Futility Closet - 197-Alone Across the Outback

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from a house made of tombstones to a register for clown faces. This is episode 197. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1977, a young woman named Robin Davidson set out to pursue what she called a lunatic idea, to lead a group of camels 1,700 miles across Western Australia, from the center of the

Starting point is 00:00:38 continent to the Indian Ocean. In today's show, we'll follow Davidson's remarkable journey alone through the outback and learn what it taught her. We'll also dive into the La Brea tar pits and puzzle over some striking workers. At 5 a.m. one morning in 1975, a 25-year-old woman named Robin Davidson stepped off a train in Alice Springs, Australia. It had taken her two days to travel the 500 miles from Adelaide to the arid center of the continent. She had six dollars, a small suitcase full of inappropriate clothes, and a dog named Diggity. She had come to pursue

Starting point is 00:01:16 what she later called a lunatic idea, to gather some wild camels from the bush, train them to carry her gear, and then lead them into the desert. In later years, she was constantly asked why she wanted to do this, and she constantly pressed back, asking why there had to be a reason. When she wouldn't give a simple answer, journalists would often make one up, which exasperated her. This bothered me, too, at first in reading her book. Why do a patently enigmatic thing and then steadfastly refuse to explain why you've done it? I thought she was being coy. Many writers suggested that it was a response to her childhood. When she was 11, her mother had killed herself and Davidson had discovered the body. She has explained patiently that she does not think that's the reason, but writers tend to suggest it is anyway to her

Starting point is 00:01:57 annoyance. Even the makers of a film about her journey, released in 2013, wanted to make that her motivation. I couldn't make sense of this until I saw an interview she gave to the Sydney Morning Herald, in which she said, the problem for me there is that the hidden message then becomes that for a woman to do anything extraordinary, she has to be disturbed in some way. She has to have something to work out. That makes sense to me. If a man climbs a mountain, no one asks why he's done it, or he can just say that he wanted to, and that's accepted. If a woman climbs a mountain, people ask, what was driving her? Why did she feel she had to do that? Somehow it's not enough for her to say that she simply wanted to. Davidson was fascinated with

Starting point is 00:02:32 the desert and decided that she wanted to cross it. That's all. People are often surprised to learn that there are camels in Australia. We've discussed them on this show before. They arrived in the 1850s to open up inaccessible areas, transport food, and help to build telegraph systems and railways. When they were no longer needed, their Afghan masters left them there, but they were perfectly at home in the country, and their only natural enemy was man. By 1975, there were 10,000 of them wandering the central deserts. Altogether, Davidson spent two years getting ready. She found that there were three men in town who worked with camels, and she apprenticed herself to two of them, getting her training by tending to camels every day. Eventually, she put together a group of four of them, Dookie, Bub, Zalaika, and Goliath,

Starting point is 00:03:12 and assembled enough knowledge to feel that she could travel through the desert capably with them. Rather late in the game, she realized she'd need money to finance the trip, since it might take most of a year. The camels were taking up all her time, so she couldn't save up the money by working in town, and she didn't want to borrow it since a loan might take years to repay. Eventually, she met Rick Smolin, a photographer, who suggested that National Geographic might sponsor her in exchange for a story about the trip when it was finished.

Starting point is 00:03:37 She sent them a query letter. She planned to depart in March, which is the beginning of autumn in Australia, so she decided to do a trial run in January, walking to Utopia, an aboriginal community 150 miles away. She made that journey with two friends in heat that sometimes reached 130 degrees. It was exhausting, but by the time they finished, she'd worked out everything that was wrong with the saddles and gear and knew what adjustments to make. National Geographic flew her to Sydney and told her they'd pay her $4,000 for an article.

Starting point is 00:04:05 That gave her the money she needed, though it meant she would lose some independence, and the magazine assigned Rick Smolin to meet her periodically along the way to take photographs. On the morning of her departure, it took her two and a half hours to load up 1,500 pounds of baggage. Then she set off. She wrote later, I wondered what powerful fate had channeled me into this moment of inspired lunacy. The last burning bridge back to my old self collapsed. I was on my own. All day on the first day, she felt a feeling of release. She was nervous on her first night out because she now had to contend with millipedes,

Starting point is 00:04:35 scorpions, and snakes in the wilderness, but she began eating a diet of natural foods that she wrote eventually had me so healthy I felt like a cast-iron Amazon. After dinner, she listened to tapes to learn the language of the Pichanjara, the Aboriginal people of the Central Australian Desert. She decided to cover 20 miles a day, six days a week. She wanted to finish before summer returned to the desert, and she'd promised National Geographic she'd finish before the year was out. That gave her six months, which she could stretch to eight if she had to. On the third day, her map misled her. If she wasn't in any real danger, she could make her way to she had to. On the third day, her map misled her. She wasn't in any

Starting point is 00:05:05 real danger. She could make her way to the next stop with a compass, but she worried about what would happen if she lost her way when she was far from help. She considered carefully what to do and decided to set up camp where she was and spend the afternoon looking for the track. Eventually, she saw the error and learned her first lesson. When in doubt, follow your nose, trust your instincts, and don't rely on maps. Her first stop was Arionga, a missionary settlement in the McDonald Ranges. There she was greeted by Pidjantjara children, and she found that from that point on, people always seemed to know she was coming. The Pidjantjara have a special relationship with camels, and that gave her an immediate bond with them. She spent three days in Arionga, and then headed for the Tempe Downs Cattle Station,

Starting point is 00:05:44 40-odd miles to the south, where she had lunch with the station managers, filled her canteen with rainwater from their tanks, and went on her way. This is how she would spend much of the early part of the journey, connecting the dots between settlements and cattle stations as she made her way west toward the Gibson Desert. Her next major stop was Ayers Rock, an enormous sandstone rock formation where Rick Smolin had been assigned to photograph her. Nothing had gone wrong so far, but she felt that her first two weeks had been disappointing. She wrote, I was exactly the same person that I was when I began. And yet there were changes. She was beginning to tell time and direction by the stars, and her tapes of music now sounded alien and incongruous to her. When she reached Ayers Rock, she found herself irritated by

Starting point is 00:06:22 the tourists, whom she called bad-mannered, loud, insensitive, litter-bugging oafs. Smolin had brought along a friend of hers, but that only annoyed her, and when she tried to describe her experiences to them, she could tell they weren't understanding. Smolin irritated her at first, but she grew to like him and agreed to let him come with her to Docker River, five days away, where he could photograph some aborigines. Still, she was disappointed that she'd begun to think of her adventure as a story for other people, and regretted that she'd strayed from her original plan. They were a day or two out of Docker when Dookie, the largest camel, fell and tore a muscle. They limped into the settlement and had to wait there for six weeks while the injury healed. The Aborigines hated being photographed by Smolin, and Davidson realized that her article wouldn't lead anyone to really care about these people, whom she'd begun to admire.

Starting point is 00:07:07 And people now thought of her as Smolin's wife, which changed the way they treated her. When he finally departed, she was glad. She was drawn to the Aborigines, but still felt a distance from them. She still didn't understand their culture well, and she learned that Smolin had offended them by photographing a sacred ceremony, and she was seen as his accomplice. They refused to allow her to cut across their sacred country, so she would have to travel 160 miles along a dreary track. Aborigines divide whites into two groups, people and tourists, and she was a tourist. She felt herself deeply discouraged at that and began to think of quitting. But some distance further on, she met Aborigines on the road, and one of them, known as Mr. Eddie,

Starting point is 00:07:43 said he'd accompany her to Pialpapachara, two days away, to look after her. She wrote that he had all those qualities typical of old Aboriginal people—strength, warmth, self-possession, wit, and a kind of rootedness, a substantiality that immediately commanded respect. In the end, Mr. Eddy accompanied her more than 200 miles as she traveled out of Sandhill Country into vast plains of yellow grasses leading up to Rocky Mountains and on to Warburton, the next settlement. By example, Mr. Eddy showed her how to live in the land. She began to divest herself of possessions, rely less on maps, and fight against her incessant Western urge for regimentation and order. She said later, it is very difficult to delineate what he taught me because it was by example, not by instruction.

Starting point is 00:08:23 But I think the main thing was being able to let go of a Western preoccupation with time and structure and just let myself move into a more sensible way of being. She wrote, I don't think I have ever felt so good in my entire life. Beyond Warburton, she'd have to pass through 400 miles of completely wild desert. This would be the heart of the journey, the most difficult stretch of country. Mr. Eddy suggested she find someone to accompany her, but she wanted to do this on her own to test her newfound confidence. At Warburton, the last aboriginal outpost in that country, Rick Smolin found her again, bringing her mail. She spent a week there, she said, floating with happiness. She wrote, I could not remember ever associating that emotion with myself before. None of the trip had gone as she'd imagined. None of it had lived up to her expectations. Nothing had gone according

Starting point is 00:09:02 to plan. But in trudging along, she wrote, she'd thought through everything that had ever happened in my past and all the people who belonged there, back to her childhood, in an emotionally detached way, as if her life had happened to someone else. She wrote, it was a giant cleansing of all the garbage and muck that had accumulated in my brain, a gentle catharsis. And because of that, I suppose, I could now see much more clearly into my present relationships with people and with myself. And I was happy. There was simply no other word for it. She left Warburton in July, expecting to pass a month in the desert before she saw another human being. She looked forward to it calmly, feeling self-reliant. She set out along the Gun Barrel Highway, which is a pair of parallel tracks that had originally been a survey line. It runs dead

Starting point is 00:09:41 straight due west through arid emptiness for hundreds of miles. Smolin drove ahead of her, periodically dropping drums of water in case she needed them, but after a few hours she cut across country anyway with what she called a sense of freedom and joyful aimlessness. She saw things for what they were now, without naming them, without studying them, just observing the relationships among them. One morning she took out her alarm clock, set the alarm for four o'clock, and left it ticking on the stump of a tree. Altogether she spent a month along the gun barrel, she wrote, learning to accept my fate, whatever it might turn out to be. She said later, the paradox was I was as remote from the rest of humanity as it is possible to be, and yet I had never felt as connected and indeed as existentially at home. It was sort of the antithesis of loneliness, if you

Starting point is 00:10:22 like. There was something about having to expand myself in all sorts of directions that made me realize that there were all sorts of abilities and talents there that I had no idea I had. As she approached the Carnegie Cattle Station, she found that she didn't want to arrive. She didn't want to see people. When she reached it, she found that the station was abandoned and desolate. The cattle had overtaxed the land. To her, this now looked like the true desert, man's desert. She met two young men and scolded them for bad management. She asked them whether they couldn't see the difference between the land outside the fence and the land inside. They couldn't, and she realized that she herself couldn't have seen the difference six months earlier. As she advanced out of the Gibson Desert, she began to pass cattle stations again,

Starting point is 00:10:59 still making her way steadily westward, still feeling an expansive sense of freedom and possibility. At the Glen Ale station, they gave her a muzzle for Diggity to keep her from eating strychnine, which was being dropped from planes to exterminate dingoes. But Diggity hated the muzzle, and Davidson eventually freed her of it. She wrote, those days were like a crystallization of all that had been good in the trip. It was as close to perfection as I could ever hope to come. I had discovered capabilities and strengths that I would not have imagined possible in those distant, dreamlike days before the trip. She felt invincible, untouchable. But that night she received what she called the most profound and cruel lesson of all. Diggity crept into camp and began to vomit. She had taken a strict nine-bait, and when she began

Starting point is 00:11:37 to convulse, Davidson had to shoot her. There were no words to describe this. Diggity had been with her through the whole adventure. They had arrived together at the Alice Springs train station two years earlier. And now she was gone. Davidson walked on, but through her numbness, she decided to end the trip when she reached the town of Wiluna. Then, to her surprise, as she made her way out of the desert, journalists began to find her and offered $1,000 for her story. So how the stark elements of her undertaking,

Starting point is 00:12:02 a woman, a desert, camels, and solitude, had taken the imagination of people around the world, people who felt alienated and powerless. She felt they had made her into a symbol, she wrote, a mythical being who had done something courageous and outside the possibilities that ordinary people could hope for. Ironically, that was the opposite of what she'd been hoping to do, which was to show that anybody could do anything. She received many letters, including hundreds from people who said, you have done something I would have liked to do but never had the courage to try. They were almost apologetic, and their letters puzzled me and frustrated me the most because I kept wanting to shake them and tell them that courage had much less to do with it than sheer

Starting point is 00:12:35 good luck and staying power. With Rick Smolin's help, she managed to dodge the journalist until she finally arrived at Woodlace Cattle Station, the end of her journey. This would become the camel's new home, and they took it to it immediately. After a few days there, the owners offered to truck her and the camels to a spot half a dozen miles from the ocean, and on day 273, she and the camels stood on the shore of the Indian Ocean. The camels had never seen anybody of water larger than a puddle, and they boggled at the endless expanse in front of them. Davidson took them in for a swim. She wrote, and I rode down

Starting point is 00:13:05 that stunningly, gloriously fantastic Pleistocene coastline with the fat sun bulging on a flat horizon, and all I could muster was a sense of it all having finished too abruptly so that I couldn't get tabs on the fact that it was over. She stayed a week on the beach, then departed for Brisbane and then New York. National Geographic published her story in May 1978, and she wrote a second piece for the Sunday Times in Britain, which syndicated it around the world. When a book was commissioned, she wrote a fan letter to Doris Lessing, a British novelist, who suggested she come to London and write it in her basement flat. She called the book Tracks, and when it came out in 1980,

Starting point is 00:13:37 it became an international bestseller. It has never been out of print. Looking back on the trip, Davidson said, For me, going to the desert was wonderful and large, but not weird. What I remember is entering into something exquisite, something transcendentally beautiful. The desert gives you an awareness about where you actually fit in the world. You get this very clear sense of the way nature fits together and your place in it. I wanted to shed burdens, to pare away what was unnecessary. The process was literal in the sense of constantly leaving behind anything extraneous to my needs, and metaphorical, or perhaps metaphysical, in the sense of ridding myself of mental baggage. Rick Smolin said she listened to her own little inner voice. That voice is a

Starting point is 00:14:13 crazy little thing that we all dismiss as being frivolous, and she listened to it. I can't tell you how many people have told me that after reading that book, they felt as if they were wasting their life. Since her journey, Robin Davidson has continued to travel and to write about her experiences. She lived on four continents and has had more than 40 addresses. She said, I would hope that the central message of the book is that you can expand your boundaries and that you don't have to obey the rules and you can experiment with your life in all sorts of ways. At the end of Tracks, she wrote, the two important things that I did learn were that you are

Starting point is 00:14:42 as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most difficult part of any endeavor is taking the first step. In episode 192, we discussed how diver William Walker worked underwater for five years to construct a firmer foundation for the Winchester Cathedral. Charles Hargrove wrote, I really enjoyed William Walker's story in the recent podcast and hope that he was well paid for his efforts. But I wanted to draw your attention to the fact that there is a person today who is doing a job in vaguely similar conditions, Julio Cucamara, who is the scuba diver for the Mexico City sewer system. All the articles I found on Cucamara were from 2013, so I'm not sure if he's still in this job, but back in 2013, he had spent the previous 30 years diving into Mexico City's

Starting point is 00:15:40 7,500 miles of sewer pipes to unblock drains and make manual repairs, all while wearing an airtight suit and helmet weighing about 90 pounds. He was making these dives an average of four times a month, staying submerged in the human, chemical, and animal waste of the sewers for anywhere from 30 minutes to six hours at a time, usually working blindly in the murky water. That's a huge city, too. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:16:06 In the course of his work, he encountered the dead bodies of humans, horses, and pigs, as well as less organic items such as weapons, furniture, refrigerators, and car parts. During an interview in 2010, he said, Oh, my goodness. said, we find all of it in the sewers. You've got to ask yourself how it got there, but there it is. It's crazy. Oh my goodness. And Stephan Goodrow sent an email with the subject line, some more treacherous diving work, and said, another podcast called Criminal deals with various crime and crime adjacent stories. And one episode was about Sergeant David Mascarenas of the Los Angeles Police Department, whose job title is dive supervisor. If a case involves finding evidence that has been ditched

Starting point is 00:16:51 in water or other liquids, he's in charge of that. This particular episode concerned the LAPD's 2013 efforts to retrieve some homicide evidence from the La Brea tar pits. Because the tar pits emit flammable gases, powered machines, which would produce a spark, could not be used. And Mascarenhas was the only one on his team who was willing to go into the pits. I'll let you hear or read further details for yourselves. Keep up the good work. I didn't even know you could do that. I didn't either. The La Brea tar pits are large, hot, bubbling lakes of a thick tar-like substance that belch up methane and hydrogen sulfide. The pits are actually composed of natural asphalt, which is a residue of crude oil.

Starting point is 00:17:32 They are tens of thousands of years old and are famous for containing the fossils of prehistoric animals, such as saber-toothed cats and mammoths, that got trapped in the heavy, sticky material. The LAPD got a lead that evidence for a homicide case had been thrown into the pits, and as dangerous as it would be to go in after it, Mascarenas didn't want criminals to get the message that the pits were a good place to dump incriminating evidence. That's kind of clever, though. You'd probably feel pretty secure if you dumped your evidence in there. Mascarenas wasn't able to see anything at all through the asphalt, so colleagues used sonar to try to detect what he was looking for and then radio him instructions to guide him.

Starting point is 00:18:11 It sounded like it was a pretty surreal experience for him, moving through the thick liquid and encountering weird columns of asphalt that were being pushed upward by the methane gas. He said, I've been under moving ships in underwater reservoir sheds, you name it. This is by far the craziest thing I've ever done. And not just crazy, but downright dangerous. He got badly stuck a couple of times and each time he seriously thought he might not make it back out. Because of concerns that the heat might be hazardous for Mascarenas and might dissolve his protective suit, they intended for his dive to only take about nine minutes, but it ended up lasting 77 minutes. In the end, his fins were melted and deformed,

Starting point is 00:18:52 and the asphalt had gotten in through his suit and was covering his arms and part of his face, but he was mostly okay. That sounds like seriously, that sounds so incredibly dangerous. It's not like what evidence could make that worth risking? Well, I don't know. But like he said, he didn't want criminals to think, well, if we have anything to get rid of, we have a great way to do it. He wanted to send the message of, we'll get it no matter where you put it. That's impressive. And as for it being risky, he actually hadn't told his wife that he was planning to do this. And she heard about it on the news before he actually made it home.

Starting point is 00:19:26 So when he arrived home, she was so angry that she punched him in the chest because he had risked himself like that. So he was injured. Yes, actually. And because the case is still open, the LAPD won't actually say what the evidence was that they were seeking and will only say that it did help apprehend some suspects. So if anyone hears an update on this, please let us know. I'm really curious to know what it was that was hidden in the pits. And we heard from another listener about the association between

Starting point is 00:19:57 a Fisher-Price alphabet magnet set and its apparent effect on children with synesthesia. John Burns wrote, the lateral thinking puzzle from podcast 189 and the follow-up notes in this week's show, 192, from the listener from Norway resonated deeply with me, as I have the same type of synesthesia, and now that I have looked it up, I see mine appears to be linked to the same Fisher Price toy, as my color to letter and number associations are nearly identical to the toy, and I have many fond memories of playing with it. There is a photo of it in the below National Geographic link. Up until now, I had always assumed that my synesthesia came from one of those

Starting point is 00:20:34 alphabet and number posters over the blackboard in early elementary school or maybe toy blocks, but now I know that it must have been this Fisher-Price toy as the color to letter and number mapping is almost 100% accurate in my case. I even found a document I created a decade ago, where I colored in the first nine letters of the alphabet throughout some paragraphs of sample text, and it also matches the Fisher-Price set. So my case, at least, has remained static over the years. This article also makes reference to toy blocks, which Greg guessed while trying to solve the puzzle.

Starting point is 00:21:05 The article starts off briefly describing an 1892 case where they thought toy blocks may have been the cause, but the 1893 paper resulting from that case ultimately dismissed the theory. Thanks for such an entertaining, engaging, educational, enjoyable, and especially enlightening podcast, and also for unintentionally solving this long-standing mystery for me. The article that John sent describes the case of Miss C, who was interviewed about what was called colored hearing for a paper published in 1893. Until she was interviewed about how she saw W as a pinkish heliotrope or C as a vivid lemon yellow, she had assumed everybody saw letters in color. As John mentioned, they first thought that maybe she had learned the

Starting point is 00:21:51 color associations from wooden alphabet blocks, but found that the colors didn't really match up. And I should mention that our discussions on the show so far have been about one of the most common forms of synesthesia, grapheme color, where letters and numbers are associated with colors, but it's believed that there are roughly 80 or so subtypes of synesthesia. So for some people, words or shapes can evoke flavors, or numbers can be perceived as having personalities, or sounds can induce tactile sensations. The puzzle that started our discussion was about the grapheme color subtype, and most of what I've seen on the topic has also focused on that kind.

Starting point is 00:22:33 One thing that I thought was interesting about the Fisher-Price toy's obvious influence on a significant subset of synesthetes is that researchers haven't been able to find another single influencer with that kind of effect. A 2005 study of Australian grapheme color synesthetes looked for associations between their color letter pairings and books or toys that had been popular in Australia when they were young and found no clear relationships. A 2015 American study that did find the effect for the Fisher-Price magnet set noted that the toy was not as common in Australia, and that might explain the lack of an effect seen for it there. The American study also looked for any other clustering of color-letter pairings in their very large sample of synesthetes to see if they could find suggestions of other stimuli that might

Starting point is 00:23:14 account for other subgroups, but they weren't able to find one other than the Fisher-Price subgroup. That means, I guess maybe we said this before, that whoever came up with this that day at Fisher-Price just arbitrarily assigned colors to letters, not realizing that, I mean, if they'd chosen a different combination, I guess those would have imprinted instead. Probably. And all those people would have different associations. As best we can tell, probably. And there's also the interesting finding that some color letter pairs seem to have been common over long periods of time in ways that can't be traced to any children's toys. over long periods of time in ways that can't be traced to any children's toys.

Starting point is 00:23:49 So, for example, the 2015 American study found that the most common color associated with the letter O was white, but there weren't any white letters in the Fisher-Price magnet set. And back in 1893, Miss C and other synesthetes who were interviewed also had a tendency to link O and white. What do you make of that? That's very strange. It is very strange. And actually, if you look at the two studies, the Australian and the American one more carefully, you see that

Starting point is 00:24:10 they tend to find for most letters what they call like a modal response or what a large percentage of the synesthetes would give. And some of them seem kind of obvious, like R is red and y is yellow okay but some of them don't seem as obvious like o and white or um and some of them differed between the two groups so like d was brown in australia was the brown was the most common response and it was blue in america as the most common response and neither of those matches up to the magnet set either. So they're thinking that there must be some kind of cultural influence, but it's not really clear what the cultural influence is. And interestingly, the cultural influence seems to actually compete with the Fisher-Price influence, because the Fisher-Price letters don't usually match up to what is

Starting point is 00:25:00 otherwise the most common responses. So it actually, in some cases, overrides what seems to be the other normal, or not normal, but more naturally occurring pairings. That's a funny problem because it's just, you just have to use your imagination to try to figure out of all the possible cultural associations of which one is doing this. Right. There's no way to figure it out systematically. Right. So far, I don't think that they've really been able to pin down where too many of these pairings are coming from, other than the Fisher-Price

Starting point is 00:25:29 magnet set. And people often assume that the way they perceive things is the way everyone perceives them. So it seems to be common for synesthetes to not even realize that they're experiencing something that others aren't. So for example, filmmaker Stephanie Morgenstern said in an interview, a few years ago I mentioned to a friend that I remembered phone numbers by their color. He said, so you're a synesthete. I hadn't heard of synesthesia. I only knew that numbers seem naturally to have colors. Five is blue, two is green, three is red. And music has colors too. The key of C sharp minor is a sharp tangy yellow. F major is a warm brown. In her book, Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens,

Starting point is 00:26:09 Patricia Lynn Duffy wrote about how when she was 16, she mentioned to her father that she remembered learning to make the letter R as a child by adding a line to a P and being surprised to find that you could so easily turn a yellow letter into an orange one. Her father was completely bewildered by her statement, and Duffy wrote, for as long as I could remember, each letter of the alphabet had a different color. Each word had a different color too, and so did each number. The colors of letters, words, and numbers were as intrinsic a part of them as their shapes, and like the shapes, the colors never changed. They appeared automatically whenever I saw or

Starting point is 00:26:44 thought about letters or words, and I couldn't alter them. I had taken it for granted that the whole world shared these perceptions with me, so my father's perplexed reaction was totally unexpected. From my point of view, I felt as if I'd made a statement as ordinary as, apples are red and leaves are green, and had elicited a thoroughly bewildered response. and had elicited a thoroughly bewildered response. I suddenly felt marooned on my own private island of navy blue Cs, dark brown Ds, sparkling green 7s and wine-colored Vs. What else did I see differently from the rest of the world, I wondered?

Starting point is 00:27:16 What did the rest of the world see that I didn't? It occurred to me that maybe every person in the world had some little oddity of perception they weren't aware of that put them on a private island mysteriously separated from others. I suddenly had the dizzying feeling that there might be as many of these private islands as there were people in the world. That's a good point. There's no way you could, you can't describe laboriously the way you experience everything just to check it with everyone else. Right. And I've heard that point before that like, how do you know that what you see is read looks the same as what I see is read? We both

Starting point is 00:27:48 see something, but we don't know that they look the same to each other. So it is a good point that maybe we never really know for sure how other people are perceiving things. And lastly, in his book, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman said, When I see equations, I see the letters and colors. I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions, with light tan Js, slightly violet bluish Ns, and dark brown Xs flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students. Thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us. We really appreciate how much we learn from our listeners.

Starting point is 00:28:30 If you have anything you'd like to send in, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to give him a strange sounding situation and he has to figure out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. This puzzle comes from Paul Sloan and Des McHale's 2014 book, Remarkable Lateral Thinking Puzzles.

Starting point is 00:28:57 Why would workers go on strike because they wanted to make less money? Okay, by strike you mean a refusal to work? Yes. In order to make less money? Okay, by strike you mean a refusal to work? Yes. In order to make less money? Yes. By money you mean money, what I think of as money, their pay? Yeah, currency.

Starting point is 00:29:12 The workers are human? Yes. And that's the cause of their strike? I mean, is they're striking deliberately for that reason to... Because they want to make less money. That's the case? Yes. Do the workers' employers... That seems like a silly question even to ask,

Starting point is 00:29:29 have a reason for wanting not to lower their pay, to keep their pay at the same level? No. Wait. The workers, the employers would be willing to lower their pay. I suppose the employers would be willing to lower their pay. There's not some reason that they have to go on strike to induce them to do that. Right. So the question is then, why would you strike?

Starting point is 00:29:51 Would it help me to know what kind of work this is? It sounds like it would. Yes. In other words, not any line of work would do this. It's something about the nature of the work itself. Yes. Does it matter how they're paid? No.

Starting point is 00:30:10 And do I need to know the reason why they want to be paid less? No. That's not a correct question. They're going on strike. Yes. And their demand is that they want to be paid less? No. They want to make less money

Starting point is 00:30:25 all right they want to make less money yes but they'll be paid the same in other words they're the salary given worker won't change let's presume that the salary of the given worker won't change but they want to make less money less money meaning less cash? Like it's the way in which the money is given to them? No. No, that's not it. Make less money meaning they're going to be paid instead in some other way? No. Compensated in some other way? No. Oh, that's all good thinking. I see what you're thinking. Yeah. No, that's not it. Well, I'm having trouble then getting the difference between being paid less and getting less money. They wanted to make less money.

Starting point is 00:31:07 Ah. Were they like treasury workers or people who actually literally made money? Yes. They work at either the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing where paper money is printed or the U.S. Mint where coins are made and feel that they are being asked to produce too much. I like that. That's a good one. We're always on the lookout for more lateral thinking puzzles. So if you have one you'd like to send in for us to try,

Starting point is 00:31:33 please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is a big commitment of time to research and produce each week. So we're really grateful to everyone who has pitched in to help keep it going. If you like our podcast and want to help support it, please check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the supporters section of the website at futilitycloset.com. While you're at the site, you can also browse Greg's collection of over 10,000 compendious amusements, check out our store, learn about two Futility Closet books, and see the show notes for

Starting point is 00:32:05 the podcast with links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments for us, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by Greg's awesome brother, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 197-Alone Across the Outback

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