99% Invisible - 241- Mini-Stories: Volume 1

Episode Date: December 20, 2016

Host Roman Mars talks to the 99pi producers about their favorite “Mini-Stories.” These are little anecdotes or seeds of a story about design and architecture that can’t quite stretch into a full episode, but the staff loves them anyway. Roman talks … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Over the years, I'd guess about 20 people have written to us suggesting that we do a story about the mysterious, giant, concrete arrows that dot the US landscape from New York to San Francisco. If you don't know, these are about 70 feet of what looks pretty much like sidewalk concrete in the shape of an arrow pointing backly west. They date from the 1930s and they were part of the transcontinental airway system that helped planes carrying mail find their way across the US before the age of reliable radar and GPS. When they were operational they were painted bright yellow

and were accompanied by a tower topped with a bright rotating beacon. Today the towers and paint are long gone, but many of the giant arrows remain, sometimes with weeds poking through the cracks in the concrete. They're super cool and fun to find on Google Maps, but that's about it. There's not too much more of a story there. I'm glad I know it. I'm pleased I got to tell you about it. It's totally a 99% invisible story, and I'm honored when people learn about them and they think, I need to send this to Roman. But ultimately, the arrows are not something

on which we can hang a whole episode. We come across these kinds of stories all the time. Not just as suggestions from the audience, but in our own research, there are tons of little interesting would-be 99-PI stories that get cut out of an episode or just don't warrant six weeks of production and 20 minutes of air time for whatever reason, but we still kind of love them. So as a little change pace, we thought we'd throw them all together in a couple of episodes featuring me interviewing the 99PI crew talking about their favorite mini stories.

That's what we've been calling them. I think you're gonna dig it. I certainly had fun talking to everybody. So without further ado, first up is Sam Greenspan. One of my favorite things about this job is that I get to go to research at the University of California at Berkeley Library in the Environmental Design Library.

And it's this modernist building. It's hideous from the outside, it's beautiful in the inside. The library itself has all these vossily chairs that might actually be original to the Bauhaus, but anyway, so I was over there. I was doing research on the story that would eventually become the plot of Zion, which aired on the show last week. Yeah, and that's the story about the sort of the founders vision for the Church of Larghtay Saints in Insolix City in their efforts to create like an urban grid, like a really big urban grid. Exactly, exactly.

So I was reading this article just in my research there called The Mormon Village Genesis and Anticidence of the City of Zion Plan by Richard H. Jackson published in the journal Brigham Young University Studies in 1977. Anyways, just set this up. So here's the author of this article talking about how most towns, west of Appalachia, all kind of developed the same way. And so Roman, if you would, read this quote from him.

Okay, let me see. The cities and towns, which were founded during this period, were remarkably similar, with the exception of Circleville, Ohio. Most town plots consisted of a regular grid pattern with straight streets crossing at right angles. Actually, I grew up in Newark, Ohio, which is only about 30 miles away from Circleville, Ohio,

so I know Circleville. So you've been assertive, I don't know if I've been there, like it's famous for mountains, like Indian burial mounds. Funny you should mention that, because while Circleville is also known for something else, or maybe not known for something else, but it has a quite amazing history of urban planning. So what did you find out?

Okay, so from that one, Glyb note in this journal article about Mormon villages, I found this other article in the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians from 1955, this guy named John W. Reps, and it had an article entitled Redevelopment in the 19th century, colon, the squaring of Circleville. Squaring of Circleville.

Okay. So in 1810, a local power broker in Pickaway County, Ohio named Daniel Driesbach was deputized to establish a new town that would become the county's seat. Driesbach decided on a piece of land that had two Native American earthworks. Mounds basically, one in the shape of a square and one in the shape of a circle. In central Ohio, these types of mounts are like really incorporated into the landscape.

So like, I grew up going to Indian Mount Mall outside of Newark, Ohio. And so they're in Newark, they're in Circleville, they're all around there. So they're a big part of the landscape and the kind of the lore and the mystique of Central Ohio. And they really all are like in the center of the city. Like there was no regard for them.

They just put a city on top of the mound. So Circleville is totally a case of that. Daniel Driesbach just wanted to plop a city right on top of this Native American mound. But what he did that his contemporaries found so weird was that he used the circular earth work to build a city with a circular grid. So normally, so imagine we're kind of like floating over a city.

Right. You can kind of see, say we're floating over Chicago, right? Big, let's say we're, let's imagine we're floating over Salt Lake City. Right. You have all these rectilinear roads. They're all kind of crossing at right angles. It's just sort of like a grid like graph paper sort of. So this looks more like the wheel of a pirate ship. The steering wheel of a pirate ship, right? There's a sort of central node and in drysbox plan, the county courthouse would be in the middle and there's kind of a big plaza around it.

And then there's a circular street around that and then another circular street around that one. And then there's these sort of, there's these roads that all shoot off from the courthouse that all kind of connect outwards that all lead back into the center of the circle. Which is all being formed by the circular Indian mouth. Yeah, it was sort of the framework. I think, imagine what it gave him the idea. Yeah.

So, circle bells established, early 1800s, people start moving in. But to the founder, Daniel Driesboxes, this May, the circle villains hate it. Like really, really hate it. It was dismissed as childish sentimentalism. People complained that the round streets made for awkwardly shaped lots, so they had to build their houses kind of in weird ways. So by 1837, about 30 years after the founding of Circleville, the people were so fed up with this circular grid that they appealed to the Ohio state assembly. They just wanted Circleville to look like the rest of Ohio.

They wanted Circleville to be squares, will. More or less. So they hired a company called the Circleville Squaring Company. That's on the nose. Yeah. I wonder what else they did in town. And so the Circleville Squaring Company was hired to de-circle Circleville. It took about two decades, but eventually they were successful. So today, if you go to Google Earth and you look up Circleville, Ohio. Zoom in. Yeah. Yeah, it just is a grid. It looks like every other boring town in Central Ohio. The Circle of Health Square and Company was extremely successful.

They did their job for sure. Yeah, all that remains are a few rounded buildings I hear I haven't been there. There's the name of the town itself which has never been changed. They have not yet called it Square's building. And the city's municipal seal, which if you look that up. Oh, it's pretty nice. It's like, it looks if you look that up. Oh, it's pretty nice. It's like, it looks like the original urban plan. Yeah, I believe that's Daniel Drysbox original drawing

or at least, or some kind of reproduction based on Drysbox original plan, where you can see the courthouse in the middle and you can kind of see all the, the radial streets coming off of it. Yeah, it looks really cool. It's actually a pretty good seal. It reveals some good history. That's so cool.

I mean, don't put it on a flag. It's a good seal. Yeah, I think the flag should just be, you know, the steering wheel of a pirate ship. That would work. That would work. So I'm Kurt Colstad and I am the digital director at 9% and visible as well as a web producer. What does that mean? Basically, it means I manage content and design on the website.

So we produce articles for the website. We also produce companion pieces for every episode that contain additional materials like videos and links and images. So people listening to the episode can go on the website, listen to the episode, but also serve for round for additional media. Right. So if you are a listener to 99% of us, but you've never been to the website, you are missing out because there's at least two, and maybe three more stories a week that are on the website that have nothing to do with what is being broadcast on the air.

Right, so in a lot of cases, we have an idea for a story, and there's just kind of not enough there for us to make a full episode out of it. It wouldn't be long enough, it wouldn't be in depth enough, or it's simply too visual. So a lot of cases, if it's something that you need, absolutely need to see a graphic or an image or a video for the subject matter to make sense, we're gonna have to make that into an article

instead of an episode. But the topics are really the same. It's built environments, it's those 99% invisible things you see out in the world that don't know how to make sense of. And so in a lot of cases, these are ideas that have been kicking around in the office for years, and now they've kind of finally found it outlet in the form of a web article. What's one that's like a quintessential or just like really popular one that that would be fun to talk about? So the Dutch reach has been a real hit this year. And I don't think anybody expected that. It's a pretty short piece, about a pretty simple fix

to a pretty common problem that just resonated with listeners and readers in a way that nobody could have guessed. So what is the Dutch Reach? The Dutch Reach is basically a technique for keeping Biker's cyclist that is from getting dored. So if you're driving along, you've got a biking lane for keeping bikers cyclists that is from getting dored. So if you're driving along, you've got a biking lane on your right

and parking to the right of that, and you pull over into a parking spot, and you go to open the car door, and a cyclist is coming, you might not see them. And that's because, in part, you're opening the door with your left hand if you're an American driver, and you're just, you know, you look at the rear view mirror, you're opening the door with your left hand if you're an American driver. And you're just, you know, you look at the rear view mirror, you might not spot them, but there's one simple way to make sure that every time you open that car door,

you're looking to see if cyclists are approaching. And that's by reaching over yourself with your other arm to open that door. So let me make sure I have this right. So you pull over and instead of opening the car door with your left hand, what you'd be inclined to do, you reach over with your right hand and it causes you to twist and look over your shoulder and really check if there's a cyclist coming.

Exactly. And it's a very simple solution. It doesn't have any associated cost. It doesn't take any extra time. It's something any driver could do and any bicyclist would be grateful that the driver is doing. It's a solution we can all relate to. It's something that deals with a problem in the built environment that probably isn't going to be fixed anytime soon in other ways.

It just costs too much and takes too much time for cities to overhaul these systems. Of course, in an ideal world, we'd have protected bike lanes. And everything would be perfect. But in the world we live in this Dutch Reach solution, which comes from Holland, hence the name, it gives drivers a way to do something simple that will help improve safety for everybody involved. That's so cool.

And so that's, I mean, it's like when people saw that, they just shared it like crazy, because it was something you could, something you could like, understand quickly, it's sort of common sense, but it's one of those great, like the perfect sort of story like this is, you wouldn't necessarily figure out on your own, but when you see it, it feels like common sense, you know? Exactly, it's the kind of solution that once we, you know, start teaching people to do this

in drivers education, it would just become second nature and we wouldn't even think about it as the Dutch reach. It would just be the way you open a card door. That's good. Cool. Alright, thanks. Alright. I'm gonna go for it. Tell me who you are. Yeah, my name is Emmett Fitzgerald. I'm the newest producer here, 99 P.I. So you just came on like a few months ago, actually? Yeah, I came in to help out when Delaney

was on maternity leave and refused to leave. Yeah, we decided to keep you good. So we're telling all kinds of little stories that maybe we've researched as producers and reporters but don't really quite qualify as a full 99p I stories or they're like little things cut out of other stories. So what is your mini story? That's one percent.

Yeah, so this is a story about a special soccer stadium in the northern Brazilian state of Amapah, which is like a super remote state. It's, it's pretty, it's like, it's big. It's like the size of Florida or something, but it only has six, seven hundred thousand people. Wow. And 90 percent of the state is just the Amazon rainforest, but there are a couple of little cities,

including the capital city of Makapa. And Makapa is known, or is sort of, when tourists visit there, one of the things that they're told about the cities that it's right on the equator. And there's a number of landmarks that kind of signify where the equator is in the city, including one of the central streets is called Abanida Equatorial,

which runs supposedly along the equator, and there's a red stripe right down the center of the street. And another thing that sits right on the equator is the city's soccer stadium, which is a 10,000 person arena that's called Estadio, Milton, Korea. I don't know who that is. It's like a local soccer bureaucrat of some sort. But everyone locally just calls it Oze-Dau, which means the big zero after the stadium's latitude line.

Right. So for being the equator is the zero point, right? Yeah. It's not just that the stadium itself sits on the latitude line on the equator, but that the equator runs directly down the midfield line of the football pitch, of the soccer field. And so in every individual game, and these are games between small,

Brazilian, professional soccer clubs, but because the midpoint line is the equator, it's sort of like each side in the game is representing an entire hemisphere. These little small local club games are really like a battle between North and South of the entire world. At least until time. When the two sides, when the two teams switch sides. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.

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I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Oh! Joel! The sun is shining in the green part of the sky, and the sky is in the sky. Tell me your name. My name is Delaney Hall. And what do you do here? I'm a reporter and producer and sometimes I edit stories. So what is your mini story?

So my mini story actually came to us from one of our listeners to this woman named Carrie New Jents. And I've actually met her because I was at a conference and she had on very memorably a camouflage baseball hat with orange letters that said asteroid hunter. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, she is an asteroid hunter. She's an asteroid scientist at Caltech and she actually has her own podcast called SpacePod, where she talks with different scientists who study space. So our listeners write in a lot saying you should do a story about this or you should do a story about that and Kerry suggested one that I

really liked. Oh cool. So what is about? So before I can tell you what Carrie suggested, I have to back up a little bit. So earlier this year, there was this enormous discovery in astronomy. And there's an experiment called the laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory. Yeah, and the shorter way to refer to it is Ligo. And scientists working on that experiment detected a signal from space that they turned into a sound. So I'm going to play the sound for you.

And so am I listening for the one that's going, what? What? What? So what that sound mean? That sound is the sound of two black holes colliding and unleashing the energy of a million trillion suns. And it doesn't actually sound like much, and that's because the black holes collided a billion years ago. And so the sound has been traveling through space for all of those years, getting fainter

and fainter as it goes. And by the time it actually reached us here on Earth, it was just that little whoop, whoop. But the scientists amazingly heard it. Okay, so why is it so amazing? Because it is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, which are basically ripples in space time. And gravitational waves were predicted more than a hundred years ago by Einstein in his theory of general relativity. And that theory totally reimagined the rules of physics. So basically instead of a static framework, Einstein had this theory that matter and energy

could actually distort the geometry of the universe and create these ripples of gravity. And so he had theorized the gravitational waves exist, but this sound was the first evidence that they're real. And so it basically was evidence that this wild theory that Einstein had that had been mathematically proven it was like the first physical evidence. Wow, that is amazing. That's incredible. Yeah, yeah, it was kind of my blowing. And the discovery generated a ton of news, obviously.

But as Carrie, our listener, wrote in to point out, there's a design angle. Oh, I'm always in favor of design angle. Yes, design. designing angle. Oh, I'm always in favor of designing. Yes, design. So what she was interested in and what she said you should really look at is the instrument. The machine that detected the sound is amazing and extremely sensitive. You know, it would have to be sensitive in order to pick up a sound that's been traveling through space and decaying for a billion years. So Kerry said you should do a story about this instrument that detected the sound. And why did we do that story? Because it's so hard to describe.

It's like so much technical detail. I'm probably saying things that are wrong right now, even in a mini story, it's just, you know, it's too technically complex and sort of difficult to describe on the radio. I mean, the machine itself is like part of it's in one part of the country and part of it's in another part of the country is like these Ujianne Tana's and they like stretch and it's just really complicated, but there was this one element to it that I love and that I think We can do justice to right now Okay, so it's a little for me. What is the what is this element? Yeah, so basically the detectors on this instrument They had to be totally isolated from the vibrations and

noises of the outside world because environmental noise might have interfered with what the scientists were actually trying to hear. So they're trying to hear this tiny faint sound. And then, meanwhile, there's just everyday noise all around them. There's trucks driving by. Right, everything. I mean, like there's people talking rumbles of the earth, wind, everything. You have to eliminate all of that. Yeah, totally.

Like a tree might fall over. There might be a thunderstorm. All of that noise can mess with the experiment. So basically to deal with that, the scientists, first of all, tried to isolate the experiment. So basically to deal with that the scientist first of all tried to isolate the detectors and they put them in giant vacuums to isolate them from from all that outside noise and then on top of that the experiment employed two people who were environmental monitors. So their job was to figure out how environmental sound

might interfere with the experiment. And Kerry actually talked to the guy who ran the experiment, Dr. Dave Ritesy. He's the head of LIGO, and here he is. And they do tests, so they'll put speakers in the vacuum tank, or in either vacuum tanks, and you can play your favorite symphony, and then you measure its effect.

Yeah, so they played these recordings. They did stuff like play recordings of howling wolves. And they even had a staff member ride away on his Harley to record the effect that the rumbling motor had on the experiment. There's a great entry by the team that was doing the environmental monitoring saying Bubba rides off in a motorcycle. Bubba is one of our facility managers in Hanford and he was doing a test for them. And so over time they generated this huge library of what different kinds of sonic and reference might do to the experiment.

And so when the genuine signal appeared, they would know that it wasn't just environmental noise. And it wasn't Bubba. That it wasn't Bubba. Yeah. It's hard to convey how crazy it is that they were able to detect the sound. And the other crazy thing is they

detected it like right after they turned the experiment on. Yeah. Yeah. So fast that they thought it must be a mistake. But it was no mistake. This is one of the biggest scientific discoveries ever. Yeah. Yeah. And I really love this kind of science story or this detail about sort of the process of science and just all the mundane everyday stuff that can get in the way of that grand magnificent discovery. That's so cool. So we should thank Carrie for the first one. Yes, yes. So thank you, Dr. Carrie Nugin. She's one of our listeners and she did a whole interview with Dr. Dave Ratesy, who's the head of LIGO.

It's on her podcast, it's called SpacePod. And she just knows so much more about this stuff than I do. So if you have any questions or complaints? Yeah, to wreck them, the Dr. Nugent. Dr. Nugent, yeah. Asteroite Hunter. So that was Mini Stories Volume 1 in the final episode of 2016. I interviewed all the 99 PI producers for this project, so you'll hear the rest of the crew on the first episode of 2017.

In the meantime, we're all gonna take some time off, but I would also like to use this time to collect a few mini story suggestions from you, the listeners, kind of like the concrete arrows thing that I can talk about in between the stories from Katie, Sharif, and Avery on mini stories volume two. So get in touch via the contact page on our website, it's 99pi.org, or on Twitter at Roman Mars,

or at 99pi.org, or you can comment on the Facebook post for this episode. If you are sad that you will not have a new 99% visible episode for the next couple of weeks, go download a bunch of the old ones. We almost never run repeats, but they're all there in the feed, just waiting for you. Most of you probably haven't heard everything, and if you have heard everything, you probably won't remember everything. I barely remember them and I was there when we made them, so just go download everyone. I hope you have some good time off coming your way and I'll talk to you

next year. 99% invisible is Katie Mingle, Delaney Hall, Kurt Colstead, Sharif Usef, Sam Greenspan, Avery, Trouffelman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Terran Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI org. We're on Instagram and Tumblr too, but you won't really fully understand this show until you spend some time at 99PI.org. So back when I first had my twin boys, Maslow and Carver, huge chunks of my days were spent pushing them around the hills of the East Bay in a giant double-stroller, listening to podcasts. So this was in early 2008, and that's when I discovered my first true love in podcasting.

The Bugle. Audio newspaper for a visual world. It was one of the most popular comedy podcasts in the world presented by Andy Zoltzman and John Oliver, who at the time was newly at the Daily Show. After it finished its run, at the time's online, it went independent and I donated my own money to keep it going. It went follow for a bit, while both John and Andy got busy with other things. And a while ago, I heard from Andy's sister, Radio Topia's own Helen Zoltzman, that Andy

was looking to make it his primary focus again. And I'm incredibly excited that it's now part part of radiootopia with Andy and a rotating set of co-hosts, including Wyatt's Nakh, Nishkumar, and my favorite. Hell Insultman. With everything going on in the world, I'm just really excited that we have a hilarious news satire program with a global perspective that can react to what's going on. So please welcome them to radiootopia and subscribe to the view. can react to what's going on.