Stuff You Should Know

The digital duo Josh and Chuck deconstruct your world.

Podcast Goodness: Totem Poles and Odd Town Festivals

by Charles W. Bryant
November 20th, 2009
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Good morning, SYSK Army. And isn’t it a lovely morning? It sure is here in the ATL. Thanksgiving is just around the corner, which means some nice relaxation for yours truly, along with a few little house projects during my time off. You gotta have life balance, right? Enough about me, how about a little podcast goodness?

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Punkin Chunkin? What the Blarg?!?!

by Charles W. Bryant

November 19, 2009
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Hello folks – if you listen to the podcast then you’ve heard Dr. Clark and I mention this Science Channel show lately, something about pumpkins being flung through the air. The whole thing got me thinking about why humans like to fling things, or this case, chunk things. What is it about us that we’ll put time and money into such a seemingly frivolous undertaking?

by Charles W. Bryant

November 18, 2009
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Hey there, folks. Thanks for tuning in this week. Joshers and I have some pure webcast goodness planned out and we hope you can all tune it to give it a look see. Enjoy, and let’s hear from you – we’ll respond to as many comments as we can, live on the air.

It all goes down at 1 p.m. EST.

Thanks for all the support, everybody!

Check it out here:

by Josh Clark

November 17, 2009
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Around 7:30 on the morning of Sunday, July 2, 1961, Earnest Hemingway went downstairs to the foyer of his home in Ketchum, Idaho, still clad in pajamas and robe, removed a 12-gauge shotgun from a rack near the front door, and shot himself in the head with it.

Hemingway was 61 when he shot himself and he’d just been released after a two-month stint at the Mayo Clinic, where he’d been treated for severe depression. He followed in the footsteps of his father, who had shot himself at age 57.

by Josh Clark

November 16, 2009
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Everybody hates the Nazis. Except, of course, neo-Nazis, and everybody else hates them too. The reasons are pretty much endless: the Holocaust, the horrific medical experiments, the ones who got away to Brazil and Alabama. Nazis are fun to hate, really. When else has there been a body of people so dedicated to such utterly despicable ideals? It’s like it was totally lost on them, their future place as history’s whipping post.

by Charles W. Bryant

November 13, 2009
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Hello there, fine folks of the SYSK Army. I trust everyone has had a good week and behaved themselves. Dr. Clark and I had our first public speaking gig since we last caught up and it went swimmingly. We spoke to a group of law students at GA State University about Fannie, Freddie and the Fed. Believe it or not, we were able to inject some personality and humor into it. Special thanks to our GSU fans who sneaked in to help support us! Pretty cool.

by Charles W. Bryant

November 12, 2009
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Here’s something that you may not know about me — I’m a sucker for stories where people see religious images in their everyday lives. Most of the sightings I’ve heard about over the years have been in the United States and Christian-based visages. We’re talking Jesus’ face on a truck window, the Virgin Mary’s in a moldy ceiling stain – that kind of thing. I love these stories, partly because I’m fascinated by how seriously some people take it, and partly because most of the time the image really does look like the icon of record. And you never hear about anyone seeing Ernest Borgnine in an oil stain on the garage floor, so there’s that.

by Josh Clark

November 10, 2009
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Music has a real effect on us. Why, I’m listening to music right now (Devo at the moment) and it’ll probably help shape this post. Case in point: There’s a new study out in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that covers how songs with prosocial lyrics have a prosocial impact on its listeners. Take, for instance, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” Remember Band Aid? The all-star group recorded that song 25 years ago to raise money for famine-stricken African nations. And it worked; the single raised over 8 million pounds. That’s pretty prosocial.

by Josh Clark

November 9, 2009
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There is a race afoot among blue chip IBM and a number of smaller start-ups to reach the $1,000 mark for sequencing individual DNA. Ever since the Human Genome Project completed its work in 2001, the quest to read a single person’s genetic code went from a possibility to a reality. The reality cost the U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan, France and China conglomerate a cool $1 billion, however. You have a billion dollars lying around to have your genetic make up sequenced? Me either. Do you want to have your personal genetic code cracked? Probably. Maybe. I don’t know either.

by Charles W. Bryant

November 6, 2009
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Hello podcast listeners, friends and members of the SYSK Army [formerly "Nation"]. Hope you’re all safe and sound, wherever you lay your head. Not a lot of time today, folks so on with the show…

This week on the SYSK podcast program we covered infant memory and product placement. Tuesday’s show was all about how babies, with their edible little soft knees, form and retain memories. Turns out, much like we expected, that there’s no way you can remember being born.

by Josh Clark

November 3, 2009
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There is a massive, albeit subtle to those of us not really paying attention, grab being made by the field of sociology right now. The social science is making a move to wrestle control of the study of murder from its soft science sister field of psychology. I find this intensely interesting. For the last X decades, since psychology has been around really, the field has had complete and unadulterated domain over the crime of murder. When Jack the Ripper was running around Whitechapel, the cops rounded up everyone who even seemed crazy and sent them off to asylums. The tacit implication was that anyone who butchered women must be insane.