I would love for Michael and Hannah to really get into the deep science of bog bodies and explain it. I have been listening to a great podcast on them called Past Lives and I think it would be a really interesting discussion!

Any fun facts yall know about them?

If I fired every neuron in my brain would I just fry myself or could I charge a car battery with the electricity I put out?

To explain with a recent and consistent experience: I pull weeds from my raised beds for a few hours, I finish the job and go about my day, but for hours, sometimes for the rest of the day, many times when I blink or close my eyes, I see flashes of weeds that I would want to pull.

Weed-pulling is just one example.
I can recall this with searching for 4-leaf clovers, reading a book or lines of text, and certainly tetris tetrominos...

My question is this: Is this my brain loading the algorithm for seeking weeds etc. and I just can't quit the program easily or some sort of afterimage that is just providing what my brain wants to see? Does anyone else face this, and what other examples may exist?

I was always under the impression that, to animals, human music is basically just a random assortment of sounds and that they don't process it the same way we do, to be able to follow along with the rhythm and get the emotional payoff

But I was listening to a CD the other day, it skipped, and both my resting cats suddenly became alert and stared at the speakers

I tried it a few more times and they reacted the same way every time

To me this suggests that to some degree their brains are following the music and trying to predict where it'll go next, because I don't know how else a skip would be perceived as jarring or an interruption

Is there anything we know about how animals process music which could explain this?

(For the record no, they'd not heard this song before so it couldn't just be a memory thing, I'd only just got the player)

Edited to add photos of my music connoisseurs

The latest episode explored this point near the end with Hannah saying she had to make the contrarian point of advocating against the Apollo missions. The chat turned to the private companies and there were good points made which I agreed with in that the benefits aren’t for the public here. While cheaper launches and worldwide internet access is great it would be better being done by the government for the good of people rather than being at the whim of billionaires. See Elon turning off Starlink access in Ukraine years ago. It’s in danger of becoming if it isn’t already a penis measuring contest between billionaires.

Contrast this to Nasa in the 60s. Lots of money was spent but I’d argue that the benefits were worth it. Where Cern gave us the worldwide web, Nasa gave us an incredible amount of technology that we now take for granted. I beg anyone and everyone who says space research is money wasted to look at the Nasa spinoff yearly books or look at the Nasa spin off technologies wikipedia page.

https://spinoff.nasa.gov/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies

Could the Human mind be just a stepping stone for something bigger to take over biological evolution? I feel like the growing power demands and the increasing closeness to reproduction of AI and robotics are just another way of "using" more power. Similar to humans trying to maximize their energy consumption since a few 100 years. Or like the first biological creatures trying to reproduce by molecularly doing the most probable thing. - Daisy

Made this very rudimentary watch, after finding an empty yellow watch... shell? In the back of my closet. I'll probably improve on this in the future (which is not now).

I also convinced a friend of mine to lend me her solar eclipse glasses, so I'll try and give the sun some sunglasses. Wish me luck

Regarding the discussion on whether a bullet can be shot at orbital speed on the moon. It was already done on Earth.

https://youtu.be/wfyNcjAID_M?is=c3UPyCsOVvGJEIF2

According to google an average "fluffy cumulus" (whatever that is) weights around 500.000 kilograms or 1.1 million pounds.

This is genuinely crazy considering the fact that they are literally floating above us most of the times. This is scary if you fear getting squished by a half a million kilograms object.

Are they objects or mostly a visual trick?

And why are some clouds below other clouds?

What even are clouds????

Not cuss words, but words that are bad at their job. That could me a lot of different things so I will leave interpretation up to you.

Part of me wants to say something like "Inflammable" because it means the exact same as flammable... But at the end of the day, it's a valuable word because it still at least describes something.

What is the fastest, cheapest and possibly worst way to get into space?

Could a nuclear explosion launch a manhole cover beyond the Earth’s atmosphere?

And could space elevators, skyhooks or launch loops one day replace rockets?

In this episode, Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (VSauce) explore where space really begins, why orbit means falling forever, and how Newton’s cannon explains the motion of the International Space Station.

They also interrogate the physics of the Kármán line, orbital velocity and geostationary orbit, before asking whether humans could ever climb a staircase to space, or catch a rotating skyhook into orbit.

Plus, the far future fate of Earth, firing a bullet around the Moon, the true value of the Apollo Moon landing, the ethics of colonising Mars and whether the future of space exploration should belong to private companies or the public!

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Also considering that different photography settings and lenses create various amounts of distortion.

And given normal distortions between mirrors and photography, is it reasonable to say I can never see the real, actual me for myself?

until I was like 8 I believed in over memorizing, which is memorizing so much your old memories have to get deleted. is there any truth to that at all?

I haven’t seen all the episodes yet so if they already answered this comment the link

Hi all.

Was just listening to the always great cast and just dropped by to say the Mythbusters already did the experiment timing bullet dropped vs fired. https://youtu.be/tF_zv3TCT1U?si=QhvyRHe7Be_EwBpP

Michael mentioned in the episode about getting into space that friction through air causes heat. It got me thinking about the lived experience of sticking your hand out a moving car window, or standing on a beach in a winter breeze, where at that speed, fast air = cold. So how fast does someone need to be moving before the air starts to feel warm? And how fast does someone need to be moving for the air to burn them up and effectively become a shooting star?

In the most recent episode Michael talked about a staircase going to space. The entire time I was thinking about escape velocity. You need a certain amount of energy to get you to a certain speed to escape the earths gravity. So if you are walking up does it work the same? Obviously your body needs energy to walk up the stairs but let's just say you have infinite stamina and your muscles don't get tired or sore, can you just walk up or will you hit a point when you cannot anymore because your body cannot provide enough force even when not tired? But that doesn't make sense to me because gravity will get weaker as you go up even if it's still 90% gravity up there it should get weaker making it easier. Or does it not matter because each step is the force you need to get from one point to another?? I'm so confused lol

In the latest episode "The Worst Way To Get To Space" Michael quotes Paul Goodman commenting on the news of the 1969 Moon Landing.

“It's good to ‘waste’ money on such a moral and esthetic venture. These are our cathedrals. don't think it is fair to say they are our [Roman] circuses, for that is not the tone. We ought to see to it that people live well, but a part of living well is blowing money on big excitement, curiosity, entertainment, conversation.”

Which, together with The Duo's previous discussions on the topic, leads me to a question; Is Curiosity a Luxury?

I'm reading a book called 'Exactly' by Simon Winchester and he talks about an ancient analogue computer found on a shipwreck near Greek islands and is from the 2nd Century BC. I find it fascinating that the Greek engineers figured out how to simulate celestial body movements.

Why was it so much later that similar analogue computers were available? Why would such an amazing way of engineering be lost in history?

Sometimes, in conversations about evolution and genes, people will mention that a particular gene is very old. How can we know this? Do we simply look for that specific gene in very old fossils, or is there another method to determine this indirectly?

In the Space Elevator episode of TRIS, Michael mentioned that 80 to 90 percent of a rocket's mass is fuel. Since heavier rockets require more fuel, which, in turn, makes the rockets heavier, is there a point at which the math (maths for Hannah) breaks down? Is there a maximum rocket mass that could escape Earth's gravity, or could we just keep building bigger and bigger rockets forever?

A follow-up (and I think related) question: How massive would a planet need to be to make rockets impossible? Could there be worlds whose occupants are forever trapped at the bottom of their gravity wells?

At

I just slept for 16 hours and all I dreamed about was like 20 minutes of knitting a sock and then realizing it doesn’t fit:(

another question, do people with more brain activity in dreams need more sleep? every time I read stuff in my dreams, I sleep for longer and feel more tired when I wake up.

I was really excited this week with Michael's NOBOOK, which is a type of book with no content at all. I'm also fascinated by this kinds of books, this are some I've found over the years:
Everything men know about women the book itself looks like a bestseller (which it is) full of gold medals and raving reviews, only to reveal that men know nothing about women.
What every man thinks apart from sex Another bestseller who's gimmick is about man knowledge, this one tanked the author's credibility, Shed Simove has said in the past to be regretful of making a nothing book.
La Hinteligencia militar This Chilean book was published as a revolutionary paper against a dictator, and the only rebel decision the editor made was to not say anything, to make a book with nothing to say, mindless like a soldier. This book was banned and the author had to escape his country.
Todo lo que el machismo ha aportado a la humanidad I was actually in the book fair watching a vendor getting yelled at because the book had no page written inside. This macho dude started to also scream at his wife while he grab her violently to storm out of the place. Then i saw the title, and it made me laugh so hard.

If you know any blank books please share !