Brain Junk Trace Kerr and Amy Barton

Did Trace complain about clickbait titles in this episode? Yes. Did she ALSO use a clickbait title for this very episode? Absolutely. Sea scallops like light and it turns out that works in the favor of fisheries and the environment.







Show Notes:



Oceanconservancy.org: Scallops



Fishtek Marine YouTube on the tech and study. Also their website



Science Daily: University of Exeter paper



University of York: Scientists accidentally discover “scallop discos” as an environmentally friendly fishing method

While doing the show notes for this episode, Trace looked into tips and tricks for when you take a vacation and have to drive on the opposite side of the road. The advice? Don't panic and purchase travel insurance LOL. There are so many different historical reasons for how countries chose what side of the road to drive on.







Show Notes:



Lancaster-Philadelphia Turnpike



Somerset Historical Center: The Conestoga Wagon



Windwagon Smith a Disney animated picture from 1961



Wikipedia left and right side



The Economist" Robespierre and driving on the moral side of the road



US Dept. of Transportation Federal Highway Administration: On the Right Side of the Road



UK car glass and their opinion on right side/left side



BBC: A 'thrilling' mission to get the Swedish to change overnight

Nothing like rubbing yourself down with snakeskin jerky to keep yourself from getting eaten. Today we check out the parallel evolution of the California ground squirrel and rattlesnakes. It's an olfactory camouflage arms race that on a bad day, ends with someone getting eaten.







Show Notes:



UC Davis: Squirrels Use Snake Scent



Royal Society B: Donning your enemy's cloak: ground squirrels exploit rattlesnake scent to reduce predation risk



Nature: Squirrel Masks Scent with Rattlesnake Skin (Cool video of squirrels in action)

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.