Good Job, Brain! - 134: For Your Safety

Episode Date: November 15, 2014

DO THE SAFETY DANCE! Facts and trivia about keeping you safe. Remember those (super annoying) automatic safety belts that were build into a track along the car door? What happened to them and how did they came about? Having a hard time opening medicine bottles? Well, Chris has quite the story for you on child-proof packaging and how scientists test their safety. Learn about the mesmerizing and magical history of bulletproof vests and why it works. Karen's just "plane crazy" about all the seemingly fun (but important!) stuff in airplane safety videos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an airwave media podcast. Hello, squishy and squeasable squabbling squires. Welcome to Good Job, Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. This is episode 134, and of course, I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are your practically praiseworthy prancing prinksters. I'm Colin. I'm Dana. And I'm Chris.

I am having a Rod Stewart moment. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Raspie voice. So I apologize. I went on a bender this weekend. And then I was gone this weekend in Anaheim for BlizzCon, which is a gaming convention featuring all of Blizzard's games. And I met actually a couple of good job brain listeners.

Oh, awesome. Yeah. Thanks for saying hi. Nerds listen to this show. Blizzard makes World of Warcraft. Yes, and StarCraft and Diablo and the new game. But primarily now Harthstone. Heartstone.

Which is where they get all their money from. It was great. I had lots of fun. I really like meeting all the people who said hi. Nice. And then you killed them and took their loot. Yeah. That's how it works.

Hunter Pence, right, of the San Francisco. So Giants, he was there. Oh, he was there? He was there. I was going to say, he's into Heartstone, right? He's super into Hurstone. And he's very good. Oh, yes.

He's good at baseball, too. World Series. P.S. So it was super fun, but the drawback is, now my voice is shot. Well, it's not that bad. I'll rally. Yeah, we'll rush you out to karaoke immediately so you can sing Maggie May and play to your strengths. Get the Tom Waits playbook.

Have I told too lately that I love you. Oh, that's good. Oh, are you Rod Stewart? I close my eyes for a moment. We have an I'm actually from the last episode. I had a question about Ice Age, the movie. We had some questions about Ice Age the movie and who various characters were. Sid was the sloth in Ice Age, the movie, played by John Leuizamo, and Diego was the saber-toothed tiger, played by Dennis Leary.

Yes. Thanks to all you eagle-eared, bat-eared, bat-eared. Bat-eared. Elephant-eared. Elephant-eared listeners. Listeners who wrote us. Sometimes our brains fart. It happens, man.

It was the email from Dennis Larry that really... That's still in the post. Yeah. All right, without further ado, let's jump into our first trivia segment, pop quiz, hot shot. And note that I did not say general because we have, as we're waiting for our new batch of trivial pursuit cards, here we have some trivia cards from the game Foodie Fight. So they're all food-related stuff. So it's not general.

Okay. It's highly specific trivia. It is. And this, man, it's pretty deep. So we'll see what happens. It's for foodies. Okay. It's for foodies.

Which I think all of us are. Which we are. Yeah. Well, we'll see. Sure. We'll see. Okay. I consume food.

You're right. All right. All right, you guys have your morning zoo radio buzzers out. Let's start our foodie adventure. Question number one. Oh, they're categorized, but I don't know what the categories are. Anyways. All right.

Yellow question. Who wrote in his 1825 work, The Physiology of Taste, quote, Tell me what you eat And I shall tell you what you are Oh, I've heard that quote You know where you heard that quote from? The sky No, the Japanese Iron Chef

Oh It always started with Chairman Kaga Reading this intro And then That's too early for like James Beard or Yeah, I don't know Yeah Who was it?

Who is it? The answer is Jean Anthelm Brea Severin. Okay. See, tough. We're off to a good start here. How do that last name?

B-R-I-L-L-A-T-S-A-V-A-R-I-N. Like the last part is kind of like savory. Savory. Yeah. Brilliant saver. Like you can kind of fudge it on the trivia sheet. Like, write some of the first few letters and like, it's in French or false. All right, next question, which is a purple star.

What time-saving kitchen tool was Dan Aykroyd Hawking? in a 1976 Saturday night live sketch Colin I think that was the basomatic

yes Basomatic Rov Co's super basomatic 76 Yes Which is essentially just him dropping fish

into a blender Ew is pretty gross It's pretty gross Like a like a rot Like a whole A whole fish Into a blender

Yeah And then what And turning it on And Yeah Green Sprout question What did C does C

P.W. Post introduced in 1897, claiming it prevented appendicitis, helped cure tuberculosis, and tightened loose teeth. Chris. Cornflakes. Incorrect. Well, he called it Post Toasties, but it was corn flakes, right? Incorrect. What would it? What was it? C.W. P. Okay, so what was it?

Some kind of cereal. C.W. Post introduced in 1897, claiming it prevented appendicitis, helped cure tuberculosis, and it's tuberculosis and tightened loose teeth. Oh, was it like grape nuts? Was it grape nuts? It's grape nuts.

That was his second big. That is that tight. I always feel like they're loosening. I think they're loosening out. Yeah. It's also an excellent exfoliant, too. So, you know. Scraps your tongue.

Food or not food. Yeah. Yeah. Also, kitty litter. Yeah. Very good. They love digging in that stuff. Yep.

It smells so nutty. Yep. It takes the rust right off your car bumper. You can fix loose beanie babies. with it, just fill them right back up. That's really good until it rains. Sure. And then it just expands.

Good old grape nuts. I love grape nuts. Yeah, they're really good, but they are, they're work. You feel like you're working. It's a divisive cereal. Yeah. Teal server question, what is often served accompanied by baguettes, nuts, and condiments made of fruit paste?

Accompanied by baguettes, nuts, nuts, and fruit? Condiments made a fruit. Fruit paste? Probably. Cheese? Oh, yeah. Cheese. A cheese plate.

Oh, it's just cheese. Yeah. Okay. Ooh, interesting. All right. This is a little red pot question. How many large whole eggs yield one cup? Oh.

That is a good question. One cup. Let's see. One, two, three. Eight. Incorrect. Dang. Dana.

Two? Incorrect. No way. Four? Five. Oh, five eggs. Five eggs to a cup. Five large eggs.

Okay. All right, good job, guys. We've attacked this foodie fight thing. It's kind of weird. I think all things considered we did fairly well. We'll look up. For next time, we'll look up what the categories are. All right.

So this week's topic was a democratic decision. This was really strange. Yeah, it came up in a weird way. We were at trivia, and there was a round where the answer to every question was the name of a rockback. band. But the question had nothing to do with the rock band. So it was talked about blah, blah, blah, this medieval torture device. And the answer was Iron Maiden. And there was something about a certain type of alcohol that's 190 proof. Right. Something really ridiculously high proof. Right. So the answer is Everclear. And then, Colin, you followed that up with... Oh, yeah. Like, we were talking about, like, you know it's a dangerously high proof when your alcohol has to have a flame suppressor or a flame canceling device on the bottle. So there's a little, like, metal grate on the Everclear bottle. that stops flames from accidentally leaping into the bottle

and turning your party into a Molotov cocktail. Yeah. And 151, I think, also has that. And then I think from there, we kind of just started talking about like, oh, just weird trivia about things that are to protect you or safety. Safety devices. Yeah.

And we did a show about things that are dangerous, right? Yes. So why not do a show about things that are safe, things that keep you safe? So put on your helmet, strap on your knee pads, and your seatbelts, look both ways. We're all about keeping you safe.

I can lift you up. I can show you what you want to see and take you where you want to be. You could be my luck. Even if the sky is falling down, I know that we'll be safe and sound. We're safe as sound. I have a quiz for you guys called Safety First,

which is a great. grab bag of questions about safety, protection, and preventing harm. So get your buzzers ready. Okay. Jump on in when you think you have the answer. Some of these are multiple choice. Some of these are true, false. Here we grab bag, general grab bag, general grab bag about safety, precautions, protection.

I'm not a very safe person. Oh, really? Yeah. True or false. Bicycle, motorcycle, and football helmets significantly reduce the risk of concussion. Chris. False. That is false.

They're there to keep your brain meats from falling out. The primary goal of a helmet in either biking or sports is to protect against skull fracture or bleeding on the brain. Strictly speaking, it's not that hard impact that causes a concussion. It's when your brain slams against the inside of your brain case. Or if you have torsional, rotational, that's where you get the damage from the concussion. You can't insert an extra layer of protection between your brain and your skull. It's going to get jostled. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So it's, you know, I mean, it's really scary. And like in the last year or two, in particular, in professional football here in America, this issue has really kind of come to the foreground. There's a lot of research and study going on now that they, we just have never done on a large scale with concussions. And they're really finding out that, wow, these football helmets really do virtually nothing against concussions. But it prevents their brains from leaking. Yeah, it's a, they won't die. It prevents, yeah. Not immediately. Yeah. Yeah. We are just like, right. right now in the infancy of developing concussion protection helmets right now, yeah. What would that science be? Is it just more padding or what would that entail? So, you know, as I say, like one of the biggest problems is the rotational tension on your brain. So they're working on trying to find ways to minimize that, you know, things like memory foam to maybe sort of slow down the impact as much as possible.

So it's not like a sudden halt on your brain. There's not a lot they can do. It's tough when your brain is moving at 20 miles an hour and then stops. It's very suddenly. During an earthquake, you're indoors when the shaking starts. This is multiple choice. What is the safest course of action when you feel the shaking? A, get outside as quickly as possible. B, take cover under a sturdy table or desk.

C, stand inside a doorway or other archway. Chris. Doorway. Incorrect. Really? I've always heard doorway. Me too. I think it's the table or desk.

It is the table or desk. And Chris, you can be forgiven for thinking that because for years, they did tell you get inside a doorway, get inside an archway, it's the, quote, the most stable part of the structure. And they found that this really is not the safest place to be. They've done based on years of looking at who survives earthquakes. They worked backwards, and they found that people who survived earthquakes were under sturdy pieces of furniture that protected them from falling debris. So you get under a table or a desk and hang on tight. It should be emphasized. Hold on. It's interesting, though. I read a little bit about this.

In the early days, especially in California, there were a lot of houses built of brick or Adobe or unreinforced masonry with wooden door frames. And so after a bad earthquake, often the intact part of the structure would still be the wooden door frame. And so their reasoning was like, oh, this is the best place to stand because it survived. But it doesn't really work that way because your survivability is a lot better under a table. my option would have been round up my dogs. My mama bear instinct will kick in. Get under it. Cover them with your body.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then, of course, do go outside once the shaking has stopped. Oh, oh, I didn't know that part. Especially if there's damage to your structure, you know, you want to try and get outside so you're not hurt by a collapsing building.

Wow. Time to invest in some sturdier dining tables. Yeah, I know. I thought you're going to say sturdier dogs. Trade that IKEA for pottery barn. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to upgrade now. In America, statistically speaking, what is the number one cause of death for people

under the age of 35? Huh. Number one cause of death people under the age of 35. Dana. Car accidents? It is. Automotive accidents. Yes.

There is a huge amount of data all around traffic accidents, of course, as you might imagine, between insurance companies and the highway traffic safety administration. So, according to highway traffic safety. traffic safety data. What day of the week? What day of the week is the most dangerous day to drive? Interesting. Chris. Wednesday? Not Wednesday. Karen. Friday. Not Friday. Dana. Monday? Not Monday. It's Saturday. Yeah. Weekend. People are out. The weekend. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of like one whole day, in terms of raw number and percentage of cars, Saturday is the most dangerous. And late nights on Saturdays and Sundays in particular tend to be extremely dangerous.

Midnight to 3 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday are both, those are the one and two. Last call. It's drunk driving, people speeding. A lot of people not wearing seatbelts at that time of night. So automotive accidents, yes, number one killer people under 35. Tell me, we'll go a little bit older here. For people aged 35 to 54 in America, what is the number one cause of death? Not related to something health related.

Oh, okay. Heart attack or cancer. Like an injury. What they call an injury death, right. Unintentional. Right. Woodchipper. It is not wood chipper.

Falling off from the roof. No, no. Drowning? No, no. Fire? More than fire, more than firearms, more than cars. It is prescription pain killer overdose. Oh, wow.

What they call the kettle. category of unintentional poisoning. And this is crazy. This was almost unheard of as a category of death up until the 1990s. Of course. Yep. Just with the boom in prescription pain killers. Medication got real strong.

Accidental overdose has now, yeah, it kills more people than anything else. Wow. 35 to 54. Accidental prescription overdose. Read those bottles. So please, yes, read your bottles. All right. Last question.

Last question. According to NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, what is the number one cause of indoor lightning-related injuries? What? The number one cause of indoor lightning-related injuries? There's more than one. Indoor lightning-related injury. You guys can reason this one out, I think.

Oh, really? Swimming pool? No, you have an indoor swimming pool? Okay, so wait. People do. Lightning gets inside the house. house somehow. Yeah.

TV? Oh, yeah, satellite dish. You guys are on the right track. How does it get in? How does it get in? Cordid telephones. Really? Cordid telephones. You're just on the telephone.

Yes. Lightning strikes the telephone wire. It travels up all into your telephone. Oh, my God. And it comes out your ear. This not only is possible. This not only happens, it happens in enough numbers that they can track data on it. So did they used to tell you to, like, not use. your telephone during a lightning storm.

I did not know that. I remember this. I remember, yep, if there's lots of lightning, don't use your telephone. Lightning strikes the telephone pole outside. Yeah. Right. And then there's just a wire, copper wire,

basically, right? And it comes right in through and it goes right into your phone. It does. It does sound like, yeah. Just the killer current following all the way from, yeah, all the way into your house. It's a hardwired. It's literally a hard wire all the way from outside up to your face.

I was thinking things sticking out like, oh, you know. Your face. Thank goodness we got rid of those In my family We have a story My great grandmother Who she lived on a farm

Grew up on a farm My mom would tell us that during Lightning storms and thunderstorms She wouldn't use the toilet Because she was afraid That the lightning's gonna zap the pipes And come up and zap her on the butt And everyone was like we're all like

Lapped at her And as I was reading it They're like no They did in fact advise you To stay away from indoor plumbing For a long long long time Yeah and I was like Oh my god

My great grandmother was not Is that actually a problem, or was that like... It's much less than it was with courted phones. This is not a huge issue, but they would advise you to stay away. You think you'd be safe from lightning indoors, but not so. My God, that's so creepy. Not so. All right.

Stay safe out there, guys. Wow. Wow. I'm going to think about that lightning through the phone thing for a long time. That's, you've haunted. It's quite a haunting thought. And also, I need to upgrade my dining room table. Yep.

Yeah. So, speaking of not one to take an overdose of prescription medication, I wanted to have a chat with you guys about child-resistant packaging. Child-slash-adult resistant to everything. Yeah, so, I mean, otherwise known as incorrectly, child-proof caps. Oh, yeah. And they really say, a lot of the authorities in this situation, they really don't want people saying child-proof. Because you say child-proof, you think to yourself, oh, it's just. childproof and then you just totally forget about any other safety measures that you can take like

not leaving it in a place where they can get you oh it's childproof it's not childproof it's child resistant it is put it in the crib as they say it is it is your last line of defense okay it is if everything else fails they can't open up the bottle hopefully and this is that one specific type of cap on medicine bottles there there's a lot of yeah so i mean there's there's the classic kind of stuff where you've got to like push it down and turn it but but you know it applies to to any kind of child resistant you know not only caps on medicine bottles but just any kind of packaging that has some sort of a device um that is specifically geared towards defeating the primitive lizard brains of children so they don't know what to do so the invention of childproof

caps happened uh pretty much the way you would expect it did um oh no no no no no no not in a bad way No, in the sense of, so came from the people you would expect it to come from. In the early 1960s, there was a pediatrician in Ontario, Canada. Yes, it is a Canadian invention. His name is Henry, and his last name is spelled B-R-E-A-U-L-T, and it's pronounced Bro. So, Dr. Bro. Dr. Bro. Came home from work one day and told his wife, I am sick of this.

He was sick of pumping children's stomachs all the time, because there was a lot more. medicine in the home. I mean, just things like aspirin, but they'd eat all of it, you know? Like, they would just get into the medicine and eat it. And it was actually, it was around this time, Canada alone, 100,000 cases a year of children poisoning themselves. Oh, my gosh. Right?

So. Poisoning and then dying? No, no. Well, there were about 100 deaths per year out of 100,000 cases. So they were able to, like, save the children in the vast majority of cases. But the doctor, he was like, I'm sick of this just happening in the first place. Like, how are they just constantly getting into this stuff? So the first thing that Dr. Bro tried to do was to educate the public.

This never works. That never works. After everybody finished laughing at that, he moved on to basically, like, attempting to form an alliance between pediatricians and pharmacists and really, like, solicit inventions for, like, how can we create a package for pills or whatnot? that, you know, children have a hard time opening. So from these efforts, uh, directly came the most famous, uh, childproof cap. And it's actually called the palm n turn. Oh, okay.

So that is the palm dash capital N dash turn. Oh, and so that's what that thing is called in the professional parlance. It's a palm in term where you have to push down intern. And it's, it's two totally separate types of force, you know, and that's kind of the important thing. the kid is going to apply one force to the bottle rather than applying one, then while holding it, apply the next one, you know, so it defeats the child. According to the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, poisoning dropped by 91% after the palm and turn was fully rolled out and everybody started using 91% drop in poisoning.

Oh, my God. Okay. So the problem was access. Yeah, basically. It was totally, yeah. Once the kids couldn't get in there anymore, it yet totally, totally stopped. So that's the, that is the story of the, of the palm intern. It was like, let's invent a thing.

We invented it. It works. Hooray. Here's what you might find even more interesting. In 1970, a couple of years after the invention of the palm intern, the United States passed the poison prevention packaging act. And what this essentially did was it just empowered the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to lay down rules for what kinds of products are now required by law to have child. resistant packaging. And number two, how do you determine if a certain kind of package qualifies as child

resistant? So I will tell you about the test. I'm imagining like having in the wood style these different rooms just for different children. I'm just imagining like a lot of babies and little lab coats. You're basically right. So they use test panels of many children, like 50 children between the ages of 42 and 51 months. And so basically they don't let any kids test more than two packages

Because they don't want them to like learn how to open it They kind of bring the kids in totally fresh So they do the test not in the cabin in the woods But in a in a quote well lighted room that is familiar to them and is free from distractions Okay The tester gives each child an empty child resistant package and says here try to open this And the kid has five minutes if they open up the package they are not tested further and that that test is counted as a fail. Oh, one and done. That's one. I mean, you know, they add up all the fails and you've got

to get a certain percentage, basically. So that's a, that's a fail. Now, here's where it really gets interesting. In the first five minutes, after the first five minutes, the tester then shows a child how to open the package. And also, it says, also tells any child who has not tried to use his or her teeth, that it is all right to do so. Okay. So they tell you, use your teeth, use your here's how you open it. The child that has five more minutes. Okay. So, and then if they open it again, it still, it counts as a second stage fail.

And so basically then, for a package to pass, 85% of the children tested have to be unable to open it in the first test. And then after being told how, it's 80%. So if you're below 80% after you, even after you tell the kid how to open it, it's a fail. Wow, that's pretty hard. Yep. If the package passes that test, then they test. the adults. Yeah. It's like, can I get my medicine out?

Yes, that's exactly it. They bring in panels of senior citizens. They bring in panels of adults from ages 50 to 70. Okay. And they give it to them and they say, this is how you open this package. And then the adult has five minutes, again, to be able to open the package. That's a long time. That is a long time.

But then once they're successful and they get it, they then have. a minute to, once they learn it, they have a minute to be able to open it and close it it properly. If they have to be able to open it, they have to be able to close it. And so, again, it has to pass the adult test of adults being able to use it. And then so if the kid, so they have the whole test, if the kids can't use it and the adults can, then it qualifies as child resistance. Wow, that's so smart. Right.

Now, of course, there's, like, lots of companies out there that will, like, do your child resistant packaging and the testing and all that for you. But you can do it on your own, basically. It's just the U.S., you know, the commission just sort of lays out all these rules as to how you do it. Wow. Palm and turn. It's like a 90s art and B group. Yeah.

Or like a street hustler moon. He's like, oh, yeah, I got him with the palm and turn. Yeah, that's how you guys. Slipping the $20 bill. All right, let's take a quick break. A word from our sponsor. It feels really good to do. be productive, but a lot of the time it's easier said than done, especially when you need to

make time to learn about productivity so you can actually, you know, be productive. But you can start your morning off right and be ready to get stuff done in just a few minutes with the Inc. Productivity Tip of the Day podcast. You'll hear advice on everything from how to build confidence to how to get the best night's sleep. New episodes drop every weekday and each one is five minutes or less, so you only have to listen a little to get a lot more out of your weekdays. Listen and subscribe to Inc. Productivity Tip of the Day wherever you get your podcasts. That's Inc. Productivity Tip

of the Day, wherever you get your podcasts. On 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. And we're back. You're listening to Good Job Brain. And this week, we're talking about facts

about safety and things to keep you safe. So similar to Dr. Bro that Chris talked about. Dr. Brow. My safety innovation was also really championed by a doctor. Yeah. Yeah, it was a neurologist, Dr. C. Hunter Sheldon. That sounds made up. Yeah. I mean, it really does sound like a fake name. He was a neurologist in the Pasadena area in the 50s, and he was seeing a lot of brain injuries related to car accidents. And he's like, these things could be safer. So he wrote an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association proposing, all sorts of improvements to cars. So this was in the 50s. This was in the mid-50s, 54. He proposed all sorts of improvements like seatbelts, airbags, roll bars, reinforced roofs. So in 1959, Congress started actually requiring all automobiles to comply with certain safety standards. Oh, cars at that time didn't have any of this stuff. Oh, yeah, no. So he was like, they didn't have to. They didn't have to have seatbelts. And most of them didn't. Oh, no, it was not the law at all. Oh, my God. It's just a You're just sitting there.

You're just flying through space. And your metal box sliding around. 2,000 pounds of... I mean, they really weren't that far removed from, like, horse and buggy days. You know, it's not like cars. Cars didn't really go that... Hadn't gone that fast for a while. Yeah.

Now they're going really fast, and you can get really injured. So he's like, hey, hey, guys. It wasn't until 1958 that seatbelts were standard in cars. Before that was, like, an option you could upgrade it. Saab was the first one. one to do it as a sob. Sob, that's good trivia. Do you remember those automatic seatbelts?

Oh, yeah. The ones that are part of the door. I hate those things. Oh, God. Those were terrible. I hated those things. It's like the seatbelt that travels around the door inside to lock you in. Yes.

Because there was an issue where people wouldn't put on their seatbelts. Like they were like, we'll take care. We'll take all the friction out of this interaction. Don't worry about it. We'll put the seatbelt on you. Well, we got it. It's going to be great. And so they were huge in the 70s.

It started in the late 70s, there was a mandate that all cars needed automatic seatbelts or airbags. Oh, that's earlier than I remember. Either or, yes. That's way earlier than I thought. Yes, it was during the Carter administration. It was super controversial. Automakers didn't want to do it. And it would go back and forth.

It was political. Reagan administration almost overturned it. And the Supreme Court said no. And so for a long time, cars would get the automatic seatbelts because they didn't want to buy the more. expensive airbags for them oh god because there was a price yeah in 1995 the airbags became met like standard or requirement for the cars and so then they stopped putting in automatic oh is that the only reason that they stopped because they were like we don't have to it was it was the cheapest of two options it's cheaper here's the thing the automatic ones are

not better than the than the manual ones because they're hooked into your door so if your door opens in your car crash, you might fall out. You still have to do, on some of them, you still have to do the manual lap belt. If you don't do the manual part, it's not very effective. Right. I definitely remember there were a lot of people who would just disconnect

them. It's like, oh, it's too annoying. I'm not going to use it at all, which I'm sure is even the worst possible outcome. Right. People found it, exactly. People found it annoying, would disengage from it. So I have a couple questions for you guys about seatbelts. All right. We could just talk it through, if you like.

All right, let's keep it cash. Keep it cash. We'll keep this cash, but seatbelt wearing is not casual. That's right. There you go. Okay. Anything casual. Anything not casual is mandatory.

That's right. According to the CDC, are men or women more likely to wear their seat belts? I feel like it's, I'm going to openly embrace the stereotype. I feel like it's got to be women. I bet women are more likely to wear them. Yes. Women are 10% of. more likely to wear their seatbelt.

Only one state in the United States does not require adults to wear a seatbelt. Yes, just one. Do you guys know what state? It's got to be some super libertarian state. Maine, maybe. Not a Maine, not really. New Hampshire.

It is New Hampshire. Live free or die. Live free or die. Personal liberties. They also have the second lowest seat belt usage of any state because it's not mandatory. Wait, wait, it's the only state where it's not mandatory, and yet they only have the second lowest seatbelt usage. So there's a state where even fewer people wear the seatbelts and they're flouting the law.

So there's a thing, there's primary enforcement and secondary enforcement. So primary enforcement is you could be stopped for not wearing your seatbelt. California's like that. That's primary enforcement. Secondary enforcement is if you're stopped and they also notice you are not wearing your seatbelt, then you get that. a ticket. So there's different states have different. Yes.

Got it. And going to primary enforcement, like, no surprise, significantly increases the rate of people wearing their seatbelts. Oh, sure. Mississippi went from, like, a secondary to a primary state, and their seatbelt rate went up by 30% or something like that. What is the most expensive place to get a ticket for not wearing your seatbelt? Oh, you mean?

State. Oh. Yeah. I mean, I'll just throw this out there. Is it California? I'm going to. I'm going to guess it's somewhere where there's, it's somewhere in the, oh, I was going to say like, yeah, somewhere with a lot of open highways, like, I don't know, Arizona, Nevada, something like that. It's Texas.

You were, you're close. Yeah. Texas is on Wikipedia. They said it was $200 in California on your second time with all the fees was $190. Okay. So Texas still won. They have a bigger ticket for not wearing your, bigger click-it ticket. The ticket itself is eight inches by 13 inches.

Right. So I just got off the plane this morning and then I came here to record. And, of course, in an episode about safety, I have airplane safety stuff that we know, that we've been trained and brainwashed that we just know. But maybe we don't know why or for what reason. And so I kind of looked into more of the stuff. Thanks to British Airways Flight Safety Awareness course, you can actually, they have a lot of stuff. on safety that's kind of open to the public.

Like, you can learn more if you want to. Or you can even do a simulated training course that takes like a day and you go through the safety training in different situations. You get to, you get to inflate the slide. Oh, really? Oh, cool. I always want to do that as a kid. So, like, an opening door.

So all that stuff, they simulate and you can, you can actually partake and learn why things happen and stuff like that. Demystifies it. Yeah. That's cool. This never happened to me. I always wonder, I mean, obviously, these are bad situations, but you just kind of want to see it happen. Oxygen masks.

Oh, yeah. I've never seen that happen. No. No. So when that happens, what is, what do those safety videos tell you to do first? Your mask before assisting a child. Yeah. Before.

Before putting on someone else. Yeah. Especially a child. Because you can't help anybody if you don't have any oxygen. So, yes. Yeah. There's a more specific. specific reason because say that happens when there's decompression in the cabin right so which means

that basically means all the oxygen would be sucked out of the plane and your lungs so you probably only have like 20 seconds you know in a very bad case scenario and so what happens is then you will experience confusion and you're in a weird stone yeah he messes with your judgment yes and And it's, you just kind of forget and you're flighty and you're hazy. And so, so you have to help yourself first before hitting that state before putting, say, a mask on a child because they probably can't do it themselves. I thought it was, oh, I just want to breathe air and I should really always help kids. Yes, but very specifically, you'll be in a state where you're like, whoa. You won't be able to help yourself.

You won't be able to help the child. Yeah. So we drunk. There's a lack of oxygen going to your brain. Yep. And act quickly, really fast. While you're settling in, you're sitting in your seat, you might be reading a book, and then you're taking off, and all of a sudden, all the lights are off, and you're like, darn it, I want to read my thing. So then you have to push your own little light.

Why do they turn the lights off when you take off? They turn the lights off when you take off. I mean, the first thing comes to mind is just to minimize any possible drain on the system, but it seems like a plane would be more robust than that. It is so that passengers Their eyes can adjust to the dark If anything happens and say powers off or whatever Their eyes are already adjusted to the dark So they can see

Versus you're in a super bright airplane All of a sudden power goes off Then you're like almost temporarily You're not blind It's disorienting So I was like oh That's kind of dark to think about But like all of these are like

This is why I fly with an eye patch So I've already got that one eye is always ready. It's like, save that. Your death perception is horrible. Yeah. Do you guys know what a May West is? May West? Oh, are those the around the neck inflatable life preservers?

Yes. The personal. Rhyming slum. The personal flotation device. Oh, hello, guvna. Let me put on my May West. I think it's more a visual reference. It is.

Okay, yeah, sure. That inflatable yellow life vest, because it looks like you have a, big boob figure that's hilarious it is cockney rhyming slang though it's like a life vest oh yeah you know that's what I'm saying yeah May west life vest yeah life vest big chest may west I don't know who does this but they're apparently a large number of people steal those life vests oh really off of planes as souvenirs I've never do that people you can just take it out

they're underneath your seat Yeah. That's reprehensible. It is. It's horrible. Yeah, it's horrible. It is not a cool souvenir to have. If you're getting onto your seat,

you might want to check to see if you're like best is there or some jerk before you. I've never checked. I've never touched it. It didn't even occur to me that this was a thing to be concerned about until just now. If you don't have it, you're supposed to tell the flight attendant that you don't have it. I've never seen anyone tell a flight attendant that they don't have it.

Who wants to be the one who's like, Excuse me. I don't have my life fest. That's true. They'll be like, why were you checking for your life fest? Somebody told me. Good job, Ray told me to. Also, another very subtle thing.

A subtle thing that they tell you about life vest these days is when they're talking about inflating your life vest, it's always when you're outside. You always say inflate when you're outside. Right, so you can fit through the door. This was in the 90s. Was there a. There was an incident. Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 was hijacked in November 1996,

and they had a crash landing in the ocean, the water. So then all the people in the cabin started putting on their life as inflating. They can't get through the doorway. And also, they're so buoyant, the water came into the cabin and they can't. Oh, they're trapped inside the cabin. Oh, my gosh. Now they explicitly say, put on your light more inflate your life vest when you're outside when you're ready to jump on the inflatable slide so most of time they'll say this you'll see this in the little clip art or the little safety guidebook i also like the very subtle nuance between when you're outside versus when you hit the water

oh i'm just on outdoors now oh yeah yeah oh in the event of a water landing there is no such thing as a water landing that's called a crash Wait, can planes not land on water? They don't have the ability to land on the water. Like water planes, like water planes, like with the skis on the bottom of the sky? Indiana Jones plane, exactly. That plane can conduct a water landing. It can land on the water. There's a reason why, like, you don't hear a lot of this stuff,

especially if you go take the British Airways course that they don't mention in the safety video or whatever because it's too much information. Yeah. And for a person to sit there, you're already not paying attention. You're already... They have to distill it down to, like, just the...

The important probable stuff. Right, yeah, yeah. And then also be tactful enough to kind of explain what the reasoning is, you know, just to not freak you out. That was a fun plane ride this morning. Researching all the things that could go wrong. I was researching this on the plane. A little bit scary. No frills, delivers.

Get groceries delivered to your door from no friends. with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC optimum points on your first five orders. Shop now at no-frails.ca. Man, this episode's getting a little dark. Yeah. I can't promise it's going to get necessarily any lighter. All these safety devices, like they had to come from something bad happening.

From something bad happening. So, yeah, we didn't know it was going to be so dark. But we got one last segment, Colin. Yes. And I'll do my best. Just some sunshine or no. I'll do my best to infuse. some levity into this segment.

I want to talk to you guys about bulletproof vests. Oh, yeah, okay. A barrel of monkeys. This is about protecting you and saving lives. Obviously, if you are in the military or law enforcement in particularly dangerous parts of the world or parts of certain cities, having a bulletproof vest is going to be your first line of defense if someone's shooting at you. Yeah.

And, you know, so more broadly speaking, bulletproof vests, which is an old term, by the way, falls under body armor, sort of as a category. And, you know, there's all kinds of body armor depending on what your specific need is. For any part of your body that can be armored these days, there's a piece of armor that can fit it. The most well-known

material in bulletproof vests is... Kevlar. Yes, that's right. I knew you guys would know that. What kind of material is Kevlar? Like, if you were to hold some Kevlar in your hand, like what type of material are we talking about? Corn. Is it corn? It's not corn.

It's like textile fabric. Yeah, that's right. That's right. A really tightly woven kind of fabric. That's exactly right. Yeah, I mean, strictly speaking... It's not a gel. So really, technically, the Kevlar is the material, the fiber, out of which they make the fabric.

It's man-made. It was invented at DuPont. It was invented by a woman. Wow. Stephanie Kowlick was a chemist working for DuPont in the 1960s. It wasn't called Kevlar. Obviously, it was a chemical name that I will spare you. Her group, they were researching materials to make...

tires more durable. They were trying to find fabrics and materials that could just make tires run longer, save money. A lot of people, you know, you have this image of like from Bugs Bunny cartoons, bulletproof vests or like this like rigid material, you know, they'll show like the bank robbers with bullets, you know, flying off their chest and ricocheting all around. That's, that's not how Kevlar stops a robot. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know, like a super rigid bulletproof vest isn't, isn't feasible for a couple of reasons. Like the strength to weight ratio that you have to have. like steel i mean you could you know cover yourself with steel plates yeah that's not really feasible if you're a cop on the beat or a soldier out in the field and then the bullet goes into the steel plate and the steel plate shatters and it goes you know or sticks up in you yeah it's just so right right there's a reason we don't have knights in armor walking around basically on the street anymore as awesome as that would be it's very noisy clank clank clank clank clank clank clank clank clank clank clank you always you know the you can't do undercover police work anymore yeah he's the undercover

night. Flanking around. It's just like a night wearing like a t-shirt. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, those sunglasses. Yeah. But yeah, as you implied, right, the other issue is ricochets. Yeah.

So, okay, great. Maybe you did have a steel plate that deflects a bullet. It deflects it into the guy standing next to me. And that's, nobody, nobody wants that. That's not good. And now he has to have a steel plate. And then it goes, bang, ping. Right.

Kevlar. So Kevlar stops bullets by being extremely densely woven. fabric, and the fiber has an extremely, extremely high tensile strength. Way stronger than steel, meaning tensile strength, if you pull on it, it's extremely hard to break it. So when you're wearing a Kevlar vest, you know, and most Kevlar vests are many layers, so it's not just one sheet of Kevlar. Yeah. It'll be multiple, multiple layers. Because you can have really thin sheets of Kevlar. Absolutely. They don't stop bullets. Pen and Teller wrote a book. They wrote a bunch of books back in the day.

They include a whole bunch of like little magic tricks in with the book, obviously, of course, right? And so one of the things they included with one of the books was a sugar packet, fake sugar packet made of a thin sheet of Kevlar. And it's impossible to open. To tear open. So you just put it in with a sugar pack. So he picks it up and as much as they tear this thing. But it feels like paper. You know, it feels like a thin sheet of paper.

It feels like a sugar packet. Where it gets its strength is the bullet can't make its way through the fibers. It basically comes down to it's so dense and it dissipates the energy, right? So it hits the fibers because the fibers are so strong, as they try and stretch out, it dissipates the energy along the length of all the fibers that spreads it out so it's not concentrated in a spot. In one spot where you get hurt. Now you still don't actually want to get shot while wearing Kevlar. You can go online or if you know anybody who's in the military law enforcement. Even if you have a Kevlar vest on and even if it's tough.

the bullet, you are going to have a nasty bruise underneath there. Yeah, because it is still flexible. A lot of heavy-duty body armor these days will be a combination, in fact, of Kevlar with, they will put steel plates in or, you know, even more common composite plates or ceramics, you know, so it's a mixture of the flexibility with, with some rigid material. A lot of the earliest innovation in bulletproof vest technology was done by outlaws, criminals and outlaws. I bet, because, you know, it was if you're going to go hold up a train or rob a bank, you know, you know that the law is coming after you and they're going to be firing at you.

So it's funny, there are many tales of, you know, outlaw gangs, criminal gangs with homemade, improvised, bulletproof vests. And it can be anything from just lots of layers of fabric or cotton or straw. You know, again, works reasonably well. There are tales of people, you know, shovel blades, you know, just whatever chunks of metal you can get your hands on. If I learned anything for movies, it's the absolute best method. is stopping a bullet, are with an important personal memento that someone gives you place in your

family Bible or the silver dollar from my grandpa or the badge. World War I was sort of the, it was the first modern conflict where armies really kind of started getting interested in body armor or bullpressed on a wide scale. So they started rolling them out around World War I. They've gotten a little bit better, obviously, in every succeeding generation since then. They're very advanced today. Early on, it was fairly crude. They were just a lot of rigid materials.

And so you might be thinking that the fiber-based bulletproofness, like, oh, this is the latest technology. This is the new stuff. But not so. Let's travel back very quickly here to Tombstone, Arizona. Ooh. Yes, yes. The Tombstone Arizona of the Wild West.

Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp. Named after the movie. Yes. Yes. And the pizza. Safe to say, even with Hollywood exaggeration, yeah, gunfights, gunfights a plenty in the Wild West in Tombstone, Arizona. There was a physician who lived in Tombstone in the late 1800s, Dr. George Goodfellow, and he got interested in and started researching the seemingly magical properties of silk as bullet protection.

So this was in 1880s, Arizona. There were a couple incidents in particular that really got him interested in this. There was a man named Luke Short who shot a man named Charlie Storms in Tombstone. He killed him, killed him. And a bullet from Shorts gun hit a silk handkerchief that was in Storm's pocket and pushed it all the way into his heart. This is a little gruesome. And he's like, well, that's interesting. What is it about this silk handkerchief that his regular clothes and his skin and bone and heart couldn't stop?

There was another incident. There was an outlaw named Billy Grounds. I love these old West outlaw names. Billy Grounds ran into a sheriff's deputy. and got shot full blast in the face with the deputy's shotgun. Wow. It killed him instantly. Okay.

But again, Dr. Goodfellow was, you know, performing the autopsy, looking at the body, and he noticed all the shotgun pellets, they went through his hat. They went all around his head, his neck, but his silk neckerchief that he was wearing didn't get penetrated by the shotgun pellets. He was stylish, too. Yeah. Nice little cravat. So this is 1880s, and people, again, are noticing, like, wow, it doesn't have to be as

super rigid. It doesn't have to be something really strong. It's about the tensile strength. And so as I looked into it a little bit more, it turns out that silk-based, fabric-based bulletproof vests were not just feasible. They started being made. So by 1900, you could buy a bulletproof vest made out of many layers. It wasn't just a handkerchief level, several layers of silk. And, you know, these would work comparatively well. You know, I mean, keep in mind, bullets traveled a lot slower back then, you know. It was, you know, a hand-packed black powder gun. It's not like a modern-day assault rifle.

For $800 in 1914, you could buy a bulletproof silk bulletproof vest. That's a lot of money. That's a lot. That's almost $20,000 today. Wow. So imagine for $20,000. But if you were stealing that money. Yeah.

That's for fine. You'd make it back. Yeah. Or if you were a dignitary or a winning leader in 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, who, of course, his assassination is what kicked off World War I. On the day he was shot, he was wearing a silk, bulletproof vest, very much like the one I just described. Of course, he can afford it.

Now, as anyone who has been in a field of battle will tell you, it doesn't matter how good your vest is if it's not covering the area that you get shot. And, in fact, yes, Franz Ferdin was shot in the neck. Oh, my God. Above the area. where he was wearing the vest. And just imagine, you know, I mean,

this is one of those course of history event kind of things in an alternate scenario. If he had been shot a few inches lower, who knows, the vest might have stopped the bullet and saved his life. That's an amazing story. So it just unravelled and unraveled and just interesting, so to speak,

yes, interesting threads of stories about bulletproof vests and body armor. And imagine, like, silk coming out from, like, worm butts, you know, that can do this. Well, I mean, we have. I've talked before. Have you ever seen a silkworm with a bullet wound? No.

No. I rest my ears. All right. And that is our show on safety. Thanks to you guys for joining me. And thanks to you guys for listening in. Hope you learned a lot of stuff about worm butts. I just want to say that again. Child resistant.

Yes. Resistant packaging. Seat belts, airplane safety, and more. Of course, you can find us on. iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, and our website, goodjobbrain.com. Thanks to our sponsor, Audible, and we'll see you guys next week. Bye. Bye.

Bye, bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. really were, what women in the past used for birth control, or what Queen Victoria's nine children got up to. On the History Tea Time podcast, I profile remarkable queens and

LGBTQ plus royals explore royal family trees and delve into women's medical history and other fascinating topics. Join me every Tuesday for History Tea Time, wherever fine podcasts are enjoyed.