Stuff You Should Know: An Incomplete Compendium of Mostly Interesting Things

View in Browser   Key insights from Stuff You Should Know: An Incomplete Compendium of Mostly Interesting Things By Josh Clark, Chuck Bryant

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What you’ll learn This information probably won’t save the world, but it could enhance your trivia game. In Stuff You Should Know, a pair of podcasters provides a smorgasbord of interesting facts about the world in which we live—some obscure and tucked away, others hiding in plain sight.   Read on for key insights from Stuff You Should Know: An Incomplete Compendium of Mostly Interesting Things.

1. A global pandemic has impacted facial hair trends. In 2017, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) released a pamphlet that was far more interesting and entertaining than they probably intended. It was an illustrated guide showing 36 styles of facial hair, including mustaches, beards, some combination of the two, or none at all. The pamphlet’s purpose was to indicate which styles hindered proper mask wearing and which did not. The majority of styles don’t make the CDC’s cut. Here is yet another strike against a feature of human anatomy that does not seem to have a significant function. Eyebrows keep sweat out of our eyes, head hair protects us from getting scorched by the sun and retains body heat in the winter. Eyelashes keep out dust and other particulates. Pubic hair minimizes friction and helps keep bacteria away from the body. But what does facial hair do for us? Scientists don’t have a definitive answer for us. Some have speculated that it helps regulate body temperature or acts as a defense, but why would natural selection leave  50% of the world’s population (i.e., women) without such features? Another, more compelling explanation is that facial hair serves the dual function of attraction and dominance: It helps men attract mates and ward off competition from other males. It’s a display of both sexual maturity and toughness. The rivalry component of this theory is more compelling than the attraction component. After all, there are a variety of opinions regarding facial hair: Some women love it, some loathe it, some are ambivalent. A far better predictor of attraction than facial hair density is prevalence in a community: The more common the trait, the less desirable it becomes over time, and the less common, even less desirable other traits gain power of attraction. This creates a vacillation between the rare and the commonplace. So if someone finds himself in the hipster corners of bearded Brooklyn or just got hired as a lumberjack, clean-shaven might just increase his powers of attraction. But if he is in a clean shaven town, a beard will set him apart. Evolutionary biologists call this pattern “negative frequency dependence.” It shows up all over the animal kingdom. The decision to have facial hair or not is also culturally influenced. When bearded Vikings were pillaging the British Isles, the English began shaving their facial hair to distinguish themselves from their oppressors. For centuries, the ancient Romans were clean-shaven to set themselves apart from the bearded Greeks. Individuals also influence facial hair style. If you look at the common names for the different styles, you’ll see a lot of them are named after people—many of them artists: the Van Dyke, the Dalí, the Fu Manchu, the Verdi. In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, beards were on the rise. Perhaps a thick beard was a way of signaling competence in an era when wallets were no longer thick. In more recent history, a global pandemic has proven powerful enough to alter facial hair styles. The pogonophiliacs (beard lovers) have been in decline, perhaps partially informed by speculative reporting about facial hair putting people at greater risk for COVID.

2. Years or even decades of attention go into the traditional Mexican beverage mezcal—only for the stuff to be guzzled in moments by college kids. Does the word “mezcal” mean anything to you? If it doesn’t, you’re definitely not alone. It’s a spirit native to Mexico, and its most common iteration is tequila. Just as a Scotch is a particular variety of whiskey, tequila is one of many drinks that fall under the umbrella of mezcal.  Mezcal has been used in traditional folk ceremonies in Mexico since the 1600s, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that mezcal was injected into the American mainstream. Sure, Americans got their hands on cheap tequilas, but the purer mezcal made a splash in U.S. markets much later. It gained popularity in large part due to a famous Los Angeles-based artist named Ron Cooper. Cooper stumbled upon mezcal in Oaxaca, Mexico, while vagabonding through Central America with some comrades in the 1960s. He began hunting for the best mezcal in remote villages in the Oaxacan countryside, and then brought back the crème de la crème to share with the artist community in Los Angeles and New York in the years that followed. In 1995, Cooper began sourcing locally crafted Oaxacan mezcal and selling it in the United States, where it began to get people’s attention. The way mezcals are mindlessly chugged at many a house party creates a humorous contrast with the patience and intricacy involved in making agave-based spirits. It takes anywhere from seven to 30 years for the agave to be ripe for the plucking. Whiskeys and wines will sometimes age for years, but the grapes, wheat, corn, or rye used to make those beverages are always a matter of months away from harvest.  At a certain point in the agave’s maturation process, the plant sends up a blossoming stalk that can grow up to 25 feet tall. This forces whatever sugars were on the verge of shooting up the stalk to return to the piña, the fruit at the plant’s base. It took years for the agave to reach this stage, and it will be a few more months or even a few more years before the nectar finishes gathering in the base. The fruit that the jimador (the worker tending the agave) removes from its spiny enclosure can weigh upwards of 200 pounds! From there, the piña is taken to a distillery for roasting. Traditionally, the fruit is sliced in half, covered in agave leaves and dirt, and placed in a fiery pit called an horno, where it roasts for three to five days. The roasted agave heart is then chopped up, pulverized, and the fibers are put in water to ferment for about a week. The product is a liquid with the same alcohol content as a strong beer—usually 8% to 10%. The concoction is then distilled several times, and mixed with more water. Law requires an alcohol by volume level between 36% and 55%. Depending on how long the mezcal sits in a barrel, the drink will emerge a different color ranging from clear (a month or two) to a dark golden amber (a year or longer). As mezcal is bottled, a worm (more specifically, a moth larva) is added to the bottle. Whether it’s done to mark authenticity, to enhance flavor, or honor tradition is up for debate.

3. We might not be too far away from the world’s first trillionaire. What’s the most likely path for the world’s first trillionaire? Billionaires could convert their USD into Mexican pesos. That would be the quickest route, but we will assume the USD standard when we speak of trillionaires. Before we do that, let’s contemplate a number so big we can hardly grasp it: a trillion. That’s 12 zeros behind the 1. That’s a thousand billion. It’s a number reserved for the infinitesimally small or colossal, for talking about atoms in a cell, cells in a body, stars in a galaxy, and so on. Could someone really have that kind of money some day? If we look at a list of the 10 wealthiest people across history, we see that they’ve been shrewd industrialists, warriors, and a computer geek who formed a monopoly at a hinge moment in the personal computer industry. Half have been emperors (or tyrants, if you like) who had the empire’s wealth and resources at their fingertips: Joseph Stalin, Caesar Augustus, Mansa Musa, and others. It’s possible that some of these figures had wealth exceeding a trillion dollars, even though it wasn’t measured in USD. Based on history and current leaders, the first trillionaire will probably be a dictator or a monopolist. This person will probably have a lifestyle similar to the billionaires with whom we are already familiar. The two main contenders at the moment are Jeff Bezos and Vladimir Putin. Putin mostly pulls strings of the Russian political economy from behind a curtain, so exact figures are impossible to find, but intelligence reports estimate his worth to be between $200-300 billion. Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos is currently the richest private citizen, as his company has devoured the retail sector. Your home, car, and office are probably full of trinkets and gadgets purchased from Amazon’s online store. Even if you refuse to get your produce from Whole Foods and opt to support the relatively smaller contenders in retail, you are probably utilizing some services that run Amazon Web Service (AWS), the most colossal computing cloud on the planet. Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and numerous big name platforms rely on AWS, so chances remain quite good that you are still a cog in the Bezos machine—albeit a conscientious cog. Some speculate that Bezos could become the first trillionaire by 2026 if present trends continue, but Bezos himself doubts he will. He’s mentioned that most companies—even the biggest and most successful—fizzle out after 30 years. Amazon’s 30th birthday is 2024, so if Amazon is consistent with that average, he might not make it to the trillion dollar mark. Perhaps Bezos’ best and most interesting shot at one trillion is in space. Blue Origin (Amazon’s space exploration program) has among its goals the harvesting of the trillions of dollars’ worth of precious minerals found on asteroids across our solar system. According to astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, there could be as much as $100 trillion in minable substances on a single asteroid! To put that in perspective, that figure exceeds the entire world’s annual GDP.

4. There isn’t strong scientific evidence for the effectiveness of well witching, but it has been a practice around the world for millennia. In Africa’s savannas, large herds of wildebeest, zebras, and elephants trek across the plains for hundreds and hundreds of miles. Guided by some kind of cue or instinct that scientists fail to decipher, these large land mammals know exactly where and where not to go to find more secure sources of water, running the same circuits every year, as they have known to do for millions of years . We humans, on the other hand, are less (and perhaps decreasingly) connected to our primordial instincts than our mammalian counterparts. Humans have found other ways to locate water. One practice that extends back at least 8,000 years goes by many names, but is usually called well witching, water witching, water dowsing, or water finding. There are a number of iterations, including using a Y-shaped branch, rods, or a willow switch, but the items are always held out in front of the body, parallel with the ground (not too loose, not too tight). The goal of the divining implement is to discern the presence of subterranean water by observing minute movements in the instrument while walking. The rod’s slight bending toward the earth signals the presence of water. Is this all errant nonsense? The National Ground Water Association certainly thinks so. They’ve released official statements repudiating well witching as pseudoscience without any merit. But is it that simple? If it’s so absurd, why have people all over the world used this practice for millennia? There are cave paintings of well witching in Africa. Ancient Peruvian, Chinese, Egyptian, and Hebrew civilizations used the practice. The Ancient Roman writer Cicero referenced a dowsing rod, as did Confucius, and a 6th century mathematician from India. The religious reformer Martin Luther discussed it—and decided it was from the devil. In the 1900s, the Americans, British, and Russians offered courses and even degrees in well witching (or “biophysical locating” as it was fashioned for post-Enlightenment academia). To this day, there are over 70 local chapters in the American Society of Dowsers—none of these with Luciferian connections. This practice of divining is not limited to water, either. There are dowsers for precious stones and metals—even for lost wallets and keys. The market for specialized dowsers is actually quite sprawling. Psychologists use the term “ideomotor effect” to describe what’s happening with a practice such as well witching: The movement of the divining implement has more to do with what’s in the dowser’s mind than what is or isn’t beneath the earth. Unconscious mental activity is what moves the rod, not the water. For the dowsers, this is a mark of authenticity rather than of fraudulence: There’s something happening within a person, something discerning the presence of the desired substance. The rod’s bending is just an outward display of an internal instinct. Perhaps there is some biological, evolutionary basis to the notion that certain ineffable instincts remain within us Homo sapiens, intuitions that science can’t adequately trace, but which we also can’t shake. Though well witching hasn’t stood up well to rigorous scientific inquiry, it is important to be wary of rigid scientific fundamentalism in the same way that one would guard against intransigent religious fundamentalism. Phenomena like well witching do us a service by keeping science on its intellectual toes.

5. It was spelled “doughnuts” well before Dunkin’ popularized the shorter “donuts.” Sweetened fried dough has a history extending back at least to the Greco-Roman era. The earliest known usage of the word “doughnut,” however, dates back to 1803 in an English cookbook. For the record, it was spelled with the full word “dough” rather than the abbreviated “do-”.  How did doughnuts come to have the iconic hole in the middle? Until the mid-1800s, doughnuts were strips or small balls of fried dough. But the mother of American ship captain Hanson Gregory would make doughnuts for Gregory and his crew. She would season them with nutmeg and cinnamon and put walnuts and hazelnuts at the center (literally “dough nuts”). While we don’t know exactly what inspired him, Gregory began using a small round tin to punch holes in the center of his mother’s confections. “Doughnuts” did not become “donuts” until the late 1800s, and more widespread among bakeries in the 1920s. The shorter form really became popular in 1950, a few years after the centennial commemoration of Hanson Gregory in his hometown of Rockport, Maine—the man who put the hole in the donut. In 1950, William Rosenberg started a confectionery which would eventually be called Dunkin’ Donuts (it was originally called “Open Kettle”). In the years following his mobile sweets and coffee shop that catered to factory workers, Dunkin’ Donuts has become a booming franchise with locations across the United States and the world. The shortening of “doughnuts” to “donuts” is very in-keeping with the American tradition of efficiency and pragmatic simplicity. But while the shorter “donut” is an acceptable spelling, the original, longer spelling is still preferred 2:1. Maybe the abbreviated form is so thoroughly associated with Dunkin’ Donuts that people assume it’s more corporate than correct. However one may pronounce the word, it is clear that the doughnut has left an indelible mark on society (and our waistlines), and remains among America’s favorite snacks.