Learn about how the overview effect changes your perspective when you leave Earth; why the Calder Mercury Fountain in Barcelona pumps out pure liquid mercury; and, how researchers came up with a set of core beliefs that measure how you feel about the world. Please support our sponsors! Visit capterra.com/curiosity to find the best software solution for your business — for free! 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: The Overview Effect Describes How Leaving Earth Changes Your Perspective — https://curiosity.im/2jCVb3H Look But Don't Touch Barcelona's Mercury-Spewing Fountain — https://curiosity.im/2jCTIdH Take the Primals Inventory to Measure Your Beliefs About the World — https://curiosity.im/2SppQyh Want to support our show?Register for the 2019 Podcast Awards and nominate Curiosity Daily to win for People’s Choice, Education, and Science & Medicine. After you register, simply select Curiosity Daily from the drop-down menus (no need to pick nominees in every category): https://curiosity.im/podcast-awards-2019 Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about how the overview effect changes your perspective when you leave Earth; why the Calder Mercury Fountain in Barcelona pumps out pure liquid mercury; and, how researchers came up with a set of core beliefs that measure how you feel about the world.
Please support our sponsors! Visit capterra.com/curiosity to find the best software solution for your business — for free!
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:
Want to support our show? Register for the 2019 Podcast Awards and nominate Curiosity Daily to win for People’s Choice, Education, and Science & Medicine. After you register, simply select Curiosity Daily from the drop-down menus (no need to pick nominees in every category): https://curiosity.im/podcast-awards-2019
Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/measure-your-beliefs-about-the-world-the-overview-effect-and-a-mercury-spewing-fountain
CODY: Hi! We’re here from curiosity-dot-com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about how leaving Earth changes your perspective; why there’s a fountain in Barcelona that pumps out pure liquid mercury; and, how researchers came up with a set of core beliefs that measure how you feel about the world.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
The Overview Effect Describes How Leaving Earth Changes Your Perspective — https://curiosity.im/2jCVb3H (from upcoming Thursday) (Ashley)
Humanity could benefit from getting a new world view. And by “world view,” I mean, quite literally, a view OF the world. From outer space. Today, I want to talk about a phenomenon called the overview effect. It’s the term for the change in perspective that many astronauts have reported after looking down on our tiny planet from way up in space. It was described by Apollo 14 pilot Edgar Mitchell, who was the sixth person to walk on the moon. He said, quote: “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you…’” I’m just gonna say “unquote” at this point, because he chose to use some pretty colorful language. But you get the idea. Another famous example of the overview effect comes from Carl Sagan. In 1990, the Voyager 1 probe took a snapshot of Earth from 4 billion miles away. The image inspired Sagan to write this famous passage in his 1994 book "Pale Blue Dot." Quote, “Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves,” unquote. Unfortunately, we can’t all go to space, but In May 2008, a group of experts in science, technology, and art founded the Overview Institute. Its mission is to educate both the space community and the general public on the nature and psychosocial impact of the space experience. Their hope is to find better ways to communicate exactly what astronauts experience when they're up there, both through new forms of media and, perhaps in the future, with better access to commercial space travel for regular people. As for what you can do right now, we recommend diving into NASA's image library and letting yourself become one with the universe.
Look But Don't Touch Barcelona's Mercury-Spewing Fountain — https://curiosity.im/2jCTIdH (Cody) [FREELANCER]
You know what you do NOT want to become one with? A mercury-spewing fountain in Barcelona’s modern art museum Fundació Joan Miró [foon-DAH-see-oh jj-oh-AHN Me-roh]? After all, the toxicity of mercury is well known. Or at least it should be. Sure, the Calder Mercury Fountain is beautiful to look at, and it is surrounded by a thick pane of glass that protects viewers from breathing its fumes or touching the lethal liquid. But why create such a deadly piece of art in the first place? Here’s the story.
Back in 1937, the toxicity of Mercury was NOT known. So, when Spain commissioned American Sculptor Alexander Calder to create a monument to recognize mines in Almadén [alma-DEN], which were once the world's greatest source of mercury, Calder constructed a fountain in his signature style that pumped out mercury, instead of water.
The finished piece was shown at the Spanish Republican Pavilion for the 1937 World's Fair in Paris, sitting in front of Pablo Picasso's seminal painting Guernica [GER-nick-kah]. That Picasso piece famously serves a political message in the context of the Spanish Civil War, and so does the mercury fountain. At the time, Almadén was under siege by fascist troops.
A sad fact is that lots of the slave laborers and criminals who worked at the mines died of mercury poisoning — because again: no one knew the danger of mercury.
According to the World Health Organization, mercury is one of the top ten chemicals or groups of chemicals of major public health concern. This is something we've known about since 1866, but it didn't really enter the public's conscience until about the 1950s.
On the bright side, now that we know mercury is toxic, we have ways to reverse mercury poisoning — as long as it's caught early. Of course, that still doesn’t mean you should get too close to Barcelona's Mercury-Spewing Fountain.
[CAPTERRA]
ASHLEY: Today’s episode is sponsored by Capterra, a FREE online resource to help you find the best software solution for your business.
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CODY: One more time, that’s capterra-dot-com-slash-curiosity. Show our sponsor some love and check it out today — for free!
Take the Primals Inventory to Measure Your Beliefs About the World — https://curiosity.im/2SppQyh (Ashley)
Once upon a time, Jiminy Cricket told Pinnochio “let your conscience be your guide.” Have you ever wondered how your conscience is guiding you, though? Well a team of scientists at the University of Pennsylvania identified 26 cardinal beliefs that they say guide how you live and interact with the world. And you can even take a quiz called the Primals Inventory to measure them. "Primals" is the researchers' shorthand for "primal beliefs," or the convictions you hold at the core of your being. I’m talking about big questions like “is the glass half empty or half full”; "is the world a good place"; and "does everything happen for a reason?" The researchers wanted to identify a set of cardinal beliefs shared around the world. So they analyzed important texts, reviewed academic research, and conducted focus groups with representative samples of the world's four major religions. Then, the team held retreats in the U.S. and China for prominent thinkers and researchers. That helped them narrow down the list and see which beliefs could be clustered together. After 75 drafts and input from 55 researchers from around the world, they ended up with a set of 26 core beliefs. Here are the four main categories for the primal beliefs: Good measures your optimism. Safe measures your vigilance. Enticing measures your curiosity and your appetite for exploration. And Alive measures your search for grander meaning in life. Most of the remaining beliefs were clustered along with these main categories, except for a few outliers that were independent of other categories. The team showed that primal beliefs can have a huge influence on a person's behavior, and that they vary greatly from person to person — even people who are related or were raised in similar environments. They also found that people's primal beliefs remained pretty stable over time, and seemed to dictate how they lived their lives. If this all sounds kinda like the idea of personality, you're onto something. The researchers say that primal beliefs may explain many of the differences between people's personalities. You can find links to a few versions of the Primals Inventory in our full write-up on this, which you can find on curiosity-dot-com and on our free Curiosity app for Android and iOS. As with any online quiz, take your results with a grain of salt. But it could lead you to do some introspection, and examine the core beliefs that guide you through life. Let your primals be your guide!
ASHLEY: Before we recap what we learned today, we want to quickly remind you to please nominate Curiosity Daily to be a finalist in the 2019 Podcast Awards! Find a link in today’s show notes, or visit podcast-awards-dot-com, to register. Then find Curiosity Daily in the drop-down menus for the categories of People’s Choice, Education, and Science & Medicine. It’s free to vote and mercury-free! And now, let’s recap what we learned today.
CODY: Today we learned that the overview effect changes the way you think about… everything!
ASHLEY: And that there’s a fountain in Barcelona that spouts mercury, even though it’s one of the most toxic substances on Earth.
CODY: And that researchers think they’ve come up with 26 core beliefs that affect your behavior.
[ad lib]
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Stay curious!