Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Scales

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why scales (the tool for weighing) are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Scales. Known for balancing. Famous for balancing. We're talking about that meaning of the word scales specifically. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why scales 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 because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie, what is your relationship to or opinion of the topic of scales? Yeah, you know, I mean, look, sometimes I'm trying to trade some salt for some gold dust. And you know what I use? I use a set of scales. And it's fair, except for when someone puts their hand on the scales, which is not good. That's not cool. That is a party foul, sort of in the Silk Road community. You're not supposed to tip the scales. You're supposed to weigh them fairly for the spices that I have brought to you. Alex, that is the extent to my knowledge about scales is that they're used to weigh and measure goods in spices. This one, if people remember the windmill episode recently,

where we kind of did a progression of windmills for grain, windmills for lifting water, then wind power. We're going to start with the balancing type of scales this week and then go into other scales from there. So I'm glad we're starting in this vibe of being out there with Marco Polo recording your activities and being like, I'm just a normal person. Why are you pretending I live in a land of dragons? The guy who kept getting lost in a swimming pool. But yeah, when I think of scales, I guess I do. I think of Lady Justice with the scales that she's holding, which as far as I know, that's not how you're supposed to use scales. You're supposed to put them on a flat and stable surface, because if you're holding scales, it's not

going to be an accurate reading. I am aware that scale technology has improved over the years. Know nothing about how it works. I know you put stuff on it and things happen inside the little plastic cube that are mysterious and interesting. But yeah, I get the general concept of how the old timey scales work where you have a fulcrum and basically weigh things by having counterweights that you are comparing it to and then checking to make sure that the scales are level.

Yeah, I really want to thank at Venus SubVvet on the Discord, who's also a longtime wonderful supporter, hung out on our previous communities too. Thank you for this idea for an episode because it's such a perfect topic for the show. I have two scales in our home, one in the kitchen and one you stand on in the bathroom, and I never think about them. They're just a magic plastic box, like you said, that tells me what stuff weighs. Exactly. There are so many takeaways this week, but of course, stats and numbers too. And our stats and numbers are in a segment called... Well, I thought about these numbers. Dad said, dang, they're pretty high. And I thought, yeah, there's a stat for everything. So I took my old man's cosine and parameters. It's nifty and awfully grand. Spending podcast time with Katie. We're dropping these stats and the numbers in your head.

Wow, that was beautiful. I played the piano. Yeah. But with my mouth. Yet another one of my normal requests for Katie before taping the podcast. And she did great. I just, you know. And thank you to BeardoPNW on the Discord for that fun Ben Folds idea. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make him as silly Wacky and Bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to sifpod at gmail.com. And this topic, we're going to start very conceptual. The first number is four. Four. Number four. For what?

That is the number of broad categories of measurements that have interested most cultures, especially early on. Four kinds of measurements. And one source this week is the book, The Story of Measurement by science writer, Andrew Robinson. He says those four categories are- Wait, wait, wait, can I guess, can I guess, can I guess? Sorry, I said one, but yeah, go for it. Yeah. Wait, I didn't hear what you said.

So I'm still gonna guess. Perfect. I mean, weight is obviously one of them. Yeah, weight, yeah. I'm gonna guess length, time. Okay, I've got three. Volume? Yeah, I should have said physical measurements because time definitely fits.

But it's length, area, and volume along with weight. Ah, okay. Yeah. Okay. So for the purposes of this episode, we're talking about machines that do one of those four physical measures. It's machines that measure weight. That's a scale. And when we separate that out, that also leads us to something amazing about the history of scales, which is that many people in cultures and situations have just not bothered with scales and with weights

because they just used an easier tool for volume. It's much simpler in a lot of contexts to just say, oh, let's do cups of this cooking ingredient, or let's buy and sell a kind of a uniform sack size of this stuff instead of weighing it. I see. Interesting. So these societies don't really use weighing at all or just not typically? Especially early on, they might use a scale and balancing something, but it's just more of a modern thing to want to know the weight of everything. And people have skipped it in many eras whenever they could. Because volume and weight can be different. Because volume and weight can be different, but when it comes to creating a consistent measurement of something, if you have the same volume, it's going to be the same, if it's the same stuff.

Yeah, exactly. I do remember when I started baking a lot, especially cookies, I started reading things that said, you really need to bake by weight. If you're baking by volume, there's going to be little weird inaccuracies in what you do. And that's probably true, but especially ancient peoples just said, who cares? I'll just do volumes because it's much easier than inventing new technology. Well, yeah. I mean, I guess you could change the volume of, say, flour. Like if you use a flour sifter, you increase the volume of the flour because you're introducing more air inside of the flour. So if you were trying to cheat someone, you could like fill a bag with sifted flour and there seemed like there's more flour in it, but it's actually like a different weight from like a bag of more densely compacted flour. Exactly.

So yeah, it's that kind of thing. And we have benefited over time from, in a lot of cases, gaining scales as a way of finding out a specific weight and being able to use that for our thinking and trading and everything else. Also imagine if Lady Justice just held like a couple of big sacks. That wouldn't have the same impact as her holding the scales. These are the sacks of justice. I declare you one bag of guilty. Oh no, I'm one bag guilty. Terrible. And, you know, at the same time people did invent scales, the balancing type scale got parallel invented lots of places. We don't know how old it is or where it came from, really. But the next number for that is about 4,500 years old. 4,500 years ago.

Andrew Robinson's book says that that's the age of a set of standardized stone weights from what we call the Indus Valley civilization. We don't know what they called themselves, but they live near the Indus River in what's now mainly Pakistan. And they made standardized stone weights for one side of a balance scale. Yeah, that's what's interesting is you kind of have to start out with a unit of measurement. Like how much is one pound, right? It's kind of this, or one ounce, it seems kind of arbitrary. And so you start out with some unit of weight, then create a bunch of other units of weight from that. Like in some systems, like with like imperial weights, it doesn't really make a lot of sense. But, you know, with with you can like scale ups once you have your sort of lowest unit of weights, you can scale that up to larger units of weights.

And as long as you keep them consistent, then you can weigh things by counterbalancing what you're measuring on a scale. But yeah, I just wonder, how did they come up with that, those first units of weight? How did they decide how much one, I don't know what they would have called it back then, but one stone of weight would be? Wow. You guessed the main one is stones. like specifically calling a unit a stone and basing it on one stone people found and said, let's use this. Yeah, that's been consistent across a lot of places. Why that stone though? Like what was so cool about that stone that they decided to use that one? By stone, I mean like a loose rock usually for it to be small enough to fit on a scale.

Right. It was basically something small, kind of heavy, and no better purpose for it that was just laying around. Another source this week is nonfiction writer Claire Cox Starkey writing for Lapham's Quarterly. And she says that many early communities just came up with a balancing scale because you just make something balanced on a fulcrum. just came up with a balancing scale because you just make something balanced on a fulcrum and then picked a stone and said, just let's hang on to this and keep track of it. And this is kind of our go-to one stone of weight that we balance stuff against. Imagine if you're the guy who loses that stone, like the one stone that your entire society uses to weigh everything. Like, hey, Grog, where's the stone? What stone? The stone. The stone we use for weighing literally everything. Oh, right. That stone. Yeah. Let's see. Ooh,

might be in my other coat pocket. Like, we don't even have coats yet. Seems too stressful for me to have one stone that everyone is depending on for the entire system of whites. When you said that, two different entire stories washed over me. One is the Charlie Brown vibe version where everyone's yelling at them and it's sad. And the other version is the Mr. Bean vibe where somehow there's also a turkey on his head and the stone goes flinging into like a lady's dress or something. Like it's weird. There were probably both types of early ancient humans.

There were basically two types of human being back then, the Charlie Brown and the Mr. Bean. That's why they have such different skulls. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Science continues to marvel at this. skulls. Yeah. Science continues to marvel at this. This Indus River civilization, it was pretty organized. It's so ancient, we just don't know a lot about it. But we know they were organized enough that they started having standardized weights. And that makes them

kind of an outlier. Most smaller communities just grabbed a stone. And there's a few other ancient societies that did standardized counterweights. And one that's in particular in our English language and measurements is the Romans. Those Romans always being bean counters about things. Kind of literally. They were obsessed with beans. We'll link the past episode about beans. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, beans are an incredible fruit.

They're not actually a fruit. They're a legume, but they are highly nutritious. They're great. Yeah, the Romans got one thing right. Yeah. Literally only one thing. The slavery, not so much, but the beans, they were onto something. thing. The slavery, not so much, but the beans, they were onto something.

The number here is about 2,500 years ago. I know it's hard to keep numbers in folks' heads. That's about 2,000 years after the Indus River, folks. About 2,500 years ago, the ancient Romans laid out a law code for their new small republic centered on the city of Rome. The law code was called the Twelve Tables. And according to historian Mary Beard, the Roman state did not start making coins until about 100 years after this law code. So the fines and punishments in it are based on the weights of precious metals. Like you have to give somebody a weight of bronze or silver or some other precious metal. So they were using scales extensively. You got to give someone an ingot. Yeah, pretty much.

Yeah. Like you're fine as an ingot. And then you're like, ah, do I have an ingot in my wallet? Let's check. Old tickets. Yeah. Parking tickets would suck. You have to like drag an ingot over to like your local parking meter, which is probably

like just a big horse or something. I don't really know how parking worked back then. If you had a horse parking, did they have like chariot parking? Wait, the meter is a horse? Like it's a horse supervising horses. Well, yeah, I guess that's true. What would the meter would be like? I don't know. Would it be an ostrich? Something. Oh, that's cool. I guess I'm going by like Flintstones rules where all the appliances are animals of some kind that are like vaguely shaped in the way that you'd want that appliance to be shaped, like a woodpecker as a record player or something. But in Roman times, I imagine you'd have some kind of like ostrich or other ratite working as the parking meter. Okay, so the scale on the Flintstones Animalogic, it's like a fun spider monkey with like its arms out to the side and then hanging down, you know?

That's cool. That's sort of being hung by its lapel and it's always going, it's a living. But yeah, back to actually reality and not stupid flintstones jokes um so you'd have some kind of uh you'd have like but but how did they they would just like have standardized like this is one unit of bronze and this is how many units of this bronze you have to pay should you break one of our laws, like, you know, wearing a toga when it's casual naked Fridays or whatever. Yeah. And the Roman Latin word for scales was Libra. The same as what we now use for the astrological sign Libra.

Is that where LB comes from? Yes. the same as what we now use for the astrological sign Libra. Is that where LB comes from? Yes. It's kind of from two uses of the word at once because they also developed a standardized counterweight for their scales and they named the counterweight Libra Pondo. And so that kind of got shortened and garbled into other languages. So then the term pound became a weight in English and the abbreviation LB from Libra became the abbreviation for pounds. English is silly and frivolous. I assume there's no reason for that. They just decided to. I feel I thought I just grew up thinking that the people who invented English were just screwing with everyone who had to learn this language. But yeah, but I would also like when I whenever I read LB, I don't immediately think pounds. I just kind of pronounce in my head lub. Yeah.

Does anyone else do that or is that just me? I do that. Okay. Pretty much. Yeah. I just never questioned it or dealt with it till now. How many libs is this? Yeah.

How many libs do I weigh? Did I gain any libs? I've even heard people say as slang, like, I'm 170 LBs. Oh, yeah. In the vibe of, like, I'm a buck 70 for 170 pounds, you know? Yeah, that's a thing. There's a sound it makes in my head, and it's like, lub. Lub, yep.

Lub. Yep to lub. All right, so it's from Libra. All right. Yeah, and that set of things, that's also part of why we have this scales of justice thing. Because the Romans had a goddess-type figure called Justitia, who was one of four female personifications of virtue, and she held the scales. Oh, because you had to pay fines in ingots and whatnot, and they would use the scales to weigh out your fine. Right, so it's like any picture of someone doing a job, holding the tool of the job,

like a farmer with a pitchfork. Right. Scales are all over some other Mediterranean cultures, too. Justitia is not just from this use. It's also influenced by a Greek justice goddess called Dicey, and she had a scale as well. And then separately in Egyptian lore, there's afterlife lore about weighing your soul against a feather on a scale. So this all just speaks to the ancientness of balance scales. I learned about that because there was a movie with Big Bird in it where I think he was going around with like a dead Egyptian child. It was very weird.

I'm just having this memory again. Are you confident you did not dream this? This is real. Okay. Can I do a quick Google? Please. I want to know if Big Bird met with like Anubis. Yeah.

Big Bird, Egyptian afterlife. Well, it's auto-completing for me. Whoa, okay. Yeah. This is huge news. So it's Don't Eat the Pictures, Sesame Street at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That makes sense. They go to an Egyptian exhibit and encounter an Egyptian prince named Sahu, who is a child who have been cursed to remain on Earth until he answers the question.

Where does today meet yesterday? So, yeah, it is. Wow. I'm right. Yeah. Big Bird does meet an ancient Egyptian undead child. And that's how I learned about the thing of like weighing your soul against a feather. In fact, they might've used one of Big Bird's feathers, if I remember correctly.

Formative moments in my childhood. New York City is so weird because its museums, especially the Met, are lousy with Egyptian art. And so of course this leads to Sesame Street making an Anubis thing. Partly stealing, yes. It's just called stealing. One entire temple with permission and then some stealing. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Well, look, you know, some of it's cooperation and then the other 90% is stealing.

So who's to say which way the scales of justice are tilting? Speaking of which, scales. Some of those cultural uses of scales maybe people have heard parts of, but in researching this, I found out there's a whole nother amazing cultural use of scales that I'd never heard of before. And let's explore that with takeaway number one. One West African kingdom used balancing scales for all their transactions and as a repository of cultural lore. Hmm, explain. Yeah, this is a kingdom called Asante. It also gets written as the Ashanti Empire, depending on who's writing the book. But this was a West African kingdom in the 1700s and 1800s AD, recent history. And the Ashanti had an intricate combination of economics and storing their cultural lore.

And it was all centered on personal balancing scales for transactions. I mean, the transactions make sense, but cultural lore, I'm very intrigued. It's this combination where their main currency was gold dust. And partly because gold dust, you can break that down to such tiny little particles. It's workable for the thing we joked about with Roman parking tickets. You can actually use gold dust for it if you're accurate enough and careful enough. Yeah, you can carry it around. You can store it in your nose. It's just very convenient. Don't sneeze. And yeah, so they had gold dust as a currency. And so people,

especially a household or the head of a household, would have a really finely calibrated balancing scale. And then also a satchel called a futuo, F-U-T-U-O. And the futuo was a bag containing all the necessities for doing gold dust transactions on a balance scale. It's got the dust, it's got your scale, like scoops and brushes for handling it. And then most distinctively, they had a set of counterweights and the counterweights were intricately carved and usually representations of sayings or parables or other things in Asante culture. I love that. I love it when you mix functional tools with culture and art. It's amazing. I love the sources for this. One of them is another book this week. It's called World in the Balance, the Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement. It's by Stony

Brook University professor Robert P. Kreese. And the other source is a piece for JSTOR Daily by Amelia Soth. That's probably the easiest place for people to see pictures of this stuff because the counterweights were particularly distinctive. They were called maramuo, and the maramuo were small. They weren't much bigger than Monopoly board game pieces, is what JSTOR Daily says. And despite that small size, they were extremely elaborately carved renderings of animals, objects, geometry, people. There's

even one in Robert Kreese's book, which is a representation of people using scales and gold dust in Maramuwo to do a transaction. Wow. That's meta. Right. But a lot of them were records of cultural lore. Like one example is there's a maramua, which is two crocodiles in kind of an X shape over each other. And that depicted an Asante saying, which is two crocodiles have one common stomach, but when they are eating, they fight over the food. But when they are eating, they fight over the food. You're going to have to run that one by me again because I don't get it. My brain is not... I also needed the explanation for sure. Yeah. It's the saying one more time.

I got lost around two crocodiles have one stomach because I'm like, they most certainly do not. I like that so many cultures do animal parables that are not biologically accurate. It's great. No, but they're fun. Yeah, the saying is, two crocodiles have one stomach, but when they are eating, they fight over the food. And the saying is a, like, rueful saying about family members. Oh. It describes the thing where everybody in a family broadly has the same common interests.

And yet a lot of us will kind of have more fights with family than with everybody else in the world. Hmm. It's like a very nuanced, interesting saying that I don't think there's really an English equivalent of or like American equivalent of that I know. It'd be two Kaiman fighting over the same Chihuahua, right? In Florida. Oh, you're just switching the species. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. And so they're really going all out here. Like I think of balancing scales as just having a little metal lump for a counterweight. Asante people, apparently they were so focused on using scales for transactions. There are accounts of traders using knives to measure out a couple of tiny grains of gold dust with the precision of someone preparing a dose of drugs. Like just to use a couple grains of gold dust to buy something ordinary like bananas.

Like, oh, I need bananas for the week. Here's one grain, two grains, three grains. Wow. And then you're also getting out these amazingly carved counterweights that are culturally representative. That's amazing. I love embellishment. And I feel like I miss that a little bit

in a lot of our modern day stuff. Although we do have like Garfield telephones, that cat-shaped clock. For some reason, I'm only thinking of cat-shaped things right now, but sometimes we do embellish our modern tools, but I feel like sometimes it's just like, this is strictly functional. We don't need any cool or fun embellishments. But I really love the embellishments, especially if it has some kind of cultural significance where you're, you know, kind of keeping a record of these stories and sayings and art just in your daily sort of transaction, something that, you know, could just be someone not really thinking and not really just like mindlessly going

about these tasks, but instead it has sort of a interesting ritual to it. Absolutely. Yeah. This is so much social interaction within a purely financial transaction. It's like if we all stopped and carefully read our paper money and also if our paper money had anything good on it. Yeah, which it doesn't. Self-checkout sucks too, by the way, because it doesn't work very good. I'm always making a mistake in it. And then someone has to come over anyways and be like, oh, you have to click this button next. And then also, like, just there's no human touch, right?

There's no personal interaction there. You're just talking to robots all day long. It would be so great if the self-checkout glitches and the employee walks over and is like, hey, I can help you. And then they whisper a profound wisdom to you while they're doing it. Oh, that would be thrilling. Like, oh, I should help you. And then they whisper a profound wisdom to you while they're doing it. Oh, that would be thrilling. Like, oh, I should reconsider how my family interacts. Wow. And it's probably generational.

And then they leave, you know? This state in what's now pretty much Ghana in Africa, they were very committed to it across all their economic exchange and the culture within that. I wish I had heard of it before, and now I'm glad I've heard of it. It's very cool. That's most of our stuff about balance scales proceeding into the other types. I find it

amazing that balance scales are not obsolete. And we've really only developed in super general terms, two other ways of doing a scale. And one of them is also very common. It's called the mechanical force gauge kind of scale. There's too many ways these can work to list, but the gist is that instead of putting two things on a balance and aligning them, we're taking the mass of one thing and letting gravity press that against the machine. For example, one of the common ones is a spring scale. A lot of bathroom scales use a spring and other gizmos to measure how much your mass with gravity pushing on it is compressing the spring. Like there's not two things being balanced, you know.

So it's like measuring the compression of the spring somehow. So it's like measuring the compression of the spring somehow. Yeah. And it also turns out grocery store produce scales, if they're not completely digital, it's a spring scale where they're measuring how much the spring like apples and bananas in them and you'd see the little red thing go up and tell you how much is on there. And yeah. Yeah. It kind of does a like boing with the little... It does do a little boing. Yeah. In incredibly general terms, because there's too many to list, those are the two main kinds of scales, some kind of balance. And then the other kind is this mechanical force gauge. Like even the somewhat old-fashioned doctor's office scale, where they move a little metal object on a ruler to finish weighing you, that's still a balanced scale, just with a lot of other parts to it.

Like your weight's just redirected through other levers and simple machines so that they only need to move that little thing instead of putting a whole nother person on the other side. I see. I see. Which would be fun. That's like seesaw doctor. Like, well, let's get let's let's see how much you weigh compared to Gary. It's our unit of measurement. Just Gary. How many Gary's are you? Yeah, like every doctor's your weight opponent. Like, let's see how many me's you are is weird. You're one and a half me's. Is that bad? I don't know.

And so for thousands of years, in incredibly general terms, it's been those two ways of doing a scale. And then amazingly, takeaway number two. It's been those two ways of doing a scale. And then amazingly, takeaway number two. The American and Russian space programs developed a whole new form of scale for space stations. Oh, right. Because gravity don't work so good on space stations. Exactly. Have they tried like one astronaut stands on the scale and another astronaut sits on his shoulders to weigh him down onto the scale?

Push, push. Yeah, it's an insight that feels obvious once you hear it. All of our scale types depended on gravity. Right. It didn't really matter that we couldn't weigh people on brief trips to orbit or brief trips to the moon and back. But once we started having people on space stations long term, the American and Russian space programs developed a whole new form of scale, which directly measures mass instead of measuring gravity's effect on mass. I see. Do you have to get in like some kind of tube of water or something? Because I know you can measure things with like water displacement, but that sounds unsafe. I'll bet that would be possible, but they figured out a version with a spring and with strapping a person to it. Huh. Interesting. Because the tension of a spring is not really depending on gravity. It's just how a spring is made. It has that feature. spring and they have mass, but I'm still so confused. How do you pull down on the spring

if you're just kind of floating there? It's really ingenious. And the key sources here are SciShow on YouTube. It's an episode hosted by Michael Aranda. And then also a Mental Floss piece by Michelle Debchak expanding on that. The way it works for NASA, for the US, it's a machine called the Space Linear Acceleration Mass Measurement Device. The acronym is S-L-A-M-M-D or SLAMD. Slammed. Yeah. Slammed.

SLAMD. And it's basically a contraption where we attach an astronaut to a large spring, which we know the springiness of already, and then allow the spring to release and push them a distance of one meter. Hmm. And then NASA observes that with a camera and does a simple math equation of how quickly the spring pushed them one meter indicates their mass. And then we figure out their weight from there. Oh, so it's the resistance of the human against the spring energy. That's very interesting. Yeah. And they can even test if the spring's calibrated right by putting nobody on it and just seeing how fast it goes on its own. So it's a really good machine. That's very cool.

Yeah. That's very clever. And we, until space stations, had never used that approach to weigh something because gravity is on all the planets and is part of how we weigh stuff otherwise. Yeah, I wouldn't even think about it because personally, I've never set foot outside of Earth. I'm just not that much of an outdoorsy kind of person. So I like to stay here. I'm xenophobic. That's why I haven't done it. I just don't like other groups.

given the chance to like for free go on like one of those Bezos space trips? I don't know what, like, you know, would you or would you not? I don't like roller coasters. I don't find that fun even though I get it. So I think I probably wouldn't, but for like actual space, I would think about it. That's like worth it probably. I think I would pass as well. Cause I, it scares me. I think I would pass as well because I it scares me like there's something about it that kind of I've also heard that people when people go into space, sometimes they have the sense of like, oh, our planet's so small and we're all connected, but in a kind of scary way. So I feel like I don't want to be scared in that way. I don't want to have that kind of existential crisis of like, we're a tiny peanut floating in darkness. I think I heard the most recent famous example of that is, is Jeff Bezos personally sent up William Shatner.

Yeah. Who played Captain Kirk on Star Trek. And then he came back and was really messed up about it. Yeah. Which is clearly the opposite of Bezos' dream, you know? There's a video of like, well, Shatner, like really shaken up going like, like, we're just this tiny thing floating in blackness. It's so important to care about this planet.

And Bezos is like cracking open champagne, going like, yeah, space, woo! Yeah, and it's just such a different thing being in space. And so we need this totally different novel scale. And the Russians did a similar version where it's the same general type of machine, but they let it oscillate up and down rather than just one push. And then they measure how quickly the oscillation happens. Oh, okay.

Not only is the scale amazing, it's kind of more important than all the bathroom scales on Earth because extended time without earth gravity, it causes a lot of health problems in particular loss of muscle and loss of bone density and tracking weight is the best way, you know, like kind of on the scene to see if that's going okay. The bone density is the one that seems the scariest because if you lose muscle density, that's bad, but you can kind of gain that back. It seems like in a relatively straightforward way, but to regain your bone density, it's like doing the things to regain your bone density would risk causing problems for your bones because like some of the impacts, right? Like if you're losing bone density and then you do like a high impact kind of sport, then you could like break your fracture, one of your bones. Yeah, it's a legit, really important thing to get right. And this is really critical health care equipment, the scales on the space stations.

I'm glad they figured out a way to measure loss in bone density without like having to remove your bones in space. So good job. Give me your skeleton. Like, okay. Come on, give it here. Give me that skeleton. Fine.

Yeah. And one more number here about all that. It's the number 14,000, about 14, fine. Yeah, and one more number here about all that. It's the number 14,000. About 14,000. That is the number of animals in the London Zoo. According to the New York Times, every one of those animals gets an annual weight check in August, on top of many weight checks across the year. According to Head of Operations Angela Ryan, quote, We record the vital statistics of

every animal at the zoo from the tallest giraffe to the tiniest tadpole, end quote. This is kind of a mini takeaway number three. A big part of zookeeping is just putting the animals on scales, it turns out. Like there's other parts, but they're constantly convincing an animal to get onto a scale to weigh it. Yeah. And I mean, I'm sure we've got a lot of pet owners out there. If you've ever gone to a veterinarian with your dog or your cat and they're like, can you help me get this animal on the scale? And it's like, you are the professional. Can I help you get my own dog on a scale? No, no, no, no, no.

You went to school for this. I'm incompetent. I don't think you understand. My dog sets the rules and I try to follow them. I don't make any rules for my dog. She does what she wants. No, no, I try to get her to go on the scale. It's just, she understands just she is trained and she

understands commands, but she doesn't quite understand what I precisely want. I'm like, get up on the scale. So she'll get up and then immediately leave, right? She's like, okay, I'm on this. Now I'm gone. It's like, no, sit on the scale. It's like, okay, I'll sit and I'll look at you. Now I'm gone. Now I'm off the scale now. It's like, no, sit on the scale. It's like, okay, I'll sit and I'll look at you. Now I'm gone. Now I'm off the scale now. It's like, no, you got to wait. So the concept of sitting and waiting on the scale just doesn't really happen for my dog. So I imagine it's hard for a giraffe too, is what I'm saying. Like, what do you do?

I imagine for a giraffe, you got to like hoist it by some kind of truck and use that to weigh it. It turns out it's both easier and harder than I would have expected. The key sources here are the New York Times talking to the staff of the London Zoo and the Washington Post talking to the staff of the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Their methods of getting animals on scales is pretty much treats. I thought there would be more elaborate machinery, like you said, to it, but it's pretty much treats. And then a few animals will go for a game element. Like there's some monkeys who will follow a ball on a stick, like it's sports, and get on the scale that way. Of course. That's cute. Like you're tricking the monkeys into good health.

For a lab tech job, I used to work with monkeys who are in behavioral research. And we just had them in a little container and knew the weight of the container so that you could weigh the whole thing with them inside. That's amazing. And it also fits one of the bigger challenges that I'd never thought about for these zoos, because that London Zoo quote is true. They really measure the weight of all of their animals. And the London Zoo says that their smallest animal is the leaf cutter ant. And they regularly monitor the weight of the leafcutter ant colony and then estimate the individual weight of the ants based on subdividing that and measuring the weight of the whole thing. Right. That'd be funny if like there's one really big ant that's kind of tipping the scales for all the other ants.

It's like, you know, Jeremy. Well, it probably wouldn't be Jeremy. It'd probably be like Susan because most of the ants are going to be female. But there could be a female ant named Jeremy. Well, it probably wouldn't be Jeremy. It'd probably be like Susan, because most of the aunts are going to be female. But there could be a female aunt named Jeremy. I don't want to judge the aunts. Anyways. Yeah, our aunt listeners are getting less mad at you now. They're like, okay, she acknowledged. She acknowledged. I'm hip. I'm hip to the youth that want to be an ant named Jeremy. Yeah, they think leafcutter ants are about five milligrams in their population. Wait, each ant is five milligrams?

Yeah. Huh. I would have thought it'd be less. I guess I don't know how much a milligram is. I would have thought it'd be less. I guess I don't know how much a milligram is. Yeah, I have no sense of it. I'm simply too big, I think, to feel a milligram. I can't understand a milligram. I'm a huge, clumsy ape. I'm too large and my fingers are too sausage-like.

Yeah. Yeah, and the DCZ also says their biggest challenge is their rare songbirds, because most of them are neophobic. They're scared of new things in general. put a bunch of mealworms and other foods on the scale, zero out the scale, and also kind of leave scales around to get the birds used to them too. And then they can convince birds like the red-eyed vireo to come and get weighed and eat treats. Draw like a googly face on one of the scales, a little friendly face, like, I'm just your friendly little scale. Want to have some mealworms on top of me? And you even have to time it properly as they eat the treat, you know, because the treat is on the scale. And so you have to adjust for the treat coming off a little bit. It's a really intricate zookeeping challenge of just weighing a little

bird. Yeah. And then the other fun thing is pretty much every sizable zoo has a giant industrial scale behind the scenes. The London Zoo's largest animal is a giraffe named Maggie, who's 750 kilograms or about 1,650 pounds. I don't understand that either. I can't go too small and I can't go too big. There's a very limited amount of weight that I understand. And it's about 20 pounds. And that's it. I understand how much that is. Yeah. I just love thinking about that about zoos now. The DC Zoo has a scale for their Asian elephant, who's about 13,000 pounds. They have to put them on a scale

all the time. So do they just entice the elephant to walk on the scale or is that what happens? It's as simple as like, there's a treat over here and come get it. It's that easy. So it's also a relatively humane thing. Like they just walk onto a platform and get a treat. It's cool. Right. Okay.

Yeah. That's. Yeah, it's nice and fun. That is fun. I wonder if they have like, I know they have large MRIs at zoos, but I wonder if they've ever had a MRI big enough for an elephant. Because that seems like you would need magnets that are too powerful and would just like suck everything metal in from a two mile radius. It's like one of those machines in the final battle of a Marvel movie where the whole city is getting sucked into it. You're like, oh no.

Seems like that. Yeah. But I don't know. I've never seen, I know they have large MRIs, but I don't know if they have an MRI big enough for an elephant. Yeah. But they do have a scale. That's good to know. Right. It's also nice that they're good at this. Like, they've pretty much solved this task for weighing animals. We're not struggling to track their health in terms of that. And also, it turns out scales are sort of our first indicator in many cases of zoo animal pregnancies. Aw.

Like, if the weight keeps going up for a few weeks and there's no obvious reason, that might be time to do pregnancy test on the elephant or the, and not the ants, but you know what I mean? Just a tiny little ant baby shower. It's the queen ant and she's like, it's got so many little baby blankies for all of the hundreds of larvae she's about to lay. baby blankies for all the hundreds of larvae she's about to lay. Every gift is just that slime that they turn all food they gather into that they like to eat. Yeah. Every gift is, yeah, that sort of ambrosia, that sweet sugary substance that they regurgitate into each other's mouths. Folks, we're going to take a quick break from that note. Go have a snack if you want. And then we'll come back with lots of other modern scales that are extremely the title of the podcast. Folks, as you know, this podcast exists because of the members of Maximum Fun.

And so thank you so much to everybody who does that. The rest of you, please consider becoming a member. Please go to MaximumFun.org slash join and pitch in on this show. You get to have the joy of taking some ownership over making this part of your week exist and making it awesome. I also like that we don't just ask you to donate. We also try to do things on our end to find additional support from companies, things, products that are actually awesome and that you'd probably be excited about. The product this week is Wild Grain. Very thankful to Wild Grain for supporting this show and also filling me with food. I think most of my atoms

are Wild Grain at this point. I love their food. And the foods they do are sourdough breads, fresh pastas, artisanal pastries. So, you know, the three best foods, sourdough breads, fresh pastas, artisanal pastries, all of the things I want to eat all of the time. All of those bake from frozen in 25 minutes or less. You don't have to thaw. You just preheat your oven, throw it in, and suddenly amazing breads and amazing pastries are coming at you, or you boil and enjoy that pasta. I particularly enjoy their tonnarelli, their linguine, their other pastas that cook so quickly. You have an entire amazing weeknight dinner of that pasta, maybe a salad you tossed, maybe something else you threw together, truly in like 10 minutes. I'm not exaggerating the

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when you go to wildgrain.com slash SifPod to start your subscription. You heard me right, free croissants in every box and $30 off your first box when you go to wildgrain.com slash SifPod. That's wildgrain.com slash SifPod or you can use promo code SIFPOD at checkout. 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. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more

is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace, because, yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Folks, we're back and with more numbers. It's a very numerical topic, scales. The next number is 80,000 pounds of weight. That's heavy. That's a lot. That's a lot, Alex. It varies by state, but that's the usual legal weight limit for a truck on U.S. highways. 80,000 pounds of weight per truck.

Okay. Is that because if it's bigger, it'll damage the road? Yes. That's pretty much one of the two reasons. And we're getting into that because our highways in the US have what are called weigh stations, and many other interstate systems in the world have those. I've seen those. I've never driven a truck though, so I've never had to stop in them, but I've seen them. Yeah. It's a truly SIF kind of scale because most of us are not truck drivers. So we just see them on road trips along with McDonald's and trees and we think, oh, OK, that's a thing. And we move on. And it turns out it is a giant scale to put a truck on.

And state governments operate weigh stations for taxing trucking companies. They tax them based on the weight they're carrying because that theoretically will then be used directly for repairing roads after the weight wears them down. That makes a lot of sense. So do they use just like a giant, giant spring or something? It's the mechanical force kind of scale. And there's an amazing piece about how they work for Mental Floss. It's by writer Jake Rawson. He says that it's a mechanical force kind of scale using an elaborate electrical system and electrical gauge. And either they measure the truck one axle at a time, or they have a bigger scale that measures all the axles at once. And then the most advanced version is what's called weight in motion, where the scale is so

advanced, it can let the truck roll across it without totally stopping and just pick up a weight measurement from that. How does that even work? Basically, just a really finely calibrated scale. And then also a computer that's able to sort of suss out which part of the roll means which weight. That's nuts. Yeah, it's high tech. Take into account that, okay, this axle is holding up really the whole truck, but let's just take this part. And then they do the addition and division and they get a weight. All right, Alex, let's get into that.

Get out your TI-89 or 90. They must be past TI-89 now, right? Like they've gotten higher numbers in calculator. It's going to be some unspeakable number. I don't want to know. Don't write in. Don't tell me. I'm neophobic.

I don't want to know. Don't tell me. I'm neophobic. I don't want to know. Yeah, and so weigh stations are doing the purpose of taxing trucks to help repair roads. And then also the other purpose is a safety limit on the total weight of trucks. If it's too heavy, it could cause a big accident or get out of control on a slope or something. That makes sense. You don't want a literal juggernaut just careening through all of the road barriers and every car and just turning it into a sort of particulate matter, which... Right. As far as I know, that's like the Cybertruck strategy is just to be sort of a...

Oh, no. Cybertruck strategy is just to be sort of a extremely dense metal rectangle that no other car or human being can compete with in terms of density and inflexibility. So it just smashes through everything. That's how I understand it, but I'm not a car doctor. Yeah. These wave stations are basically keeping us all safe. That's good. Like when you see one, it should feel like seeing heroic firefighters or something like, thank you. Great. Good. I'm going to go next time. I'm going to stop there and say thank you to thank you for your service. And they're going to be so confused. Like, yeah, don't plug up the way station by saluting them because they're also really trying to get those trucks through.

Apparently these scales are astoundingly durable and well-built and also warrantied to take on that weight 200 times a day for 25 years before needing to be totally replaced. That's an extraordinary amount of weight that these scales are handling. Man. We have one more fast takeaway that we'll also get more into into the bonus this week. Because takeaway number four. The personal bathroom scale is less than 100 years old. Hmm. Like there might have been a few people who owned a big apparatus for that before 100 years ago, but those only became common in the 1940s.

That kind of tracks, actually. I'm not too surprised by that because I thought the obsessive tracking of our weight is a relatively recent thing in human society. Yeah. And it's mainly because of how scale technology has worked. I think we've always been interested in it. And then it's one of these things where the general population got a new tool and used it for that. That's interesting. I mean, I also know that there's been a lot of cultural changes, right? Like in terms of what our beauty standards are, right? Like where there's this idea of health and fitness and weight tracking that are tied into beauty standards where it's less of just like, I look in the mirror and I like what I see and more of like this quantifying, like, well, I got to see how much weight I've either gained by going to the gym or lost by going on a diet. And it all seems very like, it's interesting because on one hand, it can be useful information, but I also wonder how it impacts our mental health to quantify sort of our physical health

constantly all the time. Does it lend itself to sort of more obsession over body image or more obsession over like control over fitness and eating. Yes. And I'm going to link a few health resources about just what a few people say about that, in particular, the Cleveland Clinic, like what they say about it in terms of should you be tracking your weight a lot. And the big thing the Cleveland Clinic says is that most people's body weights fluctuate by as many as five pounds within a day. So more than two kilograms. It's mainly driven by when we eat and when we use the toilet.

Yeah. And when we've had a lot of water to drink. Like, it's all normal stuff. I've just experimentally weighed myself in the morning versus at night. And it's very different because, like, you wake up, you're all crusty and dehydrated. You get on the scale, you weigh less. And then you go on at night, you're all, you're all replenished with food and water and you get on the scale and you know, it's a, it's usually heavier. Yeah. And yeah. And so they suggest that weighing yourself can be positive for your health and can be a good way to see how you're doing, but maybe do it a maximum of two times per week and even at consistent times of the day.

That seems excessive, even two times a week. Yeah, because it changes so much kind of hour to hour that you don't want to weigh yourself so often that that's psyching you out. And like have the sudden wave of joy or worry or something else every time you weigh yourself. Like you don't want to do that too often, just mentally. It doesn't help anything. Yeah. I mean, it is useful information. Like if you're losing a lot of weight for no reason or gaining a lot of weight for no explicable reason, like, yeah, it's like good to know because that usually indicates some kind of issue, but it's like, I don't know. I just, I just wonder, like, you shouldn't have to be weighing yourself all that often just in terms

of your, in terms of your health. It really is a health benefit to us that people have these scales in our homes because you can tell if something big is happening and without needing to go to a doctor and make an appointment for that. And then at the same time, you want to just make sure your approach to it and mental health are doing okay. Yeah. Before really the 1940s, you could get a scale for your house, but it was sort of like getting an appliance more than this little tool that we have today, where a bathroom scale you can tuck into a cabinet and it's easy. And before the 1940s, people would get weighed at a doctor, especially in the 1800s, 1900s. And then the one other popular approach to it was what was called a penny scale.

In Europe and colonized North America, people got into penny scales starting in the 1880s, which was basically a public amusement on the street where you put a penny in and it gives you your weight. Oh, right. That's interesting. Yeah. It's like a fun game. Really, yeah. This was a lucrative amusement business of just putting a scale outdoors on the street in a robust enough container that it lasts a lot of years. It doesn't get like broken down by the weather.

It's like those like amusement games where it's like measure how much arm strength you have by like hitting a thing, but like measuring your weight where we don't have, but somehow those didn't become household appliances where you like whack a thing and it tells you your arm strength. Going to a doctor who's like, I have checked your results on the love-o-meter and I have to say. It's malignant. Yeah.

So that, yeah, that is interesting. But then when it becomes so common, it becomes a household appliance. It's no longer fun, usually. Yeah. It's kind of a chore.

I guess with the one exception of video games, basically all other technology. Yeah, once it's in the house, it's like, ah, boy. Video games, still cool. I don't know. Tape measures are still fun. The way that you push a button, it zoops back in like an annular tongue. I kind of like that. That's true.

Okay. Two machines. Yeah. Every other appliance. Not just a chore. No, I mean, it's kind of the paradigm shift is kind of like, you know how like people have Apple watches now and it measures things like your heart rate and your steps that you take and stuff like those kinds of things were not so ubiquitous like the i mean apple watches are not ubiquitous yet i don't

think that uptake on them is high enough they're too expensive but like uh and i don't have one and i actually kind of don't want one uh even if it was something I could just easily afford. It's like, you know, I feel like the constant monitoring of your heart rate would drive me insane with anxiety. Like, I would not want that kind of feedback of knowing what my heart rate is all the time. That could be really helpful in terms of monitoring, say, like cardiac events or something, and it could save lives. And then on the other hand, it could make a lot of people really anxious about their heart rate, because your heart rate fluctuates all the time. Sometimes you have like skipped beats and all these things, and that's all pretty normal to have. But if you're aware

of it all the time, it might make you very anxious, as I suspect it would make me extremely anxious to know, like, oh, your heart rate is up. Like, really? What's wrong? Oh, it's up even higher now. Wow. Let me keep worrying about it. See if it goes down is exactly what I did when I first got one of these watches. Yep. I relate. Did you try that out? I had that experience and I have managed it. And the other thing is I had to turn off a notification that tells you that you haven't stepped in a while because it kept going off while taping podcasts. Yeah, I know. I'm sitting for the podcast. This is not information.

It's a work hazard. But it's yet another way. Scales are so stiff. Like we, I think, take for granted that you can just go weigh yourself right now if you want to. And then before the 1940s, there were many decades of scales as basically an entertainment device. And I'll link our past episode about mirrors, because before the 1800s, maybe your doctor had a scale, but it was sort of like your appearance before mirrors were common. You had a vague sense

of what it was, but your weight was just sort of a vague concept unless you goofed around with some kind of industrial scale or agricultural scale. Right. As technology gets better, we can have a much more detailed and intimate understanding of what is going on with ourselves, what we look like, all of our sort of data points. And some of that might be useful and good for our sense of self. And some of it might drive us a little bit bonkers. Exactly. And we'll have even more about this personal weighing in the bonus. And I'm so glad people are here for getting into this amazing topic. Thank you again, Venus SubVet on the Discord. What a'm so glad people are here for getting into this amazing topic. Thank you again, Venus sub vet on the discord. What a good idea. Yeah. Fantastic idea. I'm going to go lure

myself onto a scale with a treat. I'm going to chase this shiny red ball that is bouncing around for no reason. I'm sure it's not aliens trying to weigh me on a scale. Hey, folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the Asante kingdom used balancing scales for all their transactions and as a repository of cultural lore. Takeaway number two, the American and Russian space programs developed a whole new form of scale measuring mass instead of weight. Takeaway number three, a big part of zookeeping is just putting the animals onto scales. Takeaway number four, the personal bathroom scale is less than 100 years old.

There's more about that in the bonus show, and then in the main show we had tons more stats and numbers about everything from the origin of scales to American trucks to Roman culture and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, 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 at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason that this podcast exists, so members 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 two more ways of weighing human beings. They're the most amazing penny scales and a weirdly positive scale for witch trials. penny scales, and a weirdly positive scale for witch trials. Visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of 15 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog

of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include the book The Story of Measurement by science writer Andrew Robinson, the book World in the Balance, the Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement by Stony Brook University professor Robert P. Kreese, plus some astounding work from JSTOR Daily, Atlas Obscura, Lapham's Quarterly, and other digital resources. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of

the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Scadigoke people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIF Discord where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join that Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode

78. That is about the topic of bricks. Fun fact there, the Great Wall of China is made of bricks and limestone and rice, and that combination is shrinking all of the time. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals and science and more. 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. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members and thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported

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