Dear Hank & John - 244: screamingfrog.mp3

Episode Date: June 15, 2020

What could be in an audio file labeled "screaming frog"? Do you write with timelines in mind? What do I do with my grandma's fruitcake? Where do I get a bunch of mosquitos? Do Americans just walk into people's houses like on TV? What's the deal with voting? Do magnets work in space? Can we tell if a planet disappeared? Hank Green and John Green have answers! If you're in need of dubious advice, email us at [e-mail]. Join us for monthly livestreams and an exclusive weekly podcast at patreon.com/dearhankandjohn. Follow us on Twitter! twitter.com/dearhankandjohn

Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John. Gorsair preferred to think of it dear John and staring into the abyss. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you to be a advice and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AF's who imbleden. John did you know that there's a cow that lives in the foothills of Man Everest and he understands up. Oh I didn't know that. Everybody just sees Himalayan there.

Why was it a cow? I talked on that on a second. I thought it shouldn't be a cow because it's a cow's are female. Yeah, it's a, yeah. You know, it'd be hurl-layin' there. Nothing worked about that joke for me. And if you're gonna put a cow in a joke, it's like check off's gun.

Like that cow better go off. No, it's a misdirection. It was a red. It was a red. Herring is not a great red herring. I'll say if you write a mystery novel and your red herringring is the cow that you went to red herring tunnel. It was a red whole steam.

Now see, that kind of saved it for me. That kind of saved it for me. I just had to think really hard for a type of cow that started with H. And it only took that 24 seconds to think of a kind of cow, even though you live in a panor, which has more cows than people. It's true. Now Hank, usually we banter a little bit back and forth at this point, Yada Yada, who's you, what's he? But this, we have to get to a question this week. It's vitally important.

It's from Izzy. She writes, dear, John and Hank, during my last Zoom session with my 70-something-year-old French tutor, she shared her screen and my eyes were immediately drawn to an audio file on her desktop named Screaming Frog. I think about this at least five times a day.

Is this a recording of a screaming amphibian? And if so, why are they screaming? And why is this on her desktop? Can frog scream focusing on the subjunctive mood wasn't easy? Easy. Well, is he I feel like focusing on the subjunctive mood is not easy right now in general. I'm not sure what a subjunctive mood is, but I think I've seen plenty of them on Twitter. I not only can frog scream. Yeah. but one time when I was in high school, I was awakened by a screaming so loud and so human that I left my bed, put on my pants, went outside, jumped up over my neighbor's fence because I was worried someone was hurt,

and it was a frog. Yeah, I mean, let me play you a clip of a giant screaming frog. That is, I believe the name of the frog. And this is a sound that is maybe on your French tutors computer. I can't wait. Now, why is a separate question? Oh my God.

Yeah. That is a screaming frog. That is a screaming frog. So yes, frog's in scream. That does not answer the question of why there is a screaming frog audio file on your 70-something-year-old French tutors desktop. Yeah, so I have a theory about this.

Oh, John has a theory. Okay. So, my experience with older people and also with myself, I count myself among older people, is that essentially all of our files are on the desktop. And so somebody sent, like some grandchild, I'm imagining, sent an audio file of a screaming frog and Hank, as you know, grandmothers can feel proud of anything.

And so the tutor was probably like, oh my God, I can't believe my grandchild figured out how to send an email attachment. That's wonderful. I'll download it and maybe I'll even like put a copy of it on the refrigerator. Yeah, I have to keep this. This is a thing that I now, that is now a part of my memory and like a gift that I have

been given. And so I must keep it that I must keep it on the desktop. But I showed that video to Henry, my son who's 10, and he then showed it to all of his friends and then like they ripped the audio and are sharing it with each other. So it's happening all over again, is he? Like it's whatever happened to your seven year old French teacher is about to happen to them again because it's making the rounds.

Yeah. Screaming Frog is now going viral on the young person internet, which is just I guess, do they just email each other? How do they communicate for 10-year-olds? Mostly email and gchat, but all sometimes they will hold up pictures of memes on their iPads while in Google Hangouts with each other, because they're not that great at like, you know, emailing memes. And it's hilarious because they're like hold it up and then they can't really see it And it's like so so Squidward says Oh my god part about that is that they don't they don't really know who the SpongeBob characters are

So like there's this whole world of memes that they don't fully get because the memes were made for people like five years older world of memes that they don't fully get because the memes were made for people like five years older. Right. Right. We're too old. You and I are too old for spot-bob memes. Way too old. And they're too young for SpongeBob memes.

Like, we completely missed this giant SpongeBob era. We did. Now, the nice thing is that you can't miss the Pokemon era because it began after us, but it will continue forever. It's true. it's true. This next question comes from Clemens who asks, dear Hank and John, my roommate and I both like to write.

So I told her a story from your podcast where John said that in his books, it's always Friday. Like a character does something on Friday and then two days later they do something on Friday. We're wondering, as published authors, you both write with some certainty that your manuscripts will be worked on by professional editors. So before you had editors, would you have edited those sorts of details by

yourself? Would those mistakes have made it through to your draft? Do you now write with less intention about those details? Because you know that an editor will look over your work? Thanks, not a Pope, Clemens. This is interesting. I'm very curious about how you approached this, John. Yeah, well, so I remember when I was writing looking for Alaska, and I didn't know if it was gonna be published, and it seemed unlikely that it would be. I thought a lot about, what do I need to do

to make the book better to get an editor interested in it? And one of the things that I thought about was, oh, I should like make sure the timeline lines up. And especially with that book, because it's so specific, I needed it to be an exact mirror of the first half and the second half and everything. And so I did go through, I still made a ton of mistakes as it turns out, but I went through and tried to do it. Part of me, it's an error. And I don't want to say that it's not an error. And if it pulls someone out of the story, it's a problem.

But part of me thinks like that's how we remember stories. Like that's how stories get told. Like story, it doesn't bother me to have inaccuracies or unreliability moments in a novel because I don't think of it as an authoritative text. That said, like it's nice if the calendar makes enough sense that the reader doesn't think about the calendar. Now that's separate from thinking about the structure of the novel, which I do sometimes do earlier.

Yeah. But yeah, I don't worry about whether it's Wednesday until the very end. And Julie Straskable has on many occasions like made actual calendars for the worlds of various stories, including stories that never came out, unfortunately. But yeah, and I always treasure those and find them really beautiful because it feels like, you know, in Julie's mind and in the mind of this calendar, the book is really happening. Yeah, I mean, I did do that and I actually used my personal Google calendar.

We'd like go five years into the future and I'm just like, okay, here's where the story is gonna happen. So five years from now, my Google calendar will suddenly be like, this is what's happening in a beautifully foolish endeavor. That's cool. That's how I have done it. And I also use, I use a piece of timeline software called Eon Timeline, but I only use it for like things that are

happening in a particular day. So like hour to hour things when there's like different people doing different things during a climax, that's the only time I used that. I didn't use it for day-to-day stuff, but when it was like, everything is happening right now, and there's three different people doing three different things all at the same time.

I needed to make sure that that was making sense, and that helped me write it, rather than me trying to fix things, and making sure that the timeline was right. I needed to write it in a way where it all made sense. And I could see where everybody was at any given moment of time. And indeed, it does have a thrilling climax.

So I should say that a beautiful foolish endeavor is available for preorder everywhere and comes out July 7th and has a thrilling climax. And there's signed copies in the UK now. There's signed copies in the UK that are available. Also, I have never used that software because I've never written a climax. I think they're overrated. So much fun.

Why not just have the book end? The next question comes from Jess who writes, Dear John and Hank, my partner and I were supposed to get married in April, which did not occur because of, you know, however, my grandma without me asking, has already made me a fruit cake for my wedding. And now she's mailed it to me. The problem is, I don't like fruit cake. Well, I mean, Jess, of course you don't like fruit cake.

Nobody does. I don't like any cake you can mail. Well, this is one of the great unifying things about 21st century life on earth among humans, is that all humans hate fruit cake, and yet it's still happening. Is the main advantage of fruit cake that it is maleable? Like, I can't imagine mailing a cake and having it sort of like make it through

unless it's a fruit cake. I think the main advantage of fruit cake is that when people ate fruit cake 80 years ago, A, it tasted relatively good because people didn't know about chocolate red velvet chocolate cake yet. And it does last a lot longer. And so, you know, like, you can eat fruit cake, at least in my experience, for a week or two after it's made. Definitely. Definitely. It's not any worse than it is fresh out of the oven.

But I think it also reminds people of a time in their life that they want to be reminded of. That's the only reason I can imagine why someone would like fruit cake is if like, you know, because they're things that are gross that I that I like the taste of because they remind me of childhood. Like I don't labor under the delusion that brown sugar pop tarts are a high quality breakfast item, but I still enjoy them when I get them, because they taste to me like being 11,

but not the bad parts of being 11, just the good parts, right? But right, Hank, the question was, what does Jess do with this fruit cake? Ah, I just, I did look up when I was prepping for this, like what do you do with a fruit cake? And I found a list of like 10 things you can do with the fruit cake that you have, but you don't want and all of them were bad.

They were all, one was like fruit cake croutons and I was like, go away. So I think you gotta eat at least some of it, Jess, because it's some grandma, it's gonna be a good memory. It's a thing for you and your spouse to do together in these times better strange and you'll form a memory and it'll be a good story. I think you just slather it in icing,

not like good icing and make yourself, but like icing that you get from the grocery store, you just slather it in icing until it's slightly moist. And then you choke it down, which I think is what everybody does with fruitcake. Yeah, and then the rest of it, you make into dirt with the compost. Or if you wanna like share it with friends and family

and say like, hey, do you want some now? Of my Graham's fruitcake, she's a very nice person. That'd be great if everybody felt okay about gathering. Oh God, I keep forgetting about that. I keep forgetting that there hasn't been a soul in my home since March 13th, who isn't in my nuclear family. Oh God.

All right, Catherine asks, dear Hank and John, I'm applying for jobs in college. And I found one that involves working with mosquitoes. This intrigues me, considering I am very interested in insect-based research. I read the job description, and it said that I need to, quote, provide mosquitoes for experimental use.

Nope. How do I acquire mosquitoes? Do I need a dealer for that? Ha, ha, ha, bugging out. Catherine. Wait, Hank, is this part, is this a thing in research that you've got to bring, like you've got to bring your own lab mice,

you've got to bring your own mosquitoes, you've got to, I've never heard of this before. What I'm curious about is whether this job is just providing mosquitoes, like were there other parts? Oh. And it's like here's what we need. We need a mosquito creator, a person who, like, are there other piece, like,

is there research component to this or are you just a mosquito harvester? In either case though, it is not hard to get mosquitoes. I mean, yeah, Catherine, you should just come to my backyard where there are actual billions of them. No, that's that you can do that. That's a lot of work.

But to catch a to get a lot of mosquitoes, what you need to do is you need to put out some standing water and then you can squeeze some nutrient into that. You might just blend up anything, blend up any fruit or vegetable, squeeze it into the standing water. Mosquitoes will lay their eggs in there. But as soon as you see eggs laid in there, you need to put some netting over the top of it so that they can't get out when they hatch.

And then once they hatch, you just pinch it off and you have a bunch of mosquitoes. There's YouTube videos that will teach you how to do this. So yeah, that's how you get mosquitoes. I don't know if I'm worried that though what you're seeing as a potential research job is just that you are a mosquito farmer. Which isn't a bad job. No, it's important.

I guess it's important, so I'm going to need to do that. Yeah, for the research. As you know, Hank, I really want to see the number of mosquitoes on Earth decline precipitously. Yes. The only multicellular organism that I am fully opposed to. And ticks. Yeah, like I'm very opposed to ticks,

but I'm fully opposed to mosquitoes. The slight difference, I guess, is that they made a TV show called The Tick, that was very good. Oh, yes. Based on a comic book series that is also very good that Orin and I like to read together now, even though it is definitely not for children. Yeah, so the tick is a one and a half star animal to me because it inspired good art. The mosquito is a solid single star.

Oh, God. If you could give, if you can get it up that high, mosquitoes is bad. But sometimes you have to create more mosquitoes further to be less mosquitoes so that you could do research on them. Yeah. I get it. I get it. Catherine Hank has told you how to become a mosquito farmer and I for one look forward to your career as a mosquito farmer and your eventual memoir on the topic called Adventures in Mosquito Farming. I watched the YouTube video and they were making this person was farming mosquitoes for their larvae so that he could feed them to his fish and he had all the stuff in his house and my thought was, man, like, you get sick

for two days and your house is full of mosquitoes. Like if you just like can't go home for a second, like the larva hatch. And then you're going to house full of mosquitoes. This is a bad strategy. Yeah. Don't do that. Don't, yeah, try not to keep them in the house. It was a good video though.

Well, that's great keep them in the house. It was a good video though. Well, that's great. I'm so worried. What I want to say to you, Catherine, is you can do this, but you're going to have to be on it. You can't listen to a podcast while you're farming mosquitoes. You have to be paying attention constantly because you need to make sure that not a single one of those little people

gets out of your control. Yeah, because then you might be responsible for somebody getting really, really sick, not no pressure. But again, that's a pressure that we're all under at the moment. So you know what it's like, Catherine, let's move on. A question comes from Georgia who writes, dear John and Hank, I've consumed a fair amount of television program, these... Programmes.

Georgia spells program's weird, which makes me think that Georgia is from the United Kingdom or somewhere else. Georgia spells program's weird, which makes me think that Georgia is from the United Kingdom or somewhere else where they spell program's weird. Television programs based in the USA. And I have questions about your country. Primarily, are neighbors not expected to knock in the US or do you all just walk right in, wander the house, and yell your neighbor's name?

It seems like that's what happens on TV and it strikes me as quite rude. The only people whose houses I walk into without knocking our family members. If you have time, I also want to know what the do is with the red cups at parties. Why do you have special party cups and why are they always just red? Why don't you use normal glasses? Yeah, Georgia, I'm pretty sure. So I don't even feel comfortable walking into family members' houses with no mocking, just for clarity. Me neither.

I barely walk into my own house without knocking. I have had friends in my life who I can walk into their home without knocking, but 100% of the time that home has been a dorm room. I, at this point, I don't expect to go back to that life, but if you are making a television show, you need to get to the jokes. And having, waiting for someone to answer the door

isn't how you get to the jokes. Right, so that is a movie magic thing where in movies and TV shows, there's a level of comfort that you don't see elsewhere. Actually, this was made fun of in Seinfeld, if I recall correctly, by the fact that Kramer would always just like come in and then like slide across the room. And it just exploded into the room.

Yeah. And we all got that joke as being a sitcom, like a reference to a thing about sitcoms, whereas Georgia watching it without that context might have been like, well, this guy is just extra rude. But yeah, I think that's just movie magic. I don't see that a lot in the United States.

The red cups thing is also to some extent movie magic because if the cup is clear, then you got to make the stuff in it look like beer or wine or whatever you want it to look like. And that can be a little bit of an annoyance, whereas if the cup is red, usually it can just be whatever. Yeah. And there used to be rules, I think, about when you could show beer being consumed on television

like there were times. There still are. There are still those rules. If you want to make a PG-13 movie, you can have kids holding red cups at parties. And I think you can even have them like sipping from red cups at parties, but you cannot have it be clear that it's beer. Wow. You can't have it be unambiguous that it's beer.

And so that's part of it, but also I will say, and I'm not sure whether the chicken or the egg came first, but every party that I've ever been to that has like a keg of beer at it also has a bunch of red solo cups, and I don't know why. Yeah, I think that they're just a, the solo cup people did well. They took over that market and the brand is solid. John, I would like to go back to the neighbor walking into the house and ask a question. Do we all a little bit wish that we lived in that life where our friend, like we had a tight enough relationship

with our friends that they would just walk in? No, no, that's just you. You're the only person who has that wish. No, no's just you. You're the only person who has that wish. No, no, no, because I know who knows what I'm doing in here. That's my business. I mean, that's true. That is true. All right, Hank, we got another question. This one comes from jazz who writes, dear John and Hank, I'm going to be able to vote very soon and I'm super excited. Thank you, Hank, for how to vote in every state. It was very helpful. Hank has helped make a show on YouTube called How to Vote in Every State that helps people learn how to vote in their

states because depending on what state you live in, the rules can be extremely different. I know it doesn't seem like the best system. We can talk about that later. I know it doesn't seem like the best system. We can talk about that later. Jazz goes on to say, but I still have many questions. Like, how frequently does voting fraud happen in America? Why are so many people against voting by mail? Why do Americans need to register to vote, unlike so many other countries?

Grateful to be living in an amazing democracy. Jazz, I love your optimism, but I also feel like I should note that you sent your question in 10 weeks ago. So what most people living outside the US and many people living inside the US don't understand about our election system is that we don't really have like one election every four years. We have many, many, many different elections. We have dozens of elections every four years and also dozens every two years because every state and territory in the United States runs their own election. Now there is some level of federal oversight about this stuff. There are federal rules for how to make a good election happen, but there's a lot of flexibility in those rules. And in

some ways, this decentralization is bad and it's annoying and it's frustrating. But in some ways, by design at least, it has some benefits, the main benefit being that you can't really like rig an election, or you can maybe rig an election, but in doing so, you only rig one out of the dozens of elections. Yeah, there are a bunch of advantages to this.

Another is that different states get to do it differently based on their different circumstances. So in some places with really remote voters, like in Alaska, where it's very hard to get to a polling place for a lot of the population, they kind of have to have voting by mail. Like, it's sort of, it's ludicrous to think that you'd have it a different way. And that's also the case in Montana is we have vote by mail and sort of the reason why supposedly is that

is that there's a lot of people who live in really rural places. At the same time, those also tend to be places where there is a more homogenous population, where there are fewer black people. And so a lot of the reason people get freaked out about voter fraud is much more about this perception of how somebody who is not them and they see as sort of an outgroup is going to influence the election and is going to sort of take out group is going to influence the election and is going to sort of take over and somebody who they, like sometimes, you know,

this is a real thing in America. We don't see this group of people as, like, they should have a voice or we see them as more likely to be criminal or something like that. And so, you know, you see that the voting rights tend to be looser in places where there are mostly white people,

and when white people feel threatened traditionally and historically, and even today, then you have these more restrictive voting rules. That's a thing. And I think that when we look at why we're worried about voter fraud, a lot of times that comes down to, you know, being afraid of your fellow citizens because you see them as different from you or as sort of outside of who you would like to enfranchise. I mean, I think that's the more generous way of

stating it. I think another way of stating it is that you don't want those people to vote because their votes would count and thereby make your votes less powerful. Yes, I think one of the many ways we see systemic racism in the United States is in the voting laws and the voting regulations that continue. It's obviously very different from the kind of open, unambiguous voter registration bias that existed in the Jim Crow era, but it is still a huge problem in the United States. And that is what a lot of the conversations about voter fraud are about because the truth is that voter fraud is very, very, very rare.

It's relatively easy to catch, and it just isn't a big problem. It just isn't. It isn't a big problem in vote-by-mail states. It isn't a big problem in voting-person states. Yeah. Vote-by-mail as a person who, in Montana, you sign up for vote-by-mail every election. You get the ballot in the mail. You have several weeks to think about it, to do research, to know exactly what you're going to be voting on.

It also often comes along with a pamphlet that's like explains the different ballot initiatives to you. It's really good. And it is very frustrating to me that other people don't have this way of doing it, where you don't have any sort of outside pressure. And like, people who want to go to the polls absolutely can. The lines are shorter because people who don't want to go to the polls can vote by mail. But also, it just means that my chances of getting busy that day and not being able to vote are nil. Like, it doesn't happen to me. And because like, the thing shows up in the mail and then I do it. And I just like that so much,

and it's very frustrating to me that that's not an option for many people. Yeah, and to your last question, Jazz, about why Americans need to register to vote unlike so many other countries, that's also a question with a bunch of different answers. But one of the key things to remember is that other countries, not all of them,

but many other countries, when they went to universal suffrage, where every adult could vote regardless of race or gender identity or anything else. When they went to that system, they went to that system. In the United States, we ostensibly went to that system and then didn't actually go to it because we had another system placed on top of it that was in place to prevent black people and other people of color from voting. And so that system that was on top of this idea of universal suffrage existed until the mid 1960s and the vestiges of it are seen all over, I mean, all over everything, but all over our voting system, especially.

A lot of the rules and regulations that built up around this were built up around an idea that like not everybody like we don't really have universal Universal suffrage and so we're kind of trying to create a world of universal suffrage within a series of regulations that still don't quite reflect that reality that that you know we claim to want. Yeah, there is actually one state that does not require registration even North Dakota does not require voter registration, so it is possible to do that. That's the other thing that like there is an advantage to having 50 different voting systems, which is that you see what works and what doesn't. And so we can say that in places where there's vote by mail, there isn't more fraud because we have places where where it's, you know, vote by mail is an option for every voter. So having different systems and letting

people test out different ways of doing it does have an advantage. And that's one of the, I think one of the strengths of the US is that we have these sort of independent states inside of the country where, you know, you run a lot of different experiments and see what works and what isn't working. I think sometimes it's a strength. Sometimes it is not a strength. Regardless. It is not working and they keep doing it. Regardless, everyone who isn't sure if they're registered to vote or that their registration is up to date can go Google how to vote in every state or just how to vote in your state.

And Hank's YouTube video should come up, but also lots of other helpful resources and you can get registered and vote. Woo, woo, woo. All right, this next question comes from Savannah who asks, I've been freaking out about this for days. Help do magnets work in space. Yes. Yeah.

There isn't a reason why magnets wouldn't work in space, but I did bring this up because not only do magnets work in space, but if you take a magnet to the International Space Station and you let go of it, it will point toward the nearest pole on Earth. Whoa. Feel like if the South Pole is nearer, it will flip so that the South side of the magnet is pointing at the South Pole of the Earth, and then as the International Space Station goes over the South Pole,

it will turn to face directly downward to point at the South Pole and then it will turn as you fly away from the South Pole, turning the entire space station into a giant three-dimensional compass. That is amazing. I love that. I've been reading this biography of Edmund Haley, the guy that Haley's comment is named after. I've actually been reading several biograph Edmund Hayley, the guy that Hayley's comment is named after. I've actually been reading several biographies of him. And he was obsessed early in his career with Earth's magnetic fields, which are very weird, but like we're especially weird in the 17th century. Like it seemed just really, really weird that, you know, magnetic north wasn't quite

north and all that other stuff. Yeah. And he's, he helped create longitude, which was very difficult to do, much harder to do than latitude in part by sailing around the world and like figuring out different parts of Earth's magnetism. But the main thing that I've concluded from reading all of these biographies

is that no matter how much I read about Earth's magnetic fields, I will never understand it. Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's important to note that like, we as a species don't yet totally understand it. So that's, there's still a lot of mystery there. Yeah, like every few pages, I'll think I'll have it and then they'll introduce some, a new idea and I'll be like, wait, what? Like all the time that's just here. And I'm always reminded of that classic insane clown posse lyric, which is not a sentence I'd say very often,

f-ing magnets, how do they work? Which everybody made fun of, but like, how do they work? Yeah, I mean, it is very weird. I mean, it's, for clarity, it is just as weird that we stick to the surface of the earth. Like, yeah, we, that is also very is very weird. I mean, it's for clarity, it is just as weird that we stick to the surface of the earth. Like, that is also very, very weird. It's super weird. That like, atoms stick together,

like that you put a bunch of protons, which repel each other at the center, like basically touching, and then they stick together, they stick to, and they don't just rip themselves apart. That is also very weird. All those things are sort of equally weird. Like all of the fundamental forces, you know, I'm sure that there are physicists out there who'll be like, well, we understand

I'm, but like they're weird. It's weird that forces exist. Yeah, you can understand something and it can still be weird. Yeah. On that front, I recently got an email at the Anthropocene Review to email address. And it was from a kid who was like, I think that you should write a review of iron. It's a very good mineral. And initially I was like, oh, that's kind of sweet, but it's not a great review idea. And I started reading about iron. And I was like, oh my God, I'm made out of chemical elements.

Like I am, I have four grams of iron coursing through my body, and if I had one or ten, I'd be dead. Yeah, that's super true. Weird, and not in a good way. No, not in a, not in like a, yeah. I mean, there are no, for the record, there are no great ways. But yeah. Yeah, I feel that. No, yeah, I mean, there are no, for the record, there are no great ways. But yeah.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Which reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by the forthcoming Anthropocene Reviewed episode about Iron. Iron, it is a really good mineral. It's great, it's great. I think that it's a tactically an element,

but I'll let it slide. Well, I got an email from a little kid, Hank. Be nice. Well, it's fine for him to say that, but you're a 40-something-year-old man. I was quoting him. But I do, I do probably need to go back and rewrite the review then.

No, I'm just kidding. I'm not rewriting it. This podcast is also brought to you by Brown Sugar Pop Tarts. Brown Sugar Pop Tarts, not the height of culinary history, but really very difficult for me not to buy every time I'm in a grocery store. You wanna know an incredible fact about pop tarts

I learned from the Sunday New York Times Crossword puzzle. The recommended microwave heating time for a pop tart is three seconds. Oh my God. Today's podcast is also brought to you by Screaming Frogs. Screaming Frogs representing the way we all feel on the inside. And finally, this podcast is brought to you by Microwaving a Pop Tart, the only thing that takes three seconds. thing, the only thing that takes three seconds. It's true. I mean, also, but like I can't imagine microwaving a pop tart. I guess if you're in some kind of circumstance where you have no access to a toaster, but you do have access to a microwave, you just eat it raw.

That's how I eat every pop tart. That's true. I would eat it raw, of course, because even when I do have access to a toaster, I often eat my pop tart raw That's true. I would eat it raw, of course, because even when I do have access to a toast, I often eat my pop tart's raw because I'm eating them while feeling immense shame, and I'm not looking to make it as good as possible. All right, we also have a project for awesome message from CJ, who writes, there is no frigate like a book to take us lands away, nor any courses like a page of prancing poetry. This traverse may be the poorest take without oppressive toll. How frugal is the chariot that bears a human soul. Thank you, Hicken John, for taking me lands away. Well, that's very nice, CJ. And thank

you for quoting Emily Dickinson. Nice one. All right. We got another question. It comes from Nicole who writes, dear John, and Hank, I was listening to the latest episode of the pod. And during the Mars news, I started thinking, is there a way that scientists can tell if there were planets that no longer exist? Like, what if there was once a planet that existed with life on it that maybe just, I don't know, exploded or something

and it no longer exists? Is that a thing we're able to figure out? Best, Nicole. Well, we're not able to figure out if that planet had life on it. But there's definitely a number of ways that planets either no longer exist or are just not around anymore. That seems like a very subtle distinction. Yeah. I appreciate you leaving open the possibility of a ghost planet. So basically, yeah, basically, they're called rogue planets.

Wait, what? And what happens is, so during, during, and this usually happens early in the formation of a solar system. So the chances that life is evolved on a planet when one of these things happen is low. But what can happen? You can get sucked into a gas giant and become a part of it. You can smash into a rocky planet, which is how we got our moon. There used to be two planets, like planet-sized planets that were in orbit roughly in the same area and then slowly over time, some perturbations happened and they slammed into each other. And this is where we think we got the moon.

Probably that was way too early for there to be any life to have evolved on either of those planets. So it didn't kill anything, but you could imagine a situation where it could happen, you know, a billion or so years into the formation of a solar system and life has evolved by that point. The other thing that can happen is during a during an orbital perturbation where there were these

events early in the solar system where like planets like switched places and like the whole thing like would move around in really dramatic ways. And during things like that, you can have a planet that gets ejected from a solar system. And in that case, the planet would not be around anymore, but it would not be destroyed. But anything that was living on it, unless it was living in a hydrothermal vent situation, would then be dead because it would not get the energy

it needs from the sun. But life that was based on chemistry or differences in temperature gradients because of volcanic interaction, that might still continue. And it's really interesting to think of life on a rogue planet, far away from any star and pure darkness. No animal has any way of sensing photons because photons photons do not exist, unless they are created by animals or organisms, like I should say.

And they would then just sort of like hover around the areas where they were chemical or thermo-gradients that they could utilize to, you know, power their own far from equilibrium states anyway. Wow, not that I think about that all the time. That's really beautiful. That's fascinating to contemplate. It is the thing that could happen.

Wow. John, this week in Mars News, we're talking a bunch about planets and stuff. So let's continue this. So some new research indicates that at one point Mars may have had rings and also it may have rings again in the future, which is really interesting. So Mars has two moons, Phobos and Demos. Phobos is the one that

orbits closer to Mars and is also much younger. It's only 200 million years old, which is, so the solar system is like almost 5 billion years old. So that's pretty young in terms of the solar system. like almost 5 billion years old. So that's pretty young in terms of the solar system. Demos is about a billion years old and both of the moons have like quirky orbits. Demos travels in like a slightly tilted path. So it's tilted like two degrees off the equator. That might not seem particularly exciting. People actually didn't pay them attention to it, but this is important for this new research. So at some point we think 30 to 50 million years from now, Phobos is going to get close enough to Mars that gravity will tear Phobos apart and turn it into a ring. So we've known that this might be a possibility, but they recently ran some numbers and found that this

is probably, like, that this has probably happened before and when that happened, like the pre-phobos moon, so it wasn't really phobos. It was like 20 times larger than phobos and then ripped apart and then recollected itself. And in that process, that is probably what caused Demos' little tilt. So we used to think that this tilt was like basically just a thing that happened and like was just a thing that happened and like was just a quirk, but now we're like, oh, this is probably because this like continual tearing apart and reconstruction of this moon is the thing that it influenced that. It seems like the next time it will not reconstruct itself, it will be too close

to the planet, it will become a ring. Wow. And probably won't have a chance to reconnect itself into a significant moon again. And, but it will also, for clarity, be very bad for anything on the surface of Mars, because while that ring, most of the stuff might stay up in orbit, but a lot of it will fall to the surface of Mars. Yikes. Yeah. That, I don't think I understood how rings happened until just now. Well, they have a different, a different places.

Basically, it is one of the two stable ways stuff can orbit a planet. You either have a solid blob, or you have a really spread out, really localized slice of stuff that can stay in orbit around a planet be like tiny little bits instead of one localized glob. Right. Well, that reminds me, Hank, of the great T.S. Eliot line. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper, which in turn reminds me of the end of AFC Wimbledon season. They're not coming back. They're not going to play the last however many games. It seems they are going to finish or at least try to finish the premier league season, but it's clear that league one and league two are not coming back. It also, I mean, seems that Wimbledon will not be relegated, but as part of the season ending, there are end of season awards that I wanted to let

you know about. Since I guess the season is ending, not the way we would have wanted obviously. The women's team was looking to have a very exciting end of the season with lots of stake. And that is, of course, now not happening, which is a huge bummer. But they will go again in 2020 and 2021. That season, hopefully, it restarts in the fall. And I wanted to let you know about the players who won the annual awards. The sponsor player of the year was Steph Mann. The managers player of the year was Kelly Heimann. Kelly Heimann is an absolute rock for AFC Wimmelden. And I just, yeah, I was super happy to see that the team found a way to honor

those players and acknowledge them and their contributions this season, even though, you know, everything is impossible. This also means that both the men's and the women's team, as well as the youth teams have played in all likelihood their last game at Kings Meadow, which will now be the home of Chelsea Football Club's women's team. And AFC Wimbledon will be moving in, officially moving in to Plow Lane, hopefully this fall whenever the the season starts and I mean, you can go in line and

look at pictures of Plow Lane, it's starting to look quite a bit like a football stadium. That's the way it should look. Yeah. So it's not yet clear exactly how or when the season will officially be over, but well, I guess stay tuned. Yeah. All right. Thanks, John, for the update and guess stay tuned. Yeah, all right. Thanks, John, for the update, and thank you

for having a podcast with me. This podcast is produced by Rosiana Halls-Ros and Sheridan Gibson. It's edited by Joseph Tuna Mettish. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Trocavarti. Our communications manager is Paulic Garcia-Prieto. The music you're hearing is by the great Gunnarola. And as they say in our hometown,

don't forget to be awesome.