Dear Hank & John - 246: A Hard Wet Sponge

Episode Date: June 29, 2020

What are some socially distant birthday strategies? Why do we refer to things as bone dry? Do all microwaves rotate in the same direction? Why haven't we cured cancer? Can I appropriate abandoned office plants? Is it okay to drink tea from a coffee mug? Why does alphabetical order exist? What does it mean to waste water? 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. Of course I prefer to think of it Dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you to be a advice and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and FC Wimbledon John. Have you heard that all across America, as we approach and get into summer that stadiums, stadiums are heating up way more than usual. Oh, why is that? It's because there are no fans.

It's stupid, but it's true. There are no fans. The premier league is back on TV. And you know, I've been a fan of Liverpool Football Club for most of my life. And I got to see Liverpool play for the first time in 97 days yesterday. It was a nil, nil draw. And it was as dull as a football game can possibly be. And yet I felt unadulterated joy the entire time.

I realized that it was the first time I'd felt like complete mindless joy in 97 days. I'm very happy for you. Was it weird with no screaming? Well, they pipe in fake crowd noise into the TV broadcast. Just like, but not like, whoa! Or like, like, last track. It's not like perfectly timed, but sometimes they do attempt like when the referee makes a dubious decision.

Really? Yeah, they attempt to have like a boo. But it's always a little too late. Like I'm imagining that there's somebody playing a keyboard, each of which has a different crowd sound. But the person's just like watching the game on like a four second delay. So yeah, it's not quite working for me yet, but I'll tell you what when Hank, I know that this

podcast is not primarily about football, but I just want to tell you this, if and when the people win their first English Premier League title and their first title in 30 years, I had imagined that moment so many times, and I'd imagine being at the Union Jack Hub with all of the members of the Liverpool Indianapolis community, and I'd imagined being at Anfield watching it happen live, and I'd imagined it in every conceivable place except for a loan in my basement, which is where I'm going to actually be. And I'll have like a single champagne popper, and it'll be like,

pew! Hey, we did it. But let's do some questions, John. Do you want to answer some questions? I do. I do. For a little bit of background, before we go into the questions from my listeners,

I think it's important to note that Hank and I had to talk to each other on the phone for 25 minutes just to get ourselves into a headspace where we thought we could make this podcast and laugh and have a good time. Or what passes for a good time these days. Hank, with our first question today, we're going to return to your book of Beautifully Folutioned endeavor, which comes out July 7th with this question from Emma who writes, dear John and Hank, my birthday is coming up on July 7th. The same day as Hank's new book, a beautifully foolish endeavor comes out. And I know I won't be able to celebrate as usual. I know Hank recently celebrated a socially distant birthday, and I was wondering if you have any ideas on how I could celebrate my birthday from home. Of course, I will be reading Hank's book and watching Vlogbrothers live on YouTube at 7pm Eastern time with special guest,

John. Birthdays in books. Emma. Well, we'll try to do a special shout out to you, Emma. Yeah. Thank you for for being there. Also, thank you for the plugs. My socially distant birthday was really fantastic. And I wasn't able to gather with all of my friends. So, Katherine collected messages from all of my friends and put them all in one place in an audio format. It's basically a podcast of my friends telling me why they like me, which I should listen to every day. And Emma, maybe you should nudge somebody

in your life to ask them to do the same thing. Or in lieu of that, just do it yourself. That's okay. It's still nice. Yeah. I feel like, hey, my birthday's coming up. It's going to be a weird one. Send me an audio message of why I'm good. Or, you know, constructive ways that I could improve. Or, you know, constructive ways that I could improve. Maybe not as much of that. Yeah. So Alice has had a socially distant birthday party. It was a little bit of a bummer, but Alice enjoyed it.

She's much more adaptable than her dad. I think we're going to remember this as a weird time, Emma, and you're going to remember this as a weird and difficult birthday. And that's okay. It's hopefully not going to be the last birthday you have. And hopefully you'll be able to look back on this and be like, oh, thank God that ended. Yeah, yeah, hopefully it will be something that you, uh, you remember because it was different. And I think that that is often the case when, you know, when things are as expected, they make a little bit less of an impression. But even if things are good, but in a different way, they can, they can stick with us for a longer.

Yeah, it's interesting that you say that Hank, because it occurs to me that I don't really remember many of my birthdays at all. And the ones I do remember are the ones where something unusual happened. But in my case, it was usually terrible. Like my 39th birthday, for instance, I went go-carding, which was my first mistake. And then of course, my second mistake

was that I got a displaced fracture of my ribs from a go-carding accident. Yeah, I remember you going to this go-carding place and I was like, that looks cool and then I looked at it and I was like, that looks like, no, it's not really what I imagine is go-carding. It's two story levels. Yeah, it's hardcore go-carding and I got into a fairly serious accident, but I thought I was okay. It just, I happened to go to the doctor two days later for something else and he noticed me get up on the examination table very gingerly and then he touched, touched it and he was

like, your rib is very broken. And you should go to the emergency department right now. It might be stabbing you in the liver. Oh my god. Which it wasn't. Thankfully. Yeah. Yeah. I was able to repurpose all of that in my novel turtles all the way down. Yeah. Yeah. John, you seem to it doesn't go great when you race. It's true. The other time that I I raced a car. It when you race. It's true, the other time that I race to car, it caught on fire. And this is like the only times, right?

Like, yeah, like imagine you as a racer. I do a fair amount of go kart riding, driving, what do you call it? Yeah. We're brothers and I don't even really know this. Well, I mean, I do live in the racing capital of the United States, Hank. Mm, yes, that's true.

Uh, yes, that other time when your car caught on fire, but they had told you before your car caught on fire, that if you crash, just wait and someone will help get you out of the car. So your car caught on fire, but you, being you, were like, I will continue to follow instructions and just sit here. Yeah, which, to be fair, they did come and get me. You know what I think? Instead of focusing on all the times that I was a bad race car driver, can we not focus on the time when I was a really good race car driver when I drove the payslap for the Indian

apolis Grand Prix and I didn't get into a car accident? And then the very next week, the payscar driver at the very next race, like slammed into the wall and they had to like stop the race for an hour. Can we focus on that? Oh God, that's so embarrassing. Well, when you did this, when you said you were doing that, I was like, John, what are you thinking? This never goes well for you.

I was so, I have never been as nervous as I was driving that Pace Car. It was not a pleasant experience, not least because one of the Indy Car drivers, the person who had the pole position, Simone Pashino, he was riding up against my bumper and he kept like, then he would slow down and he would go back to tailgating me, but like, it's a totally different level of tailgating when you're talking about professional race car drivers. Like tailgating for them is being one inch behind the bumper. And I was taking it very personally as I do when I get tailgated.

And I was like, listen, Simone Pashno, they told me to drive 72 miles an hour. And I am driving 72 miles an hour. And if you think I'm gonna speed up just because you're not happy with the tire pressure or whatever, you've got another think coming. I love it. I love it.

You show him and he's probably like, has no idea he's even doing it. He's probably like a solid, a solid like five times his comfortable distance. Totally, so I actually saw him like months later. And I was like, boy, you were really like really, real close in my rearview mirror. And I, I felt like it was a little extreme.

And he was like, oh, no, I don't, I don't really remember that. But that's what he would say. He's a very nice guy actually. Okay. I think, uh, what was, what was the question? Oh yeah, you got a great birthday. I'm a driver, payscar. Go race.

This next question comes from Maggie who asks, Dear Hank and John, when expression my mom uses all the time is the phrase, bone dry. Yeah. You know why so many things are that dry in your home. I don't understand this mainly because aren't our bones

in our bodies, wouldn't they be like full of fluids? Aren't they wet? Can you get back to me? Stay safe Maggie. I love, could you get back to me? Could you get back to me for this? It's like yeah, thanks, friends. We try to occasionally do that.

And also, I love about this question is how terrible it makes me feel about my bones. Yeah, they are just all inside of me, aren't they? So what? Well, here's the thing, Maggie. They're moist now, but a dryness is coming. Maybe depends on how. I guess the idea is that if the bone is out in the desert or the animal who died is out in the desert, and then the bone eventually appears after being blasted by sand and torn out by vultures, that eventually that bone will be very dry, but it doesn't seem like the default state for a bone. Well, most bones aren't in the desert.

To quote me on it. So, stitch it on a pillow. Yeah, so the actual etymology of the phrase bone dry is pretty interesting, not least because it's really new and you would think that it would be old because most bone related things are old. We've had them a long time, yeah. Yeah. But bone dry didn't appear in English until 1830?

Oh, wow. And it isn't about the fact that if you leave a bone out and the sun, it will eventually become dry. But like, if you leave anything out and the sun, it will eventually become dry. You know, you could say the same thing about like, Yeah. A pond.

Yeah. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Pond dry, you know how it is? Pond dry, we're a sponge, you know? I was like, put it, yeah. This is dry as a sponge and it's like, well, it's a, bbf. Bones are basically hard sponges. Do, whoo, wet ones. I don't wanna go back in time to before I knew about that. Hard, let's sponge. All right, let's move on to another question.

This one from Gracie who writes, dear John and Hank, do all microwaves rotate in the same direction? Gracie. writes, dear John and Hank, do all microwaves rotate in the same direction. Gracie, no, no, Gracie. In fact, my microwave rotates to the left half the time and to the right the other half of the time. And I don't know why. Oh, I do.

Oh great. So when the motor does its little thing, when it stops, the mechanism rests in the direction that it stopped in. And so a nicer microwave wants to have it rest not in the same way every time, because it rests against the mechanism in the same direction every time it wears faster in that direction. So basically, it switches directions only so that the motor will be able to have a longer lifespan.

And also, I think that it lets them use a slightly less expensive motor because it means that it will be able to, instead of like overcoming where it's already resting and pushing through that, moving the direction that it's not resting in. And that's actually less energy to move. So it's an engineering thing where they're able to make a cheaper, longer-lasting microwave as long as they have it move in different directions every time. That was actually fairly interesting. I always thought that it was a wind, unwind.

Unwind? Yeah, unwind. Yeah, like there's a spring in there that if you keep going the same direction, it would eventually be like, I can't, I can't. Yeah. I don't want it. Yeah, like this is spring in there that if you keep going the same direction it would eventually be like, I can't, I can't. Yeah. It's not that.

Well, that's disappointing. But I'm glad that I now know the facts. There. You're settled. All right, I think we have another question. This one comes from Taylor who writes, dear John and Hank, we're all donating lots of money to cancer research funds.

And I'm only 23, but so far as I'm aware these fundraisers have been a thing for a while. Why haven't we cured cancer? Oh, just, is that all? So, Taylor, one of the things that we don't hear about that much, but is really important is that the overall mortality rate from cancer is declining really dramatically

and has been declining dramatically throughout your lifespan. There are a bunch of reasons for this. Research and better treatment is one reason. Another reason is public health decisions. We tend to like really undervalue the importance of public health in these conversations, but people choosing not to smoke cigarettes has been a big deal for lower cancer rates and higher cancer survival. The other important thing here, and we have a sideshow video about this if you want to watch it, but cancer is not one disease and like not even every lung cancer or breast cancer is the same as other lung or breast cancers. And the things that go wrong for cancer to happen

are really varied, and some of them are fairly well studied, and we have ways to combat them, and some of them are still completely unknown. And part of the reason that they're unknown might be because they're more rare, so we haven't had the money to do the research. Part of it might be, it's just more complicated and we haven't figured it out yet. It tends to be that in order to get cancer, it's not like one thing went wrong.

Usually there's a couple of genetic things that you're predisposed to, a couple of genetic things that happened along the way, maybe, and like those things might be in completely different parts of your body system. So it might be one thing happened in your immune system that went wrong, one thing happened over here in like your sort of like cell regulation systems, one thing that happened over here and like your actual like the tissue that was the sort of start of the cancer. So it can be a bunch of different things. And if we focus on one of those things, we can sort of carve out a whole section of cancer and improve mortality around that.

But while cancers are spreading, they sort of like find new mutations that might help them survive our treatments. So it's super complicated. And the amount of work that we have done in terms of cancer research is really amazing. We have a long way to go. We also have a long way to go and increasing access to those treatments because they tend to be very expensive for the first 10 or 20 years after they're developed and a lot of them, a lot of them are less

old than that. So, having that limited access is also a huge deal and something that we should be looking hard at. Yeah, I mean, the first person to get access to Methotrexate, which is a chemotherapy drug that's been around for like 60 or 70 years, the first person to get access to that in Sierra Leone's ConoDistrict got access to it last year. Yeah. So, we have a long way to go both in terms of the discoveries that we need to make, but also in terms of the actual health consideration,

which is not about whether or not we figured something out, it's about whether or not we can distribute it widely and equitably. Yeah, and there are also cancers that are super treatable if you find them at the right time, and that's why screening is really important, I'm getting my colonoscopy in two months. So if you are, if you are of the age, make sure that you're getting all of your correct cancer screening because that is how we stick around for ourselves and our families.

I had a great colonoscopy in February before all of this started. Yeah, it was great. I look back on that time with a great deal of nostalgia. It's very hard for me, not like most of the time when my brain is doing nostalgia, I can say like, you know, what brain the old days weren't that good. Like, oh, 1990, it was so wonderful. I was 12 years old and blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, except that like the chances of getting murdered

in the United States were literally twice as high in 1990 than they are today. Like most of the time I can tell myself a story that helps me to understand that my urge to sentimentalize the past is misplaced. Right. But that colonoscopy in February of 2020 really was as good as it gets.

This is the peak. There's the peak for John Green. We're right at the top peak. Peak John Green right there. That's not just peak John Green. I want to be clear. That was the peak like February 12, 2020. Oh no. Was the best moment of human history. Okay. All right, John. This next question comes from Adam who asks, dear Hank, a John, I'm considered an essential worker in my job doing maintenance for dorms and office buildings at my university. The offices have been empty for a couple of months due to COVID, but I have taken it upon myself to water all of the abandoned office plants during my lunch break. What I want to know is, are those plants mine now? They only survived due to my labor and clearly have neglectful parents.

So is it incorrect for me to appropriate them? I actually want a real economist to answer this question for me. Like a plant is a living thing. And so there's the plant, and I think that you might own the plant, but I worry that you don't own the pot yet. So it might not own the dirt that the plant is growing in. You might only own the plant. And I'm not even totally sure that you own the plant.

I think it depends on the context in which the plant was abandoned. Because, right. If you got like two days notice that the office will be closing on Friday, and you didn't take home your office plants, that's on you. You consigned those plants to almost certain death. If on the other hand, you had like 30 seconds warning, and they were like, everybody has to leave the office right now, then maybe that's still your plant and you're just very grateful to the person

who's taking care of it in the meantime. Right, right. And you've been thinking this whole time, oh my gosh, I can't believe that I can't save my plant. Or I miss Sam so much because I assume that people named their plants. But in any case, the plants are grateful that they are not dead.

So thank you for doing that work, whether they are your plants or not. Which reminds me that this podcast is brought to you by plants. Plants, there are so many of the different things on the planet. And they are genuinely essential. It's weird that we don't have more corporate sponsors

that are just things that we really need. Like this podcast is brought to you by iron. Iron. Yeah. It courses through your blood and allows you to survive. But that's not our second sponsor. Of course, our second sponsor is microwaves that go in both directions, microwaves that go in both directions.

They're slightly more efficient, maybe. And this by guess this also brought to you by Simone Padgino. He's a driver of a car. And he's a former Indianapolis 500 winner, Hank. Okay. Yes, it's brought to you by him. He tailgates too much.

Well, I think he tailgates probably the right amount. He's a very good driver. By the way, Hank, you should Google Simon Pajeno so that you can see the extent to which he looks exactly like Ali G's character in Taladega Knights. Oh, wow. They really got him. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they essentially stole both his likeness and his accent for that role, but he is a lovely person. And also today's podcast is brought to you by Dry B bones, dry bones. For everybody's least favorite Mario Kart driver.

Never even tried. Never even tried to use dry bones. Hasn't happened a single time. My entire Mario Kart life. Look I've been playing Mario Kart for 32 years. I've played as Luigi the whole time. When I play as anyone other than Luigi, all it makes me feel is that I miss Luigi. Yeah.

I have the same experience for with Donkey Kong. Oh God, Donkey Kong is terrible, but we don't know. I know, but I learned how to play Mario Kart as Donkey Kong and I can't play as anybody else. That's very funny. I only know how to play this game with terrible handling and very slow acceleration. Yeah, but I can knock into you with no problems,

too. I will not change direction. That's true. That's true. We also have a project for us a message to read from Pierre and Christina who write a message from our past selves. Today is the day. You have to jump in the ocean today. It may be inconvenient and you may have worked, but you have made a commitment for the day this podcast airs. Oh, I hope it's not winter. Well, we waited until after the solstice. We did it, perfect. Pierre and Christina, it's not winter

as long as you're in the Northern Hemisphere. Yes. But I don't know that it's going to be super easy to jump in the ocean today, but I think you'll find a spot. I think past y'all may have failed to account for certain variables. But I think you can do it. I believe in you. Yeah. You weren't alone in that at least. Oh God. That's they ain't that the truth. This next question comes from Meredith who asks, dear Hank and John, my Anthropocene

reviewed mug is probably my favorite mug right now. But I do have one possible issue with it. I drink a lot of tea. So although it's technically a coffee mug, it very rarely has coffee in it. What exactly makes a mug a coffee mug? Is it weird that I drink tea from a mug with a review of coffee mugs on it?

Cups and curiosities meriteth. So I'm very fond of the fact that the Anthropocene review is only released one piece of merch and it's a coffee mug I'm very fond of the fact that the Anthropocene Review does only release one piece of merch, and it's a coffee mug that contains my review of coffee mugs that you can read nowhere except on the coffee mug. It makes me very happy. It's my favorite thing that we've ever done. But I failed to foresee, of course, Meredith's problem,

which many other people have emailed me about, which is that it's weird to drink tea from a mug that announces itself very loudly as a coffee mug. I think it's okay, Meredith. I think it's okay. I think, yeah. What it turns out that I was not doing a good job of imagining coffee mugs complexly and understanding that they have many different functions. For example, my anthropocene reviewed coffee mug is sometimes an ice cream holder.

Yeah, this is the thing. Do I sometimes wipe things that aren't dishes with a dish towel? I do. Do I sometimes use a stack of books as a tripod? I do. This is the human ingenuity and the reason why we call it a coffee mug in America is because we're coffee people, but we don't have to be coffee people. America's full of diverse takes and appreciations for different things.

And so we should be open to the fact that our coffee mugs are going to be used for various things. And I sometimes drink water out of them. So there's that. Maybe I should, I don't know why, make a tandy tea mug that contains a very view of tea. My hope is that tea is just as delicious as coffee is when drunk with the Anthropocene reviewed mug mug. Yes, you should have had it just beocene reviewed mug, mug. Yes, you should have had it just be a review of mug, mugs. This next question comes from TQ who writes, dear John and Hank, I have a baby sister who's at the stage of learning her ABCs.

So naturally the ABC song is played almost constantly in my house, which has made me wonder, why does the order of the alphabet matter? Like, I guess it makes it easier for children to memorize the alphabet, but other than that, the order of the letters matter. Like, I guess it makes it easier for children to memorize the alphabet, but other than that, the order of the letters has no significance to how we use the English language, for example, the fact that C comes after B doesn't change the way that we speak or write. Yeah, that's definitely true, but there are all kinds of reasons why it is helpful to have an

order to the alphabet. The first one, you have identified, which is that it's easier to remember the alphabet if we have an order to it. The second is that you need to look things up in an order sometimes, and alphabetically is a really good way to do that. These things are so useful that the alphabet has remained in alphabetical order for longer than any individual word has existed. Really? Yes.

Wow. Isn't that a wild notion? Yes. That is a little mind blowing. I did a vlog, there's video about this at one point in the last 15 years. Well, I forgot about it. That said, I would argue that while alphabetizing things is still really important and really useful, it is less important than it was certainly

when I was a kid. Well, yeah, now you have records and you can order them any way you want to. You can do it alphabetically or by size or by color and like you could just change the little thing in the database, but sometimes we still have physical objects that need to be ordered in a way. Yeah, so I think alphabetizing remains important. I do think it's an interesting question how important alphabetizing will be in like a hundred years because it will be probably less

significant than it is right now, and people might find it weird. I was thinking when I was reading this question in 200 years, are people going to have to learn the alphabet as adults so that they will be able to go back and read the dictionaries that we wrote? Oh, well, I mean, are you asking if they'll be able to read or if they won't know the word? No, of course they'll have to read. I'm saying that they won't necessarily learn.

They won't have the same need to learn the alphabet in the same order that we've learned it, or at least that need won't be as acute in a hundred years. I don't think. But then again, I am terrible at predicting the future. Yeah. I mean, I'm like, Orangreen is still singing Humpty Dumpty. I think that we're still gonna have that song and it'll still be part of the learning process.

I think that alphabetical order is maybe the most concrete item of culture that will last through the millennia. No, that's an exaggeration and you know it. What else? The most concrete item of culture that will last for millennia... TikTok?

No. KAAAAA! I was gonna say Hamlet, but yeah, no, it might be TikTok. I can't wait for the first, like cast tick-tock version of Hamlet. I don't really know how to pull that off, but we'll figure it out. John, before we get to the all-important news from Mars and A.C. Emild and this question comes from Joseph, who asks,

Dear Hank and John, we have all heard time and time again that we should not waste water. What does that mean exactly? I have a friend who says that that's not a real thing because of the water cycle. I'm sure it has basis and truth though. What is it and why should we not waste water? Joseph.

First, Joseph, I love your instinct that somebody who is in a position of knowing about this stuff is probably right, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't ask the question and wonder why that is. And the answer, of course, is that it's true that we don't like eject water out of the atmosphere and remove it into space. Right. Like, we don't remove water from the hydrological cycle by using it. That is true. It is also true that it requires a tremendous amount of energy to make water clean and to get water to the places where we want it to be.

So what we're really trying to save is the energy that we use to create clean, safe water, right? Yes, that's a big piece of it. And in certain places, that amount of energy is much higher than other places. So if you live in a place that has a lot of water, that number is lower, that if you live in a place that does not, it's much higher. There are also places where there is actually a limited amount of fresh water. And we are pumping it out of aquifers faster than the aquifers are replenishing.

So these are like giant underground lakes, basically. And we're pumping water out of the lakes faster than the lakes are filling back up. So eventually that water will not be one of the ways that we can get water. Now there are other ways to try and get water if you are near the ocean, you can try and take the salt out of the water,

but that's extremely energy intensive. You can move the water from where it is to places where it isn't. It also uses a tremendous amount of energy. So this question is different in different places, but in general, a lot of work and energy goes into moving a fairly finite resource, which is clean, fresh water, which, you know, there's certainly lots of water in the world, but there isn't an infinite amount. And there is definitely not an infinite amount of fresh water, you know, and if you, we really do use more than we have access to or there's a long drought.

And so the places where we get the water, either rivers or aquifers start not being the place where we can, places where we can turn to, then you have to solve that problem in really big and kind of intense ways that involve rationing water, pulling back on some agriculture, actually having people leave the areas where they are or moving the water from places where it is, hundreds and hundreds of miles through pipelines in a way that is extremely energy intensive. So big, big question, but yes. Yeah, so in short, let's try to minimize our use of water, especially potable water. That's why I like to bring up all of the water I use to water my plants from the white river.

It's a lot of night, no, you can still, you can do organic gardening, but still have all the benefits of pesticides. Because they're in the river. That's right. It comes pre-roundup. That's the great thing about the water and the white river. It's already got all of the fertilizer in it from the poop, the human feces that have been placed directly into the river system. What were we talking about? Right, the news from Mars and ASC Wimbledon. All right, take a time for the news from Mars and ASC Wimbledon. I'll start. ASC Wimbledon are building

their new stadium that hopefully they will be able to move into for the start of the 2020, 2021 season. Now, of course, we don't know what the world is going to look like in August or for that matter July, but they are currently building the stadium and there's going to be three temporary stands around three sides of the field and then one permanent stand. and they've just released like what it's all going to look like. And it's kind of a blue and yellow speckle along the three temporary stands. And then it's going to be blue except in yellow is going to be written the dawns on seats, which is very cool. There's been a lot of conversations about how people feel about the speckling. I saw on Twitter, one person wrote in reply to the speckling democracy doesn't work, which I thought was a little bit of an overreaction.

I'm not ready to give up on the idea of fan ownership, just simply because some people may not be happy with the speckling effect. I think the the specling effect is super cool and modern and that it looks great. And I just cannot wait to be at the new plow lane watching AFC win will then in real life. I pray that day comes safely and comes soon. I also see that in this this render, which looks very impressive. It looks like the most impressive football stadium I've ever seen. I think that may be more the sort of angle

that they've put it at than reality. But it looks like there's a bunch of like boxes. Yeah, there's some luxury boxes in the luxury boxes. In the central, the permanent stand has like some, if you want some climate control. Right. I bet there'll be a variety of catering packages available. Exactly.

Let's hope. So we don't know what's gonna happen, but I think it's wonderful that they're building the stadium and hopefully it will be complete soon and football will be ready to go with fans at some point. All right. Yes, please. Well, this weekend Mars news, we are now less than a month away from the launch of perseverance.

Really? Originally scheduled. Yeah. It was originally scheduled for July 17th, but there was a crane issue. So that's happens. That's been there. Pushback a few days to July 20th. Shouldn't be an issue. The full launch window is of course determined by how close Mars and Earth are to each other. And this year, that extends to August 11th. But if the launch ends up missing that window, we will have to wait 26 months for an

ex-chance. Oh, so we got it. We got to get this done. This is the one. This is the one. Fingers very crossed. It isn't the only mission aiming for this takeoff window. So this happens every 26 months.

So frequently there are several Mars missions that all launch at the same time. There's the hope Mars mission being led by the United Arab Emirates. And there's Tianwen one being led by China. And the exo Mars mission that's European Space Agency in Roscosmos led was scheduled for this year, but has been pushed back for those 26 months. So to 2022. As part of the finishing touches on perseverance, JPL added an aluminum plate in honor of the healthcare workers here on Earth, who've been working to fight COVID-19, despite the slight launch delay on Earth's

and the Rover is scheduled to land at Jazeera Crater on February 18th, 2021. So just into the new year. So the two dates I have to worry about, because you know, that's how I like to approach life. We gotta get this thing off the ground by August 11th and we got to get it on the Mars in February. Yes. So the day we're looking at is July 20th for Vermont right now and if it's not launched by August, by August, you should start

to non-your fingernails a little bit. I'll can tell you exactly how to worry, not just how much to worry, but what, how to manifest it. I could not handle working on a project like that. I know. I couldn't just talking about is freaking me out. Oh, so yeah, I, yeah. Oh, that sounds really stressful, but I am hopeful and I'm excited. It's a great moment every time when we have a launch like this and it's an even greater moment when the Rover land safely on Mars. So here's to more of that. Yes. Oh, God.

I always think there's no way I'm going to be able to watch that and then I always end up watching it. That's great. John, thank you for making a podcast with me. Thank you. This podcast is edited by Joseph Tune of Medic. It's produced by Rosie on a halls row awesome Sheridan Gibson. Julia Bloom is our community coordinator and the music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great gunorola.

And as they say in our hometown. Don't forget to be awesome. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪