Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that’s cooler than your uncle. 

I’m your host this week, Shea, and with me are my two favorite people, Steve and Aaron 

I’m Aaron, and this week I learned that all moms are, technically, bodybuilders…

I’m Steve, and yesterday I learned about Wordle and it’s a damn good thing you can only do one puzzle a day.

Headlines

HL1: Burning Ring of Fire!

Good news everybody! The leader of Turkmenistan, President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov — you may remember him as the guy who was too mean to a puppy, for Putin — has urged the lawmaker to finally close the Gates of Hell now that he’s done doing donuts on Satan’s lawn.

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Look at your phones now for a pic.

Gurbanguly, in 2019, shot his shot for YouTube fame by doing donuts next to the Gates in a bid to disprove rumors he was dead. 

The Gates of Hell opened in 1971 during a Soviet drilling operation looking for natural gas. Uninterested in a skylight, Satan just collapsed the whole damn operation, drilling equipment and all, leaving a 230 foot wide, gaping hell-mouth that’s been burning ever since.

The Gates of Hell, or as they’re less Biblically known, the Darvaza gas crater, is a roughly 65-foot-deep crater. The collapse of the drilling equipment left all that gas they were after venting into the atmosphere. Fearing the noxious methane leak geologists at the time decided to fix the problem by adding fire. They expected it to burn out in a day or two… it’s still burning.

Of course, it smells like a burning Hell pit so living nearby is not ideal, but the pit is Turkmenistan’s largest tourist sight. The president is betting that putting out the flame and collecting the gas is worth more than the foot traffic so… we’re finally going to do something about the environmental mess that is, essentially, a man-made eternal flame-hole.

• https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019–08–07/turkmenistan-president-rally-car-hells-gate-dispel-death-rumours/11392246


• https://www.sciencealert.com/turkmenistan-s-president-wants-to-close-the-gates-of-hell-which-has-been-burning-for-50-years?fbclid=IwAR3fPezAV5WAIAf38xjKTZnfQlE-QtNX-nh8VVXKFk8f9Nyp-8Xc3npDYb4

3 Centuries Later…

I’ve often said of the Catholic Church that if you put something in their complaint box today, they’ll get to it in a few short centuries…

Turns out I was right.

In 1730 the church was made aware of a grave injustice — no, not the kiddie diddling, we’ll have to wait until 2312 for them to do anything about that if this timeline holds — I’m referring to that most evil of topics, most sinful of events, Vivaldi’s “Il Farnace.”

The Opera was banned in the northern-Italian city of Ferrara in 1739 by Cardinal Tommaso Ruffo because Vivaldi, a conscripted Priest, had stopped going to Mass and was said to be in a relationship with those most vexing and depraved of creatures, a woman, called Anna Grio.

This effectively ended Vivaldi, leaving one of, if not the, most influential Baroque composers to die in exile a pauper.

Now, some 300 years later, Ferrara Archbishop Giancarlo Perego attended the opening of “Il Farnace” in Ferrara — which is as close to a mea culpa as you’re going to get from the Catholic Church.

• https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/vivaldi-opera-gets-premiere-italian-city-nearly-300-years-late-rcna10438


• https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/after-300-year-delay-catholic-church-reverses-stance-on-vivaldi-opera/?fbclid=IwAR2zPJb0TeqKq1mUQlDpWoLfhAwGitKZYS9u_8pJiH8FGQPrP4jSKrNrlFI

The Grass Is Greener in the Matrix

Shea has been playing the hell out of his new Oculus Rift, but it’s time to answer the hard questions: has it made you produce more milk?

That’s the going theory within Turkey where cattle breeder and rancher, Izzet Kocak, is using Moscow-vet approved VR headsets to trick his cattle into thinking they’re happy.

The basic idea is, you get some cheap VR goggles from Russia, program them to show the Windows XP wallpaper, and then strap them to cows. The cows, which are locked in a barn, see green fields and open skies, helping with what appears to be massive cow depression.

Currently being tested on two very lucky bovines, their milk production increased from roughly 22 liters to 27 liters. “They are watching a green pasture and it gives them an emotional boost,” explained Izzet.

According to Russia’s Ministry of Agriculture in Moscow, the OG VR cow tests helped decrease the cow’s anxiety… Also, how in 2022 is it that even our cows have anxiety disorders now?

For his part, I guess Turkish milk is valuable as Izzet plans to buy 10 more devices for his other cows.

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Jab before buzz

Want more evidence that the people who are against getting the jab are full of it when they say they have a moral objection? Just look to Quebec for a prime example. On January 6th, the Quebec Health Minister, Christian Dubé, announced that after January 18th, all Quebecers will have to show proof of Covid-19 vaccination to enter establishments that sell alcohol or cannabis. How’s that for using the stick on the unvaxxed. You can remain unprotected if you’d like, but you’ll have to do it sober. Well, heaven forbid, as a result, appointments for the first jab rose sharply from about 1500 per day to over 6000. That’s not all either. In the coming weeks, it’s been announced that proof of vaccination will be necessary to access other non-essential services. The real good news is that in Quebec the currently unvaccinated only account for about 10% of the population. If only we could get anywhere near that number anywhere in the states.

• Dhttps://montreal.ctvnews.ca/first-dose-vaccinations-quadruple-in-quebec-ahead-of-restrictions-at-liquor-and-cannabis-stores-1.5731327


• https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/quebecers-will-need-to-show-vaccine-passports-to-access-liquor-cannabis-stores-1.5729843

Headshot for Science!

What would happen if you stuck your body inside a particle accelerator? The scenario seems like the start of a villain origin story. Particle accelerators are machines that propel charged particles at incredible speeds, generally to collide with other particles, not the human body. When used in research, the beam hits the target and scientists gather information about atoms, molecules, and the laws of physics. In addition to research, accelerators are used for commercial purposes like medicine, manufacturing, and food safety. 

As far back as 2008, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), was charged with creating microscopic black holes that would allow physicists to detect extra dimensions. To many, this sounds like the plot of a disastrous science-fiction movie or just a better setup for our future villain… It came as no surprise when two people filed a lawsuit to stop the LHC from operating, lest it produce a black hole powerful enough to destroy the world. But physicists argued that the idea was absurd and the lawsuit was rejected.

Then, in 2012, the LHC detected the long-sought Higgs boson, a particle needed to explain how particles acquire mass. With that major accomplishment, the LHC entered popular culture; it was featured on the album cover of Super Collider (2013) by the heavy metal band Megadeth and was a plot point in the US television series The Flash (2014-). For the uninitiated, Flash was powered up by a lightning strike, not an atom traveling at light speed. 

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Now our story doesn’t start with the Large Hadron Collider, which is the gold standard for colliders and only the one at Cern exists, but with a smaller collider. Interestingly there are more than 30,000 colliders in the world, I don’t know how many I thought existed but it was a lot less than 30,000. Holy shit. Another cool fact, the LHC at Cern is more than 5 miles where the first collider was shorter than 5 inches. In 1930, inspired by the ideas of Norwegian engineer Rolf Widerøe, 27-year-old physicist Ernest Lawrence created the first circular particle accelerator at the University of California, Berkeley, with graduate student M. Stanley Livingston. It accelerated hydrogen ions up to energies of 80,000 electronvolts within a chamber less than 5 inches across.

Anyway, back to our Villain origins, what happens when a beam of subatomic particles traveling at nearly the speed of light meets the flesh of the human body?

In a 2010 YouTube interview with members of the physics and astronomy facult