Brain Junk Trace Kerr and Amy Barton

Nighttime waking and scattered thoughts are problem solving's evil twin. If you find yourself awake at 3 am obsessing over your problems, remember that stress and hormonal imbalances can really damage the quality of your sleep.











Show Notes:



IFL Science: Why Do We Wake Around 3am And Dwell On Our Fears And Shortcomings?



VeryWellmind.com: Military Sleep method



Science Direct: Molecular Clock



US Southwestern University: Understanding the circadian clocks of individual cells



Wikipedia: Suprachiasmatic nucleus



NIH: Visual impairment and circadian rhythm disorders



The New Yorker: The Woman who Spent Five Hundred Days in a Cave



Benadryl and Alzheimer's possible link







Transcript:



[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to Brain Junk, I'm Trace Kerr



[00:00:05] Speaker B: And I'm Amy Barton. And today I'm gonna continue changing your lives because we've talked about how to up your personal hygiene game. And today I'm gonna tell you about why you wake up at 03:00 a.m. And give you some tips and tricks.



[00:00:19] Speaker A: To stop that from happening.



[00:00:21] Speaker B: Yeah.



[00:00:24] Speaker A: I am not a 03:00 a.m. Wake up person, so this will be interesting.



[00:00:27] Speaker B: You're not what

2024 is the 100th anniversary of Band-aids. But before they were the little strips in cool tins, they came in a roll you could cut to size.





Show Notes:



Johnson & Johnson history of Band-aids



Wikipedia: Band-aid history



Disposable America



The Atlantic: The Story of the Black Band-aid



TruColour Bandages



Transcript:



[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to brain junk. I'm Amy Barton.



[00:00:05] Speaker B: And I'm Trace Kerr. And I do have a cold.



[00:00:08] Speaker A: Yes.



[00:00:08] Speaker B: But today is everything you never knew you wanted to know about band aids.



[00:00:13] Speaker A: I want to know many things. Did you buy picturey ones for your children, or were you kind of scroogey?



[00:00:20] Speaker B: Here's the thing. I kind of felt like the picturey ones didn't have enough of the nick.



I'm a fan of the fabricy ones because I feel like they stay on better.



[00:00:32] Speaker A: Yeah, but.



[00:00:33] Speaker B: Okay, so, 2024, I just figured this out when I was doing research, is the 100th anniversary of the eponymous bandaid.



[00:00:40] Speaker A: Oh, so they've had them since the 20s?



[00:00:44] Speaker B: Yes.



I went to the Johnson and Johnson website for the history of the bandaid, and I stayed for a bandaid quiz.



[00:00:51] Speaker A: You can do a band. That's fun. I'll do any quiz.



[00:00:55] Speaker B: Same. I got 90%. But I may have done some research and also cheated.



I had already been looking into it, and then I took the quiz, and I was like, I'm so smart. No, it was all but way back in the late 19 hundreds when you.



[00:01:17] Speaker A: And I were young.



[00:01:18] Speaker B: Yeah, way back then, a million years ago, back with the mammoth. You could buy bandaids in a tin.



[00:01:25] Speaker A: Yes, you can again. Now they're, like $5 more than regular bandaids.



[00:01:30] Speaker B: I haven't seen that with the flip top lid.



[00:01:33] Speaker A: I walk down that row, I'm not even there for bandaids. I'm there for whatever else is in that row, and I'm like, I probably need four tins of these fancy bandaids.



[00:01:42] Speaker B: I don't know. But, I mean, that tin, it was just the right size to fit in, like, a shirt pocket. When I was a kid, you had, like, fishing supplies in there. It's almost like the cookie tin. That's actually a sewing kit.



[00:01:55] Speaker A: Yes, exactly.



[00:01:56] Speaker B: The number of times you could open that bandaid tin and it would not be bandaids was about 50 50.



[00:02:02] Speaker A: Yes. Gum. If it's nicely in there. Yeah.



[00:02:05] Speaker B: Okay, so the story of the bandaid. Let me take you back.



[00:02:09] Speaker A: Take me back.



[00:02:10] Speaker B: Back in 1920, Josephine Knight

From poker to games played to pass the time, those 52 cards are so ubiquitous it's hard to figure just when we started using them. We go all the way back to ancient China for a possible origin of cards.













images: Cloisters Deck from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and and example of cards from today from pixabay



Show Notes:



The strange coincidence of the Instagram guy & 52 card decks



Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Cloisters Playing Cards



Atlas Obscura: Playing cards around the world and through the ages



JSTOR: an excerpt from The Game of Leaves: An Inquiry into the Origin of Chinese Playing Cards



Wikipedia: Chinese Playing Cards



Transcript:



[00:00:03] Speaker A: Hey there. Trace here. So Amy and I have a couple projects coming up over the next couple months. She's taking some classes. She's got to do homework. I've got some projects, a fiction podcast that I'm working on writing, and a novel that I'm working on editing. And we need a little more space, a little more time. So we're not stopping brain junk. Absolutely not. We love it too much to quit. But we are going to move to every two weeks instead of every week. So that means this week is an episode, and then we won't have another episode until April 2. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't get your brain junk fixed. We got lots of old episodes. You can head over to YouTube for the really old episodes. I'm slowly uploading more. We're not going anywhere. We're just going to dial it back a little bit for a little while. So enjoy this episode. Yeah, we'll see you in two weeks.



Welcome to Brain junk. I'm Trace Kerr.



[00:00:59] Speaker B: And I'm Amy Barton. And today we're going to talk about everything you never knew you wanted to know about playing cards.



Are you a card family? Like old school? Not like games, but the traditional four suit deck.



[00:01:16] Speaker A: Yeah, we are. Well, you know, it's funny because I grew up as a card family. Chaz did not grow up as a card family. They were a scrabble family. And I have converted him to the crazy eights and the Kings in the know, the old people card games.



[00:01:32] Speaker B: Yeah. Yes. Now, I have never played kings in the corner. My family is a rummy family. I think there's some cribbage in there, too, with the little pegs. Children were not allowed to touch that. I think it was an adult escape game because they played it out at the lake and they're like, shouldn't you guys be swimming? Grandpa's out watching go swim, so I need to learn to play that one.



[00:01:55] Speaker A: Well, I can teach you how to play cribbage. Chaz and I play cribbage all the time. Neither of my children like to play cards, which is funny. It began and ended with us. That's it. We're done.



[00:02:05] Speaker B: Now.



It's a generational thing in my family because my grandpa was a military fella for a long time, and so it was an officer's. It's a clubby thing.

Call them slippahs, flip flops, chanclas, slops, plakkies, slaps, pantofles, or thongs...whatever word you choose says a lot about your age and what part of the world you grew up in. We came up with this episode topic as kind of a joke. Turns out there's way more about to know about these summer shoes than we thought.







Show Notes:



Wikipedia on the history of flip flops



The Paduka



Kanye West being weird as usual with diamond studded flips



Satra: History of the flip flop



Forbes: This Brand Reinvented Flip-Flops (And Made Them A Sustainable Product)



Business Wire: Global Flip Flops Market to Reach $28.5 Billion by 2030, Fueled by Work-from-Home Trend and Growing Demand in Developing Countries - ResearchAndMarkets.com



Obama first US President photoed in slippahs



Guinness account on X: Andre Ortolf running in flip flops



Longest flip flop throw



Flip Flops History and Production Process

It's easy to believe that a snake might be a deadly mimic. But butterflies that start life as carnivorous caterpillars? Oh heck yeah!







Show Notes:



YouTube BBC: Ants Adopt a Caterpillar



YouTube Entomological Society of America: Ants and Blues



The Pattern of Social Parasitism in Maculinea teleius Butterfly Is Driven by the Size and Spatial Distribution of the Host Ant Nests



Entomology Today: Carnivorous Caterpillars Fool Ants by Sounding like Queens



PLOS One: Variation in Butterfly Larval Acoustics as a Strategy to Infiltrate and Exploit Host Ant Colony Resources



Scientific American: Actual audio of the caterpillar mimicking an ant



Avian deception using an elaborate caudal lure in Pseudocerastes urarachnoides (Serpentes: Viperidae)



Herpetological.org Pseudocerastes urarachnoides: the ambush specialist (great pictures of the viper!)



Discover: Meet the Snake







Transcript:



00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to brain junk. I'm Amy Barton.



[00:00:05] Speaker B: And I'm Trace Kerr. And today is everything you never knew you wanted to know about deadly animal mimics.



[00:00:13] Speaker A: I want to know a lot about that.



[00:00:15] Speaker B: Well, I have two. It's double header. I can't make up my mind about subjects lately and I'm just going to mash it together.



[00:00:21] Speaker C: Bonus.



[00:00:24] Speaker B: So the first one, I'm going to give you a little scenario. You have a child pretending to be a queen, infiltrating a city, deceiving soldiers into taking care of her, all the while eating the real queen's children.



[00:00:37] Speaker C: Oh, my word.



[00:00:38] Speaker A: That sounds like a marvel plot.



[00:00:40] Speaker C: It does, right?



[00:00:40] Speaker B: Horror movie, Sci-Fi it's not. It's the real life of the large blue butterfly caterpillar.



[00:00:47] Speaker A: I was sure we were going down an ant road.



[00:00:50] Speaker C: Well, wow.



[00:00:52] Speaker

If you haven't figured it out by now, Amy is not afraid to ask tough questions! Today she talks butt health, bidets, and the dangers of wet wipes. It's funnier than you'd think, we promise.



Show Notes:



Business Insider: interview with Dr. Goldstein







Am I Doing it Wrong? Jan 2024



The Spruce: 7 Best Bidet Attachments



Splinter free toilet paper



History Channel: All the Ways We've Wiped



CBS news article about Johnny Carson creating a toilet paper shortage



And just in case you're not a dinosaur like Trace and Amy, this is Walter Cronkite



Transcript:



[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to Brain Junk. I'm Trace Kerr.



[00:00:05] Speaker B: And I'm Amy Barton. And today we're going to be discussing personal care, which is, I know, one of the things you come to brain junk for, because we care about you, and we want you to know you might not be wiping correctly.



[00:00:21] Speaker A: Oh, no.



[00:00:22] Speaker B: This is a hard truth that we need to share with you.



And this comes from Chris Barton.



[00:00:29] Speaker A: Oh, no.



[00:00:29] Speaker B: Who, like, we're sitting watching whatever we're watching on Saturday or Sunday morning, and he's, uh, is this a brain junk? And he sends me this article that's entitled bad news. You're probably wiping all wrong. And I'm like, yes, it is.



Okay, are you ready?



[00:00:50] Speaker A: No.



[00:00:55] Speaker B: Parents is going to be some low key anatomical terms. Shall we talk about Dr. Evan Goldstein? Absolutely. And he is a nationally renowned anal surgeon.



[00:01:05] Speaker A: Oh, wow.



[00:01:05] Speaker B: That is a very specific specialty. But if you need an anal surgeon, you want them to be nationally renowned.



[00:01:15] Speaker A: That's true.



[00:01:16] Speaker B: Proper functionality there is valuable.



So Dr. Evan Goldstein says that the preferred method of wiping is actually not wiping. He describes when you're looking at s