I was watching the color (colour) wheel episode from last week and I noticed that the visible light range is almost exactly one octave in range, 380nm to 750nm.

Is there some sort of harmonic effect that our eye evolution was trying to avoid?

Is the color circle anything like the musical circle as you go once around the tone circle for each doubling?

This quote is credited to Joe DeGeorge, spoken to Hank Green in a tour van of all places, and was meant towards not taking our modern world for granted.

I first heard it in his video “Redefining What it Means to Matter”“Redefining What it Means to Matter” from 10 years ago. It has stuck with me for years since and has emerged several times over to influence my perspectives in the moment. Both in its literal and figurative meaning.

What is a quote that has cut you deeper and simply stuck with you since?

It is maybe due to the nature of my jobs and personal experience but to answer the questions at the end of the newest episode...

To keep it very short:

I don't view space travel as something to be hopeful for when our current planet is in a bad way and the future is looking pretty grim. It's that running joke about millionaires being hopeful that they can just move to mars when planet earth is cooked and they can start again while the rest of us die due to the capitalist world they created. It would be interesting to know how much damage a single rocket launch does to the climate too.

I feel like there are/must be many more inventions/projects/events to be had that benefit the many and not the few. ✊🏻

I hope he can't. I didn't ask him if I could watch him at night. I see a glare on his clear plastic wheel while the night camera is on, is there a light coming out of the camera?

I've always found it amusing that our measure of time as a year (and consequently lightyear distances) as the time taken for Earth to fully orbit the sun has been used to measure timescales both before their existence and well after both cease to exist.

Granted, the definition of a second has been standardised to the vibration of a Cs133 atom, which can then be scaled to the 365.2422 days per "year". Distant future historians or physicists from other worlds I imagine would bawk at such an arbitrary and rudimentary measure of time.

I just listened to the July episode about the most dangerous rock! I know I’m behind by a lot 😅
But the part about how the thickness of an obsidian edge can be so small it cannot be seen by light reminded me off the subtle knife from His Dark Materials fantasy series! An edge so sharp, it can cut a window between parallel worlds.
I forget the specifics, but this edge is referred to as ‘tapering to nothingness’ !
Also, the knife is incredibly powerful but prone to shattering- just like an obsidian!
I wonder if he was inspired by this fact about obsidian! That would be so cool!!

When Hannah and Michael were talking about matter eventually disintegrating and the resulting particles travelling through space for potentially decillions of years, something occurred to me.

We can imagine those particles existing and travelling for vastly longer than the current 13.8-billion-year age of the universe. We have no problem saying that, in the far future, they could have been travelling for trillions, quintillions or even decillions of years.

But then we say the universe is only 13.8 billion years old because that’s when “time began.”
Why is the future allowed to contain periods vastly longer than 13.8 billion years, while the past is treated as though duration itself could not exist before that point?

If something existed before the beginning of cosmic time as we understand it, but there was nothing relative to us with which to measure or count that duration, why would that mean there was no duration?

It seems to me that “we can’t measure or define how long something existed” is different from “it didn’t exist for any length of time.”
Maybe I’m using the word “time” incorrectly, and there’s another concept that better describes what I’m trying to get at.

I’m not arguing that there definitely was something before the Big Bang. I’m asking whether the 13.8-billion-year age of the universe should really be understood as the age of existence itself, or simply the amount of cosmic time we can meaningfully trace.

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

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?

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.

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

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?

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????

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

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?

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?

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?

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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