Learn how you can grow a garden in "regolith" Martian soil; how to stop spending too much money on frivolous purchases; and a memory technique you can use to remember pretty much everything. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: This Company Wants You to Grow a Garden in Martian Soil To Avoid Overspending, Think of Money as Hours of Your Life Use the Memory Palace Technique to Remember Basically Everything Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Learn how you can grow a garden in "regolith" Martian soil; how to stop spending too much money on frivolous purchases; and a memory technique you can use to remember pretty much everything.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron!
Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/gardening-with-martian-soil-how-to-stop-overspending-and-a-technique-for-remembering-things
CODY GOUGH: Hi, we've got three stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn how you can grow a garden in Martian soil. How to stop spending too much money on frivolous purchases, and a memory technique you can use to remember pretty much everything.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity. Here's something you can add to the list of weird stuff you can buy online, imitation Martian soil. That's right. You can now see how your garden might grow on Mars. Are you a Gardener Ashley?
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm not. But I got really excited when I learned about this stuff.
CODY GOUGH: I can become a gardener?
ASHLEY HAMER: I mean, I could become a Martian Gardener, any day. I just need to spend $19.99 and I too could be a Martian Gardener. This is not sponsored.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. We see--
[BOTH LAUGHS]
--was just about to say, let's get that out of the way right now. No. We wrote about it because it's science. And science is cool and fun.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. It's amazing.
CODY GOUGH: Literally, our entire show. Well, listen, to be totally clear, humans have never gotten actual samples of soil from Mars. Our spacecraft have sent back analysis of soil samples, but not the soil itself.
We've nicknamed Martian soil, regolith. And it comes from iron-rich volcanic rock with a very texture. Particles of regolith range from chunky gravel like you might see here on Earth, to ultrafine dust. And we mean, ultrafine. The dust floats up into the air a lot because it's so tiny, which is bad for spacecraft since it can get inside even the tiniest crack.
Anyway, we've kind of think about colonizing Mars. I don't know if you've heard about that. So to learn more about it, NASA's engineers came up with a simulation of it back in 1997.
They started by using ground-up basalt from Hawaiian lava flows, then they started using basalt from the Mojave Desert. And now, there's an online shop headquartered in Austin, where you can buy your own simulated regolith. NASA's featured it in one of their magazines devoted to private sector uses of NASA's technology. So you know it's good stuff.
The company is called the Martian Garden, and they offer two simulant varieties-- ones a bit more accurate when it comes to the latest Intel from Mars. And they also sell $20 starter packs with Martian soil simulant, seeds for assorted microgreens, a portable plastic greenhouse, and pretty much anything else they'll need to grow a garden. It's the closest you can get to gardening on Mars.
You are in luck if you're a fan of the movie The Martian, and you want to really get into your Matt Damon cosplay. But hopefully, this could get other people more excited about Mars. And who knows, maybe more excited about gardening too, Ashley.
ASHLEY HAMER: Cody, you know it does the Martian one better.
CODY GOUGH: Why is that?
ASHLEY HAMER: Because you don't have to use your poop.
CODY GOUGH: It's a good catch.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. Do you ever buy stuff you just know you don't need, but you get it anyway? We've all been there. But those purchases can really add up. Before you know it, you've got a bunch of junk, instead of a bunch of money.
Well, today, we've got a trick to stop overspending on frivolous purchases. This money-saving trick comes from the bestselling book Your Money or Your Life. And authors Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez have a pretty simple solution.
Just think of your money as hours of your life. That's it. You'll have to do some number crunching, though.
Even if your job pays you by the hour, you need to calculate your income after taxes. If you're salaried at $50,000 a year, you might take home about $3,500 a month, depending on the taxes where you live. Divide that by the number of hours you work, and you might end up with about 22 bucks an hour if you work 40 hours a week.
But then, you need to add up all your work-related expenses. That means commuting costs, work lunches, dry cleaning, and stuff like daycare, house cleaning, and even fun activities that help you de-stress after work. After all, some people just wouldn't be able to make it through the workweek without Netflix.
Then, add up all the hours you spend on work when you're not at work, like commuting and answering emails after hours. And then, you can crunch the numbers. Subtract your monthly work-related expenses from your monthly wages, and add your non-work work hours to your actual work hours. Then divide your real wages by your real work hours.
Let's say, you, a hypothetical 50k a year worker, spend $1,500 a month on work-related expenses, and 40 hours of work-related time outside of work. That makes your real hourly wage $10. And that's the number you can use to get your spending under control.
If your real hourly wage is $10, that means that every $10 you spend is an hour of life energy. That means a $40 food delivery is 4 hours of your life. A $15 rideshare, when the bus is just 10 minutes away, that's 90 minutes you'll never get back.
Now, I'm not saying don't splurge. Splurging is super fun, I know. But this might help if you feel like you're doing it a bit too much.
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ASHLEY HAMER: Curious, at vistaprint.com.
CODY GOUGH: If you cannot stand when you forget stuff, then you've come to the right place. Because today, we've got a trick for remembering things that comes from ancient Greece. Those ancient Greeks had some pretty good ideas, you know?
ASHLEY HAMER: They did.
CODY GOUGH: Are you a forgetful person, Ashley?
ASHLEY HAMER: I do forget things. I'm very good at using all the tools at my disposal to make sure that I don't even need to remember things. Writing things down, calendar, events,
CODY GOUGH: Calendar reminders is helpful.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes.
CODY GOUGH: I write stuff down as well. I might try this trick. It sounds both useful and fun. You may have seen a version of this on BBC Sherlock.
ASHLEY HAMER: Love Sherlock.
CODY GOUGH: Great show. Well, this trick goes by a few names, including memory palace, mind palace, or method of loci. It's a different way to think about your memory that could give you a permanent boost.
According to the legendary Roman statesman Cicero, this method was devised by the Greek poet Simonides after a dinner party that went pretty much as badly as possible. First of all, the wealthy host insulted his poem. Not cool. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the party ended when the roof collapsed and crushed every single guest beyond recognition.
ASHLEY HAMER: Geez.
CODY GOUGH: Except for Simonides, who had been mysteriously called away before it happened. Well, fortunately, he was able to actually help by remembering where the guests were sitting. He could re-unite the guests remains with their grieving families.
He realized he could use a similar spatial method to remember less morbid information as well. So let's see you've got a huge list of errands you need to run today, and you're worried you'll forget one of them. Here's what you've got to do-- you've got to go grocery shopping, pick up the dry cleaning, get an oil change, find a birthday present, and take the cat to the vet. That's five things.
Instead of making a list, try this. Think very carefully about the layout of your house. Imagine coming home and walking up the steps to the front door.
As you pull out your keys, you notice a pair of grocery bags playing around on your front lawn, pushing each other in the swing set. The more outlandish you envision something, the more likely it is you'll remember it. Then you enter the house and stand in the vestibule, where you're suddenly swarmed by a flock of freshly pressed dress suits. To remind you to pick up the dry cleaning.
Pushing past them, you walk into your living room, where your car is relaxing in a kiddie pool full of black oil. To remind you get an oil change. As you pass the bathroom, you hear strains of Happy Birthday being played, and you peek inside to discover somebody has replaced your shower curtain with wrapping paper. Term I needed by a birthday present.
And finally, you make it to your kitchen and the back of the house. There's your kid sitting at the table with a thermometer in its mouth. I don't really feel great, it says to you. You get the idea.
It might seem convoluted, but memory palaces work. Give it a shot, and see how it goes.
ASHLEY HAMER: I want to live in that house. A quick correction from two episodes ago. In our story about the frog rule, we said William McRaven was a retired US Navy General.
McRaven is a retired US Navy Admiral, the Navy doesn't actually have generals. The podcast episode and our write up have both been updated. We apologize to our friends in the armed forces for the error.
CODY GOUGH: Read about today's stories and more on curiosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: Join us again tomorrow for the Curiosity Daily, and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: Stay curious.
ANNOUNCER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.