long in a country not subject to Fogg's we have been covered with one of the thickest I remember. We never see the sun, but shorn of his beams, the trees are scarce discernible at a miles distance. He sets with the face of a red hot salamander and rises with the same complexion that was written in a letter. That's a final note for our Friday behind the scenes. Whatever's happening this weekend for you? If it involves volcanoes, I hope it is not a danger to you volcano, but maybe a curiosity and study of volcano done in a safe way. There's been a number of volcanic eruptions in Iceland since we decided we were going to go there for our next trip. So hopefully I haven't just caused a major Jinks situation by recording this here on July seventh, twenty twenty four. Dang, dang it, Tracy, I know right, So to drop us a note if you like, We're at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and we'll be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow and something brand new Monday. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday and Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I'm going to confess that this entire John VN episode was really inspired by Eddie Hazard. Yeah. Yeah, because I was remembering when she did the thing. I think it's a dressed to kill. I'm trying to remember which special talking about what Ven must have been like as a child and doing the father. I'm not only in the kitchen, I'm also in the hallway, like straddling rooms. And I don't know why. It's always been so charming and I love it so much, and it just popped in my head recently, and I was like, John Vin gets invoked a lot like Ven. Diagrams get talked about all the time, but we don't really know that much about him. And I had known that he had invented the bowling machine, which I'm like, this is a wonderful human who's like I could do lots of logic and math problems. I also like to write about history, and I invent cricket machines. That's a cool combination of things. Yeah, So I was delighted to dig into his story a little bit. I feel like as I looked at diagrams that got more and more complex, like past the syllogisms, my brain was like, no, ma'am, we have no maps for these territories. I can't do it. Even as you're reading the explainer, I cannot parse this information. Yeah, Like, well, there's where my limit is, I guess. Yeah. But I do also love the other thing that I really like about him, and the reason that I read that kind of longer piece and that other quote from his intro to the first the first edition of his first book is that idea of like, we can't just talk about these heady things amongst ourselves fellow people in this field. We need to be able to communicate these concepts and share them with other people, because that's really where their value lies is in being able to share information. And I do feel like that is I mean, at the time, it was considered quite brazen on his part to basically call to account all of his fellow logicians and people that worked in mathematics and say like, yeah, but what we're doing is no good if we can't tell the average person how any of this works. Why we're doing it. And I love that idea, you know, of someone being an educational communicator. It's just cool. I hope he wasn't secretly horrible in a way I didn't discover in my own That does happen. Sometimes it does. Someone will pop up and be like, yes, but did you find the thing about where he You know, I was about to do another edizard and I poked a badger with a spoon, But I don't believe he ever did. So. I also do really love the idea of taking on somebody's invention and trying to recreate it. Yeah, and especially because it seems very much in the spirit of John Van's own work to be like, no, you guys, math is how a lot of fun things happen here. We will show you. This is an obvious, demonstrable way we can use math, which is just cool. It's very much in the same ideology he seemed to write about, so math. I don't know why I keep taking on subjects I don't understand. Like, let's talk about physics. I don't really get physics. I struggle with it. I try very hard. I don't know if I'm trying to like re educate myself as I go, But there are certainly a lot of people I admire in these fields, so it's worth kind of doing the breakdown for me. But there are times when I also am like, uh oh, yeah, I think there are a lot of subjects where like I reach a sort of ceiling on my understanding. So like they I can do pretty well with things like biology and chemistry and physics up to a point, yeah, and then when crossing that line, I don't understand anymore. Things I've had a big, big challenge trying to explain on the show before have included philosophy. Yeah, and sometimes I'm like, I just I don't understand what's happening right now. And then some of it is stuff like we've talked about. I studied literature in college my entire degree, but when we get into literary forms from outside of like the English language tradition, Oh, sometimes I'm like, I have no idea what this is. I'm very lost. Why does this structure work this way? Yeah, I understand completely what you're training about. Uh yeah, But that's sort of like I mean to me, that's that is for me personal. One of the great benefits of this job is that I can put myself in a position where I'm like, girl, you better learn this. You got to learn it now. You gotta figure this out enough that you can communicate it in a way that hopefully makes sense of everything. I don't know. That's a good I feel like if I didn't have a job where I had to do that, I might get a little stagnant. Yeah, I mean I would hope not, because I am a curious person and I want to know things. But I also know it's really easy to just be like tootling along in your life, especially in our very complex and stressful world. It'd be like, I don't have time for that right now, Yeah, and then that time never comes. So that is my hope in talking about people like John Vin, especially because he seemed to be perpetually curious and want to do new things that were maybe not what you might have expected of him. That's a little inspirational to me, and hopefully other people keep learning new things, keep doing new things. He was quite a match man when he was like, I'm gonna inventive pitching machine. I yeah, and I love it, And he seemed to find great joy in such things. So may we all continue to learn and explore new ideas and challenge ourselves and find joy in that. Fingers crossed, we talked about the Lackey Fisher eruptions. Yes, uh, so you and I have each been to Iceland. Man, I love Iceland. Yeah, me too, I asked. I had no recollection of hearing anything about this at all ever before, including when Patrick and I were in Iceland on our honeymoon. So while I started working on this, I texted him and I was like, do you remember hearing about something called the Lackey Fisser eruptions or the like the Scott defires, And he said no, I remembered hearing about Katla and that one that had just erupted, whose name I can't pronounce. I say, I can't pronounce it because I wrote it into the script the last time we had an episode that was relevant to volcanoes in Iceland. And I practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced for so long, and then when I got on Mike, I couldn't do it anymore. But it was the one that had the massive ash cloud that cut down on like just put air travel to a standstill for a long time. It's possible that we did hear something about this and just didn't retain it. I didn't see any like signs about it in any of our photos. But Patrick and I stayed in Cloister. We stayed at the Iceland Air Hotel in Cloister, nice it. The way that we did our our trip was that we took the Ring Road and we went east and that was the part that was like our easternmost point where we stopped, and then we turned around and drove back to Reykievic to go home from there. And something I didn't know existed until working on this episode is that there is a chapel in Cloister that is dedicated to Jan Steinkerson. Today we did not see that. I did not know it was. There was not a thing that I knew to look for. We did go to a really pretty waterfall that's right in that area. There's also a park that has some of the naturally occurring I think hexagonal basalt formations. We missed that entirely too, So it would not really surprise me if we had seen or heard something about that while we were there, But like I really have no memory of it. The whole landscape of that whole region of Iceland was dramatically changed by this eruption. A lot of it became lava fields covered with that moss that covers a lot of the lava fields in Iceland, which I think is really a like in it is very pretty. Please don't touch it. It's very delicate. I said in my caveat about how difficult I find Icelandic to pronounce that there are some things that I really love about the Icelandic language. Yeah, And one of them is that so many names for things are basically broken into parts, and each of those parts have has a meaning. And so there are so many things with names in Icelandic that sound really complicated, but they end in something that means waterfall or river or any of that. So, like the very long full name of Cloister, which Patrick and I had been pronouncing wrong the whole time, because it is spelled as though you would say it clouister in English means something like farm cloister or farm church cloister. I forget what order it is, and I love that. That was one of the things when we realized that that was the case, we would immediately be like, Oh, this site is for a waterfall, let's go check this waterfall out because we didn't. We didn't make a very comprehensive itinerary. We had our lodging taken care of every night, we had our travel to and from Iceland. We had a list of things that we absolutely must do, and then everything else was just explore love, which I liked a lot. I love everything about Iceland. My list is hot dogs. Yeah, I missed the entirety of hot dog culture in Iceland when we were there. I did not know that was a thing. It's so well, now that you say you were not so much in Reykievic, that makes more sense to me. Well, we spent three days in Reykievic, then we drove east. Now I don't know then. Yeah, because what I love about Reykievic is that it is other than the fact that it's completely walkable, it's not that big. Yeah, it'll so it's I'm like, you must have walked by that famous hot dog place. I think probably we did. It was is kind of like a little just stand that people line up at. It's very small, but it's a free standing little building. Yeah. I love everything about Iceland. I shout out to my friend Adam that I made when I was there because he is a listener to the show Okay, and he was one of the guides on our tour, and we were part of a tour that had quite a number of people, so we were in a few different buses and he had told me he had seen me on one of the other buses and was like, that can't be Holly Fry, what on earth was should be doing on this tour. Then I was on his bus after that and we had a great time and he was wonderful. So shout out to Adam who told me one of my favorite jokes of all time. What do you do if you're lost in the forest in Iceland? What stand up? Because there is not a lot of tall foliage. Yeah, there is a sign, a symbol that is used on signs in Iceland that looks like like sort of a little I can't if it's called a flurtally like the little loopy square that is on mac keyboards as the mac. I knew it was wrong as I was saying it, but I can't remember what that shape is called anyway, that shape that basically designates there's something interesting here. And so sometimes we would just see that shape on a sign and we would go see what it was. And one time when we did this, it turned out to be a museum that was called something like the Land Reclamation Center that turned out to be a place that was really only opened for school groups. But some people who worked there showed up while we were in the parking lot and they were like, we're normally only you know, the kind of place that school kids come, but we will let you in for free if you will QA the English version of our audio tour for us, and we said sure, great. And it was an incredibly interesting museum because it was all about how in the process of settling and establishing farms on Iceland, a lot of the tall vegetation like trees was cut down and this had a cascading effect of the trees that were there. Something that they had done in the role of ecology in Iceland was when the lava flows come slow that down right, So without the trees there, the lava destroyed a lot of other vegetation, led to a huge problem with erosion and dust storms. And so this is an effort to plant a type of grass that I've forgotten the name of that has an incredibly long and really tangly root system, Like once the grass is planted and established, that stabilizes the soil, and then they can start planting bigger things, including trees to hopefully slow the flow of lava when eruptions happened, which I thought was really cool, Love it, love it. We had a great time with that. I ran across something that was so interesting to me during this but also wasn't really related exactly to the subject at hand, so I just put it here in the behind the scenes instead, which is that one of the things that was happening in Europe during all of this was a lot of really intense thunderstorms and a lot of lightning, and a lot of people who died during the aftermath of all of this. In German speaking countries were bell ringers who were in the bell tower, oh, during the thunderstorm, because it's a lightning rod well right still in these places, like lightning not well understood yet, and in a lot of these places it was traditional to ring the church bells to try to deter the thunderstorms. And like this was a belief that was still pretty widespread in a lot of German speaking areas in the late eighteenth century, and there was kind of a superstition that if the bell ringer got struck by lightning and killed during the thunderstorm, it was because he was not doing enough a good enough job. Wait, there's a good blame the victim set up. Yeah, right, And a lot of church bells were inscribed with this inscription that was translated as I call the living, I mourn the dead, I break lightning. I found all of this fascinating and also that it felt like a big digression in the rest of the episode. I'm very excited to go back to Iceland. I am too too. Just in case anyone listening is wondering that is currently full. Yeah, there is a wait list. Yes, you can join the wait list and we'll see if space opens up. Yeah. I peek over there from time to time, and occasionally I see it that it's like two spaces left, and then it goes back to being sold out. So it seems like a known thing with international trips like this is that sometimes people cancel. Stuff comes up in life, circumstances change, whatever, wedding schedules. Yeah, stuff happens. Yeah, So there there's definitely a wait list, may or may not be space that opens up. I'm glad. I randomly stumbled across this topic while just trying to figure out what to do as a Saturday Classic, because I found it really interesting, and I found that so many written things to get to read. We could not read directly from Steinerson's account because translation into English is still under copyright protection, but a ton of public domain stuff written originally in English. I will close our little behind the scenes with something that William Cowper wrote on June twenty ninth, seventeen eighty three. Quote, so long in a country not subject to Fogg's we have been covered with one of the thickest I remember. We never see the sun, but shorn of his beams, the trees are scarce discernible at a miles distance. He sets with the face of a red hot salamander and rises with the same complexion that was written in a letter. That's a final note for our Friday behind the scenes. Whatever's happening this weekend for you? If it involves volcanoes, I hope it is not a danger to you volcano, but maybe a curiosity and study of volcano done in a safe way. There's been a number of volcanic eruptions in Iceland since we decided we were going to go there for our next trip. So hopefully I haven't just caused a major Jinks situation by recording this here on July seventh, twenty twenty four. Dang, dang it, Tracy, I know right, So to drop us a note if you like, We're at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and we'll be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow and something brand new Monday. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.