Episode 282: Fearful Symmetry (Borges' "Death and the Compass")
Very Bad Wizards
Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro
4.8 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 16 April 2024
⏱️ 85 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A Rabbi is found dead in a hotel room, stabbed in the chest. The room is filled with Kabbalah texts and a single page in an typewriter that reads “The first letter of the name has been written.” The celebrated detective and “reasoning machine” Erik Lönnrot suspects a rabbinical explanation but is he seeing patterns that may not be there? David and Tamler get out their pipes, magnifying glasses, and deerstalker hats to unravel another Borges mystery: “Death and the Compass.”
Plus a new study on why men make errors about whether women are flirting with them, the latest in our series on studies that employ erotic fiction.
Links:
Pinpointing the psychological factors linked to men's misjudgments of women's sexual interest
Death and the Compass by Jorge Luis Borges [wikipedia.org]
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and a psychologist Dave Vizarro, |
| 0:06.0 | having an informal discussion about issues and science and ethics. |
| 0:09.4 | Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes. |
| 0:17.0 | I don't like hypothetical brain tickles before bedtime you know this. The way then has |
| 0:25.0 | The great and us has spoken. |
| 0:29.0 | Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. |
| 0:33.0 | Who are you? |
| 0:40.0 | Who are you? Who are you? |
| 0:42.0 | A very bad man. I'm A very bad man. |
| 0:44.0 | I'm a very good man. |
| 0:46.0 | Good man. |
| 0:47.0 | They think he's lost and with no more brains than you have. |
| 0:54.0 | May no attention to that man. |
| 1:00.0 | Anybody can have a brain. |
| 1:06.0 | You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. |
| 1:08.0 | Just a very bad wizard. |
| 1:11.0 | Welcome to very bad Wizards. |
| 1:12.0 | I'm Tamler Summers from the University of Houston. Dave, we both just witnessed a total solar eclipse. |
| 1:19.0 | Still think there aren't any aliens or ghosts in the world? |
| 1:23.0 | You're right, that doesn't make sense. |
| 1:25.0 | I did warn you. |
| 1:28.0 | I would warn me before the question. |
... |
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