Behind the Scenes Minis: Diagrams and Iceland Memories

Holly and Tracy discuss the challenge of understanding concepts in fields outside their own. They also talk about memories from their previous separate trips to Iceland. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday and Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I'm going to confess that this
entire John VN episode was really inspired by Eddie Hazard. Yeah. Yeah,

(00:23):
because I was remembering when she did the thing. I
think it's a dressed to kill. I'm trying to remember
which special talking about what Ven must have been like
as a child and doing the father. I'm not only
in the kitchen, I'm also in the hallway, like straddling rooms.
And I don't know why. It's always been so charming
and I love it so much, and it just popped

(00:44):
in my head recently, and I was like, John Vin
gets invoked a lot like Ven. Diagrams get talked about
all the time, but we don't really know that much
about him. And I had known that he had invented
the bowling machine, which I'm like, this is a wonderful
human who's like I could do lots of logic and
math problems. I also like to write about history, and

(01:05):
I invent cricket machines. That's a cool combination of things. Yeah,
So I was delighted to dig into his story a
little bit. I feel like as I looked at diagrams
that got more and more complex, like past the syllogisms,
my brain was like, no, ma'am, we have no maps

(01:25):
for these territories. I can't do it. Even as you're
reading the explainer, I cannot parse this information. Yeah, Like, well,
there's where my limit is, I guess. Yeah. But I
do also love the other thing that I really like
about him, and the reason that I read that kind
of longer piece and that other quote from his intro

(01:48):
to the first the first edition of his first book
is that idea of like, we can't just talk about
these heady things amongst ourselves fellow people in this field.
We need to be able to communicate these concepts and
share them with other people, because that's really where their
value lies is in being able to share information. And

(02:13):
I do feel like that is I mean, at the time,
it was considered quite brazen on his part to basically
call to account all of his fellow logicians and people
that worked in mathematics and say like, yeah, but what
we're doing is no good if we can't tell the
average person how any of this works. Why we're doing it.

(02:33):
And I love that idea, you know, of someone being
an educational communicator. It's just cool. I hope he wasn't
secretly horrible in a way I didn't discover in my
own That does happen. Sometimes it does. Someone will pop
up and be like, yes, but did you find the
thing about where he You know, I was about to

(02:54):
do another edizard and I poked a badger with a spoon,
But I don't believe he ever did. So. I also
do really love the idea of taking on somebody's invention
and trying to recreate it. Yeah, and especially because it
seems very much in the spirit of John Van's own
work to be like, no, you guys, math is how

(03:16):
a lot of fun things happen here. We will show you.
This is an obvious, demonstrable way we can use math,
which is just cool. It's very much in the same
ideology he seemed to write about, so math. I don't
know why I keep taking on subjects I don't understand. Like,
let's talk about physics. I don't really get physics. I

(03:36):
struggle with it. I try very hard. I don't know
if I'm trying to like re educate myself as I go,
But there are certainly a lot of people I admire
in these fields, so it's worth kind of doing the
breakdown for me. But there are times when I also
am like, uh oh, yeah, I think there are a
lot of subjects where like I reach a sort of
ceiling on my understanding. So like they I can do

(04:01):
pretty well with things like biology and chemistry and physics
up to a point, yeah, and then when crossing that line,
I don't understand anymore. Things I've had a big, big
challenge trying to explain on the show before have included philosophy. Yeah,
and sometimes I'm like, I just I don't understand what's

(04:23):
happening right now. And then some of it is stuff
like we've talked about. I studied literature in college my
entire degree, but when we get into literary forms from
outside of like the English language tradition, Oh, sometimes I'm like,

(04:47):
I have no idea what this is. I'm very lost.
Why does this structure work this way? Yeah, I understand
completely what you're training about. Uh yeah, But that's sort
of like I mean to me, that's that is for
me personal. One of the great benefits of this job
is that I can put myself in a position where
I'm like, girl, you better learn this. You got to

(05:08):
learn it now. You gotta figure this out enough that
you can communicate it in a way that hopefully makes
sense of everything. I don't know. That's a good I
feel like if I didn't have a job where I
had to do that, I might get a little stagnant. Yeah,
I mean I would hope not, because I am a
curious person and I want to know things. But I

(05:29):
also know it's really easy to just be like tootling
along in your life, especially in our very complex and
stressful world. It'd be like, I don't have time for
that right now, Yeah, and then that time never comes.
So that is my hope in talking about people like
John Vin, especially because he seemed to be perpetually curious
and want to do new things that were maybe not

(05:49):
what you might have expected of him. That's a little
inspirational to me, and hopefully other people keep learning new things,
keep doing new things. He was quite a match man
when he was like, I'm gonna inventive pitching machine. I yeah,
and I love it, And he seemed to find great
joy in such things. So may we all continue to

(06:11):
learn and explore new ideas and challenge ourselves and find
joy in that. Fingers crossed, we talked about the Lackey
Fisher eruptions. Yes, uh, so you and I have each

(06:33):
been to Iceland. Man, I love Iceland. Yeah, me too,
I asked. I had no recollection of hearing anything about
this at all ever before, including when Patrick and I
were in Iceland on our honeymoon. So while I started
working on this, I texted him and I was like,
do you remember hearing about something called the Lackey Fisser

(06:54):
eruptions or the like the Scott defires, And he said no,
I remembered hearing about Katla and that one that had
just erupted, whose name I can't pronounce. I say, I
can't pronounce it because I wrote it into the script
the last time we had an episode that was relevant
to volcanoes in Iceland. And I practiced and practiced and

(07:17):
practiced and practiced for so long, and then when I
got on Mike, I couldn't do it anymore. But it
was the one that had the massive ash cloud that
cut down on like just put air travel to a
standstill for a long time. It's possible that we did
hear something about this and just didn't retain it. I
didn't see any like signs about it in any of

(07:38):
our photos. But Patrick and I stayed in Cloister. We
stayed at the Iceland Air Hotel in Cloister, nice it.
The way that we did our our trip was that
we took the Ring Road and we went east and
that was the part that was like our easternmost point

(07:58):
where we stopped, and then we turned around and drove
back to Reykievic to go home from there. And something
I didn't know existed until working on this episode is
that there is a chapel in Cloister that is dedicated
to Jan Steinkerson. Today we did not see that. I

(08:18):
did not know it was. There was not a thing
that I knew to look for. We did go to
a really pretty waterfall that's right in that area. There's
also a park that has some of the naturally occurring
I think hexagonal basalt formations. We missed that entirely too,
So it would not really surprise me if we had

(08:39):
seen or heard something about that while we were there,
But like I really have no memory of it. The
whole landscape of that whole region of Iceland was dramatically
changed by this eruption. A lot of it became lava
fields covered with that moss that covers a lot of

(09:00):
the lava fields in Iceland, which I think is really
a like in it is very pretty. Please don't touch it.
It's very delicate. I said in my caveat about how
difficult I find Icelandic to pronounce that there are some
things that I really love about the Icelandic language. Yeah,

(09:21):
And one of them is that so many names for
things are basically broken into parts, and each of those
parts have has a meaning. And so there are so
many things with names in Icelandic that sound really complicated,
but they end in something that means waterfall or river

(09:45):
or any of that. So, like the very long full
name of Cloister, which Patrick and I had been pronouncing
wrong the whole time, because it is spelled as though
you would say it clouister in English means something like
farm cloister or farm church cloister. I forget what order
it is, and I love that. That was one of

(10:06):
the things when we realized that that was the case,
we would immediately be like, Oh, this site is for
a waterfall, let's go check this waterfall out because we didn't.
We didn't make a very comprehensive itinerary. We had our
lodging taken care of every night, we had our travel
to and from Iceland. We had a list of things

(10:27):
that we absolutely must do, and then everything else was
just explore love, which I liked a lot. I love
everything about Iceland. My list is hot dogs. Yeah, I
missed the entirety of hot dog culture in Iceland when
we were there. I did not know that was a thing.
It's so well, now that you say you were not

(10:48):
so much in Reykievic, that makes more sense to me. Well,
we spent three days in Reykievic, then we drove east.
Now I don't know then. Yeah, because what I love
about Reykievic is that it is other than the fact
that it's completely walkable, it's not that big. Yeah, it'll
so it's I'm like, you must have walked by that

(11:09):
famous hot dog place. I think probably we did. It
was is kind of like a little just stand that
people line up at. It's very small, but it's a
free standing little building. Yeah. I love everything about Iceland.
I shout out to my friend Adam that I made
when I was there because he is a listener to

(11:30):
the show Okay, and he was one of the guides
on our tour, and we were part of a tour
that had quite a number of people, so we were
in a few different buses and he had told me
he had seen me on one of the other buses
and was like, that can't be Holly Fry, what on
earth was should be doing on this tour. Then I

(11:51):
was on his bus after that and we had a
great time and he was wonderful. So shout out to
Adam who told me one of my favorite jokes of
all time. What do you do if you're lost in
the forest in Iceland? What stand up? Because there is
not a lot of tall foliage. Yeah, there is a sign,

(12:17):
a symbol that is used on signs in Iceland that
looks like like sort of a little I can't if
it's called a flurtally like the little loopy square that
is on mac keyboards as the mac. I knew it
was wrong as I was saying it, but I can't
remember what that shape is called anyway, that shape that

(12:39):
basically designates there's something interesting here. And so sometimes we
would just see that shape on a sign and we
would go see what it was. And one time when
we did this, it turned out to be a museum
that was called something like the Land Reclamation Center that
turned out to be a place that was really only
opened for school groups. But some people who worked there

(13:03):
showed up while we were in the parking lot and
they were like, we're normally only you know, the kind
of place that school kids come, but we will let
you in for free if you will QA the English
version of our audio tour for us, and we said sure, great.

(13:23):
And it was an incredibly interesting museum because it was
all about how in the process of settling and establishing
farms on Iceland, a lot of the tall vegetation like
trees was cut down and this had a cascading effect
of the trees that were there. Something that they had
done in the role of ecology in Iceland was when

(13:44):
the lava flows come slow that down right, So without
the trees there, the lava destroyed a lot of other vegetation,
led to a huge problem with erosion and dust storms.
And so this is an effort to plant a type
of grass that I've forgotten the name of that has

(14:04):
an incredibly long and really tangly root system, Like once
the grass is planted and established, that stabilizes the soil,
and then they can start planting bigger things, including trees
to hopefully slow the flow of lava when eruptions happened,
which I thought was really cool, Love it, love it.

(14:26):
We had a great time with that. I ran across
something that was so interesting to me during this but
also wasn't really related exactly to the subject at hand,
so I just put it here in the behind the
scenes instead, which is that one of the things that
was happening in Europe during all of this was a

(14:47):
lot of really intense thunderstorms and a lot of lightning,
and a lot of people who died during the aftermath
of all of this. In German speaking countries were bell
ringers who were in the bell tower, oh, during the thunderstorm,
because it's a lightning rod well right still in these places,

(15:11):
like lightning not well understood yet, and in a lot
of these places it was traditional to ring the church
bells to try to deter the thunderstorms. And like this
was a belief that was still pretty widespread in a
lot of German speaking areas in the late eighteenth century,
and there was kind of a superstition that if the

(15:33):
bell ringer got struck by lightning and killed during the thunderstorm,
it was because he was not doing enough a good
enough job. Wait, there's a good blame the victim set up. Yeah, right,
And a lot of church bells were inscribed with this
inscription that was translated as I call the living, I

(15:53):
mourn the dead, I break lightning. I found all of
this fascinating and also that it felt like a big
digression in the rest of the episode. I'm very excited
to go back to Iceland. I am too too. Just

(16:14):
in case anyone listening is wondering that is currently full. Yeah,
there is a wait list. Yes, you can join the
wait list and we'll see if space opens up. Yeah.
I peek over there from time to time, and occasionally
I see it that it's like two spaces left, and
then it goes back to being sold out. So it

(16:34):
seems like a known thing with international trips like this
is that sometimes people cancel. Stuff comes up in life,
circumstances change, whatever, wedding schedules. Yeah, stuff happens. Yeah, So
there there's definitely a wait list, may or may not
be space that opens up. I'm glad. I randomly stumbled

(16:58):
across this topic while just trying to figure out what
to do as a Saturday Classic, because I found it
really interesting, and I found that so many written things
to get to read. We could not read directly from
Steinerson's account because translation into English is still under copyright protection,

(17:18):
but a ton of public domain stuff written originally in English.
I will close our little behind the scenes with something
that William Cowper wrote on June twenty ninth, seventeen eighty three. Quote,
so long in a country not subject to Fogg's we
have been covered with one of the thickest I remember.
We never see the sun, but shorn of his beams,

(17:40):
the trees are scarce discernible at a miles distance. He
sets with the face of a red hot salamander and
rises with the same complexion that was written in a letter.
That's a final note for our Friday behind the scenes.
Whatever's happening this weekend for you? If it involves volcanoes,

(18:03):
I hope it is not a danger to you volcano,
but maybe a curiosity and study of volcano done in
a safe way. There's been a number of volcanic eruptions
in Iceland since we decided we were going to go
there for our next trip. So hopefully I haven't just
caused a major Jinks situation by recording this here on

(18:26):
July seventh, twenty twenty four. Dang, dang it, Tracy, I
know right, So to drop us a note if you like,
We're at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and we'll
be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow and something brand
new Monday. Stuff you missed in History Class is a

(18:47):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
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