Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that will eventually be recorded in the annals of history, sorry I said that wrong, the anals of history.

I’m your host this week, Shea, and with me are:

I’m Aaron, and this week I learned cleaning the floor is routine, but cleaning the ceiling means that something disastrous has happened… Like bottle-bombs or a defective O-ring on your keg…

I’m Steve and I’ve not been sleeping well lately on top of that it’s been really busy at work, so I’m having a hard time forming a complete sentence without stumbling over my dick. So, please bear with me.

This Week’s Drinks

Steve: I’m drinking the Voodoo Ranger Juicy Haze IPA this week. Brewed in lovely Ft. Collins, CO at 7.5% abv. This is a spiced IPA, which honestly isn’t my favorite, but it’s a nice change of pace. 7 of 10

I am finishing a bottle of Cabernet that I opened to make… Au Jus, maybe, or a schezwan sauce, who remembers.

Shea: I’m drinking a smorgasbord of beer from the back of the fridge, right now it’s another Alaskan midnight haze IPA.

Round Table

From Patreon with Love commented on your post.

The measurement of one billion trillion would be represented in factors, not with zero’s. it would be 10 to the power of 12 to the power of 9.

Kevin Rowlands commented on your post.

Love the predictions but the best Nostradamus show was The First Wave filmed in Vancouver from 1998 to 2001

Headlines…

Pensions At Bernie’s

So far, our headlines have been largely science-based. But what is science really if not testing a theory?

Theories like listener Louise’s “can Irish Post Offices tell the difference between some dude, and some dude’s corpse?”

The answer is, it seems, yes.

Last week, as of recording anyway, an Irish man stopped by the County Carlow post office to collect a pension. Not his pension mind you. The office staff of course refused him, stating that only the pension holder could collect it.

So our enterprising hero returned later that day with a friend… and the pension holder. Problem is, he’s dead.

The man and his friend fully Weekend At Burney’s’ed him. According to witnesses, they entered the Post Office with the man “propped up” between them, an arm over each shoulder, feet dragging lifelessly behind them. From a woman who didn’t want to be named, “she was leaving my house at the time and said the man looked unwell as his feet were dragging [along] the ground,” which was because he was a corpse.

The mayor of Carlow, Fianna Fáil councilor Ken Murnane said “I was absolutely shocked to hear about what happened. I cannot believe anyone would do something like that. It beggars belief, I’m just shocked.”

For their part, they got arrested and the local constabulary, called Gardaí, was investigating the nature of the man’s death.

Local Fine Gael councilor Fergal Byrne said: “The staff in the shop are very shook up from it. I’d like to offer my sympathies to the man’s family also. It’s a bizarre and upsetting situation.”

• https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/22/two-men-take-corpse-into-irish-post-office-to-claim-dead-mans-pension

Five Letter Words

Or, the ones we don’t have to bleep in the public story.

And yeah, that’s correct, the Patreon segment and outtakes are not censored for language and such! Yeah, you know you want to hear Jenn say bad words.

Speaking of words, like the rest of the world it seems, Steve and I have been pretty into Wordle. Today’s was nearly a 2 row for me, but there are a lot of words that start with “S”,“H”, “A”, “R”, and “_” — fun fact, Wordle does not think “Shart” is a real word.

Like most players, I have a default starting word that I use nearly every game: Adieu. It’s vowelly. However, according to Dr. Danny Heiber, a research linguist at the University of Alberta Language Technology Lab has a different theory.

“If you want the highest probability of getting the first word right or the second word right in Wordle, then you need to take into account the frequency of letters in English,”

Said the adult linguist with a doctorate who still goes by Danny.

“I’ve seen ‘tears’, that’s pretty good. I’ve seen ‘stare’, that’s also another good one. But my professional recommendation as a linguist is that your first word in Wordle should be ‘irate’”.

Apparently, it’s simply a numbers game. E, A, and I are the most common vowels in English, paired with the most common consonants, T and R, you should hit a few oranges, if not a green.

But that’s alls words isn’t it? So we need to look closer, much more closelier.

Redditor adeadhead analyzed letter occurrences from Stanford’s Graphbase five-letter word list and found That you’re likely better off using some combination of S, E, A, O, and R. Given that, “arose”, “raise”, or “arise” seem to have the highest potential word score.

And in case you’re wondering, the worst words are “fuffy” and “xylyl” because we’re not playing Scrabble.

• https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/linguistic-expert-recommends-the-best-opening-wordle-word/

Lifestyles of the Rich and the Genius

I was sitting in a space science class this week with one of my students and we were talking about the history of astronomy. I have always loved space so I was excited to listen in on this lesson. The teacher introduced us to Tycho Brahe. A Danish astronomer whose work in developing astronomical instruments and in measuring and fixing the positions of stars paved the way for future discoveries. His observations—the most accurate possible before the invention of the telescope—included a comprehensive study of the solar system and accurate positions of more than 777 fixed stars. This dude was a big deal but more importantly, he was a bit mad. In today’s episode, I’m going to reintroduce you to a couple of big hitters in the science community and maybe shine a new light on some of their proclivities.

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So back to my man Tycho, his upbringing was pretty normal, well, if you consider he was abducted by his uncle and spirited away to a castle in Scania where he was taught the ways of science. At 14 he was completely enthralled with a predicted eclipse of the sun for August 21, 1560. His spark for astronomy was lit and this event would be referenced many times later in his works. Tycho was educated at the University of Leipzig in his 20’s he then moved to study in Rostock where he got into an argument over a mathematical formula, and this was no normal argument it devolved into a full-on brawl and in those times brawls typically ended in a duel. As did this one… I should mention that the argument was with a cousin but that didn’t stop the ensuing fight where Tycho managed to lose his nose, the whole thing, chopped right off. This only sets the stage for our famous scientist who then went on to wear a prosthetic brass nose for the rest of his life.

Now our story doesn’t stop there as a brass-nosed man is interesting but not inherently mad. Brahe inherited a great deal of wealth from his foster father Jørgen, who died in 1565 when saving the King of Denmark from drowning… What the hell? Every part of this guy’s life was crazy. Brahe is thought to have possessed as much as 1% of the entire wealth of Denmark, and five times that much was spent by the Danish government on Brahe’s astronomical research. So now we have a metal nose, rich, scientist, nothing could go wrong.

He lived in a castle, where he kept a rather strange group of regular entertainers. He employed a little person called Jepp, who Brahe believed possessed psychic powers and the ability to see the future. Jepp was his court jester and spent most dinners under the table. I have no idea why and I don’t really want to think too much about it… For years, Brahe also kept a beer-chugging pet elk or moose in his castle. I have read a few conflicting articles that say elk or moose. One night the elk/moose drank too much beer, fell down a staircase, and died. I have searched high and low for the name of the elk moose but I have come up dry, I just hope he had a cool name like Mortimer or maybe Chocolate.

At the time, noble banquets offered delicious food, fine wine, beautiful music, beautifully adorned tables, and fascinating conversation not about new Netflix shows. But there was one downside. They went on for hours, during which time guests were expected to eat and drink until they were close to exploding. But it was also looked at as rude if you left to relieve yourself.

As the party continued and laughter hung around him, Brahe felt increasing pain in his nether regions. He must have thought he would be fine once he got home, which was just across the street. After all, the 54-year-old Dane had never known any serious illness in his life. By the time he arrived home, the need to relieve his bladder was agonizing. Gru