Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Mirrors Work

Episode Date: April 21, 2018

Whether using polished metal surfaces or clear glass, human beings have enjoyed admiring their reflections for centuries. In this episode, Josh and Chuck reflect on the types, mind-melting physics, superstitions and rather interesting history of mirrors. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Good afternoon, and welcome to Stuff You Should Know Selects. This is Charles W. Chuck Bryant here, and my pick for this week is how mirrors work from September 14, 2010. And boy, this one was a tough one.

I remember when we had the idea of doing a show on mirrors, I thought, well, that's gonna be short and not so interesting. But then I thought, oh, wait a minute, how do mirrors work? How are those things made? Where did they come from? It's pretty amazing.

So we get into all that and more, and it's a pretty fascinating episode. And this'll be one where you can kind of whip out some of these facts at your next dinner party and amaze and delight your friends and family. So enjoy how mirrors work right here, right now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We're about to talk about mirrors. Nice setup. Succinct, huh? Uh-huh. How are you? Were you in the mirrors growing up?

Look, now that we said, you know, I did it succinctly, we're gonna just blow like three minutes. Yeah, right. No, I was asking you if you were in the mirrors growing up. Were they in the mirrors growing up? Yeah, I mean, that doesn't every kid go through a phase where they're like very obsessed with their looks and mirrors and things.

Oh, yeah, I was into myself. I wasn't into mirrors. They were just a means to an end, you know? Yeah, but I was reading this, and I kind of was just thinking myself and remembering, laughing about, I remember being like 15 and like stopping to look at mirrors any time there was one to see what I look like. Yes, yeah.

And now I just, I break them. I'd forgotten all about that phase of my life though until you just brought it up. Yeah, remember that? Yeah, it's nice to be able to not look at a mirror. Like some days I'll go out, you know, after getting ready in the morning, and I have no idea what I actually look like. But I'm so, and this is cross-pollination with an earlier

podcast, I suffer from body dysmorphic disorder so badly that I don't really know what I look like anyway. What do you think you look like? I think I look a bit like the guy from Taxidermia. Hey, what's that? It's not pleasant. Okay. Well, you don't, my friend.

I don't even know what he looks like, but I can tell you you don't look like him. I appreciate that, Chuck. Chuck, do you want to hear what I had in store? Like I could not come up with an intro for this. Let's hear it. Webster's defines mirrors. Oh, God.

I'm kidding. I was going to say something equally bad, though. It was going to be something along the lines with, mirrors are ubiquitous. I've seen at least six of them today. Wow. They weren't always that way, though, Chuck. Well, it says in the article here that full-length mirrors

have only been around 400 years. That didn't seem right. That's not right. Oh, really? No. Full-length mirrors, there is a type of full-length mirror. Mm-hmm. That has been around for about 400 years.

Full-length mirrors, as far as I know, are mirrors capable of reflecting a full image of a person, have been around since about the first century AD, actually. Wow. And mirrors, us using surfaces, polished surfaces, to see our own reflection, has been around since about 6,000 BC. Holy cow. Yeah, the earliest ones were found in Anatolia, Turkey.

Wow. And they're polished obsidian. Yeah, this is a volcanic glass. Yeah. So it's dark. That's interesting, but it still produced the best reflection, I guess, at the time. At the time, sure.

Yeah. I mean, you got to go with what we had to work with, right? Well, yeah. But then after that, they led them to silver and bronze and copper polished reflections, basically. And Chuck, I don't know if you've ever held a hunk of copper. I have. Or bronze.

I haven't. Or silver. I have. Okay. It's heavy. Yeah, it's real heavy. Right? So this actually limited the size of mirrors for centuries.

Right? Yeah. And they were just kind of decorative at first, too, right? I think so. And you also had to be extremely rich to own one of these. Sure. Right? And then around, I think, the Middle Ages,

we became capable of making glass. Right. And all of a sudden, it was like mirror technology just takes a huge leap forward. Well, true, but not super forward, because the sand was pretty impure back then. They used to make the glass. So I think they said in the article, it wasn't until like the Renaissance

that it kind of really started becoming a little more polished, if you will. Terrible. And then the Venetians are who really, you know, with a glass and everything, they just took and ran with it. Well, even so, if you successfully made a mirror, it was probably extremely expensive as well. Yeah.

Because they were so rare. The process of manufacturing a mirror very infrequently produced a usable mirror. So what you're doing was adhering melted molten metal onto glass, which almost always broke the glass. Sure. So when it didn't, I'm sure you're just like, oh my God, it's the first one in seven years. I'm so excited.

Right. But then when I was reading this article, I didn't really think about it. That's what a mirror is, isn't it? I've even seen the back of mirrors. Yeah. And been like others, like metal looks like spray painted on the back. That's exactly right. Yeah.

And that was a process. What's it called? Silvering. Yeah, yeah. That was invented by a guy named Justice Von Liebig. Yeah. And in 1835, he figured out how to spray a very thin layer of silver or aluminum on the back or on one side of a glass.

And they're my friend, you have the modern mirror. Yeah. And now I think they make it now by heating aluminum in a vacuum in kind of much the same way or different methods, but the same concept. Right. Go ahead. Well, I wanted to say when you were talking about the Renaissance, the Venetians were, I guess they had the secret of mirrors under wraps.

It's like the Masons. Very much so. And if you were a mirror maker and it got out that you had told someone how to make mirrors, you were frequently killed, right? Yeah. Yeah. Trade secret. Right.

But when good mirrors were introduced, not polished obsidian, things changed a little bit, especially with art, right? Yeah, I never really considered that, but it spawned something that would become a hallmark of the art world, which is the self-portrait. Right. You could draw yourself because you could not see yourself. That's exactly right. And you could, but I mean, you're going to use like maybe a pond

or a piece of polished metal or something like that. Imagine like going out and looking at a pond and going back and sitting down as opposed to having a mirror there. Yes. Really simplified it. It's also not coincidental that good mirrors came about at the same time that linear perspective was introduced into art. What?

Yeah, there's a guy named Filippo Brunelleschi. Filippo Brunelleschi? Nice, Chuck. Thank you for doing that. And he, I guess, discovered linear perspective because I think it's one of the things that was always there. Right. We just stumbled upon it through mirrors.

Oh, really? That's how we figured it out. Yeah, because if you look at a mirror, all of a sudden linear perspective really comes into focus, if you will. Right, right. The scientist said, hey, we could use these to make like reflecting telescopes. And that was what you were at. That was a long time ago.

The first reflecting telescope was invented by a guy named James Bradley in 1721, just off the top of my head. Very well done. And the mirrors were also used by a very, very famous scientist, early scientist, named Archimedes supposedly. Yeah. I wrote an article on Archimedes death ray. Oh, did you write that?

Yeah. Did you ever read it? A while ago, just out of interest. How about that? Thanks a lot, man. Sure. Did you see in it some, I can't remember. It was one of the Ivy League schools.

They tried to set things on fire with this system of mirrors that Archimedes possibly used. Well, MIT did. That's who it was. And they succeeded. Yes. And the mythbusters claimed it was busted. Like they set a small fire, but I think they busted it because they said it wasn't

enough to like sink a ship. Yeah. But MIT, I mean, they caused quite a fire on that boat. Sure. And of course they had, I mean, I saw the setup online today. It was pretty massive. Yeah. I don't know if Archimedes had that kind of technology or at least that many mirrors

in his disposal or maybe he did. And plus they had, I think they used pretty good mirrors too. Yeah. Well, it was legend though. They don't know if the Archimedes thing is true, right? We know that he invented the water screw and that saved countless lives. What's that? It's a way to deliver water from the ground top side.

Oh, really? Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Smart dude. So Chuck, we now know the comprehensive broad strokes of the history of mirrors, right? Yes. Let's talk about mirror physics.

We work for howstuffworks.com, which means we're pretty much obligated to discuss the physics of whatever we're talking about anytime it applies, right? That's true. And mirrors are definitely one of those times. Yes. So Chuck, take it away. Well, I can cover the first part because it makes sense to me. The law of reflection, Josh says that when you bounce a ray of light off a surface, it

bounces back off in a certain way. And the angle of incidence is when it comes in, the angle of reflection, and when it bounces off, and it matches. So the way they pointed out in the article, which makes sense to me, is like it's sunset, the sun's very low on the horizon, so it bounces off at a low angle or approaches the water at a low angle, like at a lake, let's say, then it bounces off of that lake at that same low angle, like right into your face. Right.

That's why it seems brighter. If the sun's overhead, though, the sunlight is coming down under the lake, and it's reflecting back up basically over your head, you're looking at a horizontal angle, pretty much, and this is happening on a vertical angle. Yeah, that's why you'll get like more glare at a sunrise or a sunset scenario. Right. And what you're saying, the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection, right? Indeed.

If a beam of light is shot at a 90-degree angle, or no, let's say a 80-degree angle, it's going to bounce off at an opposite 80-degree angle, so both are at 80 degrees, but if you look at the whole thing, the incidence and the reflection, it's going to cover 160 degrees, right? Yes. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. You ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Life in relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so

we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So that's the first part. That's, that's how that explains how light reacts with, with reflection. And that's where the smooth surface with, with most things like say, look at my hand, man.

Take a look at these hands. Yes. And the light that's bouncing off of them, what's giving us the ability to see these huge, awesome hands is, they're not huge, are they? No. They're very proportionate. Are they smaller than average size? No.

They're bigger than mine. I got small hands. I wouldn't say you have small hands. Let's see. Yeah. Yeah. Those are like, those are totally normal. I don't have hair on the back of my hands either.

I've got hair on my first knuckles. Yeah. Robin Williams. What's allowing us to see our hands right now and judge their size and scale is what's called diffuse reflection, which the light that's coming off of all of these light bulbs right now are hitting all of these different areas, these different surfaces on my hands and it's bouncing off. It's being scattered, right?

The mirror, the highly reflective surface, what we have is called specular reflection. Right. The mirror is where it's pretty close to the law of reflection where the angle's coming in at one, or the light's coming in at one angle and coming off at the same degree in the opposite direction, right? Which is why we're allowed to see ourselves in a piece of glass with metal on the back. Yeah. And what this creates when you're looking at yourself is called the virtual image, right?

Yeah. I find this fascinating. Yeah, me too. And it's a little brain melty for me. Of course. Of course. But at the same time, you realize like, well, you've grown up around mirrors the whole time and no one has any real concept of how they work, right?

Yeah. We just take for granted that they do work, but you don't really give much thought to how they're working, right? Yeah. Like the venous effect. Did you read about that? Yeah. Let's explain that because this is where when we talk about, oh, actually the venous effect

is two different things and both of them kind of melt my brain, that the left and right being reversed, which is not actually true. Right. And then the venous effect. So let's talk about both of those. Okay. Well, the venous effect basically just shows how little we can grasp or how little we grasp mirrors and how they work.

If you look at paintings of the venous Demilo or Venus, the goddess, almost always she's holding a hand mirror. Yeah. And in the painting, you can see her face in the mirror, but she's looking at herself in the mirror. Right. And Venus is painted in the mirror for the benefit of the viewer, but you take for granted that she's viewing herself when in actuality, if you could see Venus's face in the mirror,

she wouldn't be able to see herself. She'd see you in the mirror. Right. Because of that angle or the law of reflection. Yeah. And that's the only way I finally understood that was when I remembered like in my film set days when you shoot a person looking in a mirror, they don't see themselves in the mirror clearly because you would see the camera behind them.

Exactly. They're angled and it looks like they're looking at themselves and primping, but they're not seeing themselves. It's pretty cool. Right. So that makes sense to me now. It does, doesn't it? Yeah.

Okay. The other thing you were saying is left and right. Yeah. It's not actually left and right. Yeah. This one was a little brain-melty, but I think I finally got it too. Okay. So consider that what you're not, what you're seeing isn't actually your reflection, but

another version of yourself in the mirror world. Right. Right. If you look at it that way, then the mirror represents the halfway point. It's always halfway between you and your virtual self. Right. Right? Because your virtual self, the image of yourself in the mirror is always twice as, it's always

two times away from you with the mirror representing the halfway point. Right. So you're two feet from the mirror and your virtual self is another two feet away from you. Right. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. And the left and right thing isn't really left and right.

It's really front and back. That's right. That are reversed. You, again, think of yourself as the virtual image. Yes. If you walk into the mirror world, you take, you go another two feet away from where you're just standing. So you're now, you're four feet away from where you're just standing and turn around.

Right. Which is weird because it actually gives the virtual image something of its own identity, doesn't it? It does. It's a little creepy. Yeah. So when you're looking at a mirror, it's not a reflection of you from the mirror's perspective. It's like the one example they gave was if you wrote something on a piece of paper and

then held that paper up to the light and looked at it from the back, it would appear backwards. Right. Right. You're just behind it. Yes. Crazy man. Isn't it? Yeah.

It's pretty interesting stuff. And I got to say, when you, two things, when you mentioned doing mirrors, I said to myself, huh, really? And then when we told Jerry what we were doing this on, she was like, huh, really? Yeah. But it's, I think it's much more interesting than I originally thought. Well, again, it's like the butterfly swings, you know, like we just, we have to know that if we're going to understand absolutely everything that's going on in the world.

Which is our mission. Yes. Yeah. Should we talk about curved mirrors now? Yeah. Because we were talking about virtual images. Yeah. There's actually a way to project a real image.

Right. Where this thing isn't in the mirror. It's outside of the mirror, but it's not really there. It's a projected image. Right. And that uses concave mirrors. You might be familiar with holograms. Yes.

Right. Is that the same concept there? Yeah. Concave mirrors. And actually, if you want to see a really cool example of a hologram produced by a set of concave and flat mirrors, you should type in mirage in YouTube and look for the one that's lowercase, just mirage. And it's a little piggy.

And it's pretty cool, the demonstration that this guy does. Oh, really? Yeah. I'll check that out. But Chuck, there's concave and convex, right? Yeah. Convex is the one that curves outward and it reflects at a wider angle near the edges in the center.

So things are actually smaller and you can cover more area. So that's why they'll use those. They'll stick them on like your passenger mirrors so you can see more area around your car. Right. And it also notes, you know, objects are smaller than they appear, or closer than they appear. Right.

Objects are smaller than they appear. But they are smaller than they appear. But that's not really, that doesn't matter, it's whether they're like in your back seat or not. Yeah. And they actually, there have been rumors over the years that department stores put convex mirrors, slightly convex mirrors in their changing rooms to make you like appear taller and thinner in the clothing that you try on.

Remember that Seinfeld where Elaine like buys that dress and she figures out that they had a skinny mirror and I think Barney's or Bloomingdale's or something? Yeah, I forgot about that. Yeah. I don't know. I think that's probably urban legend, but who knows? Chuck, the other one, like we said, was concave, converging. We use those for holograms.

They also use that to light the Olympic torch. Yeah, I didn't realize that either. I think that's a nod to Archimedes too. Probably so. But you're probably a little more acquainted with convex mirrors, no, concave mirrors for like shaving or, you know, those horrible mirrors that show your hair in detail. Those are awful. They really are.

Don't ever look in those. Non-reversing mirror, which really is pretty simple, it's just two mirrors perpendicular to each other, right? Yeah. And the deal is with that, they meet at the angle and so you technically can see a non-reversing image, but you've got that line running down the center of you. They don't make like a flat, single non-reversing mirror. No.

They don't. I think it's physically impossible. Yeah, it's not like they don't make it. Like they're not interested. It just can't be done. But what's funny is there's a guy named John Derby who has a patent in 1887 when he was alive. He had a patent for a non-reversing mirror by sticking two mirrors together.

I could get a patent for that. I could fill out the patent application for that. You could? Yeah. It's like take mirror A and stick it perpendicular to mirror B. Right. There. Give me my patent. Well, but then John Derby's family would come after you.

Hopefully it ran out by now just for simple-ness. Josh two-way mirrors. I've seen in every cop, shakedown movie ever made. Yes. Now this is fascinating. Chuck, how does a two-way mirror work? Well, it's really pretty easy. It's just, it's the same concept of a mirror, but it's a very thin, it's very much a lighter

reflection, the material they use, and the coated side when it faces the lit room, some of the light reflects and some goes into the dark room behind it. So basically, like you know, you can't, you can only see one way because of the light mainly. Right. So it's just like very thin reflective surface where if you're not lit, if you turn in, if you turn on lights in both rooms, you'd be able to see through that reflective surface, right?

Yeah. It's all about the lighting. So there's several movie mirror things that are done in like every movie and that's one of them with the cop movie and inevitably the person getting questioned will always walk right up and like be staring into the face of the person on the other side that they can't see. Right. And then the other favorite of mine, which one of the SNL shorts eight was the classic

horror movie scene where you, where you look in the medicine cabinet and the mirror and then you open the medicine cabinet and then you close it and the dude is right behind you. Yeah. And then there's again on YouTube, I think there's a montage, like a four minute, twenty minute montage of that being used over and over and over. Hundreds of times, dude. And it still gets people.

Yeah. But now the whole spin is to do that and then there's not someone there and then they'll turn around and that's where they are or something. Yeah. Just jerking the audience around. That's in there too. Oh, it is? Uh-huh.

Yeah. Yeah. It's not just people closing, there's someone saying there's ones where they're not standing there. Yeah. I love those movie conventions that are, the other one too is, it doesn't mean that you can do with mirrors, but the scene where you're, where someone is searching for the files and then the person's office after dark and, you know, they're coming up the steps

and they open the door and you're like, they're pinched and then they open the door and the person's gone and there's like a window open. Right. And it's just like the curtains. Yeah. Stantly blown. Hundreds and hundreds of time is still done. Yeah.

I'm still like, oh my gosh, here they come. What about poltergeist, that great classic mirror scene where the guy's like picking at that little blister and ends up pulling his whole face off? Yeah. That's pretty creepy. Yeah. Classic. Thank you, Toby Hooper.

Did he make that? Yeah. Oh, God, that's right. Yeah, he overproduced it, right? That's right. Hey, dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. You ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step

by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Life in relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. What else, Chuck? Well, there's some superstitions around mirrors and folklore, um, summoning Bloody Mary by saying her names three times in a mirror or Candy Man. If you're a little more recent, breaking a mirror, supposedly bad luck because, um, for seven years because they believe that the soul regenerates every seven years. Yeah.

That explains it. Doesn't it? Yeah. And that's why vampires have no soul. That's why they can't see themselves in mirrors. And a couple of them I haven't heard of are, uh, if you give birth and look in a mirror too soon afterward, you will see ghostly faces peek out from behind the reflection. Right.

I'd never heard that one, had you? No. I had heard of sitting Shiva though. Yeah. What's the deal with that one? Well, if you're Jewish and somebody dies part of the morning process is to cover all the mirrors in the house. Oh, did you say that in the Talmud?

Shut up Chuck. Also we have gotten conflicting, um, information about whether or not it is taboo among Judaism to be cremated. Did you notice? Yeah. And what we, and I'll stand behind what we found, which was that Reformed Jews will do it, but they, it's still not like encouraged and then, but it is actually forbidden in the actual Jewish text.

Right. So there. Fine. Is that it? I think that's about it. Um, oh, New Year's Eve, right? Yeah, I hadn't heard of this one either. If you go up to a mirror on New Year's Eve with a candle in your hand and you say the

name of a dead person, probably a dead loved one, um, in a loud voice, their face should appear in the mirror. Never heard that. And this is my favorite one, the ancient Chinese mythology. Uh-huh. Um, you know how you see weird movement in like the corner of a mirror every once in a while? Have you ever noticed that?

Uh, sure. I just figured it was like your mind playing tricks on you. I'm sure it is, unless you're Chinese, pal. Okay. Then what it is are the, um, the mirror people, the mirror kingdom. There's a group of opposites who live in the mirror kingdom and they are sworn to do battle with us. Really?

Yeah. And if this were North mythology, we'd lose. Creepy. And we may lose in this case too. But they are in a, I guess a magical slumber, um, but when we catch little weird unexplained movement in the corners of mirrors, um, this is these people stirring in their sleep, waiting to wake up and kill us all in our sleep. I'll remember that next time I see something in the corner of my eye.

Yeah. So that's it for mirrors. Um, that's it. I mean, that is it. Nothing else. There is literally nothing else to say about mirrors. Nope. And, uh, if you think that there is, we defy you to go to howstuffworks.com and type mirrors

into the search bar, pal. Darya. Yeah. Listener mail time. Listener mail, Josh. This is a little, uh, uh, cool organization that we want to support here. And how long have you been smoke free, buddy? It's, uh, over four months now.

Crazy. Isn't it? So proud. Thanks, man. Uh, hi, Chuck and Josh. Thanks for listening to your podcast and always share my new knowledge with friends. I needless to say, I'm the Friday night smarty pants and I rather like it. Why I'm writing, I want to promote the New York city walk to beat lung cancer.

I'm one of the head chairpersons at 28 years old. I never thought I would share anything, but I love my new responsibility as I'm making a huge difference, uh, to an underdog cause. How could cancer be an underdog, Josh? Is that a question? I don't know. I think it's pretty bad. When you hear someone has lung cancer, the first thing that comes to your mind is probably

did he or she smoke? It never fails. It is a valid question, uh, funding for lung cancer is completely dwarfed by other cancers that are nearly as fatal and is completely due to the stigma of a smoker's disease. Uh, I get turned away by sponsors and media all the time because no one wants to support a disease that is so preventable. But the thing is it isn't people who get LC second hand, uh, for no reason at all happens all the time.

Why don't people ask those with skin cancer if they wore sunscreen or people who have heart attacks, if they ate well, it's just silly, but looking at the numbers, it just doesn't add up. Um, so here's what we're going to do, Jess. Since you were the chair, uh, there's an event in New York city, New York city. It's called the walk to prevent, I'm sorry, the walk to beat lung cancer lung cancer. And it is October 24th, 2010 in battery park. And if you would like to take part in this walk to beat lung cancer, Jess would really

appreciate it. You can go to a website, www.lungevity, see what they did there,.org slash nyc walk. So that is L-U-N-G-E-V-I-T-Y.org slash nyc walk. Or Twitter, uh, you can follow this and get information at walk number four lung cancer, all one word. Or Facebook at walk to beat lung cancer. And Jess would appreciate your participation. So our New York city buddies that we met while we were there, uh, spread the word and get

out and walk. Yeah, that's awesome. And if you're one of those people who poo-poo's lung cancer or helping battle lung cancer, yeah, maybe it's time you took a long look in the mirror because you could be a jerk. If you have any kind of, uh, organization like Chuck and I to give a shout out to, we consider those on a case by case basis, don't we Chuck? We sure do. Um, it definitely doesn't help, or it definitely doesn't hurt to, uh, grease the wheels.

If you know what I mean. And we're not talking about cash prizes. No, we can't legally do that. Can we? No. Uh, you can tell us about your organization in an email, just send it to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

Want more how stuff works? Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever

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