Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Dice!

Episode Date: March 29, 2021

Alex Schmidt is joined by Justin McElroy, Travis McElroy, and Griffin McElroy (authors of the new book ‘Everybody Has A Podcast (Except You)’) for a look at why dice are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode. (Alex's podcast hosting service requires a minimum of 5 characters per episode title, so that's why this episode's title has 1 exclamation point)

Dice. Known for being rolled. Famous for being numbered. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why dice are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. I am joined by three guests this week, and I am thrilled to say that those guests are Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy. The famed McElroy brothers, they are here. I know, it's really exciting. They are very kindly appearing on this podcast, and they have very kindly written a book to help you, because their book is titled Everybody Has a Podcast Except You. And that is a helpful, thoughtful, and funny how-to guide on how you can start your own podcast.

It's available everywhere right now. Links to buy it are in the episode links at sifpod.fun. There are also probably unnecessary links to McElroy Brothers podcasting. I feel like most of you know about My Brother, My Brother and Me, or Sawbones, or Schmanners, or Wonderful, or perhaps most relevant to today's episode, The Adventure Zone. These guys have created and are hosting or co-hosting more than a dozen different podcasts. So I'm grateful to every guest for their time, but especially these three making time with all of the other taping they do is really nice. I really appreciate it. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Catawba, Eno, and Chicory peoples.

Acknowledge Justin recorded this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, Hopewell, Adina, and Wasatche peoples. Acknowledge Travis recorded this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Hopewell, Adina, Miami, and Wasatche peoples. of the Shawnee, Hopewell, Adina, Miami, and Wasoche peoples. Acknowledge Griffin recorded this on the traditional land of the Lepan Apache, Nirmirna, Plains Jumano,

Coahuiltecan, and Tonkawa peoples. And acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode is about dice. I want to thank two listeners for suggesting this topic. Thank you, Zoo Elder, and thank you, Steve Thomas. Your suggestion won the patron vote for a March fan-selected topic. If you, the listener, would like to suggest topics yourself and vote on topics, head to sifpod.fun.

Also, this is just some magical timing, I think, because we had this fan vote and then later on afterward, you know, we got in touch with the McElroys and we set up an episode. So really, really nice of Zoo Elder and Steve Thomas to pick such a perfect topic. Very excited for you to hear it. Please sit back or roll for charisma or dexterity or whatever. I don't know. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Justin and Travis and Griffin McElroy. I'll be back after we wrap up.

Talk to you then. Justin, Travis, Griffin, this is a real treat. And I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. But any of you can start. How do you feel about dice? I think it's the best way to cut things up, frankly. Some people like to slice things. Some people prefer a chop.

But I think a dice is the best way to go. You get kind of even both ways, smaller pieces. And I'm so excited, Alex, because I've spent dozens of hours researching dicing, different techniques, knives, different cuts, superiority to chopping. I will admit that I made a big mess up because I spent probably hundreds of hours researching the works of Andrew Dice Clay because I thought that's what it is that we were going to be talking about. But apparently we're talking about chopping things up small with knives. That is embarrassing. I'll tell you what really changed it for me was the slap chop. You know what I mean?

Because I was spending a lot of time before then individually kind of cutting it. And with the slap chop, you just put it in there and you slap and you chop it. It's in the name, Alex. And the best part is not only is it effective, it feels great to do. It's a lot of frustration. We're having a lot of fun. I mean, I'm busting up over here, but we're obviously here to talk about the Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain Summit, the Dice Summit created by the Academy of Interactive Arts

and Sciences. Oh, right. It's an annual event. Oh, yeah. For gaming. What did you guys think Sciences. It's an annual event for gaming. What did you guys think about this year's DICE event? And I think it would be fun, one thing that would be fun is if we reference

how DICE also sounds like the Swedish video game developer behind the Battlefront and Battlefield series. Right, yeah. That would be kind of fun. That is fun. Is there anything we can do with like a Dyson thing? That's something, you know. There's something in there.

Alex, when you invited us on the show, did you sort of anticipate that Hulkamania was going to run wild? This level of antagonism that we bring. I was like, please let them do the whole disambiguation page on Wikipedia for DICE. Please. This is off the top of my head. If you want me to go deep, I'll go deep. No, Dice. Okay, our relationship with Dice,

it's because we've always been like a board gaming family. We grew up playing stuff like HeroQuest, even boring bad games like Monopoly or Chutes and Ladders, which I guess is spinner-based. By the way, just going to throw it out, Game of Life, far superior to Monopoly.

There I said it. But since we started doing the Adventure Zone in 2014, I guess it was, something like that. Yep. Yeah. It has become a regular fixture of my life, so much so that I almost always have within within reach yeah dice it's weird you dig in my backpack and it looks like uh uh a a board gaming convention in there like every pocket like just reaching out okay uh here's a sack full of dice i have i have two D6s here that we're just playing with. I have a wooden case right here. Wow. Yeah.

But here's the thing. I don't fetishize them. I have some that I really use a lot. Our agent, Joel, sent us a beautiful set. These glossy, crystalline, beautiful ones. But by and large, I have no religion about it. I have no superstition about it. I just grab whatever is close and I and I use those for a long time I was using a couple from the Super Mario Brothers Yachty set just because they were nearby and I didn't go get other ones and I

kept telling myself like I gotta get new dice these are weird but nope kept using them it is it is fun a fun thing that will happen because I have now just like a big Sacco dice, which I think a lot of folks have if you play tabletop games long enough. And the thing is, is like in Fate, the Fate system, there are dice that are like blank on two sides and then have like plus and minuses on the other sides. And sometimes I'll just grab a D6 out of that bag and roll it and be like, I got a plus. Oh, no. Just grab a D6 out of that bag and roll it and be like, I got a plus. Oh, no. Our youngest daughter, they were such a big fixture in our house that our youngest daughter started collecting them whenever they were loose.

And from the time she was three or so, she was calling them dreidels. And we've been in a sort of game of chicken with the acceptability of that. We have to tell her the right name for them before it's weird that she's calling them dreidels. But it is very funny that she's calling them dreidels right now. So let's write it out for 18 more months until we have to correct her. I have a little castle that is a dice roller that has holes in the turrets that you drop the dice down and they roll out. That, as far as Bebe is concerned, my four-year-old, is what dice are designed for. Beyond that, she doesn't care.

You can put them in this castle, and they'll roll out the bottom, and it is the best thing. My one-year-old thinks they're for eating, and that's a whole other thing. Yeah, choking away is a danger. And plus, the fact that they do, in many ways, look like candy. They look delicious. Some of them, sure. But it is, I came to them when I first started. So I played D&D a little bit before we did Adventure Zone.

And I immediately thought I was going to have a set of dice for every character I played. And it was like, this is my, you know, this is a set that reminds me of the forest. And so I shall use them for my elf druid. And then eventually now it's just like, I don't know, let me see what I have. Okay, can I just roll two D10s and call it a D20? Yeah, my story is basically the same as Travis. I never played D&D before in any sort of serious way. I had a game that I played maybe a half dozen times in Cincinnati,

but I was always more into miniatures than dice. I like the way you just said that, Griffin. Say that again. Miniatures. Miniatures. Yeah, Griffin's kind of the jock. He's more of a miniatures guy. Yeah, well, that was back in fourth edition

where you more or less had to play on a tabletop so every you needed the miniatures and uh i just i just like to i not to the point where i was painting them that was a bridge too far for me right i do like you're gonna have to work so hard to get this trivia in alex you're gonna have to be just lobbing it and praying for the freaking best i'm i'm always said that I'll say one last thing. When cons used to exist before the world went to pot, I enjoyed that sometimes it like dice sellers would just like, you know, they'd have all their little boxed up sets

and there'd be like, here's like our fancy, like, you know, hand carved from bone or whatever. And then they'd be like, and here's just grab bag of some D20s. And that's what I always wanted of just like, give me four scoops of dice, please. Because I just like the weight of them. And I like having just a big sack of dice.

I don't need them. That's not the purpose. But I have them in case there's some kind of apocalypse and dice become used as currency. Or projectiles. Or projectiles or projectiles because i'm also curious like if your relationship to them like justin where you're talking about having them all the time if that has changed pre or post adventure zone starting because also as i

understand it that show sort of you tried an episode of of tabletop gaming and then it sort of blossomed you know like that's interesting to me um yeah i mean for me it is a lot of the reason i have so many sets now is because uh because of adventure zone we have gotten a chance to like play uh with other people at other people's games they played in our games we've done like special events for things and it has become so what's the word I'm looking for? Dice have become so pervasive in my life that I've stopped worrying about if I have them. And so like I'll start, like I'll jump into a game like for somebody else's show and then I'll be like,

okay, so roll a D8 and I'm like, oh you got, oh no. Hold on, hold on. And then I'll have to like look to my left and right and collect all the dice from around i do though other than like the d4 or the d20 i and obviously the d6 i still have to like take a moment when somebody's like roll a d10 i have to like examine the the dot like even now you know six or seven years into playing like i still have like they couldn't have made the 12 and the 10 a little different. Huh?

It's just, yeah. And then they give you two tens. That's the weird thing. You get the 10. That's like, you know, zero through nine or whatever,

one through 10. And then they give you the one that's just like, zero, zero, one, zero, two, zero.

Come on guys. That's for rolling a D hundred. You know that. I know that, but they're so confusing. Well, I, I i i love knowing this uh and also i think we can get into our first fascinating thing about the topic because on every episode that's a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics and this week that's in a segment called everybody everybody everybody wants to hear the stats That's a good one

I like that one Make that one permanent You just stop there You can just make a sound file of that We left it clean, we were quiet So you could just clip that and then just use that As a stinger Have people send in music to go with it

If anybody wants to put music behind that and send that to Alex go right ahead it's a good way to go and that was submitted by Shane DeLeon and as folks know we have a new name for this every week please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible submit to Sipod on Twitter or to Sipod at gmail.com but we have a few numbers here and

the first number is mostly because Alex has anyone ever done stats all folks they don't burn the great ideas i'm sorry yeah sorry sorry you know they they did and i learned that i cannot do a porky pig impression well and even like like in the week leading up to it i would be around our home and so like my partner's here because it's quarantine and i would be like under my breath trying to practice it because it's very annoying. Terrible at it.

Still can't do it. The stutter is hard. I'll give you some pointers once we're done recording off the air. I'll teach you my secret techniques. I appreciate it. Well, the first number here is very simple. It's two because I'm pretty sure I will mix up these two words throughout the episode. Because I'm pretty sure I will mix up these two words throughout the episode.

If we're being proper, dice is the plural form of the word and die is the singular. In modern American English, people use dice as the singular. But that's probably just going to come up. I'm probably going to mix them up. Yeah, that's fine. I do it all the time. And I am a professional Dungeons and or Dragons player. So I give you permission. yes i've knighted this

feels good yeah well on to the next number here is 4 500 years uh 4 500 years that's the approximate oldness of the oldest dice that people have found and the source here is a book called do dice play god by ian stewart who's a math professor at the University of Warwick. They made a bone? They're going to be bone, aren't they? Are they bone? Just tell me if they're bone. Is it bone? I think they're bone.

It doesn't actually say. Of course they're bone. They made everything out of bone. There's other hard stuff. They love bone. God, they love a good bone. And he says that these were found in ancient Iran. It's a site called Shahrre sukhteh and they were used for a game similar to backgammon yeah and then dice probably originated in the indus valley

arising from the even older use of knuckle bones which were animal bones for fortune telling and playing games because like you guys said people love bone gotta use it people love bones they're spooky how'd they even get in there you know what i mean i we did uh on on our podcast wonderful we did a segment on backgammon because i love me some backgammon uh and i like frontgammon i did not realize how many like wild cultural variations on backgammon there are like still today like it's obviously coalesced around like the version of backgammon that uh is is is commonly played but there's so many variants of backgammon all across the world with like different rule sets and different uh dice and like different mechanics to it uh and i think it it yeah it originated in in iran as well griff, what's the most dangerous version? The most dangerous version? Yeah.

That's, well, that's knife gammon. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That seems obvious now when you say the name. It's just called bad gammon. It's just. Yeah. I thought gun gammon was the most dangerous. No, you don't.

It's back cannon. No? It's where you. Okay. Oh, that's a good one. It's got a lot of fun well the next number here is 41 to 54 ad which is uh some years that's the reign of the roman emperor claudius oh for one thing apparently according to ian stewart the first dice that we're sure were used for gambling were in ancient Rome,

and several Roman emperors loved them. But then the Emperor Claudius apparently was so into dice that he had his traveling chariot set up with a specially constructed board so he could have stable dice throwing while he was on long traveling chariot road trips. Oh, we had that in our minivan growing up. We had that same thing. Us and our emperor, right there. Yeah. So Emperor Claudius was 100% real gamer is what you're saying.

Yeah, elite. Yeah, he was legit, yeah. He wasn't a fake dice geek. I don't know what the accusation would be. Yeah, sure. I bet it was really frustrating for him when people would ride with him in his chariot dice geek? I don't know what the accusation would be. I bet it was really frustrating for him when people would ride with him in his chariot and

he'd be like, so, you want to throw dice? And they're like, oh, I don't really play. And he's like, hey, I had a whole board built in my car. You're gonna play. I'm the emperor. Back then the games were much more sophisticated. Basically, he would roll one and you would roll one.

Whoever got the higher one won. So it wasn't as much fun. People didn't really enjoy it that much. No. Yeah. When the last number here, this is a modern thing. The number is 51. And 51 is the number of votes that each candidate got in the 2018 election for Byron Bethany Irrigation District Director in Contra

Costa County, California. I know this is a long, long thing. The point is they tied and then the legal tiebreak for the election was casting lots. And so in a 2018 election for an irrigation director, each candidate rolled a D20 to decide the election. Hey, when you hear something like that, doesn't it make you think this is all a sham? Like it's all just so delicately, I can't curse, but BS'd together that everybody, like if you look at anything for too long

in this system of government that we call America, it all falls apart so quickly can can i ask what the die results were do we have those numbers actually i'm curious actually do yeah there's the sacramento b they each rolled a d23 times and the winning total for the winner 51 the same number as the number of votes. Wow. Wild. That's so wild. Wild. 51, you're rolling well over the average. That's pretty good.

Yeah, 50, what, 30? That's 17 average. 30 would be average. You know, 10, getting the median there, I guess 10 or 11. No one say anything. Let Griffin figure this out on the podcast. And here's the wild thing, Justin. I already said it.

Griffin just wasn't listening. Yeah, so 51's a lot. That's like an average of, I want to say 17. There we go. Yeah, apparently the final roll was a 20 for the winner. I'm not making that up. So it was dramatic. Like if there was a camera on it,

it would be the end of the movie. Okay. I'm not making that up. So it was dramatic. If there was a camera on it, it would be the end of the movie. I'm not saying they were cheating with loaded dice, but that's 100% what happened. Yeah, was anyone watching? Because it's really easy to lie if no one's watching. You just say like, oh, 20. Right, just don't overshoot. That's all you need to do.

Yeah, I got a 26. What? I got a plus 6 to elections. I've got this magic sword. Don't worry about it. This t-shirt gives me advantage on election rolls. Maybe they just, I mean, they used a D20. They couldn't have been taking this that seriously, right? There had to be parmas like, I don't know.

I don't necessarily love irrigation. I mean, I certainly, I think it's interesting for sure, but this is honestly more of a flyer. You could have it. It's fine. Even though the irrigation manager is a critical role. Oh. Hey. Oh, good stuff.

Good stuff. Guys, we have three big takeaways for the episode, and let's get into them. Starting with takeaway number one. We know the maximum number of sides a dice can have. Really? Before it becomes like just a circle? Yeah, more or less. And obviously that's like the number of fair sides and sides that make sense.

But yeah, both ancient and modern mathematicians have worked together to figure it out. And the maximum is apparently... How did they work together across time, Alex? Listen, you just stepped all over the freaking number, Travis. God. Sorry. I was just about to climax. I was ready for that.

I'm blown away by the fact that... Pay off to climax. I was ready for that. I'm blown away by the fact that ancient and modern scientists were able to communicate throughout time to determine what the maximum number of signs were. You got to double check those ancient people. They believed in humors and all kinds of weird stuff. You got to double check their math. Yeah. All right.

What was that number again, Alex? It was 120. Okay. Beyond that, you either start to get a weird sphere, like Travis said, or it's an unfair dice. Yeah. If I could just suggest, Alex, something you could try is make one with 121. And then it would just blow that staff right out of the water.

If you just added one more side to that, just sneak one in. Make it... Oh, this is stupid. Make the die bigger a little bit. Yep. And then just add another side in there. Oh, yeah. Yep.

Yeah. What, vaguely what shape is a 100, because it couldn't be like equilateral triangle faces. The more sides you add, the closer you get to spherical. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Are you asking, Griffin, and I won't speak for Alex here, but two-thirds of the other people on this call, you're asking us to, off the top of our heads,

geometrically design 120-sided- It just looks probably like rat. It looks almost like an orb. Because the more sides you add... You think about how a D20 is a closer approximation of spherical than... I'm thinking about the faces on

the sphere. Well, that's wild. Griffin, I don't know. They're like circles. No, they wouldn't be circles. It would be triangles. They wouldn't be circles, but they also wouldn't be equilateral triangles, because I don't know that that would... They're hard stars and rainbows, horseshoes and blue moons. I don't know, Griffin, please. I'm a simple farmer.

So I just stuck it in the chat because that's a great question, Griffin. The sides are almost right triangles. Apparently, the big angle is just short of 90 degrees. Yeah, look at that it obviously there's a podcast people can't hear exactly how it looks but if people want to look at a link they can see it or just generally it's like if a d20 got really really subdivided out of control yeah is the general okay the thing about this is and this i've seen like D100s this way too, really anything past a certain size, when you roll it

you're gonna lose about 20 minutes of game time figuring out which is the side facing up. That is, yeah, sure. Like you need a level from the hardware store, like okay, so the top is this one. Yeah, right? It's too much. Apparently the team

this is made by a team called the Dice Lab, also working with Oberlin College math professor. But apparently, they spent a lot of time trying to print the numbers on it, especially the triple digit numbers, like print them without interfering with the dice's surface. So you have that whole issue, too. Yeah, that's wild. Yeah, each face, I mean, these dice look huge, but each face individually is quite small. And so etching, you know, 107 into this small face has got to mess up the like physics of the dice roll. See, and this is also one of those examples

where it having been worked on on a group makes it impressive. And if it had been worked on by an individual, it would be worrying. You know, you see like one individual walks out like I've done it. You're like, Oh my God, roast beef right now.

I'm at one 18 sweetheart. Please. I've almost got it. Please. I don't care if the kids are graduating today, the twins that we have, this is a rich fiction. Oh,

there's a lot going on here or my name is an andrew dice clay whoa it's in my blood i like the idea that andrew dice clay was a twin so then there's another dice who's very different and it's like no i'm i'm much more of an andrew normal well otherwise he would be Andrew die. Clay. Don't you wish Andrew dice? Clay's first name was like bread. And so his name would just be three things. His name would be like a really weird grocery list.

Spaghetti dice clay. It's one eighth of the way to his like Bitcoin code phrase. Like just, yeah, spaghetti dice clay it's one eighth of the way to his like bitcoin code phrase like just yeah his name would be an activation for like a sleeper cell my manchurian candidate trigger is carnation dice clay don't bring that up with him though he's extremely sensitive about it yeah well so this uh this d120 according to the team who made it it is the ultimate fair die allowed by mother nature is how they they branded it okay all right guys just say this is the biggest one we could make just right right we just couldn't cut it anymore that's basically it we gave up and apparently part of the reason they're confident that you just can't get more complex is there are other researchers who have figured out all of the different fair dice shapes.

And we'll link to a YouTube series called Numberphile. Brady Heron makes that. And he talked to Stanford professor Percy Diaconis, who said that he and a collaborator used math and computer modeling. Stop. Stop. There is no way. There is no way. I could roll.

I need a 120, a D120 to find the odds that that person's name is Percy Diaconis. It's untenable. That's the ancient mathematician that they pulled from from the past that they pulled predestinate like the parents are like I love a kid that studies dice well go with Percy Diaconis through the time raft right go with Percy

no we really want him into dice not just a list okay Percy Diaconis stepping up to the plate now for a home run opportunities Percy Diaconis i'm out of it not happening yeah and the oscar award for best onstage kiss goes to percy diaconis now welcome majority whip percy diaconis nope absolutely not percy come back from the kitchen it's your turn to fight the orc yep I'm the most accomplished hitman

in history my name is Percy Diaconis absolutely not unfathomable maybe I shouldn't be so chagrined that is his name because that is the only thing his name could be that's a D1 it's just that one thing that his name

could be like they wrote that on the. It's just that one thing that his name could be. Like they wrote that on the birth certificate and wheeled him to a university. Like, okay, see ya. Right. Yeah. They're so worried about making the biggest fair dice. Give me a smaller dice. You started D4. Give me a D3, cowards. Wait, that's a good, is D4 the

smallest one you could do, Alex? Well, technically there's D2. That's a coin. Stop. That's a coin. Stop. That is a coin. You are correct. It's not a D. I've seen a D3 before,

but then you start getting away from like angular shapes and it looks more like a football sort of situation where it has only, there's a word for this, but it only has like two axes that it can roll on. I forget what the name of that kind of shape is. And then a one-sided die would just be like a mobius strip which i got a one yeah let's see i got a one again it's a one right just throw it for your friends like ah see another one like okay can we play the only thing you can use a one-sided dice for is for rolling for how much fun rolling a one-sided dice is right

but then a one would be like a critical success on that die. Oh, man. Well, I'm looking at pictures of D2. They're weird. If you can imagine two C shapes interlocking. It's bizarre. Just use a coin. Yeah.

Easier. Come on. It's hard being the biggest jock in actual role-playing game. Yeah. I don't know. Joe Manganiello plays Justin. You sure you want to? That's actually an extremely good point.

I bet they're all bigger jocks than I am. I take it all back. He's quite a large fellow. Vin Diesel plays. What are you talking about? You're the third biggest. Yeah, third biggest. You're talking about physical shape now.

No. Okay. Sorry. Alex, please. I'm sorry about physical shape now. No. Okay. Sorry. Alex, please. I'm sorry for ruining your podcast over and over again. I'm glad to know the jocks now. This is good. Yeah.

But just the last thing here with the modern scientists like beating the ancient ones through a portal or whatever. So Mr. Percy Diaconis and his collaborator, they tried to model all of the kinds of fair dice with computers and math and everything else. And they say there are 30 families of dice shapes that are fair by symmetry. That actually makes sense. We'll have a picture link for people because there's no way to describe it. But he also says that they did all that research, did all that figuring, and then realized that Archimedes pretty much figured out the same thing like 2,500 years

ago because math was the same. Just didn't. Why didn't they check first? He didn't have TikTok to distract him so it's actually less impressive if you think about it. He couldn't have even checked TikTok if he wanted to. I bet that that's a thing that not a lot of scientists are worried about.

Like I invented the car. Oh actually Archimedes invented the car like 3,000 years ago it's that like you would think like i'm gonna make a dice and it's like hey shouldn't you look and see if anyone has made you know a dice before nah nah nah this is fine i've invented the sandwich no travis you did not invent the sandwich the sandwich has been around for a while i I call it a cup. Oh, nope, nope. Sorry, bro. That's the thing. The other thing with the D120 is that this team claims they did it and are the first people to make it.

But they also say that a French-Belgian mathematician named Eugène Catalan came up with the math in 1865. They quoted one of the founders in 1865. Oh. They quoted one of the founders of the dice lab. He said, quote, this is not an original idea. We were just the people crazy enough to actually do it, end quote. Or bored enough. Come on. Come on.

We were just the people who did it. I wish I could be the guy in the 1800s who, like, somebody walks up, like, what are you doing? And it's like, oh, I'm working on theoretical dice shapes in my head what are you gonna do with that you're gonna make that dice i do not possess i'm not that crazy my man are you kidding me do you know how crazy someone would have to be you could tear the whole universe apart with power like this it had to be the rebels of dice there's no way i'm not until percyaconis comes along. Will someone be crazy enough? Percy Diaconis? You mean the bad boy of geometry? Yeah, that's him. It's the one. The prophesied one? Yep. Well, and also with with complex dice shapes, the last last thing there is that D20s are just

older than I think people realize or than I realized before researching it. In 2003, people realize or than I realized before researching it. In 2003, Christie's Auction House auctioned a green glass Roman D20 from the 200s AD. And then also the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a D20 from the 100s BC made of a rock called serpentinite that was found in Egypt. So they've been making D20s. I assume D20s are from like the 70s, but they're very old. They go way back. And just if I could do a little deductive reasoning, I could buy a D20 now for $2.50, $2.50. So I have to imagine that Roman one is probably like, what, $30, $40 worth, right? Because it's old, but it still does the exact same thing, right? It's made out of glass.

It'd break the first time you try to roll it. I don't think you should even have to pay $ for that that's a bad dice does it have any features or it is awesome it is awesome to think about the idea that gary gygax was like anyway this game's easy all you need really to get started is a dice with 20 sides on it and everybody on earth is like what are you talking about those don't even exist exist. This is, no one's going to buy this game. And he's like, I dug it up in Egypt. And they're like, I'm not going to do that too.

That's not. Uh, fine. I'll just make some for you guys. I'll call my friend Percy. Next thing here is a big trumpet sound for a big takeaway. Before that, we're going to take a little break.

We'll be right back. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney.

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Well, from here, let's get into the second takeaway takeaway number two most dice are at least a little bit loaded and some of them decay huh it's just a bunch of features of mainly six-sided dice that i was not aware of until digging into it. And the best example of truly fair dice, as much as they can be, are probably Vegas ones. So we've got a bunch of things here that Vegas does to make their dice relatively fair. This is a piece of it because I got very interested in the balancing of D20s and stuff when we first started playing. And if you're worried about it, it's safer to get a clearer dice. You can see if there's any bubbles, or I mean, for lack of a better word,

inclusions in it, like you would find in a diamond. And there's also ways that you can float a dice in water to test it, to see how balanced it is. Wow. Yeah, I think...

Listener at home, I wish you could see how furious Alex gets when other people mention trivia that they know about. He's overturning a bookcase behind him. He's tearing pages out of his trivia books. He's just writing

the trivia he knows on the wall. Oh, is that blood? Is that feces? Secretly incredibly disturbing. More a lie. Alex, come back to the mic. Tell us about the Vegas thing. I'm sorry.

Well, folks, we're the new hosts of... I wish I was doing all that, but also super committed to quality podcasting, so I'm trying to do it silently. Like, I'm tipping the bookshelf as gently as possible. You got your pop filter on, so you won't get the plosives of the bookshelf being thrown to the floor. And Travis, what you said about transparent dice, that's one of the big things Vegas does. If people ever see Vegas six-sided dice, they're almost always transparent.

They're also just machined really precisely, according to Ricky J. A big source for this episode is Ricky J. He wrote an amazing piece for The New Yorker about the history of dice. Love Ricky J, a big source for this episode is Ricky J, he wrote an amazing piece for the New Yorker about the history of dice. Love Ricky J. They are also, I have noticed, because I enjoy craps as a game, and I have been to Vegas before,

the dice in Vegas have kind of sharper corners. Yes. Where like, if you ever see, sometimes board games will have like the very rounded off corners and like rounded off edges, But the ones in Vegas are like much more like cube, like refined cubes. Absolutely. And I think that's, it's mainly so they roll better and more evenly. I feel like home dice or so, if you throw them at your brother, it's okay.

You know, like they won't stab them. But that's really the only reason they're done that way. Yeah, exactly. You know, like they won't stab them. But that's really the only reason they're done that way. Yeah, exactly. And according to Ricky J, casinos now demand a dice that's machined to within one ten thousandth of an inch on each side. Wow.

Which is incredible engineering to put into dice, but they're doing that. Yeah. And then also with the numbers on dice, like most regular dice that you get from a board game or something, they drill a little hole for the number and then just paint that. But because there's a different amount of holes on each side then it's weighted unevenly and so vegas dice they fill in the hole with a paint that is the exact same density as the dice material wow so then it's even interesting i thought i thought they would just make the dots bigger on different sides like make this the sixth side have the dots be quite small and have the one be you know larger so that the volume of dice sort of that that has been excavated would be essentially the same uh did you know that they're with d6s um you probably did know this because you're like a trivia person alex but there are like dice that are non-regulation D6s

that occasionally will pop up because to be a regulation D6, like in sets and stuff, the opposite sides have to add up to seven. And so like, and then because there's then a certain order that the numbers have to go. So sometimes there are dice sets that are sold

where those numbers are not in the right order so that the sides don't add up to seven. And those are non-regulation D6s. I love that. Do you know the word for the laws that dictate which numbers are on opposite ends of a dice? It's a very good word. Chirality.

That's amazing. The chirality of a dice is the sort of pattern upon which the numbers are applied so that the opposite facing numbers can all sort of add up. Now, Justin, you do one. Justin, you do a fact. You can swallow any die if you put your mind to it. Just believe in yourself. Oh, man, I wish I could curse.

Hey, Alex, it's a critical okay you can uh you can edit that out later if you want well the uh the other like trick with vegas dice and travis you've probably seen it from craps is when people play craps which i'm told is mainly just a north american game but anyway craps has a rubber diamond pyramid bumper on the table. Like you throw the dice and then they bounce off this very textured rubber bumper. And according to Percy Diaconis, he's back. Boo.

Oh, yeah. What's up, buddy? He says that. I'm sorry we had to drag him away from his threesome. Yeah. Oh, no, Justin. It's a three-sided dice that he's oh my mistake okay so he says that if you go to vegas like there are scammer type people who will offer you a class and they say like hey i can teach you to do a role that will win craps more often if you take my

class he says basically every one of those classes just comes down to how to do a roll where the dice slides with one number on the top the whole time and he says that so those those bumpers are there to prevent people from doing that once the dice bounces off that it's gonna turn over and that's that's a way they fix it also you'll get yelled at if you do yeah i'm pretty sure that that you'd get one of those guys like please don't do that. There are rules and stuff. Are there classes that they'll teach you of how to keep the dice on the table? Because that's my bit.

I'll be like, whoa, whoa. And they'll bounce off. And you have never seen an adult more disappointed in another adult than you have when you do that two times in a row at the craps table. Yeah, don't enjoy it. I was there for that. It's terrible. The extent to which Travis thinks it's a good idea to play craps

also is directly proportionate to the amount of alcohol he has ingested. It's the best game there, my man. Best odds. Best odds. Just ask me and my friend Bob. It's the best odds in the whole place. He's got a system, Alex. I got a system.

I never lose. I bet on every number. Yeah. And as long as you can keep grabbing the dice, they can't stop you from throwing them. That's right. And if you throw them, that's legally, it's the dice roll and they have to follow the rules. Yeah. And if you swallow them, they can't take your money away until they come out and they see what the numbers are.

And if you throw 50 identical dice that look like the dice you just rolled all at the same time, you can take your pick. And if you yell Yahtzee loud enough, you own the casino now. That's just how it works. They won't tell you that in your fancy books, Alex. You got to learn it here on the mean streets with me and my friend Bob. As far as the slidey kind of roll, a team of engineers has done computer modeling to discover that basically every six-sided dice roll is a little bit loaded if you don't roll it a whole bunch really hard. Because what they found is... You can just say cheat, Alex! I turned to academics for how to cheat.

It's the only way I know. This is, again, the book Do Dice Play God by Ian Stewart. But this was a 2012 study led by engineer Marcin Kapitaniak at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. They built a computer model of what happens when a six-sided dice rolls. They included air resistance. They included friction against the table, and they found that if a dice bounces like a normal amount of times, like four or five times,

your chances of the number that was on top when you threw it coming up, the chances there are one in five. So just however you were holding it, whatever was on top when you released it, you have a one in five chance, even though it's a six sided dice. Like that's a pretty big swing.

Yeah, that's a big dip. Yeah. That's just stupid. Apparently. Yeah. What a waste of time. That would have been a bunch,

you know, that movie that they made about the people who like created a team of like card counters and stuff would have been a much different movie if it was just them trying to gently roll dice. Like, Oh yeah. Some cool music playing as they go. It's five again, but are you okay?

Sir, are you cool? I feel like they would have to claim to have Mr. Burns' body where they're just not strong enough to roll it hard. That would have to be the trick. Blow on them, baby. baby no not so hard these these bad teens are learning how to fake a severe iron deficiency in not bringing down the house and the uh the team here also found that in order to get true one in six probability on that top number, you have to either massively spin the dice when you roll it or bounce it at least 20 times, which I don't think anyone has ever done.

How do you do that? You can't. No. It turns out we really have to bounce and roll our dice really hard for them to not be kind of sort of loaded. I don't think most people are watching what's on top when they throw it. But if you do, you will over time know what you're throwing more than you otherwise would. And then the other thing about dice is that they said that some of them decay. This is coming from, again, Ricky Jay, the magician, author, actor, so much more. magician, author, actor so much more. When he was alive, he collected old celluloid dice. Because in 1868, John Wesley Hyatt in Albany, New York developed celluloid. It's best known as like movie film as old time motion picture film stock. But it also became standard dice material until the mid 1900s. So for almost a century, we were making our dice out of celluloid.

And Ricky Jay has found, and we'll have pictures for people, the dice will, he says, quote, typically remain stable for decades. Then in a flash, they can decompose. After the release of gases, the dice cleave, crumble, then implode. He has a whole collection of dice that basically look like they're molding, like they went bad in the fridge. That's wild. See, that's why we make them out of bone now.

Yeah, gotta have bone dice. Don't worry about it. We're back to bone. Is that what, so those were the celluloid dice that broke down in that way specifically? Yeah, those specifically. And then I guess in the 1950s,

they switched to mainly using something called cellulose acetate. So then that doesn't do that. But if you have dice from before the 1950s and you keep an eye on them, they will look like old vegetables or something after a while. And if you go to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City in LA, you can see some of Ricky J's dice that have decayed. I have. I used to live two blocks away from the Museum of Jurassic Technology. I took people there all the time. What a wild place that is. Yeah. See, I've got a dice made out of uranium, so it'll be good to go for like four billion years

before it starts to... I have a dice made out of ice. Let me find it. Damn it! Oh, no! And then we won't be able to solve your murder until we figure out the riddle. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's the sawdust. Don't worry. I was a fish! Well, from here, I think we can do the final takeaway of the main episode. Takeaway number three.

Well, from here, I think we can do the final takeaway of the main episode. Takeaway number three. Europeans might have changed their approach to dice making. I knew it! As they changed their beliefs about fate. Oh. Whoa. One more time.

Europeans might have changed their approach to dice making as they changed their beliefs about fate. I'm being specific about it being Europeans because this is one theory based on one study by one guy, but it's about a sample of old dice he found in the Netherlands from Roman times to modern times. Because it used to be that when you were born, the priest would look at you and say, this person is fated to be a dice maker. Right. And then eventually they were like,

no, I think anybody can and can't be a dice what are you talking about and so then it changed right that's what you're talking about right the judgy baptism priests like this is a dice head i'm feeling it in the water dice head totally we shall name him percy diaconus alex i'm on tinderhooks i need to know exactly what it is that you're talking about. So there's a scientist named Yelmer Erkins. Another great name. Going up. Awesome. So good.

And he's a professor of anthropology at UC Davis. And in a 2018 study, he looked at more than 100 examples of antique dice from the last 2000 years in the Netherlands. And the basic finding was that dice have not always looked exactly the way they do now in the sense that old Roman dice from the 100s and 200s, he says that they were noticeably flatter or noticeably long, like they were weird shapes for something that's supposed to be a cube. And it takes until around the 1450s for dice to be more cubic more squared off more like fair and the theory that he came to from this is that the shifts in dice's appearance may reflect people's changing sense of what exactly is behind a role whether it's fate or whether it's like the science of probability so the idea is before people believed in probability they were like

well you know the gods just do everything. So my dice don't need to be like machined right. Because the dice will just be whatever the gods say. I like that because one step removed from that is like, do we really need to roll, Doug? Just give me your fiver. Come on, Doug. Look at your life.

Look at mine. The gods clearly want me to be successful. And for you to fail, I'll take your horse now. Yeah. That's like turbo Calvinism. It's like this. It's a new whatever. If you use a moonstone on Calvinism, it's what it evolves into.

That's wild. Yeah. His work on it, Erkin's and others, it ties into like the scientific revolution and mathematicians trying to figure out the basic science of probability. According to Ian Stewart's book, the first like writings on probability science, one of them was a book by Girolamo Cardano, who was an Italian mathematician who published on it in the 1600s. And then also Christian Huygens, the astronomer did a book in the 1600s called On Reasoning and Games of Chance.

That was 1657. Are none of these people just like Steve Smith discovered? I don't know. Like, kiss your dice and they'll roll better. That is true. Yeah, that is true. That does work. The field is short on conventional names.

I don't know why you would think somebody would just be Bill Thompson and figure it out. Is it like pop music where they start as Bill Thompson, but then when they decide to get into mathematics, like, I got to change my name to something cool. Yeah. Like Percy Diaconis is the sting of mathematics. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? Because before that, you probably want your dice to be not a super weird shape, but also maybe you haven't totally thought through. This is totally based on chance.

You believe a more antique thing like turbo Calvinism. And you had other things to do. You had to fight off unicorns and stuff. There were dragons everywhere it just it doesn't it doesn't make any sense because you could you could have a six-sided dice where one of the sides is just made out of lead and so it's always going to have the same result and at that point it's like the grace of god is not going to like make different numbers come up at that point so the engineering is the engineering behind the dice is is still inherent to what i don't know it just feels fairly easy to kind of poke a hole in that

that it's just laziness honestly is what it is you think there was one there was probably like one smart person around who was like no and it's like oh you don't trust the gods oh this guy doesn't trust the god no i didn't say that i trust the gods. No, I didn't say that. I didn't say that. Or maybe just one person to say it's God's plan that we engineer these dice to be completely fair. Like, not one person thought to say that out loud? It's just, yeah, I don't get it. I don't get it. By Zeus's beard.

Doug is cheating. Everybody, Doug is cheating. I love, I'm just thinking about Doug the smug. Or wait, is Doug the person losing? I'm forgetting who Doug is now. Yeah, it's hard to keep track. Whatever it takes to get Doug the smug in there, we have to go

with it. Right. His real name is like Dougius or some shit. I don't know. I'm sorry I cursed again, Alex. Travis? Travis? Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to the McElroy brothers, Justin and Travis and Griffin, for lending themselves to yet another podcast and writing a book that will create more of them. Amazing. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly,

incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the most incredible legends about dice. Several mythological and ancient stories and one 20th century urban legend. Visit SifPod.fun for that bonus, for a library of almost three dozen other bonus shows and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring dice with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, we know the maximum number of sides for a die. Takeaway number two,

most dice are at least a little bit loaded, and some of them decay. And takeaway number three, Europeans might have changed their approach to dice making as they changed their beliefs about fate. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. Justin Travis and Griffin McElroy have a wonderful new book out. It's titled Everybody Has a Podcast Except You. It's funny. It's practical. It's everything you need to know and want to know. If you're going to try to do, I was going to say what I do, but really what they do. They do much more of it, and it's really impressive. I'm so glad there is a how-to from guys like these guys who know what they're talking about. You can also head to themackleroy.family to see all of their podcasting endeavors, or head to sifpod.fun for links to everything I just described.

Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. A great book titled Do Dice Play God? That is by Ian Stewart, a math professor from the University of Warwick. A great YouTube channel called Numberphile. That is by Brady Heron. And he talks to Professor Percy Diaconis of Stanford University about their research into dice. And then a great article in The New Yorker. It is called The Story of Dice. It is by Ricky Jay. Ricky Jay passed in 2018. He's very much missed, and he was way more than an article writer. He was an actor, a historian, a magician, and just really somebody to check out. If you miss all the dice stuff we talked about, and you learn about Ricky Jay, I think we still did good. That's a good thing. Anyhow, find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by

artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. you