All right, pal. I've got a question that I've been wanting to ask you, but it's a question that it might require your laptop or some kind of internet access because I think you're going to have ideas for answers to this question. Uh huh. But to get specific, you're going to have to probably Google a little bit or something.
Okay. I got the Webbernet some front of me. What's what we doing? What's this about?
Who do you think saved the most lives ever? Oh, dang. Okay. All right.
Let's do this. All right. Let's do this. Okay.
So I guess we need to define saved. What does it mean for a live to be saved? Is that where we start? Yeah.
I think that's a good place to start. You get first of all, I ask the question. How do we frame it? Yeah, that works.
I think it's going to be somebody that made a vaccine. I think that's where we're going to or penicillin. We're going to end up at one of those two places. Boring.
Boring. Also tension ruining. What? What are you doing?
What do you mean? You got to come up with something that isn't a good answer first and then you work your way towards something that is not just ruin it in the first five seconds. Your first podcast. What are you doing?
Okay. Yeah. Okay. We can we can start.
Okay. How about this? What about let's start with Alvin York? What about him?
I don't know who's Alvin York. You know who Alvin York is? No, why are you being like this? No, who's Alvin York?
How do you not know Sergeant York, dude, World War I. He led an attack on a German machine gun nest. He killed like 25 people on his own, totally not reading from the Wikipedia article and he captured 132 prisoners. How do you not know this?
How do you not know this? Thank you for finally telling me what you're doing. It is starting to work. I'm starting to feel bad.
No, man. I don't know who that is. Did that really happen? Is that a real Wikipedia page?
Oh, yeah, dude. Sergeant York. Okay. In all seriousness, there's there's a movie, an old black and white movie about him.
In action in World War I. And the thing he would do is he would gobble like a turkey. I'm going to go, go, go, go, go, go, go. And then the Germans would go home and they would like poke their head up and he would pop.
You don't know this. No, I don't know any of this. And is this an elaborate prank or is that he would really Turkey gobble? Yeah, the Germans to death.
You did not know this, dude. This blows my mind that you didn't know this. Let's see if I got the audio right here. How many things there are.
I know you're right. I don't know. Let's see if I can. Okay.
Let me see if I can pipe the audio into dude. If I can pipe the audio into this, I'm going to be so proud of myself. Let's see audio. Oh, I might be able to do this.
Okay. See if you can hear this. Okay. Sound.
Can you hear that? Yes. They sound like machine gun fire. I mean, kind of.
Okay. Well, here's a clip from the movie Sergeant York. So Sergeant York is crawling up to the line front of the German machine gun nest. And he's about to do the thing.
Let's see if he does it. We're not hooking heads up. Got a little licks of some wipes the site. Did you hear that?
You don't know this. Listen, listen, listen, this. Okay. So this is the old black and white.
I bet that was so much more effective with visuals. It is. But you just need to hear the gobble of Sergeant York on this old movie. But here we go.
Licks of thumb wipes the front sight, aims and then gobbles. Boom. There it is. How you beat the Germans, my friend.
I like the way you corrected yourself and did not use the word kill because that's the problem with these kind of movies is it feels so weird now that we live in a global society where everybody can talk with everybody and watch each other's movies. So you got to be a little smarter about how you make your movies now, whereas back then you could just like those are the bad guys. Obviously you needed to shoot them now. I'm like, ah, those poor German kids, they just went off to World War I.
They didn't know what they were signing up for. And they got beat by a turkey gobble. Dude, it makes me not just any turkey. Man, that is Sergeant York.
That is the good thing about the movie is he goes home and he's this huge hero, Medal of Honor, all the things. And all he wanted was the bottom land, meaning he wanted a piece of land back home in a small town that he could farm. And the bottom land was the good land because you could grow a lot of crops there. That's what he wanted in life in general.
Did he get it? Yeah, he got the bottom land and the girl. That's great. Oh, so everything worked out.
Okay. So there's a lot of people when he was trying to, yeah, his platoon or whatever, his company, I don't know, there was a machine gun nest and he knocked it out. And he saved a lot of Americans. So he saved a lot of people, probably not the most ever.
Probably not. But I do have a sneaking suspicion that we will not have heard. We won't know the name of whoever we land on as the answer to this question. Okay.
All right. Okay. But I like your impulse because that example of Sergeant. Alvin York.
York. Yeah. I mean, that's great. That's the first obvious category for a question I think we need to start with, which is what are all the different ways that you could save a life?
Oh, I got a new one. Should I wait? Okay. Should I wait or should we go for it?
Yeah, you should wait. No, work through the question with me first. Can you put the pin in that? Yeah, sure.
Pins in it. What are all the different ways you can save life? Oh, you could save a life through sexy dancing. What?
Esther. Oh, I'm sorry. That's not how we need to walk through the question. Well, how when did she sexy dance somebody?
Is that not what Esther did? No, she, she you're thinking of Salomean or daughter who killed John the Baptist. Oh, yeah, that was opposite the same. But Esther is super pretty and the King liked her, right?
It was probably super pretty. Yeah. Unless you believe really tame, family, friendly late 90s, Christian movies, where she was the most chaste and dressed the most modestly and just liked to read Bible verses to King Xerxes. And then King Xerxes was like, that's the hottest thing I've ever seen.
You shall be my wife. I think maybe they took some artistic liberties there. I think so. No, I was just going to say Esther, but maybe we're not there yet.
We're still working through the question, right? I'm sorry about that. No, it's all right. You're on fire, man.
I wouldn't have thought to start with sexy dancing, but I mean, I can think of ways. Yeah. Let's see. That's what I'm approaching.
That's a way you could say people. There we go. Yeah. OK.
That was more the kind of thing I imagined you would come up with. You could build something engineering wise that would prevent something from happening. That would be a way to save gold. Yeah.
I'm writing this stuff down. Yeah. I'm going to write this stuff down. I'm getting a sheet of paper.
You could make some sort of shield against that disaster, whether it be engineered or otherwise. OK, you could warn people far enough in advance of something happening that they could prepare for it. That's a way you could say people. The British are coming.
OK, well, these are very good, you know. Warning. Did you write down turkey? Gavol.
Pensive measures. OK. Number two, Turkey. OK, number one, advanced warning, number two, Turkey, Turkey, all right.
Number three, sexy dances. Yeah. Yeah. You told me, yeah, OK, go ahead.
What's number four? Don't remember. So disaster. This is the worst.
Oh, wait, this is not the worst. That said, ever go ahead, keep going. No, no, we have a name for that one. I don't invent something.
Yeah. This feels very different for most episodes where I have a plan in a formula that I'm going through and you derail things. This feels very different. It feels like you have a plan and I'm derailing it.
And I have to admit, I see the appeal of why you like to do this. It's kind of fun. Yeah, it is kind of fun. Yeah, it's a great time.
The difference is you're trying to derail it. And when it's the other way, I'm trying to help. Oh, just not. What else we have?
We have developed a cure for something like the thing is already on the population and you figure out a way to undo the ill that has been done. Oh, OK. So invent something proactively, invent something reactive, counteractively, yeah. Yeah.
OK, that's pretty good. OK. What about seeing somebody's about to get shot by someone else and yelling no and then running right in front of the bullet? So self-sacrifice like Bruce Willis and I get it.
Yeah. Yeah. Like that. Yeah.
Yeah. OK. I mean, it's a silly example, but you know, you got one life that you can lay down. Some people save other people's lives like that.
They make an exchange. Yeah. They make an accumulation. OK.
What else you got? Prevent war, like make peace somehow. Yeah, that's a good one. Negotiate peace would be good.
Yeah, I got negotiate peace. Excellent. Another one could be impending doom is about to happen, but you like there's a guy just looked his name up. You see something bad's about to happen and you stop it.
So I like the little Dutch boy. Oh, kind of. Stop a disaster. OK, I saw something with a viral video a while back of a carnival ride that tipped in the wind or something and there were people on it.
And then just a bunch of other families and people who were attending, they all ran up and they figured out if we just push on the thing with sheer human mass. Yeah, we could stabilize it. Yeah, but it would take a lot of people and they all rushed it and they all put their shoulders into it and they stabilized the thing. Stop a disaster.
Yeah, I think they get a fractional life saved for that. OK, so none of them are going to be in contention. No, I don't think so. Do you give more credit to the first guy in that situation who ran over and put his shoulder into it?
You know, it was a little more than symbolic because he had the idea demonstrated courage and then other people followed suit. Does he maybe get one? Oh, you know, you could almost argue that he gets all of them because he started the process that saved them all. You could argue that.
So leadership seems like too vague a thing to list for how to save a life. But is it? You don't know. Oh, we got straight up people.
The people who ported you up to Kilimanjaro, they saved lives. They saved lives every time they take people up on top of Kilimanjaro through leadership. Yeah, that's true. I'm putting down leadership.
OK. How about winning at war? Oh, wow, that's a big one because you could argue that the people of the Manhattan Project saved lives. Uh-huh.
Yeah, you could argue that. Cool. That one's tricky. One that I think is very interesting is here in North Alabama, the floodwaters of the Tennessee River used to come back and forth every year in malaria was a huge deal.
And so the combination of taming the river and also poisoning the mosquitoes, which I'm sure had all kinds of bad effects, probably killed some special snails or something or DDT, the Eagle Eggs or something. But there's no malaria in North America, which is fascinating. That's that's amazing. Good.
Yeah. So what do we call that? Engineering? Yeah.
And we've got invent something proactively, invent something reactively. But some of what you're talking about isn't even really inventing. It's implementing and having the knowledge to draft something that will work and not have unfortunate counter. It's almost civil engineering.
Oh, man, think about this. I'll tell you straight up. My leading answer coming into the conversation is civil engineering. It is a civil engineer.
OK. A civil engineer. So you're just thinking a whole class of people that have a certain profession that save lives. I am thinking of an individual.
I haven't thought all the way through. I'm saving it so we can work it out together. And once and for all, finally answer this question using Google and our brains only. Wow.
I think I know the name of the person who is a civil engineer. Really? OK, let's just start there. Who do you think I'm thinking of?
Are you thinking of John Crapper? Oh, dang. No, but I see what you're doing. OK, I'm thinking, OK, I walk me through it.
Why did you think of John Crapper or wait? Let's see. OK, maybe it was Thomas Crapper per Wikipedia. Thomas Crapper was an English plumber and businessman.
He founded Thomas Crapper in Co and London, a plumbing equipment company. His notability with regard to toilets has been overstated mostly due to the publication of a tongue in cheek biography. OK, well, maybe he didn't invent the toilet, but I was going to say the person that invented the toilet. So that improved hygiene in the modern world, which prevented disease.
That's what I was going to say. What are you thinking? I was thinking whoever invented sewers. Yeah, this is going to be my argument.
You got increased urbanization over time. And eventually that urbanization gets beyond what a river can flush. You have industrialization. You've got infrastructure.
You have the ability to move massive amounts of food and crops from the nether regions of a society. Out into the inner sanctum of society, the heartbeat of the society, the city, right? And because all these other factors are happening, basically you've created this flow by which you take the resources and nutrients from the countryside and convert it into poop that has to be done away with in one very concentrated area through a process, as a combination of biological process, but also a logistical mechanical process, getting the food there in the first place. For the longest time, the plan for how to deal with waste was put it in a river.
And then it goes, you know, away. But eventually you can overwhelm a river's ability to make unpleasant things go away. If you build other systems that just cause the amount of human waste, that how much a city can sustain to completely outstrip the flow of the river. So then you need something to keep it from turning into a situation where any water in these highly concentrated areas of civilization becomes a death trap.
Everybody's dying of cholera. You've got to find a way to deal with that waste or you just have to kick everybody out of the city. So how many people live in cities and how many of those people would be dying of dysentery and cholera since the invention of modern sewer systems, 150, 200 years ago, if they hadn't been invented, and how many people would be dying downstream from waste in cities? You make a good point and forgive my ignorance.
What is cholera and a dysentery is a disease that typically happens as a result of sewage, but I don't know what cholera is. I thought that cholera was another epidemic related to, I mean, I assume it's a bacteria related epidemic that is the result of exposure to waste and things like that. I associate it with basically you get it in the cities and the irony of the thing is that it comes from poop, but then it makes you poop a lot more, thus creating more poop and putting even more poop into circulation. Yep.
I don't know. According to a doctor, according to a quick Google, it looks like what you're saying makes sense. It's a bacteria that causes it. Yeah, that makes sense.
Man, that seems really bad. You make a really good case and have you ever developed a sewage system, a review of a built one? I know you spent a lot of time in Africa. What kind of of septic systems did you see there?
That's funny. I thought your question was going to be another jokey one and that you were still trying to derail me. Nope. And then I realized, oh, no, you meant it.
OK, have I ever developed a no? I mean, I've had to maintain a septic tank. One house that I lived in was on a septic, maybe more than one and something happened to it. And so that required attention and work.
We had a septic system at a church I worked at that got weird. And so I learned a little bit about how it works and the process of getting that fixed. And then I've had a couple of sewers explode attached to my home at various times in my life. But that's about all my experience.
I don't really get it. I don't get down into that too much. Have you? When we went to make the orphanage in Peru, physically, the buildings, the first thing we did was put in a septic system, a septic tank.
Interestingly, the septic tank never got used as a septic tank. The engineering plan for the site changed after we did it. So we made this video years ago about a septic system. And kind of the way it works is the water and the turds go into a compartment and there are baffles as one compartment will fill up.
It'll kind of overflow into the next compartment. And so the particulates will go from one to the next. And then after that, they go to these pipes. So you've heard of fill lines in your yard?
You heard of that? I don't think so. What do you mean? I never know if it's fill lines or field lines.
And I'm going to go and get now and septic tank design. I can't find it. Whatever you call them, as the turds go from one tank to the next in the septic tank, then the water will flow out into a grassy field, typically. And you want that water to go down and go into some pipes that have holes in it.
And it kind of seeps into the dirt. Huh. And so the idea is you distribute the septic water into the field, wherever you are. And those nutrients will go back into grass and stuff like that.
OK, I've definitely walked through that before because the grass is going to think of a few times. Yeah, when I've been in like a leech field, a septic leech field or something, and it's just kind of like an unused chunk of ground where really probably would never want to walk, but I did. And I was like, that just doesn't seem like normal water. It wouldn't make sense for there to be moisture here.
And then I looked more closely at how the moisture was and sort of realized what I was in. It was unpleasant. I don't think that's correct. Like that sounds like a poorly designed system because typically you.
But do you remember I told you about being a part of having to repair a system? I think so. Yeah. Oh, that is the one that's the one that I see.
Yeah, it wasn't functioning properly. That's not good. Yeah, typically you'll have a pipe underground and then you'll fill around the pipe that has holes in it. You'll fill around that with gravel, like a very coarse gravel, like a trench kind of thing.
And then like a turd French strain. Yeah, exactly. It's a turd French strain. But by that period of time, hopefully you don't have just turds in the pipe.
It's just liquid at that point. And it's just going in typically have very green grass there. I think you make a really good case, man. I think this is a really good, a really good case.
So as civil engineer, I like to joke with people that civil engineers know a lot about turd flow. But yeah, yeah, it's a big help. Well, I guess they would. There were some toilets and some sewage in the way ancient world.
I don't remember when I learned it probably college or something, but India had maybe the oldest sewer system in the world. There's a settlement there called Mahenjo Daro. Really? And they had like these baked clay sewer lines.
I don't know how well they worked, but yeah, that's a pretty significant mark of civilization there that they had the foresight to at least make things go away. But I guess I never really understood where it ultimately went to or what the plan was for dealing with it. And there are really two questions when it comes to making the turd go away and you kind of tackle both of them. One is how do you get it away from me right now?
So I don't have to smell it or experience it. I guess clay pipes like in ancient India at Mahenjo Daro or Rome had some stuff like this, a few Greek cities, that stuff like this, you know, that handles the away problem, but it doesn't handle problem number two, which is the where it ends problem number two. That was an accident. That's what you did.
It was an accident, which it was an accident. It was also an accident. Man, there's a lot of turd puns out there in the world. This is kind of a minefield.
Ah, there's another one. That one was not an accident. But how do you break it down and make it go away and civilize this filth back into something that, you know, can be a part of the world again? And I have no idea how they did that in the ancient world.
Other than it seems like the most sophisticated sewer systems still basically just took the turds away, but then they put them in a water supply somewhere else. So you're just killing somebody downstream instead of yourself, I guess, would be the idea and that doesn't seem real great. I also find it interesting to talk about the different ways that people, this, you know, I'm not trying to be funny now or anything, but like when you wipe, back in the day when I went to Bath in England and they said they had these sticks. It looks like a spoon except the spoon is not hollow.
It's kind of flat. Yeah. Everyone would sit on these, I don't know how to say it. It's like a shelf with a slot running all the way down the shelf stone.
It's like a bench and everybody would poop into that bench and then the water was just flowing through there because they couldn't pump water back in the Roman Empire, but they did have gravity fed things and valves. And so they would control the flow rate. Have you ever been to like a football game and you have this really long trophy or an all have you ever done that? Yeah, those are unfortunate.
I've had some disappointing experiences there. What does that mean? What kind of disappointed experiences? Have you?
Well, how would you describe the metal that those kind of troughs are made out of? Stainless steel, stainless steel, pretty brittle. And I don't think anybody smart designed the attack angles. Oh, brittle.
We just had terrible surface to. I just mean, if you're at a stadium, a place where people drink very heavily and then hold it until a break in the game, that is going to cause flow rates to increase when people urinate. And if those troughs are fairly shallow, they've got an awful attack angle in terms of what you pee on to. Yeah.
And some of those, I'm telling you, man, they were just, it was like some prankster engineer just designed a mirror that would perfectly reflect urine. Like, you know, it would turn the urine into mist and then just cause it to reflect everywhere upon impact, especially upon forcible impact. You got to be really clever if you're going to pee at a trough and not have a bad outcome. And I was at Riggly Field one time where the Cubs play in Chicago and it was a tense game.
Nobody wanted to get up and go to the bathroom. And then finally, there was kind of a lull in the action. And everybody charged the urinal troughs at once. And I just remember glancing down that trough at the spray and thinking, how is this happening in this day and age?
This is so incredibly uncivilized. But there you go. That's my, that's my negative trough experience. I think about that way more than I care to admit.
So I think about two things. Number one, there's an optical and optical optimum reflection angle. So when a man pees, there's a stream, it appears to be laminar, but it's not, it's, it's kind of turbulent. It's kind of interesting.
Maybe your turbulent. I don't, I think that was supposed to be a cut down, but I don't get it. So there's a specific place, and a lot of times I'll search for the place in the urinal that minimizes splashback. And I think about reflection angles and I think a lot about optical lenses at urinals.
Huh? Yeah, I do. I think about, I was with you. I was with you until there.
Every dude listening to this finds that attack angle on the porcelain. Yeah. Where if I hit it like this, it minimizes mess. You can tell an uncivilized man because they just go, if they're peing in a typical toilet, like you'd have in a house, they just go right for the middle of the water.
That's so crude. You got to find the right angle on the porcelain to make it so that there is no blowback. There is no spray. Come on, you savages.
Yeah. Exactly. If you ever been to a urinal that has a urinal target, usually it's a fly printed on the urinal. You've ever seen that?
That is the second best solution for this problem with a urinal I've ever seen, but it's very clever. I mean, the fly is just in the right spot to reduce splashes, right? Well, I have a problem with that. So I think the fly is in an optimum spot to reduce splashes, assuming a certain height.
That's why I think about lenses a lot when I go to a urinal, because as the stream goes in, or let's just say a light beam goes in, and if you can imagine the urinal to be a mirror and imagine that you're in stream to be a laser, there's a certain reflection angle that would happen. It's not a pure bounce, but it happens at a certain flow rate and all these things. I don't know what the word would be, but I would call it the sputtering rate that you're in stream is not consistent. But if you hit that fly, it's going to work until you get at a different angle, because you can hit that fly multiple different from multiple different firing points.
And the fly is not optimum from a certain position. I think about that a lot. Yeah. But isn't it incumbent on the urinator to figure out where the metaphorical fly is?
Yeah. I mean, we've all peed a lot. OK. Yeah.
That said, this is something that we've all had. We all have a large sample size of data here that we have figured out if when I go to this kind of toilet, I do this, it is messy. And usually I think you figure this out pretty young. I mean, you should have this on lockdown while you're still in the single digits age wise, but you also figure out pretty quickly that if I wanted the most chaos and I don't, this would be what I would want to do here.
No, it's obviously it's just simple physics. Oh, and by the way, the best solution I've seen for this class. It is not simple physics. But anyway, go ahead.
I think it is. I mean, I think it's intuitive physics. Yeah. You could say that.
What's the best solution? Most physics are intuitive. The best solution, I think the company is called Echo, maybe ECCO, something like that. They make a little hedge mat.
So it goes in the bottom of the urinal or goes on the back of the urinal. Yep. And it's like it's 3D printed. You know, imagine something about the size of a disc, about the size of like a injection mold that is not 3D printed and I've wanted to make a company that just made do we can talk about this for a long time?
Because one time I flew from Alabama to New York City and I decided to document every single urinal mat that I encountered. And there are plethora of companies that make these things. They're injection molded injection. Yeah.
And they all work differently depending on the angle that they rest inside the urinal. Because sometimes it's clear to me, hey, that's a really neat design, but you've got it in the wrong urinal because each urinal. Yes. Yeah.
Yes. And that is the issue, but the principle is it's brilliant because it's just like a little forest of just a little semi flexible kind of rubbery. It's astroturf maybe. Yeah, it's like astroturf.
It's like low density astroturf. Right. So if you pee intelligently into that, it knocks down any spray or almost any spray and just keeps it from going around. It's a defensive solution to the problem.
Whereas, hey, pee on this fly is an offensive solution to the problem. Well, there's a company like one tries to reduce the spray. The other accepts that the spray is going to happen, but tries to defeat the spray after it occurs. Yeah.
One tries to mitigate the problem at the source and the other tries to deal with the collateral damage once it's been inflicted. Yeah. All right. You said it better.
Yeah. I think there's another company called Splash Hog. Have you seen those? Nobody loved their name.
So they love it. They have the urinal thing down in the bottom of the urinal, but they also have this wall that goes up the backside of the urinal. And what I don't like about the Splash Hog design is it kind of lures you into a false sense of security. You're like, oh, look, there's the little hedge thing that goes all the way up.
I can just pee on that, but you can get to an angle that's bad. And in certain areas, you'll pee into a cul-de-sac. And once you pee into that little localized cul-de-sac, there's nowhere for the pee to go except straight back out. Why would hate that?
Yeah. And because it's on the vertical wall in the back, sometimes I have found that the Splash Hog does not mitigate the splash to the degree that I want, which is completely. Yeah. Exactly.
Do you also have opinions about the man? We are we are a far cry from Turkey Gobbles here. No, we're not. No, we're not.
This all matters. Yeah. I got the pin in it. We're going back.
Go ahead. And then we're going to like a swimming pool house. I don't know. You go change for your swimming pool stuff.
And this is meant like a swimming pool. I'm like, yeah, there's very little splash when you pee in those. Yeah. But like one of those places you go to change into your swimsuit or whatever.
And it's like a building that was made in 1970. And you go up to the urinal to pee and there's a divider there. And it's not stainless steel because maybe they didn't have great stainless steel technology when they made this place. It's normal steel and the paint has come off and there's a rust like splatter pattern.
Have you seen that? Like a fracture side? Like just like when you pee. I can't believe we've never talked about these things.
I mean, I don't want this to turn into the public bathroom episode and we are kind of getting there, but still I got to pin in it. Dude, this is so true. And I have a mental calculation for how many urinals there are, what the layout of a bathroom, a public bathroom is, and therefore which urinal will be the cleanest. And if they're all open, I know which one I go to.
If there are two, three, five, 11, two short ones, I've just run this math so many times and I can tell depending on what the floor walls and dividers are made of, I can be vindicated like, oh, yeah, that proves it right there. Sure enough. Once again, number three out of seven is the cleanest. It's always number three when it's out of seven.
Interesting. Because you can tell because the things that are in urine to have a certain effect on different materials and they leave a wear pattern based on the spray pattern. And so you can tell who uses what the most and I try to go to the least used. Interesting, which also usually mean the most exposed.
Yeah, that's interesting. I don't even have that in my cohesion. I mean, we don't even need to talk about the normal things you do when you walk up to a journal and there's other people there. Everybody just knows that even ladies know what to do there.
However, you have more parameters in your man, that's interesting. Your polynomial equation that you use to decide what your own to go to has more parameters than mine does. I never thought about that cleanliness. Huh, I just washed my hands after that's what I do.
But your comment about the 1970s, yes, we should. It's a big part of why I'm into that. That is part of where your your comments about the 1970 pool changing room bathroom takes my head because you can see it. If a toilet has been there long enough, you can see how well that toilet works and how well the peers interact with that toilet and most of them, they're pretty ugly.
Hold on, hold on. You just took my brain into a crazy place. Why, why, why, why right here? I like to be outside.
If I have an option of being outside or inside, I'll be outside. Last night, there was a thunderstorm and everything was very, very dark, just black of night. So I powered everything down. I was working late.
I was like, yeah, you would make a guy feel better outside P during a rainstorm. This is happening. This washes away the evidence too. That's how I first understood umbral shadows.
What does that mean? If you have a light source that has a width to it, so if you have a single point light source, then you have perfect shadows. But if your light source is soft, if it has a length to it, then like if you had a line, like a fluorescent light bulb, you would have sharper shadows in one direction than the other, kind of like during a solar eclipse, right? Of course you to.
I was peeing outside one day and the sun cast a shadow of the urine stream against the wall. And I noticed there was no shadow of the urine stream until it got closer to the wall. I was like, okay, that's interesting. What is that?
And then I realized, oh, it's because the sun has width. Do you understand? Yeah, I think I do. Yeah.
Yeah, and so it's not diffusion because of it was a gray and cloudy day. It was another way of getting there. It's just it's not a single point light source. The breadth of the sun is the issue.
Yeah, exactly. So it's fascinating. Do you like Archimedes or Newton, but just work? Not at all.
I was somewhere recently in Newton's Principia, you know, his collection of all this math stuff. I was like, oh, it's Newton. I've never actually held this book. I'll pick it up and, you know, I know calculus and differential equations pretty well.
Now I can just pick this up and I'll be able to understand it. And I opened it up and I was like, holy cow, Newton is way smarter than me. Imagine that. So that's the impression.
Impression, I guess he was real real smart. I wouldn't even understand what I was looking at to know that it was smart. It would just look smart. Yeah.
OK, the thing we've had opinion. OK, everybody converts food and beverage to waste all the time. It's constantly happening and it can spread disease and make people real real sick. When we came up with the names of a couple of the diseases that do that to people, then there's varying degrees of sanitation.
Like maybe you won't get dysentery and die from it, but quality of life is reduced. Life span is shortened with the kind of diseases that are waste born. I wouldn't even know how to put a number on it, but I got to think whoever invented modern sewage has got to be a candidate for our person who saved the most lives ever and I'm sensing that you're OK with putting them on the list of maybe. I think so.
I think a lot of what I mean, I mean, vaccinations are a pretty big deal, but I think save the most lives. You could make an argument for agriculture and say, well, these people provided food, therefore they prevented starvation. But that's I'm comfortable with what you're saying here. I think it's a good call.
I mean, it's a little bit better than Sergeant York. I'm adding maybe a touch. I'm adding provision to our list of ways to save a life. OK, because we die without provision.
So in that regard, farmers save lives. Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. I think Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Indiana, I think that's some of the most important culture in the world.
They provide so much food. I think it's a big deal. Those farmers, they're really the unsung heroes. So whoever figured out how to amplify their work, like maybe as wild as this sounds, maybe somebody who invented a certain pesticide is on this list.
And I know there are side effects and people are going to be like, yeah, but people also died of cancer. But I got to think that any calculation you would run, whoever invented pesticides, the lives saved far outweighs lives cost. Yeah, like rats, because the fleas that run rats are in the black death. That's a thing.
What do they cause? What is the black death? Was it the bubonic plague? What is that?
I don't think I think. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's what it is. I'm not 100% sure they know what the black death was.
I think they theorize bubonic plague. Which one do groundhogs and prairie dogs carry? Is that bubonic plague? No idea.
Armadillos are lepersons bad. Yeah, I don't know. Seriously, Armadillos carry leprosy. That's my understanding.
What? Yeah. OK, hang on a sec. I'm looking that up.
OK, look it up. Armadillos. Or is it a myth? I don't know.
Do how do you Google that? Do Armadillos carry leprosy? It's like it auto completed. Yeah, besides humans, nine banded armadillos are the only animals that can carry leprosy.
What is a bacteria that causes leprosy? But how about that? So whoever came up with the Armadillo trap. They're on the list.
They're probably right there with Sergeant York. Yeah, which I think is just like a really sexy Armadillo with lipstick and like a dress and stuff and it beckons other armadillos into some sort of pit from which they can't escape. It's a box with a stick. It's a box with a stick.
It's a box with a stick. That's right. The animatronic sexy Armadillos. Yeah.
OK, all right. So we got vaccine guy. We got sewer guy. We got the ag people, maybe pesticides.
Everything we're coming up with off the top of our heads is not dramatic. What about heroic examples? Is there anybody should be on the list who did some singular, momentary act of bravery or courage or decisiveness that would rival the amount of life saving of vaccine lady or sewer dude or pesticide inventor lady, whoever it is, any heroic act that rivals that besides Gandalf versus the ball rug. Playfuls.
I thought about that one as well. I actually do have one of those. There was a Russian officer. His name is Stanislav Petrov.
I'm looking this up now. Let's see. You're thinking of a different one than I am. He was a lieutenant colonel with the Soviet air defense forces.
He played a key role in the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident. So apparently there was an issue where we were supposed to, like we, in this case, would be the Russian group that he was in. Like if we see something on the radar that looks like a missile, we're going to do a retaliatory nuclear strike before we are disabled and unable to retaliate. Yeah.
So there's a time crunch here is the point. They got to go fast. Yeah. He disobeyed orders and did not issue a retaliatory nuclear strike.
And he saved a lot of NATO lives. Huh? Had he saw this blip on the radar as, hey, that's the nuclear missile heading towards Moscow or whatever it was, had he issued the order to do a retaliatory strike, he would have started nuclear war. So he's often credited as being the guy that saved the world.
So that's a why do we know? OK, I didn't know his name. Stanislav. What Stanislav?
You have Grofovich Petrov. Yeah. The Soviet air defense forces officer. Yeah.
The gentleman died in 2017. I'm grateful to him. Yeah. Me too.
I was alive in 1983. I might not be if it weren't for that guy whose name I just heard for the first time. Do you know why he didn't retaliate? I mean, was he just, did he just decide?
They shot first. My people will lose. There are people will win. There's no winning if we do a retaliatory strike.
Everybody loses. I'm not sending him back. Or did he think it was a data mistake? It looks like he just suspected it being a false alarm and decided to wait to confirm it.
He saw it. It said, hey, this looks like a missile and then four more missiles coming behind it. And he just decided to say, wait, we're going to wait and see if confirmation comes and it never came. So it looks like he just had a steady hand.
That's what it looks like to me, which is interesting. I wonder how old he was at the time. Okay, that happened on September 26, 1983. He was born in 1939.