Good Job, Brain! - 103: In Yo Face!

Episode Date: March 26, 2014

Time to face off with facts about your FACE. Chris explores the things in your face, (specifically, up your nostrils) in his dedicated booger segment. Seeing Virgin Mary on your grilled cheese sandwiches? Or seeing fiesty drunk octopodes in bathrooms? Karen offers up a quiz about the psychological phenomenon of interpreting faces. Colin dots this episode with the plump facts about moles. Take our idiom challenge, and learn about the secrets of blurring faces (and butt cracks) on TV. ALSO: Carmin San Mateo, 3-eyed animals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an airwave media podcast. Hello, lavishly, luscious listeners. Welcome to Good Job Brain, your weekly quiz show and Offbeat Trivia podcast. This is episode 103, and of course, I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are your irrefutably, irreplaceable, an irresistible, irregular's irradiating iridescence. I'm Colin. And I'm Chris. So Dana is not here this week.

She's off to doing mysterious Dana stuff. What a Dana does. Yep, yep. All right, time for our first general trivia segment, pop quiz hot shot. And we're down one hot shot. Yeah, we're down one hot shot. Oh, true. It's a face off.

Yes, boy against boy. Here we have a random trivia person card that I picked. from the box. And so Colin versus Chris, they have their barnyard buzzers. Here we go. Blue Wedge for Geography. The Caribbean Island of Aruba is part of what European kingdom? Colin. I believe that's the Netherlands? Correct. Oh. All right, Pink Wedge for pop culture. What R&B singer and Grammy winner adopted a stage name inspired by the instrument she plays? Chris. Did Alicia Keys?

Yes. Ah. I just now pieced that together. What instrument is in Alicia? Right. No. Bob's Huba. She was born Alicia Aguella Cook.

Alicia Keys. Here we go. Yellow Wedge. Who shot Harry Whittington on February 11th, 2006? Harry. Harry Whittington. February 11, 2006. Shot.

Of course, Chris. Richard Dick Cheney. Yeah. Oh, right. This was the pheasant hunting, uh, mishap. Sprade him with a, the whole load of pellets. Um, actually, uh, there's a little, there's a little bit here. The two men were quail.

Quail hunting. Quail. When Chaney accidentally hit Whittington with birdshot. Yeah. Yeah. You think you're having a bad day and then Dick Cheney shoots you in the face. I just wanted some quail I just wanted some quail

Now he's a trivia answer Yeah that's true I'd let Dick Cheney quail shot me in the face So if you're listening What would you not do? You know he would owe me one And you know There's a lot

Big time And there's a lot of stuff he can make happen That's true You'd be playing that quail card For the rest of your life That quill card in your pocket Yeah I think you should

I think it's worth for the rest of your life You got shot in the face Well, have his people call my people. I shot in face. We'll plan it. All right. Purple Wedge. What supermarket tabloid featured regular appearances by Bat Boy, Ed Anger, and an alien interested in U.S. politics?

Everybody is. The weekly world news. Yes. The only true newspaper ever published. This is like one of those, like, oh, Lochness monster spotted. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Or a woman like. Aliens fathered my children, and it'll have, like, a poorly photoshop picture of her with her arm around, like the alien. For example. Yeah. All right. Green Wedge for science. What artificial sweetener based on sucralose was introduced in 1999? Everybody.

Splenda. All right. Last question, Orange Wedge. What singer renamed Silver Dollar City, Tennessee, after herself? Oh, Chris. Dolly Parton? Yes. Yeah, was this word Dolly, Dollywood?

Yep. Dolly Parton. The park's been known as Dollywood since 1986. Good job, Brains. Oh, we have a quick, um, actually, but Dana's not here to do the voice. Can someone do the, um, actually voice? Um, actually. Okay.

So last episode, I think Dana made a little slip. She said that Sillian Murphy, actor, was in Breakfast on Mars. A lot of people wrote in, pronounced Killian. Yes. Oh, Kilian, yes. And it was breakfast on Pluto. Oh, close. Yes.

Loxy distance-wise, not that close, but they're both. And actually, it's pronounced Marphy. I guess they're not like that. Wait, really? No, no, no. I'm just, yeah. I'm bad, sorry, sorry. All right.

So this week, we decided to dedicate the whole episode to, your face? Your face. Your face. Your grimace. Right in your face. Your kisser. Your mug. Yeah. So get ready for In your face. Let me kick it off here with a quick question for you guys. Are you familiar with the term prosopagnosia. I am not, but... Okay, let's break it down. Prasau? Prague.

I'll tell you, the roots are prosopan and agnosia. I'm going to go ahead and say no. I'm not going to be able to figure this out. Prosopon means face in Greek. Agnosia, you may know this not knowing. Agnostic. So someone with prosopagnosia suffers from face blindness is what it's more common. What does that mean?

This is a condition where you, in its... simplest terms, you literally cannot form memories of faces. You cannot identify people who you may otherwise know very well based on their face. You're just neurologically, your brain is just not wired to encode that in a way that's easily retrievable. People have this. People have this. So here's where it gets even more interesting.

Brad Pitt, Brad Pitt believes that he suffers from face blindness. And he has said that he has just extreme difficulty remembering people's faces. And for a long time, you know, he kind of just thought, well, this is just, I'm sort of weird. But he realizes, no, wait, this is a thing, face blindness. And he's talked about this in interviews. It's really hard for him to be out in the world. And it's very embarrassing. But, okay, so let me ask you this.

Can't they rely on sense of hearing and voice to connect people? Yes. And this is why people with face blindness can still function in the world. They talk about this, actually, in the Oliver Sacksbook. the man who mistook his wife for a hat, which is, it's a great, so it's one of the, it's one of the good Oliver Sacks books, but he talks about, yeah, a man who could not recognize his wife's face. He could recognize her voice until it was her, but like looking at her, you know, in person or in photos, he would have to rely on other cues, you know, like, or looking at

photos of family members. He'd be more likely to remember a jacket that someone was wearing than the face. So it's not really when they see someone, they see blank. Right. They just, they see the face. They just can't make the connection. They can't distinguish it. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And apparently it's really, I mean, disorienting for people to grow up with this because up into a certain point, you don't necessarily know that, oh, people can actually recognize faces. I thought, I just thought this was how people worked in the world. Yeah. So, ladies, you know, you may as well be Angelina Jolie if you ever meet Brad Pitt out

on the street, you know, just, yeah. Piggybacking on that fact. I have a little quiz. It's themed around a almost. like the opposite of what you described, Colin. It's the psychological phenomenon that causes people to actually see faces in inanimate things. Or actually, we talked about backmasking before. It's for people to perceive what they want to perceive. And usually it's human or something that they have a connection to. Well, I mean, we're, I mean, Colin, the exception proves the rule. Like there's people who

cannot just recognize faces, but everybody else, we're like specifically looking for faces. I mean, our brain is just looking for faces everywhere, and, like, that's how we, there's something about the human face that we just, like, automatically identify with. That's why when you, like, right now, if you're sitting around at home, I have a pencil and paper, draw two dots and a straight line underneath them. And, like, it's a face. Yeah. Like, your brain will just pick that up.

That is a face. So this is called paridolia. Paradolia is the name of this phenomenon. So to your point, Chris, Carl Sagan, famous, famous scientist and astronomer. He hypothesized that it's probably a survival technique that humans are looking, seeking out, identifying faces because that's how we connect and that's how we interact with people. So a couple of examples are using those pictures of dog butts and people are like, oh, I found Jesus on the dog butts. Or like when you're cloud gazing, oh, this looks like a baby and this looks like a whatever. Or you'll see a lot of people have pictures of vegetables, you know, like, oh, this potato looks like my uncle Oscar.

Wall, if there's like wall with random patterns, you know, cracks in the walls or things like that, you'll find something that looks like a face. Yeah. My favorite one is probably a picture you took and sent to me, Chris, a long time ago. It's, you know, back of bathrooms or doors? There's a little coat. Oh, yeah, yeah, I know this one. And one is, and the picture you sent had someone write down, like, what, drunk octopus is trying to fight you. And it's like the eyes are kind of like they look drunk. They're just screws on this coat hanger. And it looks like he has his tentacles. And once you see it, you can't not see it. I see drunk octopus wants to fight every time I look at the one on my door. Yeah, we moved into this apartment and we had drunk octopus on the back of the door. And I'm like, yay. So here I have quick quiz about things that are related to paradolia.

All right. First question, Belgium or not Belgium? The Rorschach test. No, also known as the ink block test. I'll say not Belgium. It is not building. All right. Oh, wow.

It is a Swiss, and developed by Swiss psychologist Herman Rorschach that's named after him. I didn't know this, but I'm going to throw it out to you guys. How many inkblots are there in the official Rorschach test? Oh, you know, I was just talking to somebody who actually administers this test. I thought they're just random inkblots. Oh, no. It's a fixed set. Yeah.

Yeah. I feel like it's, man, 30, 35? I don't know. Chris? Seven. Ten. Oh, okay. Ten official ones.

And you can find them online, and each one is supposed to make a connection to some part of your personality. All right. Next question. According to some Asian folklore and also Aztec folklore, what kind of mammal lives on the moon? Colin. That's the rabbit, isn't it? Yes. It's the rabbit, the moon rabbit.

I know that from Japan. I didn't know the Aztecs did. So Japanese, Korean, and Chinese folklore, and other East Asian folklore have the kind of same type of story involving a rabbit on the moon preparing something because it looks like in Japan, the rabbit is making mochi with a mortar and pestle. And in Chinese, he's making medicine. And it's funny that the fact that the Aztecs had almost the same origin folklore creation story of the bunny on the moon. And in some picture of the moon, you can kind of see an outline of like some sort of blob with. two big ears and they're like, oh, it's a rabbit. Sailor Moon, you know, the cartoon Sailor Moon, her name is Usagi or rabbit. Oh, it's cute. So the story is that there is a man begging for food and there might be other animals and the monkey offered fruit and this other animal offered this and the rabbit being like,

well, I don't have anything to offer you except for myself. So I'll jump into a fire and feed myself to you and the gods were touched and be like, We're going to remember you, Rabbit. We can't save you from burning yourself, but we're going to memorialize you on the moon. Two separate cultures have almost the same story. All right. Next question. Which U.S. States Quarter prominently features an example of paradolia.

Collin together. New Hampshire. Correct. Yay. I was, you had me thinking about the moon still, and I was like a. Big Shuttle, Florida. And it is of. The Old Man in the Mountain.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Sort of a facial profile in a rock in New Hampshire. Which sadly collapsed. Collapsed. It collapsed May 3, 2003. And now there's no face. People leave flowers there all the time.

Oh, no. Poor face. I can see that. But it does, it is a really kind of handsome structure when you look at it. You're like, no, I do see a face. Yeah. Like, it does really love. It always reminded me a little bit of like Abraham Lincoln.

All right. Last question. In 1994, a Floridian woman took a bite out of her freshly made grilled cheese sandwich and discovered that the grilled cheese sandwich on the side had Virgin Mary's face on it. Ten years later in 2004, she successfully sold that sandwich on eBay. How much was the winning bid for the Virgin Mary. grill cheese sandwich. That's 10 years old at that time. $1,500.

You want to take a guess, Colin? I was going to guess $1,000. $28,000. Wow. For a 10-year-old sandwich. With a bite taken out of it. Did it sell or did people troll the auction? So, Golden Palace.com, which is an online casino, wanted that, or the company wanted

that sandwich. Wow. And so they We will stop at nothing Yes They said they will spend As much as it took them To have the sandwich

I think it's probably more accurate To say they wanted the publicity That would come with them Buying a sandwich I never thought That is really clever And now we're talking about them We just name drop them

We did We fell in the trap And so my first reaction I remember when this was kind of In the news Or you know people were finding things On their toast all the time It was like Jesus

Or Virgin Mary But I remember this one, and my question was always, how did she keep this sandwich for 10 years and not have it wrought or get moldy? She just put it in a plastic box with some cotton balls. That's all she did. Yeah. And, you know, she claimed that there was no mold for 10 years, no mold. Yeah, I mean, if it mold comes from moisture, so if it dried out before mold would have had a chance to form, then you would not get any mold. I can believe that.

Well, so thank God for Slate, because someone actually did a scientific breakdown of how and why and predicted why it did not get moldy. And here are some of the reasons, the grilled cheese sandwich, there's oil on both sides. Oh, true, yep. Either butter and margarine, and there's usually trans fat in that, and fungus doesn't really like hanging out with trans fat because they can't digest it. So they kind of stay away from it. Also, the cheese filling, the calcium, is kind of a mold retardant. That could be why. And also, the cheese may have affected the pH level of the whole sandwich, so some fungus can't strive on that.

So, yeah, very, very interesting. That was my big question is, what does she do with the sandwich? I guess I'd put in the freezer. I don't know. But there you go. You might freeze the Virgin Mary right off of it, though, you know? Oh, that's true, because you want to keep it. Right, frost.

Yeah, who wants to buy the sandwich if her faces? That's right. Now, just an old sandwich. Yeah, I would say that. It's not like now when it's like an important historical relic, yeah. So there you go. Next time you see drunk octopus, it's just a phenomenon that we humans have, always trying to look for faces. Yeah, yeah.

Well, we spent a lot of time talking about the face, but let's go in the face. Let's go up all in your face. How deep in the face? How about this? Are you familiar with the term rhino-tilexomania? Something with the nose. Rinoes, mania is mania. Yes, compulsion.

Tilexo means to pick at. This is, Rino-Tilexomania is the compulsive picking of the nose. That's right. It's time to talk about, really talk about, boogers. Today, on a very special episode. Are you ready, Colin? I don't know. Let's sit down and really just have it. You might not like boogers, but you need to.

To know this. If all of the boogers in the world were to disappear, we would just die instantly. Wait, really? Yeah. So when you breathe in, you're taking in glorious, life-giving oxygen, but you are also taking in any bacteria, viruses, microbes, what have you, that are floating in the air, and that will destroy you. Mucous is really good at grabbing onto them, based on, like, you know, what it is and how

it's made up. The mucus grabs the microbes before they get up into your... bloodstream into your system. Got it. The cilia, the tiny, tiny hairs that line your nose, constantly move the mucus back into your esophagus. They're shuffling it along. Sweeping it. Yes, yes.

Every day your body produces one liter of nasal mucus. And you drink it all. Because it goes back. You're constantly swallowing it. It goes back into your esophagus. Oh, no. I'm so gross down. So basically it just grabs onto the bacteria and just sends them, you know, through your digestive system, basically before they have the chance to get into your circulatory system.

I see. I see. So they just don't want it in your bloodstream. Yeah. Sorry. Your body doesn't want it in your bloodstream, but swallowing it and traveling to your stomach is okay. It's like our incinerator in our stomach. Exactly. But we're not really here to talk about mucus in general. We are here specifically to discuss boogers. Now, there is no scientific term for boogers. It's just, you know, boogers. Or dried mucus. Dry mucus.

Okay. When air hits your nose, the mucus down towards the bottom, dries out, and becomes crusty boogers. Now, what you do with it then is your own business. However, I will say, one study in 1995 found that 91% of people admitted anonymously via the mail to picking their nose. And the other 9% are liars. Exactly. How else do you get? Right.

It's, yeah. So basically 100% of people pick their nose. So don't try to tell me that you don't pick your nose. You do. You do. Everybody does. 44% of respondents. Oh, no.

Oh, no. Admitted to as an adult eating. Wow. As an adult is a key word. As an adult eating their boogers. Now, there was a study that I saw, and this is inconclusive, this is it actually might be good for you. But that doesn't, I'm not. Hey, but you're already eating it anyways.

It's a dried version of what they're eating. Right, exactly. You're constantly, you're right, your mucus is constantly going into the throat. Not poisonous. Right. But at the same time, still kind of gross. Now, the question is, when does it cross the line from, you know, just the sort of clearing out the old nostrils that everybody does that 91% of people admit to and the other 9% are liars?

When does it cross over to rhino-tolexomania? compulsive you do it all the time so it is potentially harmful the study found it's only a small number of people in which like they're so into picking their nose that it becomes an actual problem like it becomes a problem for them socially or it becomes an issue where they're like actually doing damage you know they're like causing nosebleeds right oh my god and in a tiny handful of cases people have reported I want you to get ready for this Just a tiny, no, they don't pick all the way up into their brain. That's not what I'm saying.

In a tiny handful of cases, people have picked their nose so much that they have poked through their septum. And put a hole in the dividing line of their nose because they pick their nose so much. So listen, if anybody out there, serious PSA, if you can pick both of your nostrils at once with the same finger, not normal. Get yourself some help. Wow. And I would assume, like, a lot of the nosebleaser damage, like, they can get infected. You could. You could.

But remember, it's a tiny group of people that do it so much. That's harmful. Yeah, everybody out there. If you're, like, hurting yourself, picking your nose. Go get some help for rhinotallexomania is what I'm saying. Pick someone else's nose for a while. Pick your friends' nose. Just for, you know, every other day.

Yep. I will leave you with this. It is said that King Tutankhammon had, amongst everything else he had, his own personal nose picker. Of course. The King's private nose picker. Person, a person. Yeah.

Yep. I did not realize that like that should be a goal for future success. But as soon as... Yep. When I'm a multi-millionaire. Yeah. Personal nose-picker. What else do I need that I don't have?

Personal umbrella holder, personal nosepicker. Yeah. And they would have to be different people. Yeah, of course. Because they need to be concentrated on doing that one half. Yeah, they must be focused on their craft. If you're holding the umbrella and picking. my nose. I'm going to get wet and or a nose bleed. Unless you are just that good. Oh, he's the

best. All right. I want you guys to picture sort of just the classic image of like an upper crust 18th century European nobleman or a dandy. Okay. All right? So just close your eyes for a second, you know, so like I'm thinking, you know, like dangerous liaisons. Like that era, right? So if you're like me, some of the things you're picturing are very fashion-related, very stereotypical. You've got like the frilly clothes, maybe you've got like a big puffed-up wig. You likely have a very pale face. Yes, makeup. Yeah, right, the powdered face. Are you guys picturing a mole as well? Yes. Okay. Oh, really? Yeah. And rouge. Yes. The mole. You'll see this in period cartoons from the time, caricatures, and it's a persistent feature of caricatures of dandies and uppercrass people from the time, even today.

You know, where did this come from? Why do we have this image of the mole as an upper crest thing? The root of the mole, it isn't some particularly famous person with the mole. It wasn't like from a play or literature. It wasn't a stock character. It was actually a real fashion trend in the late 1700s, among men and women to have moles. I think of like Marie Etouinette, that era of like Parisian royalty. Absolutely.

Absolutely. You just give yourself one. And particularly in France. Yeah. So, I mean, you just say, but this was a European thing. Yeah, you might be thinking, all right, well, that's silly. Not everyone has a mole. Not everyone has a birthmark.

And you'd be right. So the obvious answer is people wore artificial moles. Of course. Oh, it's not painted on. No, not painted on. Fake moles. Okay. So.

Did they use, like, raisinettes? Cut in half, lick the end. that's that's the poor man's fake mole yeah still a big big mall for use of raisinette yeah well you know you cut it in half if you got one for the next day as well uh the fake mole the artificial mole they were called a moosh uh which is a french word moose is the French word for fly they were they were made out of different things like they could be velvet you know they could be other fabrics sometimes they might have been you know a little bit of hide velvet was very common and I mean people

knew they were fake, right? I mean, you weren't, you weren't trying to fool anybody with your little velvet mole that you would have fixed on your face. It's kind of just like a little, like a little patch. So it didn't matter that it was fake. People knew this was the height of fashion, height of fashion, men and women. Wow. Like a lot of things in the world of fashion, it started small and just got increasingly ridiculous. Trend. Trend. It's like, because yeah, you know, once the current level of the trend is passe, you got to take it somewhere else. They became so popular that it was actually fairly common to have more than one moosh on your face at a time. So you might have one on your cheek and one on your nose and one on

your forehead even, you know, all over your face walking around. Just like, yeah, I'm looking good. Now, all right, silly enough, of course, at some point someone's like, you know, the regular boring old round moosh. This is just not cutting it. We got to bump it up. We got to have Turn out to 11. So star-shaped moosh, heart-shaped moosh, crescent moons, the little fake mole in the shape of a star or a crescent moon affixed to your face, sometimes multiple. I mean, I imagine it's almost like wearing like lucky charms on your face, you know, but then they look like moles instead of marshmallows. In one of his many great historical books, Bill Bryson relates an account of a high society woman at the time who just, The most ridiculous extreme.

She wore mooshes on her face in the shape of a horse-drawn carriage and six horses, quote, galloping across her cheeks. So, you know, it was subtle, because, like, it was, the height of fashion is in subtlety. A picture of the Wells Fargo, like, horse and carriage. If you wore a moosh on your right cheek, that could signify that you supported the wigs. If you wore it on your left cheek, you were a Toray person. And it was a political statement. If you had a heart-shaped moosh on your right cheek, it meant you were married. If you had a heart-shaped mush on your left cheek, you were only engaged.

So these were just sort of the ways of signifying to people as you move through the world. Eventually, like the wigs and like the powdered faces and like all the other trappings of those areas, the moosh, the fake mole, it did die out as a trend. So before the moosh died out, I want to share with you a little anecdote of I think it reaching. It's just, it's just the pinnacle of absurdity of how, where do you go from here? Wait, the woman with the horse-drawn carriage in six horses wasn't absurd enough? No, no. For a brief period, very brief period, thankfully, in the late 1700s, it was fashionable to wear fake eyebrows made out of mouse hides. You know, I mean, because Velvet, you know, at that point, it's just not going to be enough.

This, thankfully, did not last very long. It's unclear to me now if you needed a pair of mice to make the fake eyebrows, you know, or if you get enough coverage. It's true. I mean, you want to match up the hides. Yeah. Quick question. Before you close out of the segment, how did they affix, how did they glue or stick it onto their face? Like, what do they use?

You would just use, you know, I mean, burgers? Just a little dab of glue or adhesive. You'd heat it up real good and then just burn it in and six to your flesh. They're so grab baggy with their ingredients and stuff that maybe someone will develop, you know, like with mouse hides, it might not be the most sanitary thing or whatever. Actually, and if, you know, break out a rash. And kids, if you want to try to bring this trend back, just get a box of Lucky Charms. Take any of the blue moons, just lick it, lick it and stick it. Yep.

Yep. That's cool. Yeah. Lick it and stick it. Look it and stick it. That's good marketing slowly. You just take all the marshmallows put in the little plastic bags and you sell it that way. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, and you just mix it up day by day. Lucky moosh. Did you moosh today? All right, time for a quick ad break. And in honor this week's sponsor, Warby Parker, I've gathered some interesting eyeball facts for you guys. So I was asking myself, we know a lot of living beings having two eyes. So I'm having one eye.

And I was just curious. I was like, are there any living creature recorded that has three eyes? Okay. Not a lot. But I did five. I'm surprised you found any. I found, so there are parietal eyes, which are kind of like, they kind of function like eyes, but they're not as fully developed. There are lizard-like reptiles called turotaros who actually have well-developed parietal eye.

Okay. And it even has a small lens in retina. Ooh. These lizards have a third eye on top of their head, like right on top of their head. And what is it for? So they can see for it. So it's a lot of it is. for light sensitivity.

And I found something that used to be rumored to have four eyes. It is called a spookfish. And it looks like it has two pairs of eyes. It has some of these spookfish, a type of spookfish, they have a kind of translucent head, like a normal fish. And their eyes are flat and they look up. And they have another kind of pair that look down. so a lot of scientists thought that they had two pairs of eyes hence they have four eyes

but really it's one pair of really weird eyes that are it's like a tube or a barrel so that they can see above them and they can see below on the ocean ground they're a deep sea fish deep sea not a lot of light so they need this to kind of maneuver and look for food and to survive and they look really weird it sounds like it so there you go weird eyeball animal facts for you guys. In honor this week's sponsor, Warby Parker. So head on over to warbyparker.com slash brain and get three-day expedited shipping. From the terrifying power of tornadoes to sizzling summer temperatures, acuether daily brings you the top trending weather-related story of the day every day of the week.

You can learn a lot in just a few minutes. Stories that will impact you, such as how a particular hurricane may affect your area. Or will that impending snow event bring more than just a winter wonderland? Occasionally, there are weather-related stories from the lighter side, like how a recent storm trapped tourists inside Agatha Christie's house, a setup perfect for a plot of one of her novels. And if there's a spectacular meteor shower or eclipse coming your way, we'll let you know if the sky in your area will be clear to check out the celestial display.

You see, AccuWeather Daily is more than just weather. It's Accuweather. Listen and subscribe to Acuweather Daily, wherever you get your podcasts. That's Accuweather Daily, wherever you get your podcasts. When the creators of the popular science show with millions of YouTube subscribers, comes the Minute Earth podcast. Every episode of the show dives deep into a science question you might not even know you had, but once you hear the answer, you'll want to share it with everyone you know.

Why do rivers curve? Why did the T-Rex have such tiny arms? And why do so many more kids need glasses now than they used to? Spoiler alert, it isn't screen time. Our team of scientists digs into the research and breaks it down into a short, entertaining explanation, jam-packed with science facts and terrible puns. Subscribe to Minute Earth wherever you like to listen. All right, let's go back talking about In Your Face. So in the grand good job brain tradition.

Oh, we have so many. So many. It's been over two years. I have assembled an idiom quiz. for you guys. I will give you clues, and the answer to every single one of these clues is an idiom. They all have the word face in there somewhere. Okay.

All right, so buzzers ready. Should I get a handicap? Oh, what? Because these are all American English idioms. We'll see. You can reserve the right to complain later. Okay. Thank you.

That's very kind of you. It's like filing a protest ahead of time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All complaints must be submitted in writing, yes, in triplicate. Notarized. So here we go. If you are exceptionally good at hiding emotion, you might say you have... Karen.

Pop-p-p-p-poker face. Yes, you might say you have a good poker face. Yeah. If you're willing to hurt yourself in an effort to hurt someone else, you might say you are... Chris. Cutting off your nose to spite your face. Correct. Whoa, what?

I've never heard of this. It's like you're mad at your face. You're like, fine, I'll cut my nose off. How about that face? It's like, yeah, but you just cut your nose off. It's a metaphor. So what's the meaning of it? Meaning, like, you're willing to do, you're, you want to hurt somebody or damage somebody so badly that you're willing to hurt yourself.

Right. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Very spiteful. Yeah. If you have an abrupt reversal of opinion or course of action, you might say you are, Chris. Doing an about face.

Doing an about face. 180. Okay. That's what about face means? Right. Okay. Especially in like a military or an army context. Yes, about face means. Everybody turn around.

If you judge something based purely on its outward appearance, you might say you are, Karen. Judging a book, but no, by its book face. Spiritually, you're correct. Not so much with the... At face value. There you go. Okay. Salvaged it.

I'll go ahead and give you that. I'll give you that one. Yes, you're taking it at face value. Which comes from, of course, coins, right? Is that what it comes from? Face value of a coin. Like, you know, there's dollar gold coins where the face value is a dollar. Yeah.

The coin is worth $20,000. I can see how that. That's what most people believe the illusion is to, yeah. Yeah. Oh, okay. Oh, but we don't really, we don't quite know. Like a lot of idioms, I've seen multiple explanations, but most people seem to agree that's the most logical. Got it.

Yeah. If you're concerned about maintaining your reputation and not losing respect, you might You might say you're trying to Karen. Save face. Yes. Save face. If you become exhausted

trying to explain something to someone, you might say that you are... Exhausted. Oh. Tired. Chris? No, no. What did you think it was?

Well, I mean, I was exasperated. Exasperated. You might say you're talking until... Oh, talking until your face turns blow? Yeah. Until you're blue in the face. Until you're blue in the face. Sure, sure, sure, yeah.

Because you're talking too much or because you're angry? Just that you're talking so much. Okay. Your face turns blue. Right, until you're blue in the face. Okay. Like lack of oxygen. If you decide to own up to something you did and are willing to accept the consequences,

you might say you're ready to... Chris. Face the music. Correct. Face the music. It's time to face the music. Not going to like it, but you got to. to do it. If you have a carefully constructed plan that fails and ends up hurting you instead of

accomplishing your intended goal, you might say your plan, uh, Karen, I think you guys both had that at the same time. Well, mine's probably wrong. Eggs on my face? Not what I'm looking for. Your plan blew up in your face. Your plan blew up in your face. Yeah. I guess that's an idiom. Egg on your face is an idiom. It may come up later in the quiz. And you might be, you might be working in a chemistry lab and it might actually blow up in your face. It's possible. If you're the kind of person who says nice things about people when you're with them, but badmouths them to others,

you might be called Karen. Two-face Harvey Dent. Two-face. Yes, I will accept Two-Face Harvey Dent. All right. Last one. Here we go. If you do something embarrassing and everyone knows about it, you might say you... Have egg on your face.

Yeah. We were both looking at Karen. I was thinking, I was like, what is it? Yeah, if you do something embarrassing and you know people know, you've got egg on your face. Presumably from the action of eggs thrown on the stage or something. Oh, maybe. Back in the old-timey days, I don't know. Yeah, that's one possibility.

Or you're just a really sloppy eater at breakfast. Very good. All right. Well, you faced up to that challenge pretty well, Karen. Oh, okay. Not a lot of face pun. Dana's not here. That's why.

It was very good. All right, I don't have a segue, but I'm just going to tell you guys my kind of strategy for this segment or what inspired me. You know, I was thinking about faces, faces. And the first thing that popped in my mind, you know, when you watch TV, there's people who have blurred faces. So I want to do a segment on blurring or the, you know, or the technique of blurring faces on TV. Why are their faces so blurred? Was it a birth defect? The blurring faces is very related to having the censorship bar, like the blurring.

black bar covering, covering someone's mouth or covering genitals or whatever, or mosaicing. You see a lot of, like, pixelized. Right, right, right. Basically, TV or films, they don't want to show you what is going on because of censorship or because of SEC, lots of reasons, or it's too gory. And this is all called pixelization. Not pixelation, pixelization. I always associate it with, you know, 60 minutes or date line or they've got somebody, yeah, like a mob informant or Something like that. Or it could be because they just don't have the release to show that person's image on air. Exactly.

If you're filming, like, you can film in a public place, but, like, sometimes if you're filming in a private place or whatever, you don't have the permission, they might blur someone's face out. I always laugh a lot on, like, the real-world type shows where they blur out butt crack, you know, someone. Oh, yeah. It's like, so that's someone's job in, you know, in the production studio. Speaking of which, I did find, uh, this person whose job is in charge of this.

His name is Mitsuo Goto. He is the TV post-production wizard, and he's worked for, obviously, famously, cops, which is the real-life cop show in America. Also, True TV's Vegas Strip, which is about the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. And also undercover sting. So very related, all kind of cops, reality shows. And it comes with the territory. You're going to have a lot of butt cracks. You're going to have nudity.

You're going to have wounds. You're going to have undercover cops. And so this guy, he's in charge of a team that would work on blurring faces among other things. So I was trying to find the first example of blurred faces. I couldn't find it. But I did find 1936. There's a Charlie Chan. Charlie Chan movie.

It was called Charlie Chan at the Olympics, which were held in Berlin that year. So there were a lot of swastikas. And so they had to blot out the swastikas. because it was offensive. That's the oldest example I could find. And that's not really someone's face. You know, that is like an icon. So I couldn't find anything on blurred faces,

but I did find, found an awesome interview on EW with Mitsuo Goto. And they asked him some very important questions. Let me share them with you. How much butt crack is too much butt crack? Really get into the point. Really getting deep in. And he says that, you know, any crack. No crack at all.

If it's a little crack. It's a slippery slope. Yeah, it is. Like, how do you put that in perspective, right? So if it's a little crack, he'll match the skin tone. So it just looks like a big butt. If it's a lot of crack, then it's you just blur out part of the leg, you know. A lot of his job is blurring faces because on these cop shows, it's not the perpetrator.

It's not the cops. It's all the people's bystanders. Sure. You know, something's going on. It's going to drop loud. And they don't want to be associated with this criminal activity that's going on. Yep. So they have to blur all the bystander faces.

I mean, if they didn't sign a release form or don't agree with it. Right, right. So before computer or technology, all this stuff has to be frame by frame. Oh, I bet. Like all of this kind of obscuring, whether if it's a black sensor box or a blur or mosaic, had to be frame by frame. Now with computers, not only is it faster, but you can track moving objects. So you can now blur a moving object.

like kind of automatic. Oh, that's cool. Right. And it calculates how to move from frame to frame. A lot of the technology now is all kind of automated. You know, we see that on Google Street View. It's not like someone's there manually blurring out all the license plates or like the people walking by. They have algorithms. They have algorithms that automatically do this. YouTube, when you upload a video and you want to blur faces because, you know, maybe it's like at a rally or something. It has a tool that you can use on YouTube to blur faces. However, as we head into having shows and films and videos be more HD, then there's more things you have to blur even with the aid of tonology. Maybe you'll see a little logo of a brand name logo in the back or some guy in the back.

And with HD, you can just zoom in, zoom in, and you see his face. Yep. So we have to blur, blur that face too. Yeah, low resolution TV programming. Did a lot of that blurring already. Yep, exactly. Right, right. So it actually introduces more work.

So there you go. A little bit about blurred faces. I actually think about that a lot. Every time I see a blurred phase, I wonder, like, what is the process? How do you go in and do that? So I'm so tickled that you brought this up. Most of the results I found were really technical documents on algorithms on automating this system, but I couldn't find any actual technique that people use.

I assume it's probably, you know, with frame by frame or with, you know, film, actual film, you do Vaseline or scrub or something. Vaseline or, you know, something. I seem to remember. Someone tell me. I seem to remember, this is maybe in the, in the 80s, I guess, that, like, the precursor to a lot of this was the blue dot, do you guys remember this? It would be, I seem to remember this in, like, trial coverage, you know, if it was

like a sensitive witness or if it was a really, you know, personal case or something, and it was on, like, court TV or one of these shows, they would, they would show the person sitting in the witness box, and they would just be a blue circle. dot right over the person's face. Yeah. So I don't know if that was just, they didn't have the pixelization technology yet. And of course, these shows opt for either mosaicing or for face blurring because it's less intrusive. I mean, if you're going to blot out a whole bunch of stuff, and basically it's a screen full of blue dots or black boxes, you're like, well, I don't really know what's going on. It's really distracting. But like the blurring, you notice it

and you don't notice it. It's made to perform in the toughest conditions. It's more than a compact machine. It's a cat. Get the work done. Get a cat. Visit toramontcat.com slash compact to discover our compact machine lineup.

Well, before we sign off for the day, as you know, we have been chasing our nemesis, international thief, Carmen San Mateo. Through time and space. Right. She stole our beloved time machine, our fardists. Yes.

Fancy and ridiculous time interloper system. And we were going to... Yes. So we had to get into the emergency backup time machine and go after her. And we've chased her... We've chased her everywhere. We've chased her from Gettysburg to Berlin.

And so finally, we actually, last week, caught up with Carmen's lackey, hide a clue. Hide a clue, supermodel and cat burglar. Slash cat burglar. True to her nature, hide a clue before being caught, did in fact hide a clue for us in her little speech that she gave as they were dragging her away to trivia jail. And this is one of the things that Haida said to us. And she says, A better, easier scheme, but it really takes higher devotion and youthfulness.

She was talking about, you know, the scheme that she was going to run with Carmen. A better, easier scheme, but it really takes higher devotion and youthfulness. And we figured that there was some secret message or clue hidden in there. Yeah, because if you look it up, it's not, you know, we've been doing a lot of famous speeches or a lot of previous clues. And this one, nothing really showed up. Such an odd turn of phrase. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot of really, yeah, it's kind of a lot of strange collection of words there. And as it turns out, a lot of you figured out the solution.

You figured out what date to punch in to the fardis. And the way you did that was the first letter of every word in the sentence is A-B-E-S-B-E-R-T-H-D-A-Y. Abe's birthday. Abe's birthday, and what we had to do was travel to February 12th, 1809, when the man who would become President Abraham Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin in rural Kentucky. So if you guys went to the site and clicked on the Tartist and punched in... 0211-8-09. You would have seen a little postcard of a cabin, and that is Abe Lincoln's cabin.

So off we went to February 12, 1809. and this is what transpired. Oh, this is going to be the scheme of a lifetime. I can almost taste it. I... No! Braniacs! How did you find me? I knew that awful hide-a-clu was going to sell me out

right when I was about to commit my biggest heist ever! Think about it! Baby Lincoln! All the gravitas of President Lincoln and all of the cuteness of babies! I'd make a fortune. I even had a guy who was going to get me tiny top hats and beards. Four score and seven pacifiers ago, our four mommies brought forth a new sippy cup.

How cute would that be? Well, it doesn't matter now since you ruined everything. I guess I'll go back to trivia jail. It's not so bad. they have Sudoku Man these schemes They get worse and worse Like I admire the effort

But just plan a little bit better Why not just go You have a time machine Just go invest in Apple stocks Yeah On Google or something I don't even really get it But anyway

The important thing is Thanks to all of you listeners out there For helping out so much We caught for a second time Carmen San Mateo It's better than some other television shows where they never catch the international thief at the end. She actually goes to jail.

Carmen Sam Mateo does. Carmen Sam Mateo goes to jail so far every time. So far, good job, brain. Two, Carmen San Mateo, zero. All right, and that is our show. Thanks to you guys for joining me. And thank you guys listeners for listening and hope you learn a lot of stuff about your face or what's in your face.

We have a dedicated booger segment. Next time we're lucky charms as your moosh. Yeah, yeah. Now you know. And you can find us on iTunes, on Stitcher, on SoundCloud, and on our website, goodjobbrain.com. And check out our sponsor, Warby Parker, warby Parker.com slash good job brain. And we'll see you guys. Oh, wait.

Oh, wait. We captured Carmen San Mateo. This calls for a celebration. Yes. You know what to do. Do it, Macapella. Yeah. Sue us.

Please, please, please don't sue us. Please, please don't sue us. Please, please don't sue us. She's a satirical swindler Legally distinct from others She's a fair use finnagler Who is plainly parody She's discreetly designed

So we don't get called from lawyers Tell me Who in the heck is Carmen San Mateo Hello Hello this is Matt from the Explorers podcast I want to invite you to join me On the voyages and journeys

of the most famous explorers in the history of the world. These are the thrilling and captivating stories of Vigelin, Shackleton, Lewis, and Clark, and so many other famous and not so famous adventures from throughout history. Go to Exploryspodcast.com or just look us up on your podcast app. That's the Explorers Podcast.