April 18, 2024 • 47 mins
What exactly constitutes dust? What creatures thrive on it? How does it factor into our planet’s atmosphere? In this series of episodes from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the world of dust, from the scientific facts to the magical and the mythical.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
we're back with part three in our series on dust. Now,
if you haven't heard the previous episodes, you might want
to go back and check those out first. This will
probably make a little more sense if you have those
in the pocket. In part one, we talked about how
to define dust. We talked about our perpetual roommates, the
(00:34):
pyroglyphid dust mites. We talked about atmospheric dust and its
complex relationship to weather and climate. That was Part one.
In Part two, we talked mainly about dust bunnies both
within the home and in outer space, as well as
how some historical attitudes toward dust dust in the home
(00:55):
may have affected trends in interior design choices and even
some literary themes and horror. And today we are back
to talk more dust.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
That's right, and you know we're gonna so we mentioned
how we'll eventually get to some magical mythological ideas religious
ideas about dust that's still on the way. That's going
to be a future episode. This particular episode, I'm going
to continue looking at Victorian dust. We're gonna get a
little philosophic, but we will also talk briefly about Dracula,
(01:27):
but in a way that connects directly to what we're
talking about here. So yeah, to kick things off, I'd
like to just pick up more or less where we
left off with the theme of Victorian attitudes toward dust,
a topic that I've ended up finding far more fascinating
than I expected. All Right, So in the last episode
I briefly mentioned a source an article or paper by
(01:53):
e Lean Cleary titled Victorian Dust Traps, and I went
ahead and sought that out. It's collected in her book
The Sanitary Arts, Esthetic Culture, and the Victorian Cleanliness Campaigns,
which is in itself a very interesting book, highly recommended
if anyone wants a deeper dive into the topic of
(02:13):
Victorian cleanliness. Now, Victorian London was indeed a world in
the throes of the Industrial Revolution. The Victorian period, of course,
is so named for the reign of Queen Victoria the
Rain in Question eighteen thirty seven through nineteen oh one,
but her rule encompassed much of the industrialization of English life.
(02:35):
So we have a period here marked by rapid advancements
in industrial technology. Population swelled, a new business leader class emerged,
challenging the aristocracy for that top spot over a swelling
working class and virtually non existent middle class. So you
had vast socioeconomic differences going on, impacting the manner in
(03:00):
which the spoils and the horrors of industrialism were distributed
to a large degree, because while upper classes obviously enjoyed
more freedom, everyone breathed the same air and ultimately the
same dust and dust. You know, dust doesn't care who
you are, dust doesn't care what part of society you
come from. Now a lot has been written about Victorian sanitation,
(03:23):
like that in and of itself is a huge topic
because again the throes of industrialization, all these changes, changes
in population, changes in technology. We've touched on some of
these technologies in the past, especially on invention. You know,
how are you going to keep everything sanitary? Like the
story of sanitation is ultimately the story of any civilization
(03:44):
or any empire, going way back in ancient times. Now.
According to Lee Jackson, author of Dirty Old London that
cided on MPR's Fresh Air in twenty fifteen, this other
points out that by the eighteen nineties there were approximately
three hundred thousand horses and a thousand tons of dung
(04:04):
a day in London.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
That's just horse dung.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
That's just horse dung. We're not even getting into people
or anything. That's just horses living and pooping in the city.
And London's capacity for managing all of that was vastly insufficient.
So in the streets the dung essentially became the mud,
and naturally, if it's dry enough, that dung also becomes
the dust of London, or part of the dust of London,
(04:29):
to be clear. On top of that, the other points
out that London was a quote city of cesspools, with
each house typically hosting a believe it was like a
six foot deep, four foot wide cesspool for all of
the home's toiletry waste and I think various other wastes
as well, but a keynote the toiletry waste. And then
you had all of the coal lash produced by domestic
(04:51):
households in addition to coal lash produced by industry. Now
it was really fascinating. There was actually a system of
dust yards and dust men. They would come to your
house and haul off your dust or they would haul
off dust from the street and so forth. And then
there were the night soil men as well. These were
the people who would arrive in the middle of the
(05:11):
night to haul away your night soil from your cesspool.
Because the stinch of these activities, especially the night soil
removal here was legally deemed too odorous for daylight hours,
so in the night they would come haul it away,
put it in baskets, haulowed up out of that pit
and take it out where it could be used in
(05:32):
the countryside. The manure night soil it goes out to
help ultimately grow more food for the growing population of London.
I was reading an article by clearly A chill Me
of ground Shore, who wrote a piece about the dust
yards for this is in twenty fifteen for two Day's Conveyancer.
(05:52):
And this article points out some interesting facts about the
dust yards. And I have some other sources I'm going
to refer to about the dust yards here, But in
the eighteen fifties, the average amount of coal burn by
each household in London was estimated at eleven tons per year.
According to this article, coal lash was in demand by
the brick industry for brickmaking, though it was also needed
(06:14):
for fertilizer. Both of these needs were increased by urban expansion,
so for food, for construction for all of those bodies
in the city. So in order to help meet these needs,
we actually see an early example of a large scale
zero waste system, essentially a recycling program, though one that
(06:35):
of course is driven purely by economics here and also
one that is without any kind of modern health, environmental,
or labor standards. So, for instance, children would work at
these dust yards along with adults.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
And we know in many modern contexts, such as mining
and certain types of industrial settings, occupational exposure to dust
is a major health hazard and you have to take
special precautions to, you know, if you're a worker in
a cement factory or in a mine or something, to
protect yourself from exposure to dust, to protect your lungs.
(07:11):
And so I would imagine some of those risks were
probably involved here as well.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yeah, absolutely, So we have to be we have to
be careful about patting them on the back too much
for this program because again a lot of these standards
were not in place, and it was purely driven by economics.
But still dust yards were in many ways recycling centers
where the dust was hauled off to by the dustmen
and the street sweepers. The dust yards entailed and organized
(07:38):
sifting and separation of different elements in the dust, radiating
out from like a central heap. I included an old
like illustration here for you, Joe. You can find these
online too, if you look up Victorian dust yard. And
here we see examples of women out sifting through the dust.
(08:00):
It looks like there is a child there as well.
There's a man shoveling dust as well, and various animals
milling about.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
I do not see masks no in the picture. However,
it looks like a grand old time. They're just like
hanging out with ducks and pigs, and everybody's yeah, it
looks looks great.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah, it's a little more upbeat, I guess. Yeah. Now,
going back to the writings of Cleary, she writes that
these dust yards, along with various other things in and
around London again product of industrialization and just life in general.
(08:40):
You had slums, you had docs, you had brickyards, all
of this going on within London, and this helped to
establish a kind of moral geography of city life. Again,
morality here being very tied up with ideas of hygiene
and cleanliness and of course class. So while there was
(09:01):
in many respects just one London and certainly one atmosphere
and one smoggy sky, there was also this kind of
attempt to regulate the clean moral city within the industrial husk.
And the home especially, she points out, was increasingly thought
to constitute a quote self contained moral universe that can
in some sense be hermetically sealed from the pre germ
(09:24):
theory threats of miasma and spontaneous generation. And the home
was a haven, a safe place where all that disease,
all that horror could be shut out, or at least
there's the hope that you're shutting it out, and maybe
like the heartfelt belief that you were able to shut
it out of your home, and probably like the immediate
(09:45):
unreal geography surrounding your home. But then, as we touched
on in the last episode, you get the growing acceptance
of germ theory, and is this caught on in the
public mindset. It changed all of this. It kind of
inverted this view of where the health threats are to
your way of life. So I want to read a
(10:05):
bit here from cleary that I thought was very insightful.
Quote Miismatic theories of bad air, foul smells, and spontaneous
generation continued to dominate sanitary discourse in the eighteen seventies
and eighties, but as germ theories entered circulation, the impenetrable
Victorian home became an increasingly anxious fantasy rather than a
reliable domestic construct. Sanitary geographies of the city turned inward,
(10:30):
eventually producing analogous geographies of the over decorated, architecturally busy
Victorian interior. Even purpose built environments could contain pockets of
potential contamination and illness. In fact, the architectural flourishes and
decorative fittings so identified with mid Victorian style became sites
of suspicion and fear as the nineteenth century waned. In
(10:54):
these new domestic geographies, I argue the decorative dust trap
rivaled the urban fever nest as a primary locust of
pollution anxiety, emerging as a contested site of cultural value
and meaning in a variety of Victorian texts.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Mmmm, okay, so explain that a little the dust trap
mirrors the outside world.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Yeah, So instead of having these pockets of town that
you would avoid or kind of cut yourself off from,
or even I guess I'm reading into it here but
kind of pretend or not there, which I think is
something that goes on in a lot of a lot
of cities even to this day. But instead of just
relying on that kind of a sanitary geography, as she
terms it, suddenly you're applying that line of thinking to
(11:40):
your own home and you're thinking about those dust bunnies
under the bed, You're thinking about those corners in the
house where dust is kind of swept to and it accumulates,
or even like clearly brings an example up in the
book of a just a Victorian text on how to
hang like paintings or pictures of some sort in your house,
(12:03):
even that exercise would have warnings about dust traps, about
trying to do it in such a way as to
not permit these dust traps to occur.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
And the argument is that this view of the interior
geography somewhat coincides with or is influenced by the emergence
of germ theory, like the correct understanding that disease is
to a large extent caused by tiny organisms that are
invisible to the eye and all around us.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Right, and of course we know that new information, even
when it is accurate, it doesn't mean that reactions to
set accurate information are always you know, completely as as
on point, I guess you would say.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
You can respond to true information in an irrational way.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Right now, not to say that anything that we've I
certainly didn't find much in the way of anyone arguing, hey,
let the dust build up in your house, it's good
for you. But it does seem like there's a certain
amount of sort of dust anxiety overreach at the time,
or dust mania. But she also points out that this
doesn't mean that dust was just seen as a threat.
(13:09):
I mean, because again, dust is ubiquitous and and you also,
I think, have this kind of like you know, modern
fascination with the world. I mean, in the same sort
of scientific awakening that is making it possible to understand
what's going on with disease also with sort of illuminating
(13:29):
this idea of learning more about the world around you.
So she points out that dust, you know, is complex
in the way that we view it. Even at the
time quote when particles of dirt were illuminated by sunlight
or other atmospheric conditions, victorians could simultaneously experience the transformative
beauty and the contaminating agency of dust. And I'm going
(13:53):
to turn to an example of that here in just
a little bit.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Well, I think I can experience that duality depending on
the context in which I see the dust. For example,
there are certain filmmakers that really love to show say
maybe a strong beam of light cutting through a dark
environment and you see little particles of dust floating in
that Beam's It's a beautiful effect when achieved in film.
(14:18):
If I see that same effect inside my house, it
feels a little gross.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Yeah, Or if it is beyond a particle and it
becomes like visible cat here, Yeah, you know, it's like
I'm trying to like take my contact that's the worst.
I'm like, I've washed my hands, I'm going to take
a contact out or put one in, and somehow I've
already gotten the cat here attached to my finger, and yeah,
that is floating around and is part of the whole
dust bunny scenario.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
Of course, I'm trying to think, what who do I
have in mind? Who there's like a director who really
loves like a beam of light with dust floating in it.
But I can't think of who it is.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
I mean, it's it's a motif you see from time
to time, and it can be it'd be quite beautiful.
There is this kind of sense of sort of revealing
the particles of nature, you know, there's kind of like this,
even even though we are not obviously looking at atoms
or anything, you know, in that beam of light, there
is this kind of like revelation. It's like, oh, there
are smaller realms than this.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Yeah, you're not literally seeing the smallest things. I mean,
in the same way that consciousness of dust is equated
to consciousness of germs. You're not literally seeing the germs,
but it like reminds you that you're surrounded by things
on a scale that's very small, and that most times
you don't most of the time you don't see or
notice them.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah, So you know, I don't think it's it's it's
that much of a stretch to put ourselves in this mindset,
this mindset where she says that that that these like
the dusty corners of these homes were quote simultaneously places
of artistic imagination and filthy accumulation. So I was like, okay,
(15:57):
I need to throw in some examples of this, and
I've leave, and she mentions a number. I already mentioned
the picture hanging guide, and I was thinking, well, I
need to probably bust out some Charles Dickens here. But
then I discovered that there are examples of both attitudes
toward dust in the Victorian horror classic novel Dracula by
Bram Stoker from eighteen ninety seven.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Okay, eighteen ninety seven would be very late Victorian, but
still technically under the wire.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
It gets in under the wire, and I think, you know,
it's definitely all that time and that culture. Okay, so
I'm going to read a little from Dracula here. Didn't
think I was going to get to do that. So
anytime we get to discuss Dracula without warning, it's nice.
So the first bit, this is from early on. This
is in Dracula's castle. I was not alone. The room
(16:46):
was the same, unchanged in any way since I came
into it. I could see along the floor in the
brilliant moonlight, my own footsteps marked where I had disturbed
the long accumulation of dust.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
All right, so this this is Harker writing about being
in draculus castle. We're here clearly that the dust is
viewed as a kind of as a signal of something wrong,
like that this is not a place that is occupied
by living people, that it is only unnatural beings that
dwell here, and that the way in which they dwell
(17:21):
is not really life right.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
And so I was looking into this a bit more,
and I found an excellent paper that gets into this
and other related topics. This is from Lily s May
from nineteen ninety eight. It's titled Foul Things of the
Night Dread in the Victorian Body. And so we have
another passage here, and this is also from Draculus Castle
from the same point of view. I thought I would
(17:44):
watch for the Count's return, and for a long time
set doggedly at the window. Then I began to notice
that there were some quaint little specks floating in the
rays of the moonlight. They were like the tiniest grains
of dust, and they whirled around and gathered in clusters
and a nebulus sort of way. I watch them with
a sense of soothing and a sort of calm stole
over me. I lean back in the embrasure in a
(18:08):
more comfortable position, so that I can enjoy more fully
the aerial gamboling.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
Oh, I would not have remembered this moment at.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
All, but yeah, but it's like a nice little you know,
caught up in the moment, just sort of noticing dust
and out of context that it's been a long time
since I've read Dracula in full. I am not sure
if this is meant to be just dust or if
this is some hint of the Count's doing. But as
we'll discuss, we can easily wrap all of this up
(18:36):
under the same heading.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
But it's funny that in Dracula's Castle the dust is
clearly meant to show a lack of life that there is,
that this castle is not currently occupied by living beings
who and it's and the fact that everything is covered
in dust is a sign of disuse and decay and unnaturalness.
At the same time, dust is overwhelmingly associated with life
(19:03):
and activity of the city of the period.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Yeah. Yeah, and maybe this is what we get a
glimpse of in this this second quotation here, Yeah, where
it sounds lively. You know, he's talking about it in
terms of motion and in life and interaction. Okay, so
those are both from Dracula's Castle, but we also glimpse
dust in London as well. This is from Lucy's perspective
(19:29):
much later on in the book. The air seems full
of specs floating and circling in the draft from the window,
and the lights burn blue and dim. What am I
to do? God shield me from harm this night? I
shall hide this paper in my breast, where they shall
find it when they come to lay me out. My
dear mother gone. It is time that I go to Goodbye,
dear Arthur. If I should not survive this night, God
(19:52):
keep you, dear, and God help me.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
This is interesting in the air being full of dust
almost it's like an indicat that death is imminent.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Yeah, yeah, almost, like there's almost kind of like a
fairy fire kind of vibe to it, you know. Now.
Later on in the novel, as pointed out by May
in that write up, Dracula's London layer is said to
have walls quote fluffy and heavy with dust, which I like.
(20:22):
It's almost like there's a strong sense that Dracula's presence
alone makes the place dustier than it could have logically been.
And then, of course you know what happens at the end.
Dracula is staked Dracula is slain and quote his whole
body crumbled into dust.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
This would go back to that theme we talked about
at the beginning of the first episode, how most often
in literature it seems that imagery of dust is used
to signify a kind of worthlessness. And yeah, so when
a body in a story crumbles into dust, it seems
to it seems to indicate it almost a magical signal
(21:02):
of good riddance.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Yeah, yeah, so we definitely have that going on. There's
no denying that you know from dust you came, does
you become? And this creature of on life is now
reduced to dust. And yet May stresses that throughout that, Okay,
we have this time period in which we have all
these attitudes about dust, and we also have the titular
(21:24):
vampire here, who is an infectious creature. And much has
been written comparing like the infectious nature of vampires to
various pathogens, sometimes to syphilis and other maladies, and May
stresses that quote terror of contamination by minute particles of
corruption is thoroughly reinforced in Stoker's novel. I was looking
(21:45):
around briefly at screen grabs, and I'm like, what is
the dustiest Dracula movie that we have, And I'm not
sure offhand. You know, he turns into dust at the
end of a lot of these movies. But I was wondering, like,
which one has the dustiest sets. Now I feel like
I'm gonna have keep an eye open for that.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
I feel like the Todd Browning Dracula emphasizes dust in
Legosi's castle. There's less dust that I recall once they
move on back to London.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, And I'm not sure about the ninetiese version from
Francis Ford Coppola. I do. I am long overdue to
rewatch that one, But if I were to guess, I
would maybe expect some fine dust in the castle. But
maybe they end up avoiding it in London because there's
like a sense I feel like they probably shot London
(22:32):
with a certain air of modern gleaming there. But then again,
if you end up going into a crypt, what's the
first thing you're at least tempted to do? Set wise,
that's dust everything, right, give it that n nice Gothic air.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
We could quite possibly do the Copola Dracula on Weird House.
It is weirder than it needs to be, and I
don't know, there are things about that you could argue
are not good, but I think it's a heck of
a good time.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah, and there's greatness within it for sure.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Anyways, more on Dracula, inevitably later on in another episode
of one of our shows, but in the larger picture again,
as we've already touched on, Clary argues that the aversion
to dust and dust traps in architecture, art and design
helped fuel a more minimalist, modernist aesthetic, free from the
various nooks and crannies that might allow dust to accumulate.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
Okay, so that would make sense because I'm not a
you know, I don't have a great knowledge about interior design,
especially historically. But what I picture the interior of a
Victorian home, especially like an upper class one, I picture
it as a very craggy landscape. There's just like a
lot of stuff going on, a lot of like nooks
(23:45):
and crannies, Yeah, and things poking out in places that
would just be like hard to access with a broom
or a duster. And yeah, and I contrast that very
much with what I think of as like, I don't know,
the mid century modern interior style in American homes, which
is just like a lot of clean surfaces places that
(24:05):
would be easy to get dust out of.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Yeah, and clearly also discusses some other ideas, a much
deeper dive that we can get into here, but she
also explores some other like class based and economic factors
may have played in like if nothing else, if there's
this new in general, you don't want your house to
be super dusty. There's this new emphasis on keeping things
from getting too dusty, and therefore there's kind of this
(24:29):
additional cost to having furniture like this or household molding
like this, because it is harder to clean, and then
you're potentially having to pay more or put more into
the into the battle against that dust. So, yeah, anytime
you have shifts in design like this, there are multiple
(24:50):
things going on, but it is interesting to think about
how this may have played a role in all of that.
It's also interesting to think about this idea of like, Okay,
you know hermetically fel the home. The home is separate
from the world surrounding you, be that an urban environment
or a rural environment, or some mix of the two.
And you know, we're still sort of feeling ourselves out
(25:12):
and having different shifts in all of this. While I
haven't run across anything that has said, yes, let the
dust build up in your house, we have seen examples
of studies that have argued that exposure to cats and
especially dogs, especially at a young age, can help bolster
the immune system. You know, there's a lot about the
complexity of the microbial world that we're still figuring out,
(25:35):
and we're still figuring out how where we are in
that whole equation and where our artificial environments and our
cities currently stand in all of that as well.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
Okay, well, for today's episode, I got to thinking about
dust in the context of a of an age old
philosophical problem, and I was thinking about it like this, So,
of course dust is everywhere, there's some amount of it
in pretty much all environments and all homes. But at
what point does something actually become dusty? We talked about
(26:16):
this in part one of our series, this weird phenomenon
where you know, you look at a desk surface, or
a lamp or a shelf in your house and it
can seem like, well, it's not dusty at all, no
intervention needed, you know, it's fine, no notes, until suddenly
one day you notice it needs dusting. In fact, it
doesn't just need dusting. It is now revolting. How did
(26:38):
I let it go this far?
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Yeah, I'm reminded again. We talked about Hollywood dust machines.
What if you didn't have one and you just had
to wait for things to set to get dusty again.
What would that be like? It's like, okay, not yet,
not yet, Okay, now now it's dusty again.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
But would that ever happen if you were watching it constantly?
It seems like, you know, it's the trying to watch
a pot boil, except it would take months, I guess.
But it is weird how, at least to me, things
tend to go from not noticeably dusty to too dusty,
And presumably this is not usually because of a massive
(27:14):
quantity of dust being deposited all at once. Instead, there's
something going on with our perception. Some amount of dust
is always present, and that amount is slowly accumulating a
little by little, and it doesn't register as dustiness to
us until it is past a certain threshold, and maybe
the light strikes it in the right way, maybe we're
(27:36):
in the right mood or mental state to see it,
and suddenly it does look dusty. Now we're here, and
it occurred to me that this is actually a specific
manifestation of a famous dilemma in philosophy known as the
Sobriety's paradox or the paradox of the heap. The word
sobrieties spelled sories, from the Greek word for pile or heap.
(28:03):
It is named after the most famous example used in
these these thought experiments, and that example is a heap
of sand. So I'll illustrate the dilemma like this. Imagine
one million grains of sand piled up together on the ground.
Is this a heap of sand? I think most people
(28:24):
would say, yes, it is that. That's not a very
controversial thing to call it.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Yeah, And just the summoning the word million instantly makes
you think, well, that's a lot. That sounds heapworthy. Though
then I begin to second guess myself and think, well,
grains are small. What does a million grains of sand
pile together look like?
Speaker 3 (28:42):
Well, I mean, it doesn't matter what the number is actually,
but I think we you know, imagine you say you
start with a heap of sand, whatever you think a
heap is. Now you remove one single grain of sand
from that heap. So if you start with a million,
you're left with nine hundred ninety nine nine ninety nine.
Is it still a heap? Yes, in fact it would.
(29:03):
It would seem not only wrong but silly to suggest
that removing one grain of sand makes a heap into
a non heap. One grain does not make the difference clearly.
But assume you repeat the process a million times, remove
one grain, ask if it's still a heap. Eventually you
would have only one grain of sand left, and by
(29:26):
that point you know it is definitely not a heap. Obviously,
nobody would call a single grain of sand a heap,
And yet it seems impossible to identify any particular point
along the way where removing one more grain of sand
would make it no longer a heap. It's like, oh,
we went from one hundred and thirty eight to one
(29:46):
hundred and thirty seven grains. Now it's not a heap anymore.
That obviously doesn't seem right. But if you can't identify
the number at which it ceases to become a heap
of sand, what is a heap? You could use the
same process to question the concept of dustiness. Is this
lamp dusty. I'm looking at a lamp right now that
(30:08):
it's pretty dusty. I should have dusted it before we
started recording here. So yes, it's definitely dusty. But if
I were to remove one grain of dust at a time,
is there a point at which it would become no
longer dusty? Well, certainly there is. There's some point you
would get to where everybody would say, yeah, that's not
a dusty lamp. But you can't say where that point is.
(30:30):
You know you'd hit there before you get to zero
grains of dust or one grain of dust, But where
is it? And no single subtraction of a grain of
dust ever makes sense as the threshold, And so you
can note that it doesn't matter which way you go.
We've been talking about subtraction. But you can illustrate the
paradox by addition as well. So you can start with
(30:51):
one grain of dust, add another grain, add one pyroglyphic
dust might fecal pellet at a time, and it's hard
to say when the surface goes from not dusty to dusty.
The Sobriety's paradox is usually thought of as relevant to
the philosophical problem of vagueness. It can arise in connection
to any term that makes sense and is useful, but
(31:14):
is also vague, And so we can think of examples
from multiple parts of speech. So when you think of
adjective adjectives, you can think of tall, short, long, wide, narrow, loud, quiet, bald, hairy, crowded, sparse,
all of these where you know, you can make a
(31:36):
list of thousands of words like this, all of them
could be subject to a Sobriety's attack. Is a seven
foot tall person tall? I think basically everybody would say yes,
Now subtract a millimeter? Is that person still tall? You
can't find a clear cutoff. But also the Sobriety's paradox
(31:56):
goes a bit deeper because you can apply it or
a similar principle to concepts that you might not think
of as readily, concepts that are not usually considered a
type of measure or as counting. Based one example in
a paper that I was reading by a philosopher named
Diana Rathman, any color descriptor, for example, red red color
(32:19):
is usually thought of as visible light at a frequency
of you know, somewhere around four hundred and thirty to
four hundred and forty terra herts. It's a frequency of
reflected visible light, and you can place that range in
different places. You know, some websites I was looking at
said red is between like four hundred and four hundred
and eighty tarra hertz, or it just said it's four
(32:42):
hundred and thirty tarra hertz or four hundred and forty.
So there's obviously a range of frequencies that most people
will look at and say, yeah, that's red, and there
are ranges of other frequencies that most people will look
at and say that's definitely not red because it's blue
or it's orange or something. But whatever your starting point,
if you say start within the common red range, you
(33:04):
could vary the frequency of the reflected light rays one
at a time, you know, one hurts at a time,
one tear, heurts at a time, up and down the spectrum.
At what point is a color no longer red and
instead orange or purple? There are just tons of in
between colors. So either you have to impose a hard
(33:24):
frequency cutoff or some other kind of arbitrary rule that
does not conform to our true experience of seeing colors,
or you have to say that all colors are red.
You know, even blue is red, or even invisible gamma
rays are red too. Or you could say that red
like doesn't exist or is not a meaningful concept. But
(33:46):
I think that's obviously wrong because red is a perfectly
useful concept. We use it all the time. You could say,
can you hand me the red the hammer with the
red handle, and people know what you mean, they pick
it up.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Yeah. The only time that kind of a request causes
confusion is when you are straight over into an area
where you could make a case for it being a
different color, right, And even then you'd have to have
some other situations. The situation have to be more complex
than that, or you'd have to be particularly fussy to say, oh,
don't you mean the fusia hammer, like, I mean, if
(34:19):
there's one hammer there, you know which one they want, right,
pick the closest one to red.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
Right. So I don't think it's a good solution to
this paradox to say, actually red does not exist and
heaps do not exist, because clearly, I mean, we use
these concepts successfully. They are useful and meaningful. There are
objects that are red but not orange, or red but
not blue for that matter, And there's no and at
the same time, there's no good way to mark a
(34:46):
universal cutoff point between the frequencies of light that are
red versus orange.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Now we've already established that the Sobiety's paradox applies to
concepts like heap or pile. Those It's clear how it
works there, because those are concepts that involve an implicit
counting of things. But also, if you think about it,
it doesn't only apply to collection categories. Most nouns are
defined by some unspecified quantity of mass or measure, or
(35:17):
some unspecified degree of quality. In fact, some philosophers have
pointed out that you can attack the identity of basically
any object with a Sobriety's decomposition. So you know this
is a VHS copy of Highlander two the quickening. Now
take one atom away from it. Is it still Highlander two?
(35:37):
Is it still the VHS? I obviously yes, one atom
doesn't make a difference, And you, obviously at the same time,
cannot do this forever, because like a single carbon atom remaining,
or just a little fleck of black plastic from the
VHS would not be a copy of highland Er two
on VHS. But it is impossible to pick a boundary
(35:58):
where removing a single atom at a time makes a difference.
So these paradoxes arise from common words in terms that
don't have strict physical or mathematical definitions. Some words, not most,
but some words do have strict physical or mathematical definitions.
For example, the word trio. You could refer to a
(36:21):
trio of sand grains, and there would be three of them.
If there are more or less than three, it's not
a trio, but a heap of sand or a dusty lamp.
Those those terms are vague and they don't entail numerical specificity.
Now you might respond to this by saying, well, you know,
this is this problem of vagueness in the soariety's paradox.
(36:42):
It just arises because you know, we're being sloppy, right,
We're using vague words and concepts, and we could speak
more specifically. We should be more specific with our language
and avoid these philosophical problems. But is that achievable and
is that even desirable? The majority of the descriptive words
(37:02):
we use, again, do not have physically and mathematically precise
definitions and are, to varying extents subject to this kind
of vagueness and Furthermore, I would argue that they have
to be because it would be impossible to build a
language system that was actually usable in which all terms
(37:23):
and expressions had physically precise and mathematically precise definitions. And
if you doubt this, just try it. See if you
can communicate with somebody about everyday matters using no terms
that could invoke a Soroiety's paradox, or only terms with
physically precise definitions. I think if you do this, language
(37:43):
just becomes impossibly inefficient and non expressive. You just can't
really communicate this way, so we actually need vague terms
like dusty, even though we can't tell you exactly how
many dust grains or pyroglyphic feces are in. At the
same time, I think it's important to be aware of
the Sobriety's paradox because people try to invoke versions of
(38:09):
it or similar types of logic, I think, for purposes
of deceptive argumentation or to try to affect your thinking
with fallacies. For example, one classic way to try to
resolve the Sobriety's paradox that I think is not valid,
you know, with the heap of sand, is to say
that the paradox proves that heaps cannot exist. Since n
(38:32):
plus one grains of sand starting at one never constitutes
a heap, and since you can't tell me at what
number it becomes a heap, heaps do not exist. You
can imagine a kid pulling this with his parents when
they tell him to clean his dusty bedroom. It's like, oh,
how many grains of dust constitutes dustiness? Mom? You know,
(38:52):
tell me or your argument is invalid.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
Oh yeah, yeah, that's going to end well for you.
Kid can't lose your switch privileges exactly.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
So I mean it does sort of in a way
involve an interesting question in philosophy that that you know,
raises deeper questions about the vagueness of language, But it
doesn't prove what it's supposed to prove. It doesn't prove
that heaps or dustiness do not exist. But people do
try to use this argument that way. You know, in
(39:21):
a silly example, you could argue that no macroscopic object exists,
since you could you could do a soroiety's paradox on
them by adding or subtracting one atom at a time.
And people do use arguments like this to attack what
I think are basic valid observations, but that they might
not like. So, like a billionaire could could say I'm
(39:42):
not rich by doing a society's paradox with one dollar increments.
Oh well, if you had one more dollar, would that
make me rich? Obviously, it doesn't undermine the idea that
somebody can have a billion dollars and that that means
they're quite wealthy. It just because you can't pick a
single dollar incre meant where they become wealthy.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
Well, unless you are a taxing body, I guess, right,
and then you can put certain thresholds right, But but
then you kind of run into that situation too, where
it's like, oh, so really, if I made a dollar less,
it would be it would be different, it would be
a different bracket, and so forth. I guess. The thing
is we for like legal purposes and so forth, or
(40:23):
even like rule based systems, you know, we sometimes have
to decide on what the cutoff point is, you know,
like that's right, you have to be this tall to
ride this ride. And if if you are just a
little too short or a little too tall for the
ride or whatever, like, then yeah, you get into this
gray area. But sometimes you do have to call.
Speaker 3 (40:41):
It, well, yeah, I think much in the same way
that we've talked about on the show before, that like
life is impossible without relying on heuristics for judgment, which
can often be quite inaccurate. And so there are certain
domains where you have to override that natural reliance on
heuristic and involve laborious analytical thinking. Domains like science or
(41:04):
philosophy or something where if you just go on heuristics,
you're going to get the wrong answers. So you can't
do that. And at the same time, it's not possible
to live life by by judging everything based on laborious,
you know, deliberate analytical thinking. I think in the same
way you cannot have a language and a culture and
a life without relying on vague terms. But like when
(41:27):
it comes to the law, vague terms create a lot
of problems, so you have to go out of your
way to try to reduce them. And even then, there
are still lots of vague terms in the law. Like
in the law, you have concepts of reasonableness and stuff
you know that just that ultimately is saying, like you know,
later jurists, insert your interpretation here as to what reasonableness means.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
You know, earlier you mentioned like short and bald and
hairy as examples, and that has only made me think
too of various works of fiction or even nonfiction where
an individual a character is described, and sometimes you'll have
an author who says little more than that, you know,
describes them perhaps as like a short, bald, hairy man
(42:12):
walked across the street, and that does give you like
enough material to sort of run with it and help
generate an image in your mind for that character. But
it's going to vary greatly from one writer to the next.
There are some writers who will, you know, go into
great detail, telling you exactly how hairy they are, exactly
(42:33):
how bald, and exactly how short, you know, drawing on
all the tools of literature to make it very clear
and perhaps very engaging or funny or terrifying or whatever
in doing so. Or sometimes they'll say something that they're
really not saying much at all, but they'll say something
very specific. You know, it'll be one specific metaphor or
(42:53):
analogy that will that will give you just enough to
go on and form that kind of concrete idea in
your head.
Speaker 3 (42:59):
Yeah, that is interesting, and I guess it is a
feature of each author's individual literary style, how much sort
of laxity and tolerance they want to allow in their descriptions,
you know, how much they want to rely on vague
terms that could allow a wide range of interpretations. If
you call a character bald, that could be interpreted as
(43:21):
them having a completely shaved head, or it could just
suggest significantly thinning hair and so forth. And so some
authors might be comfortable with that whole range, and other
authors want to impose a more kind of I don't know,
authoritarian take on the reader's imagination and say here's exactly
what you should imagine. I'm going to tell you how
many hairs there are?
Speaker 2 (43:42):
You know, I was trying to think of an example
of you know, I mentioned how sometimes it's very specific,
but in a way that is not giving you a
whole lot of detail either. And I'm trying to think
of a specific example, and I had to look up
here online to find one. I believe this is a
book I've read. But in Raymond Chandler's Belong Goodbye, the
(44:03):
character of Philip Marlowe's describing somebody and says he had
a face like a collapsed lung. I mean, what are
you perfect it's somehow it's perfect, and yet like, what
does it mean? How do you? How do you? How
would you do a sketch based on that? I don't know,
but it works. It's distinct enough to work, and it's amusing.
Speaker 3 (44:24):
I really appreciate things like that. You might call those
more kind of spiritual analogies, because you can't imagine that
it means. Literally, it looks like the tissue of a
collapsed lung, but there's something, there's something of a collapsed
lung eness about it. Yeah, that's beautiful.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
But this is a great area of contemplation. Touches on
some of the other paradoxes that we've discussed and discussed
in the show before, you know, topics of like infinity,
like in what is infinity plus one? The ship of
theseus and so forth.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
And to be fair to the sarri these paradox literature,
it goes a lot deeper. I didn't take us deep
into the weeds on it, but there have been, for example,
some philosophers who have tried to use this paradox to
attack the very foundations of logic, saying like, well, you know,
so there's principle in classical logic that says either a
(45:18):
statement or its negation is true. So you know, it's
got to be the case that either A or not
A is true. And if you've got something like the
paradox of the heap, then you've got potentially something that
is neither a heap nor not a heap. And so
some people have said, well, then maybe there's something wrong
(45:40):
with logic, and people have come back and argued that way,
and so again, I didn't get deep into those dilemmas,
but if you want to look it up, it's out there.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
All right. Well, we're gonna go ahead and close out
this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, our third
episode on Dust, and we will be back for at
least a fourth episode. So if you're trying to figure
out exactly how long we're going to go on Dust,
we don't know. We don't know where the heap ends
on this one, but there will at least be one
(46:10):
more episode on Dust, maybe two more episodes, who knows.
We'll see how it goes. In the meantime, we'll just
remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily
a science podcast, with core episodes dealing with science and culture.
In the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed on
Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we do listener mail, on
Wednesdays we do a short form episode, and on Fridays
(46:31):
we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (46:36):
Huge thanks as always 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 at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
we're back with part three in our series on dust. Now,
if you haven't heard the previous episodes, you might want
to go back and check those out first. This will
probably make a little more sense if you have those
in the pocket. In part one, we talked about how
to define dust. We talked about our perpetual roommates, the
(00:34):
pyroglyphid dust mites. We talked about atmospheric dust and its
complex relationship to weather and climate. That was Part one.
In Part two, we talked mainly about dust bunnies both
within the home and in outer space, as well as
how some historical attitudes toward dust dust in the home
(00:55):
may have affected trends in interior design choices and even
some literary themes and horror. And today we are back
to talk more dust.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
That's right, and you know we're gonna so we mentioned
how we'll eventually get to some magical mythological ideas religious
ideas about dust that's still on the way. That's going
to be a future episode. This particular episode, I'm going
to continue looking at Victorian dust. We're gonna get a
little philosophic, but we will also talk briefly about Dracula,
(01:27):
but in a way that connects directly to what we're
talking about here. So yeah, to kick things off, I'd
like to just pick up more or less where we
left off with the theme of Victorian attitudes toward dust,
a topic that I've ended up finding far more fascinating
than I expected. All Right, So in the last episode
I briefly mentioned a source an article or paper by
(01:53):
e Lean Cleary titled Victorian Dust Traps, and I went
ahead and sought that out. It's collected in her book
The Sanitary Arts, Esthetic Culture, and the Victorian Cleanliness Campaigns,
which is in itself a very interesting book, highly recommended
if anyone wants a deeper dive into the topic of
(02:13):
Victorian cleanliness. Now, Victorian London was indeed a world in
the throes of the Industrial Revolution. The Victorian period, of course,
is so named for the reign of Queen Victoria the
Rain in Question eighteen thirty seven through nineteen oh one,
but her rule encompassed much of the industrialization of English life.
(02:35):
So we have a period here marked by rapid advancements
in industrial technology. Population swelled, a new business leader class emerged,
challenging the aristocracy for that top spot over a swelling
working class and virtually non existent middle class. So you
had vast socioeconomic differences going on, impacting the manner in
(03:00):
which the spoils and the horrors of industrialism were distributed
to a large degree, because while upper classes obviously enjoyed
more freedom, everyone breathed the same air and ultimately the
same dust and dust. You know, dust doesn't care who
you are, dust doesn't care what part of society you
come from. Now a lot has been written about Victorian sanitation,
(03:23):
like that in and of itself is a huge topic
because again the throes of industrialization, all these changes, changes
in population, changes in technology. We've touched on some of
these technologies in the past, especially on invention. You know,
how are you going to keep everything sanitary? Like the
story of sanitation is ultimately the story of any civilization
(03:44):
or any empire, going way back in ancient times. Now.
According to Lee Jackson, author of Dirty Old London that
cided on MPR's Fresh Air in twenty fifteen, this other
points out that by the eighteen nineties there were approximately
three hundred thousand horses and a thousand tons of dung
(04:04):
a day in London.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
That's just horse dung.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
That's just horse dung. We're not even getting into people
or anything. That's just horses living and pooping in the city.
And London's capacity for managing all of that was vastly insufficient.
So in the streets the dung essentially became the mud,
and naturally, if it's dry enough, that dung also becomes
the dust of London, or part of the dust of London,
(04:29):
to be clear. On top of that, the other points
out that London was a quote city of cesspools, with
each house typically hosting a believe it was like a
six foot deep, four foot wide cesspool for all of
the home's toiletry waste and I think various other wastes
as well, but a keynote the toiletry waste. And then
you had all of the coal lash produced by domestic
(04:51):
households in addition to coal lash produced by industry. Now
it was really fascinating. There was actually a system of
dust yards and dust men. They would come to your
house and haul off your dust or they would haul
off dust from the street and so forth. And then
there were the night soil men as well. These were
the people who would arrive in the middle of the
(05:11):
night to haul away your night soil from your cesspool.
Because the stinch of these activities, especially the night soil
removal here was legally deemed too odorous for daylight hours,
so in the night they would come haul it away,
put it in baskets, haulowed up out of that pit
and take it out where it could be used in
(05:32):
the countryside. The manure night soil it goes out to
help ultimately grow more food for the growing population of London.
I was reading an article by clearly A chill Me
of ground Shore, who wrote a piece about the dust
yards for this is in twenty fifteen for two Day's Conveyancer.
(05:52):
And this article points out some interesting facts about the
dust yards. And I have some other sources I'm going
to refer to about the dust yards here, But in
the eighteen fifties, the average amount of coal burn by
each household in London was estimated at eleven tons per year.
According to this article, coal lash was in demand by
the brick industry for brickmaking, though it was also needed
(06:14):
for fertilizer. Both of these needs were increased by urban expansion,
so for food, for construction for all of those bodies
in the city. So in order to help meet these needs,
we actually see an early example of a large scale
zero waste system, essentially a recycling program, though one that
(06:35):
of course is driven purely by economics here and also
one that is without any kind of modern health, environmental,
or labor standards. So, for instance, children would work at
these dust yards along with adults.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
And we know in many modern contexts, such as mining
and certain types of industrial settings, occupational exposure to dust
is a major health hazard and you have to take
special precautions to, you know, if you're a worker in
a cement factory or in a mine or something, to
protect yourself from exposure to dust, to protect your lungs.
(07:11):
And so I would imagine some of those risks were
probably involved here as well.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yeah, absolutely, So we have to be we have to
be careful about patting them on the back too much
for this program because again a lot of these standards
were not in place, and it was purely driven by economics.
But still dust yards were in many ways recycling centers
where the dust was hauled off to by the dustmen
and the street sweepers. The dust yards entailed and organized
(07:38):
sifting and separation of different elements in the dust, radiating
out from like a central heap. I included an old
like illustration here for you, Joe. You can find these
online too, if you look up Victorian dust yard. And
here we see examples of women out sifting through the dust.
(08:00):
It looks like there is a child there as well.
There's a man shoveling dust as well, and various animals
milling about.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
I do not see masks no in the picture. However,
it looks like a grand old time. They're just like
hanging out with ducks and pigs, and everybody's yeah, it
looks looks great.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah, it's a little more upbeat, I guess. Yeah. Now,
going back to the writings of Cleary, she writes that
these dust yards, along with various other things in and
around London again product of industrialization and just life in general.
(08:40):
You had slums, you had docs, you had brickyards, all
of this going on within London, and this helped to
establish a kind of moral geography of city life. Again,
morality here being very tied up with ideas of hygiene
and cleanliness and of course class. So while there was
(09:01):
in many respects just one London and certainly one atmosphere
and one smoggy sky, there was also this kind of
attempt to regulate the clean moral city within the industrial husk.
And the home especially, she points out, was increasingly thought
to constitute a quote self contained moral universe that can
in some sense be hermetically sealed from the pre germ
(09:24):
theory threats of miasma and spontaneous generation. And the home
was a haven, a safe place where all that disease,
all that horror could be shut out, or at least
there's the hope that you're shutting it out, and maybe
like the heartfelt belief that you were able to shut
it out of your home, and probably like the immediate
(09:45):
unreal geography surrounding your home. But then, as we touched
on in the last episode, you get the growing acceptance
of germ theory, and is this caught on in the
public mindset. It changed all of this. It kind of
inverted this view of where the health threats are to
your way of life. So I want to read a
(10:05):
bit here from cleary that I thought was very insightful.
Quote Miismatic theories of bad air, foul smells, and spontaneous
generation continued to dominate sanitary discourse in the eighteen seventies
and eighties, but as germ theories entered circulation, the impenetrable
Victorian home became an increasingly anxious fantasy rather than a
reliable domestic construct. Sanitary geographies of the city turned inward,
(10:30):
eventually producing analogous geographies of the over decorated, architecturally busy
Victorian interior. Even purpose built environments could contain pockets of
potential contamination and illness. In fact, the architectural flourishes and
decorative fittings so identified with mid Victorian style became sites
of suspicion and fear as the nineteenth century waned. In
(10:54):
these new domestic geographies, I argue the decorative dust trap
rivaled the urban fever nest as a primary locust of
pollution anxiety, emerging as a contested site of cultural value
and meaning in a variety of Victorian texts.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Mmmm, okay, so explain that a little the dust trap
mirrors the outside world.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Yeah, So instead of having these pockets of town that
you would avoid or kind of cut yourself off from,
or even I guess I'm reading into it here but
kind of pretend or not there, which I think is
something that goes on in a lot of a lot
of cities even to this day. But instead of just
relying on that kind of a sanitary geography, as she
terms it, suddenly you're applying that line of thinking to
(11:40):
your own home and you're thinking about those dust bunnies
under the bed, You're thinking about those corners in the
house where dust is kind of swept to and it accumulates,
or even like clearly brings an example up in the
book of a just a Victorian text on how to
hang like paintings or pictures of some sort in your house,
(12:03):
even that exercise would have warnings about dust traps, about
trying to do it in such a way as to
not permit these dust traps to occur.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
And the argument is that this view of the interior
geography somewhat coincides with or is influenced by the emergence
of germ theory, like the correct understanding that disease is
to a large extent caused by tiny organisms that are
invisible to the eye and all around us.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Right, and of course we know that new information, even
when it is accurate, it doesn't mean that reactions to
set accurate information are always you know, completely as as
on point, I guess you would say.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
You can respond to true information in an irrational way.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Right now, not to say that anything that we've I
certainly didn't find much in the way of anyone arguing, hey,
let the dust build up in your house, it's good
for you. But it does seem like there's a certain
amount of sort of dust anxiety overreach at the time,
or dust mania. But she also points out that this
doesn't mean that dust was just seen as a threat.
(13:09):
I mean, because again, dust is ubiquitous and and you also,
I think, have this kind of like you know, modern
fascination with the world. I mean, in the same sort
of scientific awakening that is making it possible to understand
what's going on with disease also with sort of illuminating
(13:29):
this idea of learning more about the world around you.
So she points out that dust, you know, is complex
in the way that we view it. Even at the
time quote when particles of dirt were illuminated by sunlight
or other atmospheric conditions, victorians could simultaneously experience the transformative
beauty and the contaminating agency of dust. And I'm going
(13:53):
to turn to an example of that here in just
a little bit.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Well, I think I can experience that duality depending on
the context in which I see the dust. For example,
there are certain filmmakers that really love to show say
maybe a strong beam of light cutting through a dark
environment and you see little particles of dust floating in
that Beam's It's a beautiful effect when achieved in film.
(14:18):
If I see that same effect inside my house, it
feels a little gross.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Yeah, Or if it is beyond a particle and it
becomes like visible cat here, Yeah, you know, it's like
I'm trying to like take my contact that's the worst.
I'm like, I've washed my hands, I'm going to take
a contact out or put one in, and somehow I've
already gotten the cat here attached to my finger, and yeah,
that is floating around and is part of the whole
dust bunny scenario.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
Of course, I'm trying to think, what who do I
have in mind? Who there's like a director who really
loves like a beam of light with dust floating in it.
But I can't think of who it is.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
I mean, it's it's a motif you see from time
to time, and it can be it'd be quite beautiful.
There is this kind of sense of sort of revealing
the particles of nature, you know, there's kind of like this,
even even though we are not obviously looking at atoms
or anything, you know, in that beam of light, there
is this kind of like revelation. It's like, oh, there
are smaller realms than this.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Yeah, you're not literally seeing the smallest things. I mean,
in the same way that consciousness of dust is equated
to consciousness of germs. You're not literally seeing the germs,
but it like reminds you that you're surrounded by things
on a scale that's very small, and that most times
you don't most of the time you don't see or
notice them.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah, So you know, I don't think it's it's it's
that much of a stretch to put ourselves in this mindset,
this mindset where she says that that that these like
the dusty corners of these homes were quote simultaneously places
of artistic imagination and filthy accumulation. So I was like, okay,
(15:57):
I need to throw in some examples of this, and
I've leave, and she mentions a number. I already mentioned
the picture hanging guide, and I was thinking, well, I
need to probably bust out some Charles Dickens here. But
then I discovered that there are examples of both attitudes
toward dust in the Victorian horror classic novel Dracula by
Bram Stoker from eighteen ninety seven.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Okay, eighteen ninety seven would be very late Victorian, but
still technically under the wire.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
It gets in under the wire, and I think, you know,
it's definitely all that time and that culture. Okay, so
I'm going to read a little from Dracula here. Didn't
think I was going to get to do that. So
anytime we get to discuss Dracula without warning, it's nice.
So the first bit, this is from early on. This
is in Dracula's castle. I was not alone. The room
(16:46):
was the same, unchanged in any way since I came
into it. I could see along the floor in the
brilliant moonlight, my own footsteps marked where I had disturbed
the long accumulation of dust.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
All right, so this this is Harker writing about being
in draculus castle. We're here clearly that the dust is
viewed as a kind of as a signal of something wrong,
like that this is not a place that is occupied
by living people, that it is only unnatural beings that
dwell here, and that the way in which they dwell
(17:21):
is not really life right.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
And so I was looking into this a bit more,
and I found an excellent paper that gets into this
and other related topics. This is from Lily s May
from nineteen ninety eight. It's titled Foul Things of the
Night Dread in the Victorian Body. And so we have
another passage here, and this is also from Draculus Castle
from the same point of view. I thought I would
(17:44):
watch for the Count's return, and for a long time
set doggedly at the window. Then I began to notice
that there were some quaint little specks floating in the
rays of the moonlight. They were like the tiniest grains
of dust, and they whirled around and gathered in clusters
and a nebulus sort of way. I watch them with
a sense of soothing and a sort of calm stole
over me. I lean back in the embrasure in a
(18:08):
more comfortable position, so that I can enjoy more fully
the aerial gamboling.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
Oh, I would not have remembered this moment at.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
All, but yeah, but it's like a nice little you know,
caught up in the moment, just sort of noticing dust
and out of context that it's been a long time
since I've read Dracula in full. I am not sure
if this is meant to be just dust or if
this is some hint of the Count's doing. But as
we'll discuss, we can easily wrap all of this up
(18:36):
under the same heading.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
But it's funny that in Dracula's Castle the dust is
clearly meant to show a lack of life that there is,
that this castle is not currently occupied by living beings
who and it's and the fact that everything is covered
in dust is a sign of disuse and decay and unnaturalness.
At the same time, dust is overwhelmingly associated with life
(19:03):
and activity of the city of the period.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Yeah. Yeah, and maybe this is what we get a
glimpse of in this this second quotation here, Yeah, where
it sounds lively. You know, he's talking about it in
terms of motion and in life and interaction. Okay, so
those are both from Dracula's Castle, but we also glimpse
dust in London as well. This is from Lucy's perspective
(19:29):
much later on in the book. The air seems full
of specs floating and circling in the draft from the window,
and the lights burn blue and dim. What am I
to do? God shield me from harm this night? I
shall hide this paper in my breast, where they shall
find it when they come to lay me out. My
dear mother gone. It is time that I go to Goodbye,
dear Arthur. If I should not survive this night, God
(19:52):
keep you, dear, and God help me.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
This is interesting in the air being full of dust
almost it's like an indicat that death is imminent.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Yeah, yeah, almost, like there's almost kind of like a
fairy fire kind of vibe to it, you know. Now.
Later on in the novel, as pointed out by May
in that write up, Dracula's London layer is said to
have walls quote fluffy and heavy with dust, which I like.
(20:22):
It's almost like there's a strong sense that Dracula's presence
alone makes the place dustier than it could have logically been.
And then, of course you know what happens at the end.
Dracula is staked Dracula is slain and quote his whole
body crumbled into dust.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
This would go back to that theme we talked about
at the beginning of the first episode, how most often
in literature it seems that imagery of dust is used
to signify a kind of worthlessness. And yeah, so when
a body in a story crumbles into dust, it seems
to it seems to indicate it almost a magical signal
(21:02):
of good riddance.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Yeah, yeah, so we definitely have that going on. There's
no denying that you know from dust you came, does
you become? And this creature of on life is now
reduced to dust. And yet May stresses that throughout that, Okay,
we have this time period in which we have all
these attitudes about dust, and we also have the titular
(21:24):
vampire here, who is an infectious creature. And much has
been written comparing like the infectious nature of vampires to
various pathogens, sometimes to syphilis and other maladies, and May
stresses that quote terror of contamination by minute particles of
corruption is thoroughly reinforced in Stoker's novel. I was looking
(21:45):
around briefly at screen grabs, and I'm like, what is
the dustiest Dracula movie that we have, And I'm not
sure offhand. You know, he turns into dust at the
end of a lot of these movies. But I was wondering, like,
which one has the dustiest sets. Now I feel like
I'm gonna have keep an eye open for that.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
I feel like the Todd Browning Dracula emphasizes dust in
Legosi's castle. There's less dust that I recall once they
move on back to London.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, And I'm not sure about the ninetiese version from
Francis Ford Coppola. I do. I am long overdue to
rewatch that one, But if I were to guess, I
would maybe expect some fine dust in the castle. But
maybe they end up avoiding it in London because there's
like a sense I feel like they probably shot London
(22:32):
with a certain air of modern gleaming there. But then again,
if you end up going into a crypt, what's the
first thing you're at least tempted to do? Set wise,
that's dust everything, right, give it that n nice Gothic air.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
We could quite possibly do the Copola Dracula on Weird House.
It is weirder than it needs to be, and I
don't know, there are things about that you could argue
are not good, but I think it's a heck of
a good time.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah, and there's greatness within it for sure.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Anyways, more on Dracula, inevitably later on in another episode
of one of our shows, but in the larger picture again,
as we've already touched on, Clary argues that the aversion
to dust and dust traps in architecture, art and design
helped fuel a more minimalist, modernist aesthetic, free from the
various nooks and crannies that might allow dust to accumulate.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
Okay, so that would make sense because I'm not a
you know, I don't have a great knowledge about interior design,
especially historically. But what I picture the interior of a
Victorian home, especially like an upper class one, I picture
it as a very craggy landscape. There's just like a
lot of stuff going on, a lot of like nooks
(23:45):
and crannies, Yeah, and things poking out in places that
would just be like hard to access with a broom
or a duster. And yeah, and I contrast that very
much with what I think of as like, I don't know,
the mid century modern interior style in American homes, which
is just like a lot of clean surfaces places that
(24:05):
would be easy to get dust out of.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Yeah, and clearly also discusses some other ideas, a much
deeper dive that we can get into here, but she
also explores some other like class based and economic factors
may have played in like if nothing else, if there's
this new in general, you don't want your house to
be super dusty. There's this new emphasis on keeping things
from getting too dusty, and therefore there's kind of this
(24:29):
additional cost to having furniture like this or household molding
like this, because it is harder to clean, and then
you're potentially having to pay more or put more into
the into the battle against that dust. So, yeah, anytime
you have shifts in design like this, there are multiple
(24:50):
things going on, but it is interesting to think about
how this may have played a role in all of that.
It's also interesting to think about this idea of like, Okay,
you know hermetically fel the home. The home is separate
from the world surrounding you, be that an urban environment
or a rural environment, or some mix of the two.
And you know, we're still sort of feeling ourselves out
(25:12):
and having different shifts in all of this. While I
haven't run across anything that has said, yes, let the
dust build up in your house, we have seen examples
of studies that have argued that exposure to cats and
especially dogs, especially at a young age, can help bolster
the immune system. You know, there's a lot about the
complexity of the microbial world that we're still figuring out,
(25:35):
and we're still figuring out how where we are in
that whole equation and where our artificial environments and our
cities currently stand in all of that as well.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
Okay, well, for today's episode, I got to thinking about
dust in the context of a of an age old
philosophical problem, and I was thinking about it like this, So,
of course dust is everywhere, there's some amount of it
in pretty much all environments and all homes. But at
what point does something actually become dusty? We talked about
(26:16):
this in part one of our series, this weird phenomenon
where you know, you look at a desk surface, or
a lamp or a shelf in your house and it
can seem like, well, it's not dusty at all, no
intervention needed, you know, it's fine, no notes, until suddenly
one day you notice it needs dusting. In fact, it
doesn't just need dusting. It is now revolting. How did
(26:38):
I let it go this far?
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Yeah, I'm reminded again. We talked about Hollywood dust machines.
What if you didn't have one and you just had
to wait for things to set to get dusty again.
What would that be like? It's like, okay, not yet,
not yet, Okay, now now it's dusty again.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
But would that ever happen if you were watching it constantly?
It seems like, you know, it's the trying to watch
a pot boil, except it would take months, I guess.
But it is weird how, at least to me, things
tend to go from not noticeably dusty to too dusty,
And presumably this is not usually because of a massive
(27:14):
quantity of dust being deposited all at once. Instead, there's
something going on with our perception. Some amount of dust
is always present, and that amount is slowly accumulating a
little by little, and it doesn't register as dustiness to
us until it is past a certain threshold, and maybe
the light strikes it in the right way, maybe we're
(27:36):
in the right mood or mental state to see it,
and suddenly it does look dusty. Now we're here, and
it occurred to me that this is actually a specific
manifestation of a famous dilemma in philosophy known as the
Sobriety's paradox or the paradox of the heap. The word
sobrieties spelled sories, from the Greek word for pile or heap.
(28:03):
It is named after the most famous example used in
these these thought experiments, and that example is a heap
of sand. So I'll illustrate the dilemma like this. Imagine
one million grains of sand piled up together on the ground.
Is this a heap of sand? I think most people
(28:24):
would say, yes, it is that. That's not a very
controversial thing to call it.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Yeah, And just the summoning the word million instantly makes
you think, well, that's a lot. That sounds heapworthy. Though
then I begin to second guess myself and think, well,
grains are small. What does a million grains of sand
pile together look like?
Speaker 3 (28:42):
Well, I mean, it doesn't matter what the number is actually,
but I think we you know, imagine you say you
start with a heap of sand, whatever you think a
heap is. Now you remove one single grain of sand
from that heap. So if you start with a million,
you're left with nine hundred ninety nine nine ninety nine.
Is it still a heap? Yes, in fact it would.
(29:03):
It would seem not only wrong but silly to suggest
that removing one grain of sand makes a heap into
a non heap. One grain does not make the difference clearly.
But assume you repeat the process a million times, remove
one grain, ask if it's still a heap. Eventually you
would have only one grain of sand left, and by
(29:26):
that point you know it is definitely not a heap. Obviously,
nobody would call a single grain of sand a heap,
And yet it seems impossible to identify any particular point
along the way where removing one more grain of sand
would make it no longer a heap. It's like, oh,
we went from one hundred and thirty eight to one
(29:46):
hundred and thirty seven grains. Now it's not a heap anymore.
That obviously doesn't seem right. But if you can't identify
the number at which it ceases to become a heap
of sand, what is a heap? You could use the
same process to question the concept of dustiness. Is this
lamp dusty. I'm looking at a lamp right now that
(30:08):
it's pretty dusty. I should have dusted it before we
started recording here. So yes, it's definitely dusty. But if
I were to remove one grain of dust at a time,
is there a point at which it would become no
longer dusty? Well, certainly there is. There's some point you
would get to where everybody would say, yeah, that's not
a dusty lamp. But you can't say where that point is.
(30:30):
You know you'd hit there before you get to zero
grains of dust or one grain of dust, But where
is it? And no single subtraction of a grain of
dust ever makes sense as the threshold, And so you
can note that it doesn't matter which way you go.
We've been talking about subtraction. But you can illustrate the
paradox by addition as well. So you can start with
(30:51):
one grain of dust, add another grain, add one pyroglyphic
dust might fecal pellet at a time, and it's hard
to say when the surface goes from not dusty to dusty.
The Sobriety's paradox is usually thought of as relevant to
the philosophical problem of vagueness. It can arise in connection
to any term that makes sense and is useful, but
(31:14):
is also vague, And so we can think of examples
from multiple parts of speech. So when you think of
adjective adjectives, you can think of tall, short, long, wide, narrow, loud, quiet, bald, hairy, crowded, sparse,
all of these where you know, you can make a
(31:36):
list of thousands of words like this, all of them
could be subject to a Sobriety's attack. Is a seven
foot tall person tall? I think basically everybody would say yes,
Now subtract a millimeter? Is that person still tall? You
can't find a clear cutoff. But also the Sobriety's paradox
(31:56):
goes a bit deeper because you can apply it or
a similar principle to concepts that you might not think
of as readily, concepts that are not usually considered a
type of measure or as counting. Based one example in
a paper that I was reading by a philosopher named
Diana Rathman, any color descriptor, for example, red red color
(32:19):
is usually thought of as visible light at a frequency
of you know, somewhere around four hundred and thirty to
four hundred and forty terra herts. It's a frequency of
reflected visible light, and you can place that range in
different places. You know, some websites I was looking at
said red is between like four hundred and four hundred
and eighty tarra hertz, or it just said it's four
(32:42):
hundred and thirty tarra hertz or four hundred and forty.
So there's obviously a range of frequencies that most people
will look at and say, yeah, that's red, and there
are ranges of other frequencies that most people will look
at and say that's definitely not red because it's blue
or it's orange or something. But whatever your starting point,
if you say start within the common red range, you
(33:04):
could vary the frequency of the reflected light rays one
at a time, you know, one hurts at a time,
one tear, heurts at a time, up and down the spectrum.
At what point is a color no longer red and
instead orange or purple? There are just tons of in
between colors. So either you have to impose a hard
(33:24):
frequency cutoff or some other kind of arbitrary rule that
does not conform to our true experience of seeing colors,
or you have to say that all colors are red.
You know, even blue is red, or even invisible gamma
rays are red too. Or you could say that red
like doesn't exist or is not a meaningful concept. But
(33:46):
I think that's obviously wrong because red is a perfectly
useful concept. We use it all the time. You could say,
can you hand me the red the hammer with the
red handle, and people know what you mean, they pick
it up.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Yeah. The only time that kind of a request causes
confusion is when you are straight over into an area
where you could make a case for it being a
different color, right, And even then you'd have to have
some other situations. The situation have to be more complex
than that, or you'd have to be particularly fussy to say, oh,
don't you mean the fusia hammer, like, I mean, if
(34:19):
there's one hammer there, you know which one they want, right,
pick the closest one to red.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
Right. So I don't think it's a good solution to
this paradox to say, actually red does not exist and
heaps do not exist, because clearly, I mean, we use
these concepts successfully. They are useful and meaningful. There are
objects that are red but not orange, or red but
not blue for that matter, And there's no and at
the same time, there's no good way to mark a
(34:46):
universal cutoff point between the frequencies of light that are
red versus orange.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Now we've already established that the Sobiety's paradox applies to
concepts like heap or pile. Those It's clear how it
works there, because those are concepts that involve an implicit
counting of things. But also, if you think about it,
it doesn't only apply to collection categories. Most nouns are
defined by some unspecified quantity of mass or measure, or
(35:17):
some unspecified degree of quality. In fact, some philosophers have
pointed out that you can attack the identity of basically
any object with a Sobriety's decomposition. So you know this
is a VHS copy of Highlander two the quickening. Now
take one atom away from it. Is it still Highlander two?
(35:37):
Is it still the VHS? I obviously yes, one atom
doesn't make a difference, And you, obviously at the same time,
cannot do this forever, because like a single carbon atom remaining,
or just a little fleck of black plastic from the
VHS would not be a copy of highland Er two
on VHS. But it is impossible to pick a boundary
(35:58):
where removing a single atom at a time makes a difference.
So these paradoxes arise from common words in terms that
don't have strict physical or mathematical definitions. Some words, not most,
but some words do have strict physical or mathematical definitions.
For example, the word trio. You could refer to a
(36:21):
trio of sand grains, and there would be three of them.
If there are more or less than three, it's not
a trio, but a heap of sand or a dusty lamp.
Those those terms are vague and they don't entail numerical specificity.
Now you might respond to this by saying, well, you know,
this is this problem of vagueness in the soariety's paradox.
(36:42):
It just arises because you know, we're being sloppy, right,
We're using vague words and concepts, and we could speak
more specifically. We should be more specific with our language
and avoid these philosophical problems. But is that achievable and
is that even desirable? The majority of the descriptive words
(37:02):
we use, again, do not have physically and mathematically precise
definitions and are, to varying extents subject to this kind
of vagueness and Furthermore, I would argue that they have
to be because it would be impossible to build a
language system that was actually usable in which all terms
(37:23):
and expressions had physically precise and mathematically precise definitions. And
if you doubt this, just try it. See if you
can communicate with somebody about everyday matters using no terms
that could invoke a Soroiety's paradox, or only terms with
physically precise definitions. I think if you do this, language
(37:43):
just becomes impossibly inefficient and non expressive. You just can't
really communicate this way, so we actually need vague terms
like dusty, even though we can't tell you exactly how
many dust grains or pyroglyphic feces are in. At the
same time, I think it's important to be aware of
the Sobriety's paradox because people try to invoke versions of
(38:09):
it or similar types of logic, I think, for purposes
of deceptive argumentation or to try to affect your thinking
with fallacies. For example, one classic way to try to
resolve the Sobriety's paradox that I think is not valid,
you know, with the heap of sand, is to say
that the paradox proves that heaps cannot exist. Since n
(38:32):
plus one grains of sand starting at one never constitutes
a heap, and since you can't tell me at what
number it becomes a heap, heaps do not exist. You
can imagine a kid pulling this with his parents when
they tell him to clean his dusty bedroom. It's like, oh,
how many grains of dust constitutes dustiness? Mom? You know,
(38:52):
tell me or your argument is invalid.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
Oh yeah, yeah, that's going to end well for you.
Kid can't lose your switch privileges exactly.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
So I mean it does sort of in a way
involve an interesting question in philosophy that that you know,
raises deeper questions about the vagueness of language, But it
doesn't prove what it's supposed to prove. It doesn't prove
that heaps or dustiness do not exist. But people do
try to use this argument that way. You know, in
(39:21):
a silly example, you could argue that no macroscopic object exists,
since you could you could do a soroiety's paradox on
them by adding or subtracting one atom at a time.
And people do use arguments like this to attack what
I think are basic valid observations, but that they might
not like. So, like a billionaire could could say I'm
(39:42):
not rich by doing a society's paradox with one dollar increments.
Oh well, if you had one more dollar, would that
make me rich? Obviously, it doesn't undermine the idea that
somebody can have a billion dollars and that that means
they're quite wealthy. It just because you can't pick a
single dollar incre meant where they become wealthy.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
Well, unless you are a taxing body, I guess, right,
and then you can put certain thresholds right, But but
then you kind of run into that situation too, where
it's like, oh, so really, if I made a dollar less,
it would be it would be different, it would be
a different bracket, and so forth. I guess. The thing
is we for like legal purposes and so forth, or
(40:23):
even like rule based systems, you know, we sometimes have
to decide on what the cutoff point is, you know,
like that's right, you have to be this tall to
ride this ride. And if if you are just a
little too short or a little too tall for the
ride or whatever, like, then yeah, you get into this
gray area. But sometimes you do have to call.
Speaker 3 (40:41):
It, well, yeah, I think much in the same way
that we've talked about on the show before, that like
life is impossible without relying on heuristics for judgment, which
can often be quite inaccurate. And so there are certain
domains where you have to override that natural reliance on
heuristic and involve laborious analytical thinking. Domains like science or
(41:04):
philosophy or something where if you just go on heuristics,
you're going to get the wrong answers. So you can't
do that. And at the same time, it's not possible
to live life by by judging everything based on laborious,
you know, deliberate analytical thinking. I think in the same
way you cannot have a language and a culture and
a life without relying on vague terms. But like when
(41:27):
it comes to the law, vague terms create a lot
of problems, so you have to go out of your
way to try to reduce them. And even then, there
are still lots of vague terms in the law. Like
in the law, you have concepts of reasonableness and stuff
you know that just that ultimately is saying, like you know,
later jurists, insert your interpretation here as to what reasonableness means.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
You know, earlier you mentioned like short and bald and
hairy as examples, and that has only made me think
too of various works of fiction or even nonfiction where
an individual a character is described, and sometimes you'll have
an author who says little more than that, you know,
describes them perhaps as like a short, bald, hairy man
(42:12):
walked across the street, and that does give you like
enough material to sort of run with it and help
generate an image in your mind for that character. But
it's going to vary greatly from one writer to the next.
There are some writers who will, you know, go into
great detail, telling you exactly how hairy they are, exactly
(42:33):
how bald, and exactly how short, you know, drawing on
all the tools of literature to make it very clear
and perhaps very engaging or funny or terrifying or whatever
in doing so. Or sometimes they'll say something that they're
really not saying much at all, but they'll say something
very specific. You know, it'll be one specific metaphor or
(42:53):
analogy that will that will give you just enough to
go on and form that kind of concrete idea in
your head.
Speaker 3 (42:59):
Yeah, that is interesting, and I guess it is a
feature of each author's individual literary style, how much sort
of laxity and tolerance they want to allow in their descriptions,
you know, how much they want to rely on vague
terms that could allow a wide range of interpretations. If
you call a character bald, that could be interpreted as
(43:21):
them having a completely shaved head, or it could just
suggest significantly thinning hair and so forth. And so some
authors might be comfortable with that whole range, and other
authors want to impose a more kind of I don't know,
authoritarian take on the reader's imagination and say here's exactly
what you should imagine. I'm going to tell you how
many hairs there are?
Speaker 2 (43:42):
You know, I was trying to think of an example
of you know, I mentioned how sometimes it's very specific,
but in a way that is not giving you a
whole lot of detail either. And I'm trying to think
of a specific example, and I had to look up
here online to find one. I believe this is a
book I've read. But in Raymond Chandler's Belong Goodbye, the
(44:03):
character of Philip Marlowe's describing somebody and says he had
a face like a collapsed lung. I mean, what are
you perfect it's somehow it's perfect, and yet like, what
does it mean? How do you? How do you? How
would you do a sketch based on that? I don't know,
but it works. It's distinct enough to work, and it's amusing.
Speaker 3 (44:24):
I really appreciate things like that. You might call those
more kind of spiritual analogies, because you can't imagine that
it means. Literally, it looks like the tissue of a
collapsed lung, but there's something, there's something of a collapsed
lung eness about it. Yeah, that's beautiful.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
But this is a great area of contemplation. Touches on
some of the other paradoxes that we've discussed and discussed
in the show before, you know, topics of like infinity,
like in what is infinity plus one? The ship of
theseus and so forth.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
And to be fair to the sarri these paradox literature,
it goes a lot deeper. I didn't take us deep
into the weeds on it, but there have been, for example,
some philosophers who have tried to use this paradox to
attack the very foundations of logic, saying like, well, you know,
so there's principle in classical logic that says either a
(45:18):
statement or its negation is true. So you know, it's
got to be the case that either A or not
A is true. And if you've got something like the
paradox of the heap, then you've got potentially something that
is neither a heap nor not a heap. And so
some people have said, well, then maybe there's something wrong
(45:40):
with logic, and people have come back and argued that way,
and so again, I didn't get deep into those dilemmas,
but if you want to look it up, it's out there.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
All right. Well, we're gonna go ahead and close out
this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, our third
episode on Dust, and we will be back for at
least a fourth episode. So if you're trying to figure
out exactly how long we're going to go on Dust,
we don't know. We don't know where the heap ends
on this one, but there will at least be one
(46:10):
more episode on Dust, maybe two more episodes, who knows.
We'll see how it goes. In the meantime, we'll just
remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily
a science podcast, with core episodes dealing with science and culture.
In the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed on
Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we do listener mail, on
Wednesdays we do a short form episode, and on Fridays
(46:31):
we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (46:36):
Huge thanks as always 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 at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.