The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Magical Pee, a Feline Telephone, an Infuriating Math Problem

Episode Date: June 19, 2019

The weirdest things we learned this week range from reading pee bubbles to discern one's future, to turning a living, breathing cat into a functional telephone. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Rachel just copped her hands and I really thought you were going to say they just had to read it quickly before it fell out of their hands. Dad, just quit pee in my hand. I'll tell you your future. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we, also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Jason Letterman. I'm Claire Maldarelli. So on the weirdest thing I

learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we picked up in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera. And then we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Jason, welcome. Thank you, Rachel. You're a rarefied guest here.

Stop it. That weirdest thing. So why don't you go first with your teas? Sure. My story today is of two scientists who turned a living cat into a working telephone. What? What? Rude, first of all.

Yeah. A real, a real, I'd say. It's a real d' b-nove, in the name of science, of course. Yeah, there are a lot of b-c moves in the name of science. Yeah. Did the cat survive or did it die? I can't tell you until we get to my story. Claire, what's your teeth?

There is a math problem that when published in a magazine column stumped at least 1,000 mathematicians. And the answer is so simple. Wow. Okay, here's mine. Doctors often take urine samples to help diagnose their patients. Many of us have peed in cups, I presume. But before we had modern lab tests, physicians had to visually examine, smell, and even taste their patients pee.

Oh, I knew you were going to say that. I knew you were going to say taste it. And I was like, please don't say taste it. And I knew it was coming. They tasted the pee, J. Jason, you heard it here first. Well, since Jason's tease has already inspired questions, I think you have to go first. Okay.

So before we start, I think it's important to talk about how people hear and the difference between a hearing aid and a cochlear implant. So all sound is just vibrations. As they travel through the air, your outer ear, that is the part of your ear on the outside of your head, which is called the Pina, captures the. captures these sounds and funnels them to your eardrum and your eardrum and the other parts of the middle ear vibrate and transfer those sounds to the cochlea in the inner ear. And the cochlea is what converts that sound and those vibrations into information that goes to your brain and your brain interprets.

And that is how you hear. It's a lot more complicated than that, but those are the basics. A hearing aid is a device with its own battery that amplifies the sounds. and it's great if you have mild hearing loss or even moderate hearing loss. But the important thing is that the parts of the ear that are responsible for hearing generally work, the hearing aid is just boosting the volume. A cochlear implant is meant for someone whose ears have either stopped working or never worked, and it converts sound into digital information. So it's no longer the original sound wave that came out of something or someone's mouth. and it must be surgically implanted within the inner ear, so it bypasses the parts of the ears

that don't work in order to get a signal to the auditory nerve. Anyway, all of this is to say there's no direct link between the cat telephone and cochlear implants, but the cat telephone laid the groundwork for their invention by proving that sound could be converted into digital information. I actually, in the course of my research, found a video from Arizona State University that demonstrates what hearing with a cochlear implant sounds like. So I'm going to play a clip for you, and you'll hear three different sentences, first as a person with a fully functional ear would hear them,

and then as somebody with a cochlear implant would hear it. It was a full moon three nights ago. Don't live beyond your means. That was an unexpected outcome. So as you can hear, it's converting soundways into digital information. which the brain is then able to interpret. So on to the cat telephone. We're going on a little trip, just about two hours away from our Midtown Manhattan studio to Princeton, New Jersey.

And the year is 1929. Professor Ernest Glenn Weaver of Princeton University and his research assistant Charles William Bray are trying to see how sound is received through the auditory nerve. And so naturally, they decide to use a cat for their test. Naturally. Naturally, as one does. It better not have been their pet cat. I don't believe it was their pet cat, but I don't know where the cat came from, to be perfectly honest. I'm sure it was just one they found.

Remember my episode about the Brown Dog Riots? I do remember how doctors just killed dogs all the time. So imagine how they felt about cats. Go on. Okay. On that note. So to access the auditory nerve, they had to. cut open the cat's head.

Jeez, Jason. I know, I know. And they had to remove most of its brain. Like I said, doctors. Doctors. Go on. Never go to them. Eat an apple.

Then they attached one end of a telephone wire to the auditory nerve, and they attached the other end to a telephone receiver 50 feet away in a soundproof room. Bray then talked into the cat's ear, which through the telephone. wire Weaver was able to hear in the soundproof room. And what they proved was... How? Jason, I'm sorry. I can't even let you tell this story.

I'm at the edge of my seat. No, it's okay. So what they did was attached to digital object, the telephone wire, to the auditory nerve. And they were able to prove that you could convert sound into digital noise that can be understood at another place. Wow. Yeah. What did they whisper to the cat?

So it's a great question. So what I was able to find is that they were very concerned that the noise would become either distorted or sound different on the other end of the wire. And they talked, I don't know what they said, but they talked in different pitches or frequencies to test how it sounded. And on both ends, the noise sounded the same. So I like to imagine he just meowed at different pitches. It's like, meow, mea, meow, yum, yum. The meow mix commercial. Yeah.

Yeah. This is reminding me of, I want to say it was Thomas Edison had these dolls he made with wax cylinders in them to make sound. And just those kinds of early recording devices, the sound they produce when played back is so creepy because it was like it was not very good. The wax cylinders inside the dolls did not make a really, there was not high fidelity on those. recordings. So it's just this like warbly sort of like nightmare telephone game ending with something that sort of horrifically reminds you of Mary had a little lamb. So anyway, I'm, I'm glad that they were successful after shoving wires into a cat's brain. Yeah. No, it worked. So they wanted to make sure that there wasn't something else that was sending the signal, that it really was coming

through the auditory nerve. So they attached the wire to a bunch of other different. parts within the head and muscles and things and they didn't get a sound. Just poke it around and the cat's skull with a wire. More or less. Science is great. And Claire, to answer your question, of until this point, the cat had been alive. What? And then to make sure to see essentially that the electricity within the cat's brain was what was powering the wire.

But didn't you say they chopped the head off? No, I know cats have nine lives, but. They just cut it open to get to the brain. Oh, okay. I was thinking of full chop. No, not a whole chop. Just a little off the top. Oh, no.

And there were also other things that they did. Like, they at one point cut the blood circulation off to the head, and then the signal started to fade, so they let the blood go back and realized. So they strangled the cat. They strangled the cat. And then we're like, okay, confirmed. There were a bunch of tests. It's not pretty, but it is science, technically.

So they killed the cat. and the signal was fine and then it kind of degraded and then it stopped. Well, obviously. Well, not obviously. They didn't know what was powering it. They didn't know if the auditory nerve could work if the cat was dead. Oh, I see. Yeah, and then the cat would speak to them from beyond the grave to be like, what the hell?

So anyway, that's the story of how two scientists turned a cat into a telephone. So did they write up a paper about this? or like just like an afternoon activity. They must have written something, right, because we're able to find documents about it. Right. But I was not able to find why they ultimately did this experiment. Like it proved a point, but they didn't use the research to then go further with any concepts, is my understanding.

Maybe they were just like super embarrassed by it. They're like, we made a scientific discovery, but in such a weird way. And we also struggled again. Yeah. You got to strangle a few cats, as I say. No, you do not. They were not the cat's meow. Oh.

Was it just one cat? So one cat basically was the genesis of cochlear implants. I mean, not directly, but it was able to help prove the concept. RIP cat. RIP cat. I wonder if they named it. Oh. That's what I was just thinking.

Well, on that note, that cheery, cheery note, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. Okay, and we're back. And I'm going to talk about urine. As long as it's not dead cats. Yeah. Yeah, and how. There are no dead cats in this story.

Look, the show does not specify that the fact can't be depressing. It just has to be weird. That's true. That is very true. We have had some depressing facts on this podcast. I don't know why the strangled cat is just hitting me especially hard today. You know, when we. We started this podcast. Both you and I did not have cats.

That's true. Yeah. Yeah. And now we both have cats. Wow. What are the odds? What happened to us, Rachel? We were so squarely dog people. And we love our cats. I do. I love my cranky 13-year-old lady cat. Okay. Now I miss her. I haven't seen her in like six hours. So, as I said at the beginning of the show, this is about doctors using urine to diagnose disease and not in clinical tests in a lab, but really getting in there. So this concept of euroscopy or, you know, looking at urine to analyze it, it dates back thousands of years. There's one research paper I found that said it was throughout history the first bodily fluid to be examined. I wasn't quite sure if they meant they thought that the first time someone examined a bodily fluid for medical purposes, it was urine or if it's always the first box people checked off. But I could find either believable because it's like you can make as much of it as you need to.

It is the most renewable resource, really, as a bodily fluid, I would say. You know, you don't got to like cut people open. It's got to wait. Give them some water and wait. Yeah, just got to give them some water and wait. So it's easy. Hippocrates, who was born around 460 BC. He noticed that fever changed the smell of urine.

The Greco-Roman Galen, who was born in 131 AD, he really ran with the idea and thought that urine could reveal basically anything because it was the best way to check the balances of your four humors, which of course for a long time was really the basis of all medicine. This idea that you had four humors, you had your blood, your yellow bile, your black bile, and your phlegm. Right? Yes, that's correct. I know my humors. So, yeah, and he, Galen, believed that the urine was the best way to see how those four humors were doing. So extrapolating from that, he thought you could use urine to diagnose everything. And for a long time, many people agreed.

There was this Arab Jewish physician named Isaac Judeus, who lived in the ninth and early 10th century. Allegedly, he lived for like 100 years. So that's pretty great. He wrote out a long treatise on the various colors of urine, and he abridged it into something like a portable flowchart, apparently. And that was wildly popular because people love portable references, especially if they're flowcharts. Those still exist in doctors offices and gyms. They're like, are you dehydrated? Yeah.

Yes. According to this article in Doctors Review by Jackie Rosenheck, it had more than 20 hues of urine. Oh, wow. And it said it could diagnose every known disease. And into the Middle Ages, this persisted. Doctors designed a flask called a matula that was just this clear flask with a narrower neck and a wider bottom. So it was designed for someone to be able to urinate into and then you to be able to hold it up and swirl it. And that kind of classic like doctor holding up a thing and looking at it was originally an illustration of them holding up pee.

Urine. Wow. It made a lot of sense in the Middle Ages for people to be. really into looking at your urine. Because of the church's influence, there was very little physical or visual examination of patients, especially if they were women. So for a long time, most diagnostics were like as hands off as possible. At our first live show, I talked about this doctor who studied a patient with a fistula a hole in his stomach. And he did some like really gnarly stuff to this guy. But one of the benefits of his research is that

that he really reintroduced the idea of, like, actually examining your patient to figure out what was wrong with them. And for years, that had not been the case, which made urine very useful. So a lot of this I got from the blog of Lindsay Fitzherris, who's a mental... Love Lindsay Fitzharris. Yes, she's great. Author, Medical Historian, really cool stuff on her blog. And this is from a few years ago. In 1674, the English physician Thomas Bullis famously described the urine of a diabetic as wonderfully sweet, as if it were imbued with honey or sugar, it's the wonderfully that really gets me. Because that is entirely subjective.

If he's tasting urine all the time, like it should be the extra. Of all the urine I have tasted, the sweetest, the most wonderfully sweet. It's true. I guess relatively speaking, it probably was pretty wonderful. And this is actually true. You know, if you have really high blood sugar, it does make your urine. at least smell sweet. I don't think there are a lot of people looking to confirm that it tastes sweet, but it's believable.

Around the Middle Ages and into this time, people were using kind of the modern version of that urine flow chart we talked about. So here I have a picture of a classic urine wheel. Oh, my goodness. There's so many hues of urine. There are so many colors of urine here. Okay, explain the green one. We'll get to that. I have a whole thing at the end about all the colors your pee can be.

So stay tuned, listeners. So physicians would reference these urine wheels to diagnose almost anything. And the urine wheel was so widely shared that lots of untrained people started to use them for like quack diagnoses. And then there was also divination, which was called uromancy. Oh, no. God. I also found out that ancient Egyptians allegedly used poop and how dung beetles acted with your poop as another way of divining the future. So I'm going to be looking into that more for a later episode. But for now, we will just say that there was this kind of overlap between quack, fake doctors who prayed on people who couldn't afford real medical care, who just were like, I have a color wheel. I printed it off of Wikipedia. I can point to the color that your pee is and tell you what's wrong with you. Obviously, they didn't have Wikipedia then at that time or printers, but you know what I mean.

And there was a lot of this weird overlap between pseudomedicine and divination. Apparently a lot of the uran, the uromancey had to do with like reading the bubbles in pee. It's like the tea leaves, but the bubbles. Yes. reading the pee leaves, if you will. Well done. Well done. Thank you.

Not all pee has bubbles, though. Maybe that's part of it, Claire. And it was also kind of like you had it sitting in a vessel for like a long time. I really, like, in writing with the air. And I really thought you were going to say they just like had to read it quickly before it fell out of their hands. Stats. Just like pee in my hand. I'll tell you your future.

And there was also just one more Eurobansy thing that I came across was that apparently during the witch trials, one of the ways they would test whether or not you were a witch was that they would put your pee in a bottle with some like nails and stuff. And then they would put a stopper in the bottle. And if the stopper popped out, you were a witch. Was the stopper always going to pop out? Probably. Okay.

That's how most tests for witches worked. So, yeah, there was actually a paper written in 1679 by Thomas Bryan called the piss prophet or certain piss pot lectures. So he basically wanted to discredit uromancy, which during the 17th century was a big craze. People wanted to interpret urine in all manner of fanciful ways. And there's this line in the opening of it where he says, the urine is a harlot or a liar. And I just love, I love the way people wrote about medicine in the 1600s. Those were the only two options, a harlot or a liar. Is your urine a harlot or a liar?

Check it on the color wheel. But he basically was saying like all these crazy people coming in, looking at your urine, trying to divine stuff from it, just throw the piss away. It's unimportant. And that was kind of misguided because we do use urine in clinical tests today. And that brings me to how I will end this segment, which is with a list of different colors your pee can be. Yes.

And explanations for them. Is one of them purple? And it's also from Scrubs. Because there is Scrubs episode with Purple P. Did someone have Porphyria in Scrubs? Yes. Yes, they did. Wow.

And J.D. found it out by Google. Yeah, because how often do you see purple pee? Yeah. That's one of those things that it's one time I got like an autoimmune disease that's like really rare if you're over the age of 10. Mm-hmm. Were you over the age of 10? I was. I was 18.

Oh, wow. My doctor at one point, like, pulled out his laptop and started Googling stuff because that is what doctors have to do. They can't remember literally everything all the time. And they certainly, if they treat adults and you have a disease that almost never happens to people over the age of 10, it is acceptable for them to need to reference the internet. It's not to say doctors aren't smart. Doctors are very smart people. My mom's the doctor. Hi, mom.

my mom too. Yay. Hi, mom. But, you know, a lot of times doctors would still be doing the same thing. You just wouldn't see it. They'd be in their office looking at a book instead of looking at Google. So I like that he respected me enough that he just opened his laptop and was like, let's see what we got here. We'll find out together. Wait, can I guess a disease for pee? Yes. Okay. B-tenuria gives you red pee. Yes. Not a disease. It is a lack of a disease. A genetic. A lack of a disease. Can I guess one? Another. one? Yes, Jason. Thanks for the abusing as a maple syrup pee disease. Oh, yeah. That is a real thing. It's deadly. Jason, we bring up the terrible ones. It's the only one I know that is pee in the name. Okay, let's let me get into it.

Go ahead. I have a whole list. Okay, so first of all, urine should not be clear. I was definitely told, as a chat, I, Jason just dropped his phone and I thought he was like throwing his hand out in shock. What? Excuse me? My life is a lie. I was definitely told as a child that you should be drinking so much water that your urine is clear. But that charts in the gym say.

But that means you're over hydrated. And it's true that being over hydrated is on the whole less dangerous from being dehydrated. But it is dangerous. Overhydration can kill you because it dilutes electrolytes and other essential salts in your blood. So yeah, if your urine is totally clear, you're like a plant that starts. to leak out over the edges. And you should sit by a window not getting watered for a few hours, I would say. There was that famous radio giveaway where someone was trying to win an Xbox or something

and they had to drink as much water as possible and they died from that. Yeah. So bad. I'm full of cheery facts today. Dark yellow, easy, dehydrated. You know, drink some water. The opposite of the advice I just gave, you're a very dry plant. Get watered.

Red or pink. So maybe you just ate a bunch of beats, as Claire mentioned. There's a great Portlandia sketch about people sitting on the toilet calling 911 screaming, and then it turns out they all eat beats. It's true. It can happen to you. And your poop and pee may be kind of pink, and that's okay. Just like think to yourself, have I eaten beats recently? And if the answer is yes, give it some time.

Don't worry about it. Red or pink urine can also be blood in the urine. Grab dough. I love to. diseases. We're not at Rhabdo yet, Claire. Be patient. So it also could be blood, which can be pretty harmless. It can be just like a urinary tract infection, but you know, you should get that treated. But it could also be a sign of kidney stones. It can be a sign of cancer. In some cases, apparently very strenuous exercise can turn your P-red because muscle cells are releasing myoglobin. And that means you

need to like chill out. That's rhabdomyosis. Yeah, yeah. And that can also be. dark brown urine. So if your pee is a very dark brown and you've recently worked out really hard and your muscles hurt, you got the rab dough. Which as Claire explained on an earlier episode can also come from eating a lot of quail. So if you ate a lot of quail and your pee is really brown, you should also probably go to the hospital. Dark brown or black pee in general, not a great sign. And we're talking true brown, you know, that dark yellow of dehydration, we should all be familiar with. P colors are relative. You know what's normal for you. But if it's truly brown or black, it could be a liver condition. It could actually be melanoma. Melanoma can

sometimes put melanin into circulation in your blood and some can end up in your urine. It can also be from eating fava beans or rhubarb. Oh, that's totally a genetic condition as well. Yeah, basically any color your urine can be can also be caused by like eating a certain food or or taking a certain medication. So don't assume something is horribly wrong if your pee suddenly turns a weird color. But do, like, investigate it. Go doctor. He is generally supposed to be pale yellow.

So, like, ask yourself, have I eaten beats? Did I just start a new medication that my doctor warned me might turn my pee black? Hopefully they would warn you. That seems like something that's warn you about. Orange pea is either lots of carrot juice, like a whole ton. Your skin would probably be orange by that point. Or medication. Another scrubs episode.

Or medication. There is a very common over-the-counter medication for decreasing pain from UTIs. That makes your pee like fluorescent orange. Milky, which is just a horrible way to describe pee, but that's not the word I chose. This is like an intense UTI, so go to the doctor or uric acid crystals from purine-rich-rich foods like anchovies, herring, and red meat. So if your doctor says you don't have a UTI and you have milky pee and it bothers you, maybe cut down on the red meat, friend. Also, foamy pee can be from like super high protein.

So if you're on like a keto diet and your pee is foamy, that's what's going on. Blue diaper syndrome. What? Pardon? Is a rare genetic metabolic disorder characterized by the incomplete intestinal breakdown of tryptopane, which is famously in Turkey but is also in many, many things. Eating turkey doesn't make you sleepy because you eat tryptophan like every day. It's the carbs.

But blue diaper syndrome is so named because people are usually diagnosed as children when some blue urine shows up in their diaper. And it is just from some different, you know, compounds that end up in the urine when your body is having trouble breaking down tryptopane. Okay. We're almost done with urine colors. There are only so many colors. A whole rainbow of urine. Green urine can come from eating asparagus. And you can smell a weird.

Right. Some people can smell. That was almost going to be my fact until I was like, that's a two-sentence fact. And we're done. There's kind of an ongoing scientific debate about whether, because it's a genetic difference between people who can smell the asparagus pee. But it's not clear whether the difference is that your pee smells or that you can smell the pee. Right. I think it's the latter.

that you can smell the pee? They think so, but it's like, it's possible there are also some people who don't produce the compound that makes it smell. Interesting. Blue pigment for medication can make your pee look green because your pee is yellow. It can also be a sign of a serious UTI that's gotten into your blood, but that's usually just in people with catheters. And that brings me to purple urine, which, of course, as Jason said, is a sign of porphyria. Porphyria actually means purple. a group of diseases caused by buildup of proteins that are not supposed to build up.

And it can cause all sorts of symptoms. We talked about it in our episode with Jess's vampire facts. But King George, the third, Mad King George, was famously said to have had purple urine when he died. And it is just because of those proteins getting into the urine. Apparently your poops are also purple. Port wine colored, I believe. I read on one source. That's upsetting.

And I don't know why. But then there's purple urine bag syndrome, which, according to a study I read, occurs predominantly in constipated women who are chronically catheterized. And it's a bacterial urinary infection that makes sulfatase and phosphatase. And the indigo and indirubin in their urine that results from that particular set of circumstances makes purple. And I have a picture. Wow. It's very purple. That would freak me out.

Oh, my goodness. Yeah. I would definitely agree. That's somebody's urine. Yeah. And it's purple. It's called purple urine bag syndrome because it really only happens in people who have catheters. So you see a whole, whole darn bag of this very purple pee.

Sure. You're unlikely to look down in the toilet one day and see purple pee, I guess, unless you have porphyria. In which case, I hope you seek medical attention. Oh, no, no, man. What? I was, never mind. Do you need to seek medical attention? No, no, I was going to talk more about the scrubs episode and say the only reason they knew it turned purple is because it was exposed to UV radiation.

It does, it is much more profoundly purple under UV light, as are like the skin of people with Porphyria. Really? It's upsetting. But, yeah, it can heavy purplish hue even to the naked eye. Got it. I once took some B vitamin that turned my pee. Vitamins? Yeah.

Was it like bright yellow? Like a highlighter. Yeah. Yeah. Apparently having more vitamins than you need in general can make your pee bright yellow because you're just peeing them out. Yeah, you're just peeing it out. Thanks to money. So anyway, that's everything I learned about pee today.

That's great. And with that, I think we will take a quick break and then we'll be right back. Okay, we're back. And Claire, why don't you send us off with your fact? I would love to. It has nothing to do with dead cats or urine or any other bodily fluids or diseases for once. Wow. I'm genuinely surprised. Thank you.

Yeah. Proud of you for expanding your horizons. Proud of myself as well. So in a 1990 issue of Parade Magazine, a woman named Marilyn Voss Savant, who's an American magazine columnist, who wrote this column callum. called Ask Maryland, hence her name, published a brain teaser, now known most commonly as the Monty Hall Problem, based on a 1970s game show. Oh my God, I hate the Monty Hall. I love the Monty Hall problem.

It was on Brooklyn Nine-N-N-N-N-N-N-Rew. So, yes, also on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, also in a lot of other TV shows and books that I can't recall at the moment. But it was based on this 1970s game show with a similar scenario to the statistical brain teaser that I'm about to describe, but slightly different. Once it was published, with Answer Key included, it caused such an uproar amongst the mathematics community that almost 1,000 mathematicians from across the country

called in to tell her she was wrong. Spoiler, she was actually correct. An earlier version, the three-prison problem, was analyzed in 1959 by a guy named Martin Gardner in the journal Scientific American, and he called it a wonderfully confusing little problem. And noted that in no other branch of mathematics, is it so easy for experts to blunder as in probability theory. So basically saying that statistics is where all mathematicians fail.

So here's how it went. Suppose you're on a game show and you're given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car and behind the other two are goats. You pick a door, say door number one, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say number three, which has a goat. He then says to you, do you want to pick door number two? Is it your advantage to switch from your choice door number one to door number two? I have to say clearly it is in my advantage to pick door number three so that I walk away with a goat.

Well, Rachel, you would choose a goat over a new car. Actually, I think I would too. I love goats. Yeah, I don't. Who's got room for a car in New York City? Exactly. That's true. I'll make room for a goat.

Our producer just goes, who has room for a goat? Well, okay. Anyway, okay, so Rachel chooses to bypass rules and just wants to go. I think you're supposed to stay, if I remember correctly. No, you're supposed to switch doors. You're supposed to switch doors? Yes, that is correct. You are supposed to switch doors.

But most people say, oh, it's a 50-50 chance. So I might as well just say there's no advantage to switching doors. Right. Now, because this is a theoretical probability question, there's three assumptions that if we don't state these assumptions, everyone is going to say, well, actually. So first of all, the host must always open a door that was not picked by the contestant. So if you pick door number one, they can't open door number one. Number two, the host must always open a door to reveal a goat and never the car. So they can't show you the car.

Right. Then you haven't won it. Great. Number three, the host must always offer the chance to switch between the original chosen door and the remaining door. So they can't just be like, here's what's behind this one. But you're staying with your door. Most people, 1,000-plus mathematicians included, argued that no, it would not be adventations to switch, just like what you said, Jason. Once one door has been eliminated, the chances become 50-50.

And you have no better chance of getting a car if you switch from door one to door two. But that is not true at all. Statistically speaking, you now have a two-thirds chance of choosing the car if you switch to door number two. Okay, so why? The answer lies in the assumptions. Rachel, Rachel just wants to go. Rachel wants to go. She's like, we don't even need to.

I related really hard to that episode of Brooklyn 9-9 because I have, similar feelings about the Monte Hall problem. But I really want to hear you explain it because maybe you will make me hate it less. Okay, wait, so why do you hate it so I can maybe explain it towards your hate? It's just that I get that it is technically true from a theoretical standpoint. I cannot make myself believe that it is a practical choice. Gotcha. Okay, so I think you will like my explanation.

Like, you will feel better. at the end. So he's better than Jason's. Dead cat. Wow. Ivar. At least Claire isn't biased as to who she's voting for this week. It's a vote.

She's supposed to be biased. At least she's not revealing her bias before the vote. So like I said before, the answer lies in the assumption. So at the beginning, knowing nothing other than there are three doors, two with a goat and one with a car, you start with each door holding a one-third chance of concealing the car. So one-third door one-third door two, one-third door three. Once you choose door number one, the host now can choose between door number two and door number three.

Remember, he knows what's behind them both, and he is not about to show you a car, or in Rachel's case, the goat. So that knowledge in itself, him knowing. what's behind all of the doors and choosing based on that previous knowledge shifts the odds. So the door that you chose remains one-third because it's just sitting there left alone. No one's messing with it. But the other two now act as one because he is choosing between those two doors. So the probability that we're dealing with that used to be one-third, one-third is now a two-thirds unit.

So whatever door the host doesn't choose, then grabs on that one-third chance from the door he did. One-third plus one-third, like I said, is two-thirds. So statistically, you have a two-thirds chance of winning if you switch and a one-third chance of winning if you stay. But imagine how mad you'll be if you switch. Okay, great. I'm so glad you said that. We will get to that. So this answer created such an uproar amongst the mathematics.

community that they all sent in all of these responses and it was just this like crazy thing that happened so much so that the new york times actually wrote this entire like article about this whole uproar and i would like to just quote some mathematicians that wrote in to this woman who was indeed correct quote unquote our math department had a good self-righteous laugh at your expense wrote Mary Jane Still, a professor at Palm Beach Junior College. Quote, you are utterly incorrect, insisted E. Ray Bobo, a professor of mathematics at Georgetown University. Quote, he goes on, oh, wait, no, this is another guy. No, still Bobo.

How many irate mathematicians are needed to get you to change your mind? And then Robert Sachs, a professor of mathematics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, said, you blew it. Let me explain. If one door is shown to be a loser, that information changes the probability of either remaining choice, neither of which has any reason to be more likely. So it's one and two. As a professional mathematician, I'm very concerned with the general public's lack of mathematical skills. Please help by confessing your error and in the future being more careful. So why is everyone thinking it's 50-50?

And more importantly, why won't they switch? and why are they getting so upset over this? One quick reason is because statistics rarely aligns with intuition. So because our brains see two doors in front of us, we have effectively forgotten about that third door, and so we only focus on these two and we say, okay, what's left 50, 50. But according to some psychologists, though,

another reason could be that our emotions get so heightened when there's a free car or a goat dangling in front of our eyes. This guy, John Patricelli, a psychologist, at Wake Forest University, who has studied this phenomenon repeatedly, had participants repeat the scenario hundreds of times, and when asked to recall their experience, people remembered the times they switched and lost more strongly than the times they switched in won. To them, it's not math, Petrocelli explained to me, rather, it's the emotional angst that almost winning insights. So people recall a switch and loss as a regretful I almost won,

rather than an accepting I lost. And so from an emotional standpoint, the pain, a potential switch and loss will create is just too much to handle. Yeah, that tracks. That is exactly what upsets me about it. Yeah. I agree. I think, like, if I hadn't thought about the statistics or if I really wanted the go, I would, like, my emotions would get ahead of me as well.

Yeah. I watched a lot of game show network as a kid, like as a young, like seven or eight, and watched a lot of let's make a deal specifically with Monty Hall. And I wanted to be on that show so badly. And now if I ever go on, it's back and it's with Wayne Brady. I know what to do. Wait, so when you wanted to go on the show when you were little, what was your thought process? What was your action plan? My thought process was I wanted to win a 1970s car.

They look amazing. So would you have switched? I don't know, is the answer? Probably not. Probably I would have made the same mistake I made at 26. But, you know, because of the way probability works, like, it's not magic. The car is either there, it's not. Right.

It's still a gamble. Yeah. But it's a two-thirds gamble if you switch. Yeah. Yeah. I just would be so mad. Yeah, totally. worth it. That's my solution to the Monty Hall problem. Take the goat and run. Don't let them play these mind games with you. It's not worth it. Thanks, Monty.

All right. What was the weirdest thing we learned this week? I mean, I think I'm going to go with urine because I think it was weird, Jason. But it was also involved a dead cat. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I think it was great. I applaud you. Thank you. Rachel, I think you're in the winning seat today. Oh, amazing.

I found both of your stories I'm setting for very different reasons. Thank you. I appreciate that Claire helped me hate the Monte Hall problem slightly less. Not like it. Just hate it less. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Okay.

Yeah, I'll take this. I'll take the win. Yeah, P is number one. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms, so subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on iTunes. It helps other weirdos find the show. You can buy our merch, including Weirdest Thing, T-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popside.

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