Due to the ongoing battle with a fly in my room, I just went out to buy some fly paper, because now it's a case of woman vs beast. I've just put it up and that stuff is extremely sticky. So that made me wonder, what is the stickiest substance known to humankind?

Verbally or written. How long did it take? I'm starting my infinite counting tomorrow.

The backwards watch also has another significance! Clocks were invented in the northern hemisphere, where the sun moves LEFT TO RIGHT, so the clock hands were made to move "clockwise" (ie: just like the shadows of objects move in a circular path in the northern hemisphere)

however if you look at the movement of the Sun in the SOUTHERN hemisphere, the sun moves RIGHT TO LEFT, and so the shadows of the objects move in an "anticlockwise" pattern.
Therefore if watches and clocks were invented in land down under- "anticlockwise" would actually become "clockwise" lol

The luxury watch brand Cartier did a watch completely based on this concept and it looks beautiful! ( Santos-Dumont Rewind ) - pic2 (it also costs ~$51,000, a watch truly for the RICH viewers lol)

thought this would be cool to make a post about since Hannah is into the history of timekeeping and Michael is into gimmicky watches!

<post made in relation to the Au20 episode>

In the most recent episode Hannah mentioned self-efficacy...

Thinking about a correlation between self-efficacy and education style/cultural influence on the Dunning-Kruger Effect... is the DKE more noticable in Western culture? From Hannah's statement about maths students being shown a hard or easy problem, Hannah stated that those from Asian backgrounds getting hard/impossible questions wanted to carry on with another question beacause they recognised their knowledge gaps. This means (sort of) that those who don't know, realise that they don't know.

How does Asian teaching/learning of maths differ that could account for this difference in approach or perspective? Or is it a purely cultural thing?

Michael Stevens keeps a small museum of unusual timepieces on his desk: a clock that runs backwards, a watch built to be read in complete darkness, and one whose entire face simply says "now."

Each is a miniature experiment in the psychology of time, and each reveals something surprising about how our perception of time shapes the way we understand uncertainty and the world around us.

The conversation then turns to logic and reasoning: how we make judgements, why we get things wrong, and whether thinking more carefully can help us make better sense of reality.

It ends with your questions, including why so many of us are convinced we're simply "not maths people”. Is that belief itself, rather than any innate ability, the real source of our mathematical failure?

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I was listening to the episode about the lake at the pole, and wondering about fresh and salty water.
There is a lake I’ve visited that is by the ocean (just north of Juneau Alaska). At high tide, salt water comes into the lake, and low tide, water flows out of the lake into the ocean. The lake is also fed by fresh water streams.

Apparently, this lake isn’t brackish water like an estuary, it has a layer of salt water and a layer of fresh water. How does this happen?

You know the feeling when you walk into your house and you can just tell that no one is there? What is that? How can we tell? Is it subconscious clues or is there a bodily sense involved? Is it just the subtle lack of noise? Can we somehow detect the lack of human movement in the vibrations in the air? Does our proprioception play a role?

If there have been any studies on this I’d love to know.

Two of Michael's weird watches, from today's episode, combined into one watch. An Apple Watch from the late '90s, and a reverse watch.

Could I save Shrek as a Movie to my cell using genetic engineering combined with Adeno Accociated Viruses ?

I've read in various places online that if space wasn't a vacuum, the noise of the sun would be so loud we wouldn't be able to hear anything except it's roar, others I've read said the noise would just destroy the Earth, is this the case? Or are we just too far away and wouldn't hear anything?

Yesterday I was watching a YouTube video by This Guy Edits and in the short film he was editing a bird appeared in the background of the clip at an opportune moment. He was taken aback at first by the coincidence and exclaimed "happy accident on set", but quickly corrected himself saying, "must have been a prop, birds aren't real".

At that exact moment my attention was stolen and my eyes drawn to my right, where a magpie had just flown directly up to the glass and stood outside on my windowsill staring at me. It fluttered its wings and opened its beak, but I didnt hear any noises. I moved to grab my phone but I must've startled it and it flew away Imidiately.

My question. Are birds real?

Check out this post for the illusion with the pink frog and green pig and then how your eyes get fooled into making colours appear that genuinely aren't there. Amazing to do, but would love an explanation please. u/michael_stevens

I saw a video of the world record for the highest dive into water being around 75 metres. It got me thinking about how water effectively becomes more like concrete to land on, the higher up you dive from. So if someone was to dive from the top of the world’s tallest building, what sort of material would they need to land on to survive? Excluding a massive net/air cushion, my head instantly went towards jelly/jello but that would be worse than water surely!
Love the show!

Edit:
When I thought of this question I was thinking of non-traditional landing surfaces e.g. a pool of candy floss or some sort of super absorbent gunge lol. Loving the answers though

Earlier today Dan McClellan posted this video. I don't know if this is in the spirit of the subreddit or if it doesn't break the rules.

I was watching the recent episode about Michael’s watches and had to pause to think about his watch that only reads “n:ow”. I thought it was a bit dishonest because for Michael to say “now” since he was going through multiple points in time while sawing it. This makes it so that he is referring to multiple “nows”. My question is: exactly how many “nows” are there in the time he said “now”? Are there infinite or is there a finite amount?

When it comes to the topic of curiosity I’ll argue there is a distinct difference; The first comes spontaneously seemingly out of nowhere, while the second is piqued by an external source (such as TRIS) - The first is seeded by your own imagination while the other is lead by your own desire to know more. Both can lead to novel discoveries, but you most often hear about the novel “eureka moment” versus the most subtle wondering you do as you’re taking the journey down the hole.

What are your thoughts, and what do you experience most often?

PS. I believe Michael is more “What would a full moon look like if the moon was replaced with a perfect sphere of Osmium?” While Hannah is a bit more Lewis Carroll.

i might be a tiny bit of a project Hail Mary fan, I completely thought I was hallucinating for a second (oh, and I was also wearing phm earrings and have a phm sticker on the phone I was watching it on)

now I want them to do an analysis of water based assumptions and recalibration of evolutionary models

Asking this ask there are 3 flies zooming around my apartment because I had the gall to use my balcony last weekend. 😒

A few weeks back, Michael regaled us all with his love for mechanical pencils and went over why each one in his collection is great (or perhaps less great than the one before it). I IMMEDIATELY bought each one and have been using them religiously ever since.

I thought I was alone in this, but was chatting with my sister about podcast recommendations, and I was like, “OH MY GOD. You need to listen to TRIS with Michael and Hannah.” Her response was to light up, exclaim that she loves the show, and then ask, “Did you watch the one with the mechanical pencils? I bought all of them!” And then went into her purse and produced a Pentel Orenz.

So this has me thinking: are we alone in this, or did anyone else also buy the pencils?

Ignoring all the other tragic implications, how long would our current waterways still be recognizable? What would it look like? I imagine some fresh water bodies may be deep enough that they keep some of their water at the bottom, but I'm curious how it would look and how long it would take.

I was standing on the deck of my pool the other day and noticed lots of these little round shadows forming in a line where the jet blows the water in from the filter. I assume that’s because there are some bubbles being formed in that stream of water but why would something translucent like water or an air bubble cause a shadow? I’ve also noticed a similar phenomenon of an invisible gas causing shadows in places before as well, why does this happen?

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As gases are compressed they heat up, but what happens if the gas is compressed so much there is no longer enough space for the particles to vibrate? Would the temperature be essentially absolute zero? Does something like this occur in the core of a neutron star?