The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Nature's Weirdest Sleepers, Iron Maiden Myths, Parking Psychology

Episode Date: January 28, 2024

Welcome to Season 8! Producer Jess Boddy joins the show to talk about the mythical iron maiden (as inspired by Resident Evil 4), Rachel talks about nature's weirdest sleepers, and Amanda explains the fascinating rabbit hole that is American parking psychology. 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!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Thanks to our Sponsors! Get 20% OFF @honeylove by going to https://honeylove.com/WEIRDEST! #honeylovepod For a limited time deal our listeners get 55% off your Babbel subscription at https://Babbel.com/WEIRDEST This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Get 10% off your first month at https://BetterHelp.com/WEIRDEST Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? I'm talking about mood.com. They have an incredible line of cannabis dummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code Weirdest. It's third party lab tested and ships directly to you in a discreet box. Best of all, everything's backed by Mood's 100-day satisfaction guarantee. And like I said, you can get 20% off with code Weirdest. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest.

That's code weirdest for 20% off. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton.com. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech 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 Feltman. I'm Jess Bodie. And I'm Amanda Reed. Happy New Year. Welcome to the show. Yeah. New Year. Save me. New Year new season. Yes. Season 8, if anyone's keeping track. I know we kind of stopped like doing it that way, but on our spreadsheet it says season eight. We added a new tab. It's happening. Yeah. So listeners, you know, thanks for bearing with us during our short holiday break. One quick, exciting piece of housekeeping before we get into the show, Jess and I are planning to try to do a bunch of cool weirdest thing and non-wears thing

content this year. And we're planning on doing a Q&A. episode, session, stream, whatever, on Twitch sometime in the next few weeks. So definitely follow Jess on Twitch if you don't already. Follow me on Patreon. Those are both places where you can reliably get updates about the kind of stuff we're doing that doesn't necessarily go in this feed. You can find all of that info in the show notes. And we're really excited to, you know, do some, do some weird stuff on video, other formats. Who knows? What other forms? Mathikist, clay tablet. On TikTok, the teens are getting really into wax tablets.

Oh my God, of course they are. Of course they are. Cuniform content. They're literally like, here's how I erase my wax tablet at the end of the day. Here's how I use it. I'm going to start using a piece of slate, like Little House on the Prairie. That's my new influencer move. Wonderful. I love it. 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 we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, sending out carrier pigeons, et cetera, and 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 in a fun, non-competitive, supportive way. Yes. Jess, what's your tease?

My tease is that I'm going to talk about a kind of famous medieval torture device that's actually kind of not real. I love that. I wonder if there will be a video game involved. How dare you? No, I'm so sorry. You're actually, no, you're right. Oh, no. How dare you? Amanda, what's your teeth? All right.

My tease is parking says a lot about who we are as a society. Oh, my God. I always like to brag about my parallel parking skills and I wonder if this will be relevant. Potentially, yeah. Huge. Wow. Can't wait. I want to talk about an animal that takes 10,000 naps a day.

And it's not me, actually. 10,000. Yeah, 10,000 naps per day. Is it a nap or are they just resting their eyes? Oh my gosh. That's the scientific question. I guess I can get right into it since you've really queued me up.

Okay, so as we've discussed on previous episodes of the weirdest thing I'm in this week, a podcast from the others of popular science, sleep is like both very mysterious and very important. All animals do it, even ones without brains, like those jellyfish I talked about, that can learn from their mistakes, which is wild, or central nervous systems even. Again, so jellyfish, they sleep, wild.

And a lot of single-celled organisms, they don't like sleep per se, but they have circadian rhythms, which means they have biological functions that follow a roughly 24-hour cycle. So, like, how'd that happen? That's amazing. Incredible. But again, it's all very mysterious. We know that sleep is essential, but like defining what sleep, what the thing that is essential, that is sleep that is universally necessary for animals, we still don't really have a handle on that. We don't know exactly what sleep does. We know some stuff that sleep does, but we don't know what all it does or what it did first.

So we don't know when or how it evolved. and most of the really robust research we have on it is on primates and rodents. So scientists are always curious about how other animals sleep. And that's where this recent study on chinstrap penguins comes in. Yeah, beloved. Cute little guy. Yeah. I love a cute little guy.

Researchers found that these flightless birds get about 11 hours of sleep a day, which doesn't sound all that remarkable at face value. It's like not that much more than the average human. is supposed to get. But the real kicker is how they get it, because they get this 11 hours of sleep in increments of roughly four seconds a time. Wow. Okay.

Yeah. What? The ultimate microsleepers. So scientists hung out with a colony of thousands of breeding chin-stap penguins, and they kept close tabs on 14 of them in particular. And it was important that they really be actually closely monitoring some of these penguin with sensors because from the outside and as previous observational studies had shown, it seemed like the penguins were like doing this sort of like slow blinking and head jerking

you would expect from sleep-derived parents. Not surprising. We already know that these animals spend weeks like hardly sleeping to protect their nests from both predators and from other penguins looking to like steel pebbles or eggs. It's a very busy chaos. It's a very busy chaos. place to be taking care of babies. And yeah, the general consensus for a long time has been that chinstrap penguins in their mated pairs, they trade off on either hunting or guarding the nest. And when they're guarding the nest, they, like, literally do not sleep. So researchers attached electrodes to these 14 birds that they were watching closely to track

what was going on. And they found that all those little blinks and like head jerks were brief periods of sleep. Wow. And they were doing this about 10,000 times a day, which added up to an apparently sufficient 11 hours of sleep. Oh, my God. Okay. That's like a really good amount of sleep. Do not tell the biohacking people there.

Oh, my God, dude. Keep this away from the biohackers. I will get into that in a minute. Oh no. Disclamer up top, like this is not relevant to human life. Do not microseil. Take note. Bio-hackers. Yeah. So, yeah, like, so basically these birds, when they go out to sea to do their, like, stint grocery shopping while the other parent is babysitting, they do experience some slow wave sleep.

Slow wave sleep is like what restful sleep is for birds. That is the state that they enter where you're like, that's not a sleepy bird. That's a sleeping bird. But they spent like way more time awake and active even then. They were awake like two thirds of the time. They were out hunting and they would come back to land and they would spend the first few hours catching up on sleep on the shorelines, like actually sleeping. And then they would get back to the nest and they would go into this microsleep strategy.

And then they could spend like half a day, more than half a day, just having these little four second doses. They found that all told, 75% of sleep among the chinstrap penguins was an episode lasting less than 10 seconds. Wow. Yeah. And this most of their sleep is those little blips. Exactly. Wow. And these observations were only at nests.

So it's possible and in fact likely that when they are. not actively raising eggs, they sleep more, you know, quote-unquote normally by our standards. And there are other animals that, like, in certain situations, can use little bursts of microsleep to catch up on sleep. Even humans do this to some extent, which I'll talk more about in a minute. But this is the most extreme, like, brief microsleep and the biggest accumulation of it the scientists have ever observed. And it's also the first time that they've seen something anywhere close to this extreme where the animal is not suffering. Like the animal is behaving normally. This seems to be the way it is designed to go for this animal for like a really

long period of time, several weeks. So that's like pretty wild. And they think this probably, you know, it's an adaptation that was driven by the very specific environmental factors of King George Island in Antarctica or off of Antarctica where they were observing these penguins. Penguins flocked together. They have to incubate their eggs in a big group to protect them from predators. So like they need sleep, but it's like they're in a noisy group. They have to be vigilant. And so even when they feel safe because they're surrounded, they're still like surrounded by a bunch of noisy penguins. So, yeah, it's possible that, like, people, it's possible that penguins, it's possible

that penguins that, you know, developed the ability to really benefit from these really brief bursts of sleep constantly, you know, were the ones that were most successful in raising their eggs and continuing on to have more babies. One other interesting thing they found is that the penguins at the, the like outer edge of the cluster of penguins incubating their eggs seem to fall asleep for longer stretches than the ones they observed that were toward the middle. And they were like, maybe that's because on the outer edge, they have to be more vigilant. So they're like putting more actual attention into being awake when they're the only penguin at the nest. And then they need

more, they have more sleep to catch up on. So like they have these longer stretches. But it's still like, we're still talking about micro sleep. So yeah, moving on to humans and how this does or does not apply to us. Yeah. How long does it take you guys to fall asleep generally? Ooh, it depends. There was a brief moment of time where I was playing Baldur's Gate 3 and just like absolutely demolishing my circadian rhythm.

Oh, no. I want to say I thrive on. I want to say like maybe half an hour to an hour. But it also depends on like I'm a girl who has to do the silly little sleepy time cocktail. As a child, and don't do this at home. As a child, I would take Benadryl to fall asleep, which I now know is like awful for you. That's like new recent research that like people have like we now know how much worse it is to take. Yeah.

Yeah. So never doing that again. I'm also a recovering habitual benadryl taker. Yeah. We've all been there. We've all been there. Magnesium, guys. Magnesium.

It helps you fall asleep and it keeps your bowels regular. I think I just need more sleep, but I, so it's easy for me to fall asleep at night. But I think, like, also too, if I exercise, like if I lift weights, I'm like, out like a light in like 10 minutes. My body's like, we must rest to build your muscles back. So I don't know. Rest for the gains. Yeah, for the gains.

So I stay up too late and I lift weights, which both are the perfect storm falling asleep quick. But there have been times in my life where it, you know, it's tough. Totally. Yeah. And like all that is very normal. Most humans take around five to 20 minutes to sleep, but that's like a very rough average.

And there's no inherent problem with falling asleep really quickly. It can be a sign that something is wrong, but you can also just be somebody who's like very fortunate and your body is like, we in bed, we asleep. Yeah, right. And yeah, also one interesting thing is that some people who think they fall asleep really quickly are probably mistaken. there's this thing called mesograde amnesia, which is that right before you fall asleep, you tend to not be great at, like, creating new memories because, like, of how, you know, the hippocampus, which is, you know, responsible for, for, like, indexing memories. It has these, like, bursts of activity as you're transitioning from wakefulness into sleep.

So some people are just, like, habitually unable to remember. their moments before sleep. So if you think you're somebody who instantly falls asleep, you may be wrong. But yeah, even if you do actually like your head hits the pillow in your sleep, there's no like amount of quick sleepiness that's like inherently abnormal. There's no criteria that's like you fall asleep instantaneously at night. And so there must be something wrong. But there is a big caveat because if you're regular.

Literally getting less than eight-ish hours of sleep and you fall asleep instantly. That is almost certainly because you are sleep deprived in your body needs more sleep because most people do take a few minutes to fall asleep. So like if your head hits the pillow and you're out and like you're not that great about getting much sleep, yeah, spoiler alert, you're sleepy and you should get for sleep. So yeah, even if you think you're fine, like, I've definitely met people, most of whom had like severe personality disorders, but that's another story. I've definitely met people who are like, I survived fine on four hours of sleep. I'm, science should study me. But like, if you think that's true, but you also like either can't fall asleep when you're supposed to be falling asleep or you instantly fall asleep, guess what? You're not actually thriving on those four hours of sleep.

Your body is messed up. Totally. I've been thinking a lot about that lately because there are some nights where I'm staying up late, like editing or streaming, and then I wake up early to walk my dog and it is like four hours. But then I do the thing we've talked about on this show before where I later in the day sleep another four hours. Yes. I'm doing the Victorian two-phase sleep. It's true. And once the blue moon, that feels okay.

Oh, yeah. And once a blue moon, there is nothing wrong with that. That's actually, you know, that's your body being like, let's have second sleep. I see that you see that you took. first sleep and then you were waiting to take second sleep. So that's actually like a very healthy response. Sick. Thanks for enabling me.

Oh my gosh, of course. Where it becomes a problem is when it's like you're accumulating more and more of a sleep deficit and like your body is just trying to catch it anywhere it can. And if you're like, am I okay? Am I getting too sleepy? There is one thing to keep in mind is like a frame of reference is that basically the test they do for like narcolepsy, which fun fact, it isn't literally just like you fall asleep out of nowhere and that's the whole thing. It's actually that like your sleep cycle doesn't really

happen the way it's supposed to. You go right into REM stage like right when you fall asleep. And then the rest of the night, you're actually only sleeping for short stretches because you're not going through the normal sleep phases. Right. So then during the day, your body is like, we literally must sleep. Like please be down on the floor. And so that. So that's, that's your body catching up. But anyway, if a doctor were testing you for that, generally what they do is that they'll like pick random points in the day to like have the person try to nap. And if they're able to fall asleep in less than five minutes for a daytime nap, like consistently, then they're not getting good sleep at night. So just something keep in mind. It's on the end of the

worlds but like if you think you are thriving hashtag blessed and getting very little sleep and you are unconscious as soon as you lay down consider perhaps maybe your body is really tired so yeah there is research actually on recently researchers found that even a short nap just a few minutes can help your body and brain do more of the things that it's good at after getting enough sleep. But that is not the same as taking micro-naps of a few seconds long. And it is still no good substitution for trying to get a good night's sleep. It's just that if you're feeling not great and you only have, you know, five minutes to rest your eyes, it might be worth giving that a shot. That can be just what the doctor ordered.

Before I finished my segment, I did just, I was thinking about sleepy animals and I thought I would love to just talk about some other animals that have funny sleeps. Yes, please. Is there sloths? Oh, I did not even bring up sloths because they're so famous for being sleepy. Yeah, that's the obvious answer. We want the rare sleepers. Yeah.

I looked up chin strap penguin on my own, and they are very cute. Oh, I got a look. Listeners at home, they're very cute. They're like the classic. They're like your classic. Oh, they're cute. Yeah. They have little chin straps, true to the name.

Yep. Yeah. Okay, so as for other animals, great apes, all sleep like we do. They like lay down for the night for one long stretch, which is unique. and most other mammals have polyphasic sleep, meaning like they sleep on and off throughout a 24-hour cycle, like cats and dogs.

Dogs, for example, they have a sleep-wake cycles that last a little under an hour and a half, but that adds up to like almost 11 hours of sleep on most days. But one thing I just learned, which is super interesting to me, is that some evolutionary biologists think that

the reason great apes all like make bed, and go sleepy time is that they started to get bigger. And like up until then, primates just kind of, they've crouched in branches. And it's like, you only have these like relatively short sleeps because like there's predators and like you're sitting in the trees and you're just crouching there and you're gonna sleep for a few hours

and then you're gonna go, you know, you're maybe sleep for a couple hours and go do something else, then come back and you know, whatever. You don't want to make a whole thing of it. You're just crouching out of branch. But then, Ape started getting bigger. and they couldn't crouch in branch. They were too big, too crouching branch. So, like, once apes had to, like, build something that they could lay down on,

whether it was just, like, a nice, you know, grassy bed or what have you, they had to, like, invest time and energy into finding ways to stay away from predators and, like, get away from distractions so that it was worth it to, like, create a structure and find a structure that could hold them. And so that then maybe that, like, created this feedback loop where they got to sleep for longer, they were able to do more cool cognitive stuff because of all their extra sleepy times. And I just think that's just like a really, really funny, like, random evolutionary pressure that made us animals that have to lay down in bed all night.

Too big to crouch in a tree. It's true. too big for ranch Too big for branch. There's also, so there's unihemispheric slow wave sleep which is when an animal sleeps with half their brain.

Dolphins do this, which is how they manage to stay on-aware for predators constantly. They never experience REM sleep but they're super indulgent. Yeah, never because they're always this slow wave sleep is just a separate thing from REM sleep.

different brain activity and it's just like one brain at a time. So, but like dolphins are very intelligent. So it's like that's kind of another sleep mystery where it's like, is REM sleep actually important or is just like a random thing humans that became important for humans? Obviously we know now that it's important for us. But it's like that might have just been kind of an arbitrary thing that happened. Does this mean that dolphins like sleep with one eye open? So like there I will actually mention Am I getting ahead of myself?

You're getting a little ahead of yourself But thank you for the question Yeah continue Yeah so first seals Will sleep with half their brains While they're swimming And then they sleep with their whole brains When they lay down on land

So again it's like you know All of these adaptations seem to be around Like we need rest when we're out in the open water But it's not safe to actually sleep especially for mammals that need to like breathe. So if they entered REM sleep, they and had the kind of like muscle paralysis we do when we're in run sleep. They just sink to the bottom and drown.

So. Trouble some. Yeah, exactly. And that's not good. You don't want that. No. The ocean is really deep. You don't want to wake up at the bottom if you need to breathe air.

That's that I know for sure. So yeah, speaking to sleeping with one I opened, yes, there are some of these unit, unahemispheric slowly sleepers do literally do that. So a scientist at Indiana State University, they were studying mallard ducks. A lot of birds also use this kind of half-brain sleep. And they filmed a row of ducks while they were sleeping. And they found that the ones at the end of the row kept the eye facing away from the rest of the group open.

Oh, my God. While the eye toward the other ducks was closed. Oh, my God. And the ducks within the row were more likely to have both their eyes closed. And when they, yeah, when they looked with like electrodes, they found that the decks at the end of the line were controlling which side of their brain stayed awake. So they were keeping the outside brain awake so that they could stay on look out. Yeah.

To have that kind of control. I know. So wild. If only. Yeah. I'd be like, I'd, I would have. one eye open and then it would be shut. I don't have that self-control. Yeah. Totally. Also, talk about community care. Yeah. So nice. So nice. Birds supporting birds. And they're also birds that will

sleep with half their brain while they're flying and they can like kind of coast and glide. So a lot of birds that like have really long migrations and spend like crazy. amounts of time in the air. That's how they're doing it. That makes sense. That's really smart. Yeah. And then like, then there are animals that sleep so long. Brown bats, at least according to one source I read, sleep the longest of any animal. And I trust this source because they sleep 20 hours in a 24 hour cycle.

Oh my goodness. And it seems like it's just because they, eat mosquitoes and the mosquitoes are only out for a few hours a day. So like there's no reason for them to be awake the rest of the time. Your whole life is just like snoozing and then waking up really quick to eat a bug and then you go back to sleep. Yeah. Yeah. The dining is open. That's kind of beautiful. Yeah. That's literally the plot of my year of rest and relaxation. True. That is true. That is true. Oh my God. Wow. I'd probably have liked that book more if it was about a bat.

Yeah. But, and then meanwhile, like big herbivores, like elephants and giraffes, they forage so much that they only sleep a couple hours a night. And, like, giraffes can sometimes sleep for, like, less than an hour a night.

Because, like, if a giraffe laid down and went to sleep, there would be no more giraffes. They have very fast predators. True. And they're very large. And you can't really hide in a tree as a giraffe, for example. So, yeah, they take little naps and spend all their time just kind of lumbering around.

And there are a lot of animals that, like, don't sleep much, but take a lot of time resting and really have, like, an actual physiological state that's like we're in chill mode, which, like, I certainly feel like I have one, but I feel like with humans it's less of a, like, a formal biological state. Right. So like koalas, there was a time when researchers studying them in zoos thought that they slept for 22 hours a day. But looking at animals in the wild, it showed that they actually only sleep for 14 hours a day, but they rest a lot. They have a lot of like very dormant phases. They're very chill. And that's because their diet of eucalyptus leaves take so much energy to digest. Like pandas with bamboo.

they have evolved to basically just like eat and digest their food. Or like me when I eat a Chipotle label. Exactly. Yeah. You go into a dormant phase. My last animal sleep fact is that, you know, how people say like sharks have to keep moving or they die. So like sharks, you know, we know that they can engage in sort of like, you know, microsleep or. or they like kind of just like rest a little bit but there's been a long there's been a question

for a long time of like you know how do sharks breathe because they move and the water goes through their gills and that's how they breathe when they're sleeping and in 2016 researchers who are looking at great white sharks near the Baja California Peninsula found a female great white shark and she was like basically just drifting in shallow water with her mouth open against a strong currents so that the water pass through her gills. No way. And I have sleep apnea and I use a CPAP machine and I'm just literally what I do. Oh my goodness.

Yeah. Oh my goodness. I love the image of this like drowsy great white shark just like mouth wide shark just like mouth wide open being like the water can come to me. Yeah. I also love that a lot. Yeah. Enough with the sharks lander.

Yeah. Sharks take naps too. They just don't do it where you can see them. So yeah, those are all of my animal sleep facts for today. I hope you enjoyed. And yeah, the chintrap penguin, adorable. incredible evolutionary strategy, absolutely wacky sleep habits. Do not copy the tinsrap penguin.

If you find yourself falling asleep for several seconds at a time, that is a sign that you are sleep deprived and you should not operate moving machinery. You should go to sleep is what you should do. Yeah, take a nap. Yeah. And if that doesn't seem to be fixing the problem, you should go to a doctor about your micro sleeping. But for these penguins, it's all good. It's excellent. I love that. I didn't realize so much of the animal kingdom was so varied with sleep.

Like, it's wild to think about. Yeah. Yeah. I also, like, I also realized while researching this, like, I guess in my head, I figured there were just like a couple of categories of how animals sleep. But nope, there's a lot. There's some weird stuff. So varied. Yeah. And there's also, like, there's so many animals we like have our animals. really observe the sleep up, especially outside of captivity, where it's like, similarly to like any kind of behavior you're observing in captivity. It's like, yeah, if somebody locked

you in a room and gave you all the food you needed, you'd probably nap all day too. Yeah. It's like those Mr. Beast scenarios. I literally was just thinking that. All right. Let's take a quick break. And then we'll be back with some more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? And talking about mood.com, they have an incredible line of cannabis gummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code weirdest. I'm not a smoker myself, but I do love the occasional weed gummy to, you know, help me go off to Dreamland. And I can't have one right now because I have a new kit.

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Okay, we're back. And Amanda, talk to me about parking. Yeah. So for context, my boyfriend. is a reader. He loves a nonfiction read or a classic. And we both share a love of books. So we get to talking about what we are reading. And we live in Pittsburgh where the parking chair is a really popular thing. Yes. Also a thing in Chicago. Very iconic. Yeah. It's a thing in the Midwest, generally. So a parking chair is generally, generally used after snowfall. Like if you dig out,

your parking spot, you don't want someone else to take it. So you just throw like a folding chair or any cheap chair into your parking spot so that no one can take it. And also in Pittsburgh, we primarily have street parking. So finding a good parking spot is important to everyday life. He read this really interesting book called Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World by Henry Graybar. What a cool idea for a book. Yes, it's something that you don't think about, but when you think about it, you're like, oh, like, that's actually yes. And now I have not read it yet, but it's definitely on my reading list because after hearing about it, I'm like, we must radicalize parking.

Yeah. Big parking is taken over everything. So according to the national. Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Road Rage has been responsible for 300 deaths since 2013. Wow. For the American Psychological Association, our best use, the APA. Around 30 murders per year are linked to road rage. That's scary, dude.

Yeah. And in this book, they list a couple incidents where people were shot due to road range. Like specifically fighting over a parking space. And they detail, I'm unfortunately forgetting the name now, but they mentioned this one guy who did a hate crime. And before doing said hate crime, he was like a big parking stickler, like sticking notes on people's cars being like, hello, you are doing bad parking. It kind of reminds me of like the road rage thing is very similar to me in my mind to like internet trolls because you have this like level of separation like physically from the people you're getting angry at. And it's just I fear both road ragers and internet trolls. Yeah, definitely.

Yeah. So a lot of people fight over parking spaces despite there being a lot of parking in the United States. So there's between one to two billion parking spaces in America. Whoa. A study of 27 mixed-use neighborhoods found that parking was oversupplied by 65%. Oversupplied? Oversupplied. And neighborhoods with parking shortages, like self-defined parking shortages,

were still oversupplied by 45%. Is everybody just so bad at parking? Everyone is so bad at parking. And I'll get into this later. But like everyone wants is like searching for like a good parking bar. So there's both social and psychological reasons behind parking rage and road rage. A lot of rules of the road are self-imposed. Like not everyone agrees what you do in the left lane.

Not everyone thinks it's for passing. Yeah. And when not everyone follows these self-imposed rules, people get angry when they see other people not doing this socially acceptable thing. So they, you know, lash out and they become the all-knowing parking figure. And they're like, hello, youth, let me lay on my horn and then yell at you because you're driving in the left lane when you should be using it for power. for parking, not for parking, for passing. Yeah. So parking theorist Sarah Marusick says that parking follows what she calls frontier law where

I love, sorry. Just everything you just said. Yes. Yeah. Was an incredible clause. So thank you. And please continue. Yeah.

So it's where people find a public parking spot, especially, you know, if it's in front of their house. And they claim it as theirs, all the 1800s. I was just going to say a lot of this feels very entitlement-y. Yes, which I'm also going to get into. So now the horses and wagons have been replaced with heavy death machines, which also represent wealth and status. Sure. So for example, if you don't have a car, you're a failure, which is untrue.

And back to the entitlement point, there's a lot of entitlement when it comes to a car. You know, you work hard to buy. the car being a quote unquote good driver is like a very big thing that people take pride in so for example just to your point of parallel parking lots of people you know we like to brag like people love to brag about like how good of drivers they are yeah and I I can't even lie like when I'm in a car and someone's a good driver I'm like oh like I feel safe with them. Yeah.

Which is like a psychological thing. So speaking of, high stress and displaced anger can cause road rage. But there's also a territorial aspect to it. Yeah. Because no one wants to compromise on what they view as theirs, despite parking generally being a public entity. So drivers are pretty much toddlers who don't want to. share their pencil for fear of losing it and never getting it back, despite there still being

plenty of pencils in this world, even if they don't get their pencil back. So the reason why parking is really, you know, shows how we are as a society is that we as people struggle with sharing and being inconvenienced, which we see or which we saw in everyday life through like COVID response and college debt relief and now especially parking. So Graybar's solution is literally sharing on an infrastructure level. There's so much we can do for spaces that are generally saved for parking like restaurant pop-ups and closed streets. And that's all dependent on car owners and local governments being willing to transform parking

spaces into these mixed-use third-spacy areas, which that is an entirely other different subject that is really, really interesting. Also, this world is made for cars, so having more pedestrian areas can help, which again, also something on an infrastructure level. and it's also as simple as just being okay with parking a little bit further away from where you park and just walking. So would recommend the book, add it to your reading list. It's certainly added onto mine. If I can get it on it, look at it.

The cover is really fun. It looks like a street sign. It looks like a street sign. Or like a parking sign. I love it. Yes. Oh my God. If I can get it on an audiobook, it's so over.

we're so back. And like perusing through it, the language seems it's a book about a really interesting subject that's written in this like really fun and voicy way about a subject that is so unanimous with everyday life that we don't think to look into. Yeah. I love that you mentioned convenience because it's something I've been thinking about a lot. I was just in both Germany and but even more so in Denmark and noticed that in a lot of places things like elevators would have tons of signage on them being like save this for like take

more exercise take the stairs like this this is just for people who really need it and like parking parking spaces close to entrances would be the same way which like I know that in the U.S. occasionally you'll see a like, this isn't a handicapped spot, but it's like, you know, we put a silhouette of a pregnant lady on it to remind you to like not be a jerk and take it if you don't need it. And as someone who like has a like relatively invisible disability, there were moments in Copenhagen where I was like, I really resent this sign that's making it, like making me feel like I will be judged harshly for deciding not to take the stairs. but on the flip side, I think, obviously, if they didn't have an elevator at all, that would be a huge problem.

And I'm sure there's probably slightly better, less able-less language they can use. However, I do think that the idea of, like, reminding people, like, sometimes you taking something that's slightly less convenient to you means everyone gets to enjoy a better life. and like wild. Yeah. Yeah. And it makes me, first of all, it makes me think of the sleeping ducks we just talked about,

you know, better in your community. But yeah, I was thinking as you're talking about this, Amanda, like it seems like such an American thing to do this. And how different things are in Europe where, and other parts of the world too,

where, you know, cities are built around walking and not cars. Yeah. I think this, the big stat is there are more three car garages. than single family homes in America. Stop.

Yeah. Oh, I hate that. Yeah. And even I'm noticing in Pittsburgh a lot of these like commercial buildings being built where it's just like, oh, we made another commercial office space. And it's sort of like how many businesses will actually be in that commercial office space. Yeah. And that commercial office space will also. a lot of cities have changed this law, but there are some zoning laws that state that you have to build a certain amount of parking spots for this commercial area.

Yeah. So I think it's Seattle that stopped that, which also, again, that leads to more parks. focus on walking. Yeah. And all that jazz. Yeah. Well, and I know, you know, in, I'm in Jersey City and during like peak pandemic, there was like more road space seated to, you know, parklets for outdoor dining. And they increased the, the like pedestrian walkway area downtown. There are some streets that are closed off. And thankfully, they actually, they kept the expanded like pedestrian plaza, which is great, but a bunch of businesses outside of that little stretch, like either have been forced to give up their outdoor dining spaces or, like, have to pay a bunch more for it, or, like,

fighting with the city about it. And the only argument against them is, like, it's taking up parking spaces. And it's like, I, as someone who has now had to deal with street parking as a new car owner, I can say, we do actually have plenty of parking here. Right. Not always something we can do without sparing five minutes or some amount of frustration or whatever. But like there is definitely enough parking. And it makes me so annoyed because like it would improve the city so much to have more protected bike lanes and more outdoor public space. And there's just always this argument that comes back up where it's like almost taken as as common sense. That it's like, well, obviously though, the big downside is that we don't have enough parking. Yeah. Yeah. And it also makes me think of like, when I look across the street and I see a bunch of cars lined up,

but there's at least like three feet between them. Oh, sure. And it's like, all right, can we just? And I think it also leads to, it's caused because people are like, oh, like, I don't want to damage my car in any way by being near this other car, which is like, a very, very valid reason. But it's also like, come on, man. Just like pull up a little bit.

Yeah. This is the first year that I've lived in an apartment that I have like a garage in a long time or since I've lived in Chicago. And it's the first year I haven't had to dig out my parking spot out of the snow. And it is life changing. But I definitely, I've been there. We have to dig it out. And then like I've personally never done the chair thing.

But I've seen it. And I, I, like, have immense fear in my heart to even consider moving a chair. You know, like, you don't do that. But, yeah, parking. It is a really big cultural thing here that you don't really don't even like think twice about until you do. Yeah, because I mean, we grow up just used to it. Yeah. You know.

So, yeah, down with big parking. Agreed. We're walk pill now. we're pedestrian-pilled. Big time, baby. We are jaunt maxing. Listen, I have been pedestrian-pilled for some time, but I hadn't realized how much parking was the issue.

I was focused on the cars when they're in motion, but that's how they get you. They're also a problem when they're stopped. Yeah. And it also is a like public infrastructure problem because it's like even in spaces that have like a pretty good public transit system. Like, especially here in Pittsburgh, we have a bunch of bridges. So there are literally entire neighborhoods that are easier to get to by car. Like the difference of like a one hour bus ride versus like a 20 minute car ride.

Oh, sure. So it's like crazy subject. There's like many, many layers to it. Really nuanced. So yeah, read the book. Henry Graybar, thank you for your, for your work. I wish Robert Moses had been. I wish Robert Moses had been obsessed with trains, you know?

Yeah. If only. What a world we'd live in. All right, we'll take one more quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Wishing you could be there live for the big game, soaking up the atmosphere in a crowd. But too often, life gets busy or the price holds you back. Priceline is here to help you make it happen. With millions of deals on flights, hotels, and rental cars,

you can go see the game live. Don't just dream about the trip. Book it with Price Line. Download the Priceline app or visitpriceline.com. Actual prices may vary, limited time offer. Okay, we're back. And Jess, let's talk about medieval torture. Yes.

Or the last year of. Medieval torture. To be clear, it did still exist, but it's just there's some misconstitutional. sessions. Great, cool. So I've been thinking a lot about Iron Maidens lately. Not the band, of course, but these, although if you're thinking about Iron Maiden, the band, that's also fine. That's cool. But I'm thinking about the legendary torture device of Yore. Basically, when people talk about these things, they're talking about these big, human-sized, like sarcophagi, they kind

to look like. They stand upright. And they're meant to put a human inside and shut the door. However, the kicker is that the door has a whole bunch of spikes and needily things. And so it pierces the person that's inside when that door closes. And yeah, there's a lot of like different kind of varying writing on these things. But people have also, you know, proposed and said that these spikes were arranged in such a way that they wouldn't pierce. your vital organs. Oh, yikes. Right.

Because otherwise it's kind of less of a torture device and more of a execution. Yes. Yes. Exactly. So yeah, you know, close the door. You wouldn't instantly die. You just be like, oh, man, this really sucks. I'm in a lot of pain.

I'm losing a lot of blood. Exactly. Things are going blurry. It's dark in here. And people also said a big thing about that was also like you suffer from sleep deprivation because if you like relax. your body like moves in such a way that like you receive more piercing. And so all of this was supposed to be happening in the medieval era from like 500 to

1500 AD roughly. Yeah. And again, these were, you know, thought to be torture devices or like punishment devices used to either get the truth out of someone or, you know, just just punish them. But I also want to note that torture has been studied scientifically and objectively. And a lot of the evidence says that torture really doesn't work like we think it does. Yeah, I have heard that. Yeah. And that a lot of times it does elicit falsities and untruths and people just say stuff that's, you know, that'll stop the pain. Yeah.

It's almost like there's no good reason to do a war crime, you know? It's almost. Yeah. Almost like that. Yeah. So anyway, what sparked the thought of Iron Maidens in my brain? Rachel, you said this earlier. This couldn't be from a video game. And in fact, it is.

So I was playing Resident Evil 4. They remade it last year now that it's 2024. Oh, my God. Came out last year. And I won't spoil anything. I'll spoil this one kind of enemy because it's a big part of the game. But there's these, you know, they're colloquially called Iron Maidens. And they're like zombie-like creatures.

They have spikes all over their bodies. And there may be the most scary thing in the whole game, for me at least. This is kind of gruesome. But in the game, you can like kind of explode their limbs off a little bit. So they're just kind of like wiggling around like little worms. But then they like lunge at you. And it's the scariest worst thing ever. And it's awesome.

But when you finally are able to like dispatch them and get rid of them, their bodies just explode and like shoot the spikes everywhere. So it's like a reverse iron maiden. So yeah, they're just a handful. And it kind of, you know, I was talking to my chat because I streamed RE4 on Twitch. And I was talking to my chat about it. And somebody in my chat was like, you know, Iron Maidens like, well, I won't spoil it yet. But they told me to look into Iron Maidens. And I was like, whoa.

And then I was thinking about there are more Iron Maidens. in this game called Demon Souls, which is a game made by From Software, who made Dark Souls, Blood Born, Alderman, yada, yada, yada. And those, you know, are not like a reverse Iron Maiden. They really look like what it was described historically from medieval times. They look like sarcophagi. When you open them up, sometimes it's an item or sometimes it's a little guy who'll just pop out and stab you.

You got to, like, roll the dice. Ain't that life. Yep. And, yeah, the ones, the Iron Maidens and Demon Souls were inspired also by a manga called Berserk, which inspired a lot of the Dark Souls. Oh, yeah, yeah. are. And blood-borne and a lot of that stuff. But the

kicker, which I almost just spoiled, you know, that original Iron Maiden of Yore, the things that were supposedly used in medieval times to torture people or punish people, the thing that has influenced so much popular media today, from games to books, to movies, to beyond. What if I told you?

They weren't real. They were a fake. We've been punked. We've been punked. Oh, man. Why did people make up so much fake medieval stuff. Oh, I'll get there. Oh, my gosh. So, yeah, basically there's no reliable or like confirmed writing about an actual Iron Maiden before like the 18th or 19th century, which is like a

huge jump when you're thinking about when they should have existed from 500 to 1500 AD. Basically, so step one, there was this guy back in the late 1700s. He was a German philosopher. His name is Johann Philip Sibenkis. I don't know. know if I'm saying that right, but, you know. And this guy wrote about a weird situation that happened apparently all the way back in 1515, where this guy was illegally forging coins, you know, a terrible crime, apparently. Even today, a terrible crime. Sure. Yes. Yeah. Don't forge those coins. And so he was apparently tortured and killed by a device that for all intensive purposes was an iron maiden. So it was like a human-sized cabinet with spikes. And so when this piece of writing

started circulating later on in the 1800s, all the Victorian era folks were like, oh my God, those medieval folks were so barbaric and so uncivilized and so different from us. You know, we could never act that way. Look how terrible they were and how great we are. So obviously, it's a lot easier to kind of point the finger at people from the era prior and be like, look how much better we are. which is shi, you know, don't do that. And looking back now, some historians even suspect that this Johann philosopher guy

may be embellished or maybe even completely made up this whole Iron Maiden thing from the 1500s. And why did he come up with this? Well, there were some other kind of similar devices that historians think maybe contributed to this Iron Maiden hysteria. So my favorite, Rachel and Light, I have to help me with this German word, but it's shandmantle or the his, yeah, it's like a, it's, you know, it's nicknamed as the barrel of shame. The barrel of shame. Oh, that's good. It's hilarious. So you put a person in this giant, giant barrel and just their head sticks out.

And sometimes it had a little bell, like suspended over the top of the head. So people would hear it. it's like a cat like they would hear you when you walked down the street and then they could come out and throw rotten vegetables at you yeah um so it's like a public shame barrel yeah it's like public humiliation situation and yeah it was mostly used to punish like drunkards or sex workers or like apparently also poachers which i didn't realize was such a huge issue back in the um back in the day but i guess it was um and yeah i'd think i i would think that poaching would be like en vogue you know I know. But apparently some people did not think it was very chill. And but yeah, some people,

historians think some people maybe saw this and were like, oh, what if that but spikes, you know? Sure. Yeah. And so after, you know, after this kind of like, Iron Maiden hysteria started happening from this piece of writing and all of these stories that may or may not have been true, recreated Iron Maidenes started popping up in museums and stuff, which obviously is kind of problematic when you can say they probably weren't real. And one even made it to the Chicago World's Fair in 1993

and then later went on tour across America. Wow. Which is very funny to think about. That's what happened with Chastity Vaults too. I think I talked about that at a live show a couple years back. I forgot about that. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, and it's like similar timeline too

where it's like in the 1800s people started making these and saying they were things that had existed in the medieval era and actually like they did not totally yeah it's a very similar thing and i was when i was reading about this i saw chastity about belts mentioned so i think it's a very common thing so yeah kind of going off of that this happened with other torture devices as well or supposed torture devices so there was something called the pair of anguish not a fruit i want to eat It goes up the butt, right? Well, they think they thought.

Right, that was the idea. Yeah. Or any orifice. Right, I guess. And it's kind of like, it was like metal. It was like a foot or too long. And when you turn the key at one end, it kind of like expands like a cursed speculum. And specul's already very fucking cursed.

Oh, dear. Yeah. But, you know, it was on the same timeline as Chastity Velt and Iron Maidens and people were like, oh yeah, this was definitely a butt thing, like hands down. People didn't get there, mind that of the gutter. Yeah, I know. Yeah, nothing's changed, you know. But, yeah, it turns out, you know, they found some pairs of anguish that were, that had like

caps on the expanding end. So, like, you couldn't put it inside something unless they were manually holding it shut. So there were like these different kinds of pairs of anguish that have now clued in historians to be like, okay, I think that maybe this was like a thing you used to extract fruit juice from something. This is actually an anguish of pears. Yeah. Yeah.

Like literally. Or like somebody else said maybe it's a shoe stretcher, you know, like. Totally. Yeah. No need to jump straight to torture. You know what I mean? Exactly. There are so many things you could imagine a device like that was used for.

And the fact that some dude in the 1800s was like, oh, I know where that. It says a lot more about them, but it does about people in medieval times. Exactly. So, yeah, at the end of the day, you know, Iron Maidens, Paravanguish, probably other devices, chastity belts, you know, a lot of these things were just mostly myths made up by folks in the 1800s, 1900s to kind of point the finger and say, no, they are uncivilized, but not us. And that wasn't really the case.

You know, I think it's important to like examine these things, especially when you think about like how iron maidens were incorrectly described in museums and that kind of thing. Like it's misinformation, fake news at work. So yeah, folks in the medieval age were actually a lot more civilized than commonly thought. And it's important to get the right version of history, I think. So, yep, that's my, that's my Iron Maiden fact. I loved that people just lie. And then other people are just like, you know what?

That sounds close enough. I'll accept that is true. Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, obviously we are dealing with a lot of misinformation now, and, you know, the Internet and AI, you know, can be a tool for the spread of misinformation. However, like, I also think it's important to keep in mind that, like, before people could, like, look stuff up. Yeah.

There was so much just, like, people just said stuff. Just, you know, from your parents repeating a thing. for years and then you finally get around to Googling it and you're like well that was simply not not a fact but also like what I know I talk about those all the time but when I was researching my book there were facts that got shared everywhere that I traced back to like a book from the 90s because people would be like no one will look this up like there's no one can disprove this right and yeah so people definitely have a long history of just imagining things and I feel like it's it's not even that people like sat there deciding to fabricate

something I think with a lot of the stuff that I had to like debunk in researching my book and probably with some of these medieval era things it was people thinking like I am very smart and making what is obviously a logical conclusion about you know this letter I read from medieval times and this one artifact I've seen and like this thing we know is totally definitely true about how culture worked back then and like that's so much that's so much more dangerous when people are just like I am very intelligent I have synthesize the information and let me tell you how it was yeah a lot of like ego stuff yes wrapped up in this yeah the powers of deduction.

Use it for good. It's true. Continue to deduce, perhaps. When you think you've come up with something really smart, keep asking yourself questions. Yeah. Because maybe you're about to put a dog caller in a museum telling people it was a chastity device, which is a thing that happened.

So, man, what a world. The historical record, man. What a place. Big time. Well, man, a lot of great stuff today about human folly. Yeah. And also napping penguins. Yeah.

A perfect mix for weird. And also human folly. Because if you think that you only need to sleep for a few hours a night, you're wrong. I'm so sorry, but you're wrong. if you're trying to sleep and only able to sleep for a few hours a night, you have my full sympathies and I hope you're able to figure that out. If you truly believe that's just how you operate, you're wrong. I'm sorry.

So yeah, folks, remember to follow Jess on Twitch, follow me on Patreon so that you don't miss our upcoming bonus content and non-wearthest thing content because we'll have some of that too. Amanda, thanks so much for joining us for our first episode of 2024. I resolve to be a good person who parks and not get into any fistfight so we're parking spaces. Honestly, same. And the best thing is, I don't drive. So easy. Yeah.

Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy. I'll be a good enough parker for all of us. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Jess. Of course. The Weirdest Thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Faltman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire.

Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos.