View Episode 273
Originally aired 05.30.11
1:21:48
18:35 – UYD: Ridiculous Pump
7:33 – Jonathan watched a shark documentary on NatGeo at his friend’s house. It was about Great White research – dudes standing in an aluminum putt-putt boat in the middle of the ocean with SLR cameras taking pictures. The sharks were always running in a crew together versus going solo. All the sharks care about is eating seals. One female Great White comes up underneath the boat and bites the engine, then goes back down again and comes up, and it’s a minimum of 7 feet longer than the entire boat. Jah was physically scared sitting on a couch watching it in high-def on his friend’s 60-inch TV.
10:25 – The Hansen Files on Dateline NBC confronts bike thieves in New York City. He also busted bath salts distributors. To bust one dude, he dresses in Under Armour and begins grilling him. At one point, he goes, “Well Andrew, there’s something you need to know…” Andrew responds, “What? Chris Hansen?”
44:23 – 254 television shows will be on this summer.
What Seth Learned on the Monsterweb
3:01 – Seth saw somebody on a Domino’s website building his own pizza to be delivered, and he acted like it was no big deal.
5:36 – Jah thinks he built his own pizza online with Amir once.
16:14 – Dimitri is in a state of hard physical training, and he walked Jah into a GNC the other day because he’s looking for a supplement. J-dawg couldn’t believe how much everything cost in there. Everyone was shaved, waxed and tanned. The girls that work there are hustlers. One of them comes over to ask D if he knew what he wanted, and he tells her he’s just browsing. Another guy comes over to ask her for help, and she tells him what he needs. He tells her that he was taking one of the things she recommended, and his doctor told him to stop immediately. She cuts him off and says, “Yeah yeah yeah, I know, the one you were taking, it’s this one – that one shuts your liver down.” One of the products Jah and D looked at was called Ridiculous Pump.
26:04 – Jah’s friend was interviewing for a bigtime job in advertising and was given an assignment in the interview to make a pitch. The proposal was for a beverage company launching a new social network tech-conscious campaign. The three bullet points were 1) 18-26 year olds, 2) Hispanics, 3) U.S. residents only. They basically told the person that this demographic was not brand loyal and the only way to retain them is to have them commit personal information and sign up.
33:36 – Seth is noticing that the kids today are all paranoid and don’t trust anything coming down from the top.
52:15 – Jah lives in a rent-controlled neighborhood, so there’s a lot of mad olds who don’t have any responsibilities and they’re koo-koo beans.
1:01:31 – Jah was just down near Arcadia by Monterey Park. D takes a kung fu class down there and J-dawg went with him. He said it was mental because there were a lot of hispanics and he got off the freeway, made a left and realized it was all Chinese.
1:07:00 – Jah remembers some old crazy dude telling him when he was a kid that Ronald Reagan had the mark of the beast on the back of his neck. Jah’s dad knew some crazy people.
5:59 – 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. There are 3 billion views each day.
34:43 – Harold Camping of Family Radio reports that there was a misunderstanding. A key biblical passage was misinterpreted, and the new Rapture date is October 21, 2011.
36:46 – Seth lets us know about the hottest pool parties in Vegas – Encore Beach Club at the Wynn, Wet Republic at MGM Grand, Liquid at Aria, Tao Beach at The Venetian, Venus Pool Club at Caesar’s, Moria Beach at Mandalay Bay, Bare at The Mirage, Ditch Fridays at The Palms, Marquee Dayclub at The Cosmopolitan or Nikki Beach The Tropicana.
39:24 – There’s a hippie music festival in Chillicothe, Ill., called the 11th Annual Summer Campu Music Festival. On the docket is Widespread Panic, Umphrey’s McGee and moe.
41:57 – The American Psychiatric Association met in Honolulu this past week. They were there for the professional society’s annual meeting. Among the myriad proposals now on the table is the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) – which began as a guidebook for the U.S. Armed Forces in 1952. They’re doing their first revision in almost 20 years. They’re discussing reducing the number of specific personality disorders. Right now they have 10 and might want to reduce down to 5 – which would eliminate the diagnosis of narcissistic disorder.
58:40 – Fraudulent use of disabled parking placards has exploded in California. 1 in 10 California drivers are legally registered to carry handicap tags.
1:02:33 – In Mandarin and Cantonese, the word for the number 4 sounds like the word for “death.” They’re having this enormous problem where there are thousands of houses that cannot be bought or put up for sale b/c they’re so superstitious about places bearing a 4 in the address. If there are two 4s in it, not a chance it will sell. One property is worth $1.4 million. If the address stays the same, it will lose $400,000. The number 8 sounds like the word for “prosper,” so those houses are flying. Supporters say that changing building numbers isn’t such an unusual thing and they should be allowed to lobby the city and be more accommodating. After all, Ronald Reagan took up residence at 666 St. Cloud Road in Bel-Air, but they changed the address to 668 to avoid the number of the beast.
1:07:23 – Computer errors prompted California prison officials to mistakenly release an estimated 450 inmates with a “high risk for violence” as unsupervised parolees in a program meant to ease overcrowding, according to the state’s inspector general. More than 1,000 additional prisoners presenting a high risk of committing drug crimes, property crimes and other offenses were also let out, officials said. No attempt was made to return any of the offenders to state lockups or place them on supervised parole, said inspector general spokeswoman Renee Hanson. All of the prisoners were placed on non-revokable parole. Participants are not required to report to parole officers and can be sent back to prison only if caught committing another crime. The program was started in January 2010 for inmates judged to be very low-risk of re-offending, leaving parole agents free to focus on high-risk parolees. The revelations come two days after the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that California’s prisons are dangerously overcrowded and upheld an earlier order that state officials find a way to reduce the 143,335 inmate population by roughly 33,000. The state has two years to comply. Currently, many California prisoners are living on basketball courts – 200 prisoners to a gym. They have 1 toilet for every 54 prisoners and there is around 1 suicide a week.
1:09:46 – The PCLR test is a psychological evaluation test created by Canadian psychiatrists and it’s widely used to determine if you’re a psychopath. They use it to determine whether prisoners are eligible for parole, but it’s a 50-question test – there are freak occurrences where it doesn’t seem to make sense, like the person on paper isn’t who they are in real life. No politician is willing to let any prisoners out who have a bad score because it’s a kiss of death.
1:18:10 – Bill Clinton isn’t dead, but he’s going vegan.
12:42 – Seth shows Jonathan some mailbox money. He received a residual check worth $25.45. The shoot day was April 3, 2005 – shortly before the start of UYD in February 2006. This was no for Crossroads – it was for McBride No. 6 – “Did Anybody Here Murder Marty?” It re-aired on Christmas Day 2010. This means that Jonathan should receive an actual check for it because he and Amir did the music for the movie, and each time something airs he gets about $400.
14:19 – A study of 256,370 OK Cupid users has determined that both male and female vegetarians are more prone to enjoy giving oral sex than meat eaters.
20:52 – That anxiety you’re feeling may be in your guts, not your head. The research appears in the online edition of the journal Gastroenterology. Working with healthy adult mice, researchers showed that disrupting the normal bacterial content of the gut with antibiotics produces changes in behavior. The mice became less cautious or anxious. This change was accompanied by an increase in brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which has been linked to depression and anxiety. When oral antibiotics were discontinued, bacteria in the gut returned to normal and this was accompanied by restoration of normal behavior and brain chemistry.
29:24 – It doesn’t take much imagination to guess what a porn video sounds like. It’s more impressive, however, when a computer is doing the guessing. Automatic image analysis systems are already used to catch unwanted pornography before it reaches a computer monitor, but they often struggle to distinguish between indescent imagery and more innocuous pictures with large flesh-colored images such as a person in swimwear or a close-up of a face or medical photos. They’ve started using a signal processing technique called the RADON transform to create spectragrams of a variety of audio clips. Each just a half-second long, they found that speech signals are normally low-pitched, musical clips have a wide range of pitches, both vary only gradually over time. In contrast, pornographic sounds tend to be higher pitched, change quickly, and also periodically repeat. These characteristics allow software to distinguish smutty audio from other content. The researchers used a statistical model to classify sounds as pornographic or non-pornographic according to their spectral characteristics and tested it on audio taken from online videos. The non-sexual audio clips included music, movies, news and sports. The model out-performed other audio-based techniques, correctly identifying 93% of the porn content from the test clips. The clips it missed had confusable sounds such as background music, causing the model to misclassify some lewd clips. Comedy shows with laughter were also sometimes mistaken for pornography as some of the audience’s loud cheers and cries share similar spectral characteristics to sexual sounds.
45:44 – The National Science Foundation released “Under the Microscope,” a report by Tom A. Coburn, medical doctor and U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, exposes waste by the National Science Foundation. There’s a huge list. One example: a $2 million grant given to researchers at Cornell University – “Are people who post pictures on the internet from the same place at the same time often socially connected?” Another was $90,000 to SMU and Texas: “What is the relationship between online virtual world users and their avatars?”
50:18 – A study appeared online in the journal Neuropsychology that says the driving skills of the elderly do deteriorate as they age. Research showed the older drivers consistently forgot to check for blind spots, had diminished reaction times, made poor decisions, acceleration and braking was inappropriate and occasionally mistook the pedals.
53:11 – An online survey of 14,500 people who had come from a religious background discovered that people who had abandoned their churches had improved sex lives. In his survey, “Sex and Secularism,” which he publicized last week, Darrell Ray drew a direct correlation between guilt and sexual behavior. “We find guilt is a pretty big thing,” said Ray, the author of The God Virus: How God Affects Our Lives and Culture. Atheists, he concluded, had the best sex of all. “They can speak with some authority,” he said, “they were raised in very secular homes.” All his respondents were over the age of 18 and of all sexual orientations, had abandoned their churches and had described themselves as agnostic or without religious belief. Once they left a religion, more than 50% saw improvements in their sex lives. 29.6% saw no change, 2.2% said it was worse, according to his survey. Those who had grown up in the most conservative churches, based on their teachings on sex and invocation of guilt, reported the highest satisfaction levels after leaving religion behind. All of the people who were questioned were found to have sex around the same number of times per week. They also became sexually active at similar ages. Those who had been raised Mormon showed the highest rating among those who had sexual guilt, with an average score of 8.19 out of 10. Those who had similar responses were Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentacostals, Seventh-Day Adventists and Baptists. Catholics rated their guilt at 6.34 and Lutherans came in at 5.88. Atheists and agnostics came in at 4.71 and 4.81. People who had abandoned their beliefs said that their sex lives were “much improved” and rated their new experiences on average at about a 7.1 out of 10.
19:13 – Seth read Walter Scott’s Personality Parade. Lucy Liu, a voice in Kung Fu Panda, was speaking: “Yeah, we get asked a lot about a third Charlie’s movie.
22:45 – Seth takes us back 25 years ago this week, where Madonna’s “Live To Tell” was the No. 1 single in the country.