Listener Mail: That Sweaty Horse Light

Once more, it's time for a weekly dose of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and Weirdhouse Cinema listener mail...

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Listener mail. This is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and we're bringing you some of the messages that you've
sent us over the past couple of weeks. Uh, Rob,
if you're ready, do you want to jump right in
reading this message from Ian about our Punish the Machine episodes?

(00:29):
All right, Ian Rights, Dear Robin, Joe, I'm still way behind,
still working to catch up. I went for a weeklong vacation,
which was wonderful, but one side effect was that I
lost some of the ground I had been making up.
Say sorry, I say LEVI say LEVI? What do is say?
LEVI mean? I think that's life. That's life, Okay, um,

(00:54):
so yeah, that is life. It's hard to keep up
with all these podcasts. I can't keep up with all
these podcasts. We can't keep up with all these polks.
It's listening to us really should be a full time job.
You're not taking it seriously. If you're not doing eight
hours a day anyway, and continues in your Punish the
Machine episode, you spend a decent amount of time discussing
who would be held responsible if an intelligent machine, such
as a self driving car, injured someone, you didn't mention

(01:16):
what to me as an attorney seems like the obvious
avenue no pun intended product liability law. This is obviously
a gross over simplification of a complicated area of law,
but the basic idea is if a product is defective
or malfunctions in a way that harms someone, the manufacturer
is responsible. A problem caused by the decision making of
a smart device just seems to me like another form

(01:39):
of malfunction or defect. Rather than trying to develop novel
but legal mechanisms to modify the behavior of the machines themselves,
you simply apply the coercive pressure, because all law is
fundamentally coercive in some way to the manufacturer, usually a
corporate entity, in order to motivate them to try to
avoid problems and to try to correct them when they

(02:00):
do arise. In fact, there is at least one real
world example that is strikingly similar to the self driving
car situation, the recent crashes of the Boeing seven thirty
seven Max Airliner. Those crashes were caused by the autopilot
which is a smart system, mistakenly concluding the plane was
nearing a stall condition when the air speed drops too
low for the wings to maintain lift, and attempting to

(02:22):
force the nose of the plane down to correct the
perceived problem. In this situation, Boeing has been held responsible
for the malfunctions and the ensuing deaths. Imposing monetary penalties
and possible criminal prosecution to Boeing rather than the plane
allows the law to focus its efforts on the entity it,
at least in theory, has the ability to influence. This

(02:43):
also sidesteps the problem you discussed in trying to determine
which specific person is responsible. Even if there is no
identifiable individual, the business entity can be held accountable. How
effective modern law is that. Holding corporations accountable is a
different discussion. Individuals are only sponsible for their parts of
the process, but the company is responsible for the whole.

(03:05):
Thank you again for your wonderful discussions. I hope one
day to catch up. I yes, we too, We too
hope one day to catch up. Yeah. Well, thanks for
your input, I and well so Ian. Obviously, I agree
with a lot of what you say there, except the
well I agree in the sense that. Um, I think
a lot of what you say seems like probably in

(03:26):
many cases, what the law should be. But but I
think a lot of the complications that are raised by
the main paper that we talked about in that episode,
the Remedies for Robots paper, is about what kinds of avenues,
of sort of appeals to the court systems that corporations
who make these machines will be able to use in
order to evade responsibility. Uh. And they might sound plausible

(03:48):
to some people. They might say that, Um, with a
certain level of complexity and certain kinds of machines, it
actually becomes increasingly difficult to identify whether what happened is
a result of manufacturer defect, you know, a problem with
the machine itself as it left the factory versus how
it was being used by the user, and and that

(04:10):
kind of thing. And then of course as you as
you raise there are some difficulties with getting actual, you know,
the the effect that you want of the law by
trying to enforce penalties on corporations rather than on individuals.
Because I remember one of the things we talked about
in the episode is like, well, does a you know
where they're going to be situations where a corporation says,

(04:31):
you know, we're gonna make a lot of money off this.
If at some point we have to pay some damages
on it, that's just the cost of doing business. Yeah,
and I believe we also discussed how that that can
potentially be the AIS approach as well, that can be
the machines approach. Well like that, well, that's the operating
cost of doing what I'm doing. I'm going to have
to pay fines on, you know, whatever it is I'm
doing that is out of line. Right, And that also

(04:54):
comes into when you're trying to program a robot not
to do something that is considered in some way prohibited,
something that is bad. Uh. There are these differences in
the philosophy of how you encode prohibitions, right. Uh, this
was a big theme we talked about in these episodes.
Do you encode the prohibitions as inviolable rules or do

(05:14):
you encode them as like, uh, sort of disincentives with
a certain numerical value that's hard to overcome. And there
there are good arguments on both sides of that. So anyway, Ian,
since you are a lawyer, I might recommend if you
want to send us any more thoughts on this that
you actually just read the full Remedies for Robots paper
and tell us more about what you think about their
complete argument, which you know, we we just discussed some

(05:37):
parts of. All right, when I've got the you've got
the mail bot, Carnie all hot and bothered over this,
Uh this taco? What else do we have in the
mail bag? Joe? Oh? Okay. So next, I wanted to
get into a number of responses to the most recent
artifact episode I did, which was called the Sugar Light. Now,

(05:58):
this was an artifact act in which I talked about uh,
mentions of anomalous sources of cold light. In Sir Francis
Bacon's sixteen twenty work Novum Organum and rob I assume
you haven't had a chance to listen to my artifact
episode yet, but I'll try to summarize for you so
we can talk about it. The Novum Organum was a

(06:19):
book in which Bacon was trying to lay out a
new method for logical investigation of the world, and in
many ways this the method described in this book could
be considered proto scientific, since his method is in essence
empirical and inductive. So, for example, It says, if you
want to understand something, you should try to use, you know,

(06:41):
use observation from the real world to list every instance
you can of the phenomenon you're trying to understand, and
then you should list properties that are associated with it.
So in the example of heat, that would be stuff
like light. And then you can list a bunch of
examples of things that have that associated property, but not
the property you're studying, so occurrences of light without heat

(07:04):
and so forth. And he thinks that this ultimately can
help you understand nature better. But so this leads to
a section of the book where he's just listing a
bunch of examples of cold light, light that doesn't actually burn,
like the hot light from the sun or from a fire.
And so I talked about some of the examples that
he lists in this artifact episode. He lists the appearances

(07:27):
of fire around the heads of of children, sometimes like
fire around the head or the hair that appears to
be not hot and not burning, just a kind of
halo effect. Uh. I'm not sure what to make that,
except it maybe just a general you know, it may
tie into some of the lore that we discussed in
our episodes on the history of halos and halo imagery.

(07:47):
But then he also talked about some really strange stuff. Um.
One was the idea that a flash without any evident
heat quote has sometimes been seen about a horse when
sweating at night. So I was like, what is the
deal with the flashes of light from a sweaty horse? Light? Yeah,
And then also I mentioned a few others, but for

(08:09):
for the rest of the Artifact episode, I talked about
the claim of light being emitted from scraped or crushed sugar,
which is in fact entirely real as a phenomenon something
you can see for yourself by crushing sugarcubes in a
darkened room. Um. But I mentioned that I didn't know
what to make of a few of the other things
he talks about, especially the sweaty horse. But another one,
which is that he says that light sometimes flashes from

(08:32):
an oar slapping in seawater at night, and listeners got
in touch about these with some ideas about what he
might have been talking about. The one with the oar
slapping water turned out to be relatively easy. I think
several listeners suggested that this might be a result of
bioluminescent plankton so as an example of this type of message,

(08:52):
Eric got in touch to say, Robert and Joe, longtime listener,
first time emailer, the glow caused by an oar slapping
the water sounds like by luminescent plankton to me, love
the show. Eric and John also got in touch to
say you mentioned light being emitted when an oar strikes
the water. This is actually a common example of bioluminescence

(09:13):
in the ocean, caused by micro organisms in the water.
This can also occur in rolling waves when the agitation
is enough to stir them up, and sometimes even in
calm water. So obviously we've talked about all kinds of
bioluminescent marine organisms on the show before. But I suppose
I didn't connect Bacon's claim to bioluminescent organisms because I

(09:34):
was focused on the detail of the glow occurring when
the ore slaps the water, Like, why would an ore
striking the water have anything to do with the onset
of the light. I'd never heard of this, but I
did some more digging, and I think the listeners probably
are correct here that actually hitting the water or mechanically
disturbing it in some way can sometimes cause the plankton

(09:55):
to light up, and as one very easy to consume
example of this, I found a q A on the
a s U website by a marine biologist named Amy
Hanson that connects plankton bioluminescence to mechanical disturbance uh and so.
Hansen writes that one example of bioluminescent algae is a
dinoflagellate called noct to luca or see sparklenc To Luca

(10:17):
are so small that thousands of them can fit in
a single drop of water in places like Bioluminescent Bay
in Puerto Rico see sparkle are so abundant that the
water sparkles and neon bleu at night when you run
your hand or a kayak paddle through it. So there
is actually associating the disturbance of the water with the
light coming on. And and she actually also cites a

(10:38):
couple of reasons that might be the cause of the
light coming on due to mechanical disturbance. One is the
idea that okay, a predator swims through the water and
then the light comes on to startle or scare the
predator away. Another possible explanation is that these dinoflagellates use
the light to attract bigger predators that would eat their

(10:58):
own predators. So I'm handing it to the listeners who
got in touch on that one. I'd say I'm fairly
confident that this is exactly what Bacon was talking about
with the oar slapping the water. But the sweaty horse,
on the other hand, I feel like that one is
still a lot more mysterious. Though we did get one
response taking a stab at the sweaty horse, Rob, do
you want to read this one? Sure? There's the one

(11:24):
from Stephen Hi Robin Joe. I've been a fan of
your show for quite some time, and I'm probably more
excited than I should be that I might be able
to contribute in some small fashion. The glowing sweaty horse
all caps in the recent Artifact episode about sugar light
may be much simpler than it sounds. Horses tend to
sweat profusely when working hard, so much so that their

(11:45):
entire body becomes drenched. A hot, sweaty horse in cool,
dry air can create what looks like a cloud of
mist around its body as the sweat evaporates. I live
in an area with a large Amish population, and it
is not uncommon on dry winter day to see a
sweaty horse doing a decent impression of a fog machine,
simply due to the evaporating sweat. A steamy horse may

(12:08):
not look special under the bright light of the sun,
but perhaps a wisp of vapor catching moonlight directly or
via reflection from a pond or stream may look like
a brief flash of light from a short distance. I
was unable to find any good photos of this. Perhaps
the market for sweaty horse pictures is underserved, but I've
included a link to a stock photo that shows the

(12:29):
general idea, but is likely edited to look much more
dramatic than it is in reality. This is just a
wild guess, but old riding tends to portray things in
a much more fantastic way than we might today. And
they include this wonderful photo of a sweaty horse. It's
with this mist coming off of it, or what you know,
it looks to be a mist coming off it looks

(12:50):
it looks like it is a magical horse that has
come out of some misty realm and is therefore emitting
the mist. It's quite beautiful. I feel like I'm about
to see it flanked by a hopping vampire at any moment.
I love it. Stephen. Anyways, so I think this is
I don't know if you're right, but this is a
fantastic attempt at an answer. Thank you so much to
all the listeners who got in touch with the ideas

(13:12):
about the glowing the glowing oar slaps and the sweaty horses.
This is just great, all right. This next message comes
from Daniel. This when just seems general. Daniel says, Hi,
Robert and Joe, first off, love the show. Thanks for
all you guys do. I don't understand people who listen

(13:34):
to music while driving. I love the way you guys
engage my brain. Um, there are two topics I've been
thinking about recently, and I wondered if you guys had
either already done something about them in the past or
might in the future. One. A number of times I've
come across mentions of different types of ice, both in
your shows and in science fiction I read. Most recently,

(13:55):
I picked the episode on Pie Create out of the
show History, and you mentioned there that we have one
specific type of ice naturally occurring here on Earth. So
what are the others, Where can they be found or
how can they be made? And how are they different
from what we already know? Second, glass elevators make me nauseous.
My work recently moved into a new building that has

(14:17):
glass elevators, and every time I ride one down, I
have to close my eyes to avoid nausea. No one
else I know has this problem. What's going on here?
Going up doesn't cause any issue, and normally closed elevators
don't bother me at all. Thanks well to take your
second question first. I don't know, but I wonder if
it has anything to do with uh with I don't know,

(14:39):
something akin to simulator sickness, which we've talked about in
previous episodes. But maybe this will be worth coming back
to in another episode, because I can imagine that's not
too uncommon of a feeling. I likewise don't have any
problem in regular closed elevators, but I feel like when
I've been in transparent elevators before, I've gotten I don't
know about nauseous, but definitely a little woozy. But but

(15:02):
as for ice, rob I know we have talked about
different types of ice before. I can't remember what the
scientific term for the different ice configurations is but I
think it has to do with the the different crystalline
structure of ice. Is that right? Like ice? You know,
the different numbers applied to ice one, two, three, four
and so forth. Yeah. I mean I thought we got
into it maybe a little bit in pie crete and

(15:22):
maybe a little bit more as well on our episode
on heavy Water. Oh yeah, yeah yeah. So, uh, Daniel,
you might want to go check out that that episode
on heavy Water if you haven't heard that. I think
we talked about it in there. But I'm doing this
from memory, so I'm sorry if I'm wrong, But I
think the issue is just that the different phases of
ice have different crystalline structures, usually because they're formed under

(15:45):
very extreme conditions that are not present on Earth, say,
is like really high pressure or something. Yeah, so I
don't know. Well, we'll have to look at it. It's
possible that we could do in an episode on alternative waters,
I mean alternative ices rather, but I don't I love
to see. All right, Well, let's close it out with

(16:07):
one bit of weird house cinema listener mail. This one
comes to us from Charles Hi, Robert, and Joe. I
hope this email finds you healthy and well. I came
across your podcast last year and just got to your
Weird House Cinema episode on Gunhead. Had it not been
for the fact that I'm able to listen to podcasts
at work, I'd probably still be very far behind. The
added effort to answer listener mail is nice because everyone

(16:29):
writing in has such interesting information to share. As a
first time writer, I hope I can add to that
as well. Anyway, during the Gunhead episode, you mentioned that
there were one or two scenes where one of the
characters was waving or pointing their gun at another character
when they were told to stop. You both were a
bit confused as to the reasoning the character gave, and
just concluded it was likely because it was dangerous. Although

(16:51):
this is inherently true for safety, I believe that there
is also a cultural significance, and I hope to shed
some light on it. Growing up in an East Asian
family my parents, it's always emphasized the idea of karma.
This not only included physical actions, but also extended to
acts such as gossiping about others or in this case,
pointing a weapon at someone, even in jest, the idea
being that even a benign gesture is still looked at

(17:14):
as you wishing ill fortune on that person and will
count as bad karma. Although this doesn't follow the traditional
definition of karma, which focuses on you being the recipient
of your own actions coming back to you later in life.
It revolves around the karma you wish on others. I
haven't watched Gunheads, so I don't know the nuance of
the scene, but this is my best guest based on

(17:34):
your description. Thank you for all the recent topics you're
covering your podcast. I always know I'm in for a
knowledge expansion when I turn on your podcast. Many thanks, Charles. Oh,
thank you, Charles. To be honest, I do not remember
what scene you're talking about. Oh no, no, I remember it.
There's so we have. We have the old guy, the
one who is played by the cool prog rock dude.

(17:55):
Oh that's right, yes, yes, yes, yeah, and um I'm
blinking on his name him off hand, but anyway, he's
the wise member of the crew that's gonna run this
uh uh, this gig that's gonna try and steal the
stuff from the the Robot place, you know, the Robot Island.
And yeah, there horse the gun yeah, club mach Um,

(18:16):
and he's he's like, what are you doing? Don't point
that at people? You're you know, that's you know, there's
no good. You know, he's he's, he's shutting him down
every time he does it. And we were like, well, yeah,
that makes sense. You shouldn't point guns at people. That's
not safe. But it does seem like, yeah, I feel
like Charles is making a fair point here. It sounds
like maybe it is verse two in um in an
idea of of of of ild karma and you know

(18:39):
the superstuit that would that would track with some some
other stuff I think I've heard before. So Charles, thank
you for writing in and um and illuminating gun Head further.
It is it is, It is a text that deserves
more illumination. Yes, sincere. Thanks. All right, Well we're gonna
go ahead and close up the mail bag for today,
but we thank we thank everybody for writing in. We
read everything that comes in. We don't always have time

(19:00):
to respond, and we don't have time to include everything
on listener mail, but keep it coming. We love hearing
on these topics. We love hearing about everyone's experiences UH
with these topics and UH and and your insight. In
the meantime, If you want to listen to other episodes
of Stuff to Blow your Mind, listener mail Well, that
happens every Monday. We have core episodes of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Wednesday is the Artifact,

(19:22):
Friday is is Weird how Cinema. That's our time to
cut loose and enjoy a weird film. And then we
have a rerun on the weekend. And then on Sunday,
the seventh day, we rest or we run a promo
for some other show. That's depends what what's what's required
of us frantically get ready for the first day again, yes,
um yeah, so huge, Thanks as always to our excellent

(19:43):
audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other uh to uh to uh suggest topic
for the future, that's what you can do, or you
can just say hello. You can email us at contact
and Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to

(20:07):
Blow Your Mind is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows,