View Episode 299
Originally aired 11.29.11
1:15:22
16:25 – Thursday, Dec. 1 at 10 p.m. – the premiere of Weed Wars on Discovery Channel. Go inside the world’s largest medican cannabis dispensary, Oakland’s Harborside Health Center. It’s open 365 days a year, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
34:15 – Hundreds of thousands of drivers rumble over Florida’s roadways each day. Horns blare and cars collide. Less obvious are the unlicensed drivers among them. In Florida, a state that has about 15.5 million legal drivers, there are 2.2 million people currently with suspended or revoked licenses. Many get on the road anyway. Nationally, about 1 in 10 motorists drive illegally.
24:54 – Scientists have invented a new material that is so light it can sit on top of a fluffy dandelion without crushing the little fuzzy seeds. It is so lightweight that Styrofoam is 100 times heavier than this material. It is so lightweight in fact that the research time consisting of scientists at UC-Irvine HRL Laboratories and CalTech say in the Peer Review Nov. 18 issue of Science, that it is the lightest material on earth. The material has been dubbed “Ultra Light Metallic Microlattice” and consists of 99.99% air thanks to its microlattice cellular architecture.
53:18 – The Minute Key – the world’s first self-service key duplication kiosk. You select a key for $2.99 or $3.99 for a decorative option and you get to watch the high-tech robotics cut your key.
58:21 – Domino’s understands that consumers have changing pallettes, so they’ve revamped their cheese bread and has begun selling gourmet varieties – bacon and jalapeño, etc.
3:20 – Jonathan is leaving town to see his parents in NYC for Thanksgiving and realized that as soon as you get through Thanksgiving, you’re right there at Christmas. There’s no time whatsoever between the two. By the time he gets back into town, gets sorted and figures everything out, it will be December 5. At that point he’ll have to leave in another 10 days.
30:45 – Jah was trying to clean up the desktop of his computer and he came across the fiber-optic camera video of Seth’s knee surgery. He couldn’t really tell what was going on in it. There’s audio, but it’s like underwater sucking noises, not the doctor laughing at Seth. Seth recalls that he was in the mix the whole time. He wasn’t put under consciousness. He remembers the big shots they were giving him beforehand, but they rolled him by all the unconscious people and he threw them deuces while enjoying a veggie burger.
39:06 – Every morning, especially if he smokes weed, Jah has his routine where he walks his dogs. He wakes up, gets ready, opens the door for them so they can go downstairs and pee, but within an hour of him waking up, they walk to Starbucks. Every day he has to get their leashes and plastic bag, puts his sneakers up, etc. Every time he forgets something like his mailbox key or his wallet, etc. He in essence gets to the door or almost outside before he realizes it. His dogs, Fatty especially, are hip to this, and he does his own routine where he paces in circles and eats food from the bowl when Jah grabs the leashes.
1:03:18 – Jah circles back to last week’s discussion about tipping for food delivery. Jah had indicated that you don’t need to tip the driver if there’s a delivery charge. He found out from callers that, tops, drivers will receive $1 of the $5 delivery charge. He retracts his previous statement and encourages you to tip, even though it kind of sucks.
4:33 – Time magazine’s 50 Best Inventions of the Year – Pre-emptive policing – 94.7 meters in one city block. Police officers in Santa Cruz, Calif., are getting ahead of the bad guys by figuring out where crimes will be committed before they take place. Using a computer program developed by mathematicians, anthropologists and criminologists, officers are able to predict what areas of the city are most at-risk for future crimes and the time the crimes are most likely to occur so they can have a member of the police force at the ready.
6:24 – The BBB has issued a warning about an e-mail scam that claims it’s from the BBB. The e-mail contains a dangerous attachment regarding a complaint and appears to direct recipients to the BBB website.
9:46 – December is National Write A Friend Month
13:38 – New social network called GROWLr – for bears, by bears.
1:11:25 – There was an issue with the UYD website this week. It was shut down, and when it went back up, everything was lost. Somehow it got recovered. During the time it was gone forever, Jah found out that the wiki was still backed up and archived and all of Jeff’s show notes were backed up. Jah was blown away by the reminder of the fact that the people who keep it going are crazy. He gets trippy with it being Thanksgiving and gives thanks to all.
38:20 – We’ve all experienced it: the frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do or get or find. New research from the University of Notre Dame psychology professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses: “Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as a ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away. Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it’s been compartmentalized.” The study was published recently in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. Conducting experiments in both real and virtual environments, Radvansky’s subjects – all college students – performed memory tasks while crossing a room and while exiting a doorway. In the first experiment, subjects used a virtual environment and moved from one room to another, selecting an object on a table and exchanging it for an object on a different table. They did the same thing while simply moving across the room but not crossing through a doorway. Radvansky found that subjects forgot more after walking through a doorway compared to moving the same distance across the room, suggesting that the doorway or event boundary impedes one’s ability to retrieve thoughts and decisions made in a different room. The second experiment in real-world settings required subjects to conceal in boxes the objects chosen from the table and move either across the room or travel the same distance and walk through a doorway. The results in the real world replicated those of a virtual world – walking through a doorway diminished the subjects’ memories.
55:05 – In China, they make things, which are then brought here and sold to people and then murder us. November product recalls from China from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission: the Gerber Legendary Blades Winchester Hunting Knife Set – sold for around $120 at sporting goods stores around the U.S. The latching mechanism used to lock in the knife’s interchangeable blades unexpectedly collapses and releases the blade. … the Keds Know-It-All girls shoe, sold for $23 at various department stores, has ornamental stars that adorn the heel of the shoe that loosen and pose a laceration hazard. … The Heath Wireless Command Motion Sensor Wall Switch, sold for $25 at hardware stores across the country, has switches in auto mode that have a leakage current that pass through the electrical socket and thus electrocutes people.
44:35 – Ask Amy / Ask Jah: “I nanny for two wonderful boys, ages 5 and 8. Their parents have a date night each Friday and allow me to take the boys to college hockey games on these nights. With season tickets, we sit in the same spot every time. So do the people directly around us. Directly behind us, there are a couple of middle-aged men who are very passionate about their hockey team. This passion often involves swear words. I’m worried for the boys, who have gotten in trouble for swearing, but I also understand how people behave at sporting events. Do I have any right to ask the men to watch what they say?” Jah says yes, absolutely.
30:20 – Seth started off 2010 by breaking his toe. He started off 2011 by tearing meniscus in his knee. In 2012 there will be no injuries, he says. Only laughter.
5:14 – Seth goes off on the “invention” of predicting in which parts of town and what times crimes will take place. He and Seth already invented it by watching Minority Report at the CineramaDome (Episode 051, 36:35; Episode 129, 15:42; and Episode 149, 11:10 and Episode 268, 1:03:14).
8:03 – Jah goes off on people who respond to phishing e-mail scams.
18:30 – The cover of People magazine this week 5 years ago, while UYD was closing out the first year of its show: “A Wedding to Remember.” … “Sparing absolutely no expense, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes treat their families and famous friends to a spectacular affair in Italy.”