Dear Hank & John - 260: His One Loamy Weakness

Episode Date: October 5, 2020

Why do superheroes fly with their arms out in front? Were my college expectations way off? Could we use space travel to look at dinosaurs? Should I feel bad about moderating my comment sections? Why aren't shadows totally black? Hank Green and John Green have answers!If you're in need of dubious advice, email us at [e-mail] 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. Doors, I prefer to think that Dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you dubious advice, and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John. Yeah. John, did you hear about the teacher who doesn't like to teach in public? No.

He was a private tutor. John, wait, I don't get what, wait, why is that a pun? I told the joke wrong. That's just an observation. Retail the joke, tell it from scratch and so we can find out just how good it was going to be before you mess it up. Okay, God, I'm so frazzled.

I really love it when the punchline of a joke has been ruined. I love the second telling of the joke. Yeah, listen so much. What did you hear about the teacher? Yeah. Oh, he likes to fart in private. Oh, who only likes to fart in private? Yes, instead of teaching. Yeah, he was, he was a private tutor. He was a private tutor. Oh, god, it's teachers, it's teacher day, John. Well, well, Hank, what a beautiful way to honor the teachers of the world with that joke. Really lovely. Thank you. Oh, boy. I do appreciate all of the people who have taught me. I mean, thank you to teachers, but really an extra special thank you to Hank Green for

honoring teachers in such a deeply meaningful way. Oh God. I am so thankful to all of the people who have taught me and also education is the foundation on which all progress is built, John. So thank you to everybody who does that job. I too am grateful to all of my teachers, but I am especially grateful to my children's teachers who are doing incredible work in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, as is the case for so many teachers around the world right now.

So thank you for finding ways to remain committed to your students even in this time of extreme difficulty. Yes, it's hard. Hank, I would like to begin today with a question from Estelle that I've been thinking about ever since I first read a stale's email. Dear John and Hank, why do superheroes fly with their hands and fists stretched in front of them? Is it better for like steering? Is it to pulverize oncoming obstacles? Please help Estelle. Yeah, if you're going fast enough, I guess they got to be worried. to pulverize oncoming obstacles, please help us, still. Yeah, if you're going fast enough,

I guess you gotta be worried. If you think about it, if you're literally flying faster than a speeding bullet, then something that you hit that is stationary is moving as fast to you, relative to you, as a speeding bullet. Right, so maybe you want that to hit your fists instead of your head.

That is absolutely correct. I don't think that's the primary reason, though, why superheroes fly with their arms out in front of them. I have a theory, but I'd like to hear yours. Here is my theory, and it's based on my observation of high-level competitive swimmers. They kick off the wall, and then when they could just hold their hands

at their sides while they were doing the dolphin kick, what they actually do is they put their hands in front of their heads, which I assume is there's some aerodynamic or water dynamic in this case reason for. Right. So I assume that Superman is doing this to go faster. I think that would be correct if Superman put his hands together in front of his head and made

himself into a wedge. It's a great point. Very good observation. That would allow him to move fastest through the air because when you're moving as fast as a speeding bullet, like it, like the air becomes a substantial amount of resistance. You have to cut through that air. It becomes basically a solid. You want to be like basically bullet-shaped. Yeah, but he doesn't do that and do you know why? Great point.

I don't know why. It's vanity. Oh, because it looks cool. And we all want to think that Superman doesn't care how cool he looks. But he does. But Superman is not like, his muscles have nothing to do with his strength. He only works out so he can look good.

That's right. He could be my size and he would still have super strength. That's right. He is an alien. So he only looks good because he wants to look good. It turns out he's not just vulnerable to kryptonite. He's also vulnerable to social judgment. He is.

And we all are. He's just like us. He feels scared all the time and he's worried that he might not be beautiful and he might not be worthy of love. But I will say to Superman, what I try to say to myself, what I'll say to you, Hank, what I think is true of every person and or alien from

Cal El on this planet right now, which is that we are all worthy of loving and worthy of being loved. And it makes sense in a way, Hank, because Superman, you know, like he kind of grew up without a family, he has to feel a little bit abandoned being shot in a spaceship to from a different planet to earth. Right? Krypton. Cal, Cal is his name. Yes.

You think I'm there. I was trying to do a thing, Hank. I was trying to say that all people are worthy of love regardless of whether they came from a different planet, but the thing got ruined by me not knowing that Superman is of course from Krypton, which is why Kryptonite is his problem. Yeah.

Imagine being a human on a different planet where you can do pretty much anything you want, except that like if you get near Earth dirt, these things go real bad for you. Yeah, it's not called Earthide, it's just called dirt. Yeah. It's it's is one weakness. It's got worms in it.

It's low meat. John, what if there is a steering element to this? Just Superman, it seems like he has to turn to the side to turn, which doesn't seem like how it works. I guess I'm a little bit confused about the physics of Superman. That's a great question. How would you turn?

How would, how do you turn? Maybe, maybe you turn by thinking. I think that that's the main, the main way. Or maybe it's like a segue and you just slightly reposition your weight and you're like, now I'm going west. Yeah. Feel like it could either be that the steering is internal to Superman in which case it is something that he just does with his mind. Right. Because it doesn't seem to require

any physical effort. Or you never see him like, like, put one arm slightly to the side to like push him to the right the way you do with wing suitors. Yeah, it's unclear to me, but it does look very cool and looks way cooler than not doing that, especially when you got a cape. Why else would you wear a cape? This dude is vain! Such a good point, and you know what, while we're dunking on superheroes, I would just like to say that all these years later, I continue to think that Batman is the single most overrated superhero, and I think history has shown me to be correct

in ways that none of us back in 2010 when I first said that Batman was an overrated superhero could have possibly foreseen. I, yeah, I'm there with you. That's great point, John. I also feel like if you wear a cape and you are not in the 18th century, then you cannot be trusted.

Hmm. I don't know. Okay. I got a cape. Do you have a cape? Ah yeah. What? I remember when I, I get my gosh.

Yeah, I have a cape. I haven't worn it in a long time, but when I was in sixth grade, I took up magic. Yeah, now I remember this. Remember my brief period as a magician. Uh-huh, yeah, you were bad. Well, thank you.

And I got a cape to complete the outfit. It was like neon yellow and black checkerboard cape that I would wear, and then I would do close-up magic. And poor, I mean, I so desperately wanna go back to that sixth grade kid. I had a really, really, really rough go of it, like bullying that now would be considered abusive. And I really thought that if I got good at magic,

then kids were gonna like me. Yeah, I remember you also felt that way about OP pants. Oh God, I really, I thought those OP shorts, I had a matching OP shirt and shorts combo that I genuinely believed was going to transform my social, this speaks to actually why I had problems. Social media school. That I thought I was just like one matching shirt, short combo away from total success and or close up magic. Yeah. Yeah.

But that kid was also so, so sweet. Like, yeah. I look back at my six-rate self and I feel like a level of cringe and embarrassment, of course, because I was trying way too hard and yada, yada, yada. And there were things about me that were really annoying and that were difficult for other kids, and I totally understand that. But I also look back on it, and I feel a lot of sympathy for that kid. And I think, you know what, the stuff that you were into was cool, and more importantly, the way you were into it was so cool. And I like that about you.

And I want to like, I wish I could go back and tell my sixth grade self that. So if you are a sixth grader or you have a sixth grader who feels similarly, like I think it's great that you love the stuff that you love and you love it. The way you love it. I rescind formally rescind my comment about capes. Oh, oh, I forgot about that. Yeah. No, you can't. Don't don't my comment about capes. Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah, no, you can't. Don't say that about capes.

You're hurting sixth grade me with this close up magic habit. But I do have another question that has a reason. Oh, really, we're not gonna do this one question for the whole show. I could probably count the number of items I own from when I was in sixth grade on my fingers. Oh, possibly on one hand. Is that the case for you and if so,

why is one of them the cape? It is the case for me. And I have no idea. It's one of those things where like, because I held onto it, I feel like I should hold onto it. Yeah. You know, like I also have my uniform from when I worked at stake and shake.

Oh, and I'm not sure why that's still there. I also have my uniform from when I worked at Steak and Shake. And I'm not sure why that's still there. I also have the Banana Republic backpack, Satchel thing, I wore in middle school. It was sort of like a side bag. It was sort of pursesh and all the other kids were wearing backpacks, but I was like, no, you're not gonna love my Satchel. Yeah, I remember that.

You still have that. I still got that. Can you do a full, like a John Green wretz respected outfit where you wear like clothes from different portions of your life and it includes the cape. It's a heart, it's a project for awesome perk and it's for charity. It's a hard no.

I'll just donate. I'll just don't rather donate. What about just for me? You do it just for me, your brother, who you love, who is very supportive of you, and who needs some reward for that. I have another question. This one comes from Clem who writes,

Steve Chattano and Hank, I'm a freshman in college and it's not what I expected. Yeah, Clem, I know. I know. Yes. Yes. It's always a little bit not what I expected. Yeah, Clem, I know. Yes, it's always a little bit not what you expected. And then sometimes it's 2020. Yeah, yeah. I would say it's always like 20% disappointing,

but it's not always like this. Clem goes on to write, maybe I romanticized college while I was in high school because I was so eager to have a new start. That's probably part of it. But also like you live in a social order that romanticizes college and makes lots of movies about how amazing it is and how great it is and how everybody has 175 friends

all the time and whatnot. It could also be that the experience has been dramatically changed by, you know, but I had always envisioned college as a time when everyone found their place and very naturally made dozens of friends. I live in a single because of, you know, and I have two friends after two weeks.

I'm neither of their closest friends on campus as I rarely get invited to things. How do I connect with my classmates? Is college as amazing as it's cracked up to me or do people just romanticize their college days in hindsight? The worst is yet to... Clim. Well, I, like, I, this is a hard thing in this moment.

Like, I don't know what the regulation is. Yeah, I mean, the first, I think the first couple of weeks of college are hard. Oh, yeah. Almost universally, even if this weren't happening, but it's definitely more, I mean, much more isolating to live in a single, to not have a lot of opportunities for socialization. And I think over time, Clem, you will most likely find more and more of your people. But I remember feeling really uncomfortable and lonely for a fair amount of the first semester, and then it kind of slowly got better. and lonely for a fair amount of the first semester,

and then it kind of slowly got better. It didn't, it's not like I woke up one morning and I was like, oh, I have so many friends. There are periods when I felt lonely in every period of my life and college was no exception. And that was even obviously pre-restricted. Restricted. Restricted.

Yeah, I remember very specifically, I had a roommate and, you know, we had it off pretty well, but I remember really specifically like sitting in my bunk, reading notes from my high school friends and listening to music that I was trying to be cool by listening to and like trying to discover things and find things that were different

and differentiate myself. And like, so like these like two competing things happening simultaneously, like trying to define new interests while also like just missing so deeply those relationships that like, that I graduated out of. Yeah, the thing about high school is that like, you're lucky it gets good at the very end. And they're like now you got to go to college and you're like oh great another thing that I'm going to have to spend like two years getting like comfortable with and good at.

Yeah, it's definitely hard. I remember playing music, like music that I thought was very cool in the hopes that somebody would like be walking on my dorm and be like, oh, now that person likes the cure and air go. Yeah, which I don't think is, like, I think is it isn't. It's not bad. It's irrational thought. But, but also like maybe if you, maybe like recognize that I don't know how having those thoughts too and like they want people to think ah that person's

cool. I remember the first time I like went ahead and told somebody I thought they were cool. They were like really? Yeah. I was like yeah you're so cool. Yeah that's the other thing I would say actually, Clem, is that everybody or or a lot of people are having very similar experiences. And so when I'm lonely or I feel isolated, I also become a lot of times quite self-conscious and I start to think that like, if I'm in a room and I'm not talking to anyone, everybody's like looking at me and like thinking about me and how I'm lonely and how I'm isolated and whatever, but like in reality, all those other people are thinking about themselves. This is the insight that my wife Sarah had

in seventh grade that in the way that close-up magic did not prove to be a magical life altering cure for my loneliness. When Sarah at the age of like 12 or 13, realized that nobody was thinking about her because they were busy thinking about themselves, it was like revelatory. Yeah, yeah, that took me like half way through college again. Sarah's very self-aware. I mean, I was like 32.

In fact, I remember Sarah, the first time Sarah told me that story being like, well, yeah, of course, that's true for you. Like other people aren't thinking about you because, you know, they're thinking about me. We're terrible. Why does anybody care about us? Oh, because all humans and other residents of Krypton are worthy of love, Hank. Yeah.

Yeah. Clam, in six weeks, will you write us and give us an update? Yeah. I think I think let's give it six weeks. Good luck. All right, John, this question comes from Larissa, who asks, Dear Hank and John, I'm listening from Brazil, and your podcast is very helpful and good in my life.

I was talking to my friend and we were discussing time and space regardless of knowing not nearly enough physics. And she told me that if we happened to go somewhere really far away, like to another galaxy and look back at Earth with cool telescopes, we could see dinosaurs because light years and time and weird space stuff. Is that true? And if so, how is that true? Thank you, confused confused Larissa. Before Hank answers this question, I am going to offer context because I did not know this until, I don't know, fairly recently in my life.

When you look at the sun, you're actually looking at the sun like a few minutes ago because the light of the sun takes a few minutes to get to Earth. And when you look at a star in the sky, a lot of times you're looking at that star like a hundred years ago or 200 years ago

because that star is 200 light years away, which means going at the speed of light, it takes light 200 years to get from that star to us. Yes. And this is how we can look very, very deeply into the past. Like we can look like billions and billions of years into the past by training telescopes into places that are very, very far away. And that is cool, but now Hank is going to give us the bummer.

Well, here's the thing. So we've got two problems here. One, we've got the problem of how to get somewhere instantaneously and break the laws of physics by folding space on itself or something. So if you can get 65 million light years away, so that's the farthest you need to get away to be able to see dinosaurs before the extinction event. So that's the first part. That's hard.

And then there's the second hard part, which is building a telescope, they can see 65 million light years away, with like high resolution enough to like spot a dinosaur, which both of those things are impossible, but like if you could do one, there's no reason to say you can't do the other because they're both impossible. So if you figured out how to impossible yourself into one of those things, you might as well impossible yourself into the others. So I'm saying yes, you can do it. What might be possible, and probably not,

but might be possible, is for you to leave earth right now and travel very near or at the speed of light, which is the fastest known speed we think things can travel. Now, it's quite probable that your body couldn't actually travel the speed of light without a bunch of super unpleasant and fatal things happening to it, quite probable that your body couldn't actually travel the speed of light without a bunch of super unpleasant and fatal things happening to it, but putting that aside,

if we had to get up to that speed, yeah, it would be hard. If you could travel at the speed of light and you could go like 10 million light years away, and then you had a really good telescope, which I know is impossible, then you could look back and you wouldn't see like life 10 million years ago, but you would see the

moment you left earth. Yeah, you'd have to get to the speed of light immediately, which would pulverize anything that existed. It would definitely be. Hank, there's a lot of problems with this hypothetical scenario. I'm just saying that yeah, the other problem is that it would take 10 million years. Yeah, and that would be a problem. Which might be bad for your health.

But now we're talking about like relativistic time, so it might not take 10 million, it wouldn't take 10 million years for you. Yeah, it might actually be relatively instantaneous. It would be instantaneous to you. Yeah, I think you're going to the speed of light. It'd be a few seconds, even if you're going to speed up just from slowing down and speeding up.

I think it's got realistically, you could look back with your impossible telescope and you could see Earth maybe I don't know five minutes after you left it and then you could become a distant observer of Earth, which would be a cool job that maybe some alien has right now. I do want to talk about scales here just at the end of the question because I think that this is interesting. So the brightest star in the sky, Sirius, is 8.6 light years away. So if you are on Sirius, you can see Earth as it was 8.6 years ago. No, the good old days. So to get 65 million light years away, you need to be not in this galaxy.

So Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away. So that's also a totally different galaxy still not anywhere close too far enough away to see dinosaurs. So you have to be at Galaxy NGC4845 to be able to see a Tyrannosaurus Rex as it is going extinct. Which is such an important and nearby galaxy that it only has four numbers in its name. Yeah. So it is, it's not, it's not close by. We didn't, we don't even have a name for it. Yeah, but the dinosaurs over there are incredible.

All right, let's answer another question. This one comes from Lauren who writes, dear John and Hank, I make fan vids and write fan fiction and post them online. And recently I told my friend that I sometimes delete comments that make me feel bad about my work or could start an argument in the comment section because I prefer to keep my areas

of the internet as positive as possible. Well, somebody doesn't work for Facebook. My friend accused me of censorship and it's been bugging me ever since. Is it wrong for me to delete these comments when the platform allows me to or am I just cutting out toxicity before it can grow? Yeah, so there's two ways to imagine there's two frameworks here. One is that this area of the internet is yours and the other is that this area of the internet is some kind of publicly owned thing and so everyone has equal rights to it.

And in this case, it is very cut and dried to me that that space is yours. Yeah. You decide. And you get to decide on the rules of that space. Like if people are in my house, I get to decide what I think is like okay behavior. And if they like start smoking a cigarette, I can be like, don't do that. Yeah, it is the comment section to your story. You decide the rules of that comment section. On various subreddits have different rules and those rules should dictate the kind of conversations

that are possible in those spaces. This is a very common thing on the internet. It has been common since the beginning. There is no like time in the past when there was no internet censorship. Hank and I were on forums in 1991 that had rules. Yeah, rules. Yeah, and you don't even have to, like rules also don't need to be written down

when it's a small scale space. Like it is okay to have power over small areas, just like I have power over my home. The idea that like every space on the internet, like there's this like weird idea that all internet spaces should be treated equally. It just doesn't make any sense. No. And just as well, if Lauren goes into somebody else's fan fiction comment section and says, you know, Batman's a really great superhero and says, you know,

Batman's a really great superhero and you guys are idiots. Then that person has ever, it's fine if they delete it. Yeah. We are never gonna get to a place where we have healthy spaces online. If we don't acknowledge the fact that like toxicity spreads so quickly. Yeah, it really does. And I do think that it's important to note

that people can have differing opinions and if the response to that different opinion is I don't wanna hear it and I also don't wanna other people to see it. I'm gonna exercise my power to allow some other people to not see it. Then there are situations in which that is a problem.

But this is not one of them. Because that's not the function of that space. That's not what it's trying to do. And so we have to have different rules based on the utility we are trying to achieve from different tools. And different areas of the internet are four different things. Exactly. Like, there's also norms, you know? There's norms that like when you come over to my house for dinner,

like we're not gonna get any heated argument because that's not the function of this space. Yeah. Not that people are coming over to my house for dinner anymore. Which reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by dinners with friends. That was nice. This podcast is also brought to you by John's Cape. John's Cape.

Now that we know what exists, we are not shutting up about it. No, that's, see, that's why I almost didn't tell you. Was because I didn't, I didn't want it to become a thing. John was like, yeah, we all find it was, he was like, is this too embarrassing? Now it's like, absolutely not. I was like, yeah, we all find it was, he was like, is this too embarrassing? Now it's like absolutely not. It's, you know, perfect. I feel like one of us is looking out for the other

and the other of us maybe is thinking more about what's good for the audience. All right, today's podcast is also, of course, brought to you by The Cure. The Cure, if you hear it pumping from a dorm room with an open door, feel free to just peek your head and then say, oh, I really like Friday. I'm in love. You're so cool. You are actually, if you listen to the cure now, you're so much cooler than you were

if you listen to the cure when I was a kid. Yeah. Oh, Lord. And this podcast is also brought to you by Superman's vanity, Superman's vanity, driving a huge number of his decisions, but certainly not all of them. We're not saying he's a bad person, just that he wants to be loved. Project Rossum message from Mary to my fellow nerd fighters. Thank you for being such an awesome community. Every day, it seems like I'm hearing about acts of charity or kindness. Every December, I can't wait for the project for awesome. To me, it is my new Christmas. You are all amazing people and don't stop being awesome. Thank you, Mary. And thank you for using your project for awesome donation

to spread the love and Mary and also everybody. We've been talking about this some, but I don't think we've mentioned it on the podcast. Unfortunately for this particular circumstance, we are moving the project for awesome to the beginning of the year instead of the end of the year. So it'll be in the beginning of 2021. And in order to avoid some of the difficulty of that time in general, not just this year,

but all of the time, because there's just lots going on in people's lives, both our employees and also everybody else. So we're moving it. And you can hear more about the house and the wise of us moving it soon. We'll be talking about that on Vlog Brothers. Yeah, so I guess now Christmas is gonna be in February. Heck yeah. John, this next question comes from Scarlett who asks,

dear Hank and John, some confused. Why are shadows completely black? I know has to do with like light reflecting, but I'm unclear on the details. And why aren't there a cabillion shadows everywhere from light reflecting and making like double shadows? Not the color, scarlet. Oh boy, I have answers to all of these questions.

I love it. This is deep. I love it. This is deep. First of all, when you're outside shadows, oftentimes there's like no, like there's not much of a clear shadow at all because the sky is bright. So the sun is bright, but the sky is also bright, especially like you could notice this for example when the sun is completely obscured by clouds that the sky is still

quite bright in the daytime. I don't know, not here in Indiana, but it is admittedly brighter than it is around midnight. Yes. And so all of that light that's being defused by all the molecules in the atmosphere is getting scattered around and will land and shoot in really sort of like surprising directions, like tons of different directions. I first found out about this when I was doing 3D modeling once upon a time in a former career,

and in order to create realistic objects, you have to light not only from point sources, but from a dome. So you have a dome that you build around your object, and then you have light come from every point in that dome toward the interior, and you're basically creating a sky. And that allows for these shadows that you only see when you're outside.

Now, inside, we also tend to have light coming from lots of different individual places. So it's rare that you have one point source of light in a room, but also it's bouncing off of walls, it's bouncing off of anything that isn't pure black, basically. And so you get shadows that are filled in by that light that's bouncing around. But you can get varied, there are ways to get very dark shadows. Yeah.

If you're trying to get them for some artistic reason or cinema to graphic reason or whatever, single points of light aimed directly at something with not very many reflective surfaces around. Right. So dark walls, curtains, that kind of stuff, that'll darken up shadows if that's your concern, but it doesn't seem to be, it just seems to be pure curiosity, which is beautiful. And this is why on the moon where there's no atmosphere and also, contrary to what you may think by looking at the moon, the rocks are quite dark. Shadows are very, very dark on the moon.

Are they really? Yeah. You know, that's something I like. That's something I would never have guessed, but I now that you say it, it makes total sense. Yeah, the moon is weird and difficult. Like the horizon is close, er, than it is on Earth, because it's much smaller. And then the other thing is that nothing looks far away because there's no atmosphere.

So one of the primary ways we judge things out past a certain distance when like binocular vision isn't helping us is the like stuff in the atmosphere that that includes it, it makes it a little more blue, a little more cloudy, a little less fun, like a little less detailed. And we on the moon like you can see a rock that, like a little less detailed. Um, and we on the moon, like you can see a rock that looks like it's, you know, 20 feet away and it's quite small, but it turns out it's a boulder that's like a half a mile away. Wow. That's wild. If cool. All right, Hank, before we go back to space with the news from Mars, which I know you're excited

about. First, I need to read you this email from Alexis who wrote in to say, dear John and Hank at the beginning of the pandemic, my sister and I decided we wanted to hatch chickens since we had nothing better to do. We hatched 10 chickens and one duck because the people who sold us the eggs messed up on April 30th. We named them and I named one of the roosters Hank and the other rooster, John. They've been named this ever since we could tell them apart from the others. John was the soonest to grow up and started crowing and getting long tail feathers first, but Hank quickly

outgrew him, which is just like life. I attached pictures of what they look like now the dark one is Hank and the lighter one is John sincerely. Alexis, P.S. they're really heavy. And we will include these at the Patreon. We are so delighted, Alexis, that you and your sister chose to name your roosters after us and that I matured faster, but Hank eventually grew to be larger and more interesting. John, do you have news from AFC Wimbledon for me? Oh, do I ever.

Hank, it's starting to seem, and this is a very strange turn of events. It seems like we might be good. Oh, what's that? That is, that is a twist. I mean, over after the last few years, a huge twist. So AFC Wimbledon playing in the third tier of English football are now three games into their season and we have not lost. And not only that, we just won a game at Fleetwood. We won the game away from home with 27% possession. Oh. And that's not great. They never looked dangerous and we were terrifying in counterattack.

Like, I have watched a lot of AFC Wimbledon games and we have at times looked competent. We have never been what I would call fun to watch, you know, like on a pure entertainment level. But I'll tell you, the first three games of the season have been actively fun to watch. It has been really exciting football. Like, it's just, I can't believe it's all happening. Plus, Steve said in our best player from, I can't remember if it was last season or two seasons ago, but I mean, really one of the best players in the third tier. Steve said and has rejoined AFC Wimbledon on loan and he scored the goal that saw us beat

Fleetwood 1-0 and he looked incredible. So I'm looking at AFC Wimbledon after three games in eighth place and admittedly, it's a 46 game season. There is a long way to go. But we look good. So how do you end up in a situation where Fleetwood had way more passes than you, way more possession than you,

but fewer shots on target and the same number of shots on goal? How does that happen? Well, because we sat back and let them have all of the little backwards and sideways passes they wanted to have. And then every time they tried to pass it forward, we were like, now we're not, yeah, we're going to take that ball. Yeah, I take that back. Yeah, go back, go back to your side of the field. We're going to take that ball and then we're going to kick it really long to Joe Piggett and then Joe Piggett is going to run it down and he's just going to kind of like get his body between you and the ball and he's going to frustrate you.

And then the best part, Hank, the best part was that after the game, the manager of Fleetwood Town, this guy Joey Barton, he was like, they came in with a plan to waste as much time as possible and play really negative football. Of course we did. You're right. We did come in with a point. We scored a goal in like the eighth minute and yes, then we wasted time. Like how else are you going to win a football game?

And so I just, I love to see it. I love to see the like salty tears of, well, that's a really negative way to play football. Oh, I'm sorry. We're in the third tier of English. Lee et al. Messi isn't available. Okay. So like, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna play some, the goalkeeper is gonna kick some long balls to the forward. That's just the way that it's gonna be. Like, you know, if you don't like it, get a job in La Liga. Oh, it was great. You can hear it, Hank. You can hear the hope that I can come. I'm feeling it.

It turned it all around. Also, I should add that Nerdfighteria's advertisements have gone up. And you can see them. If you watch the live streams on the AFC Wimbledon app, you can see the, in the home games. You can see our advertisements along the side of the stadium and they they really they really do make me make me tear up. They're so lovely and it's great to see DFTVA on the back of the shorts of the team in eighth place in league one. Amazing. It can't last, but what a joy. Woo, woo, what's going on in Mars?

We get that sensor and he deeper into the Martian surface. No, no, that one, I've been brought that up recently because there hasn't been any news on it, except that it's probably a lost cause. But who knows, who knows? I don't know what they're, if they've got any other plans. So, but the news is that the perseverance rover is

on its way to Mars, and also it is scheduled, like the plan is to drill samples and put them in tubes and then later return them to Earth via some other future mission. So it's going to store these samples and be like, hey, come pick them up if we have some way of figuring out how to do that. So it's designed to work with a future mission to return samples to Earth. It's very exciting, but it only has a few tubes in which to store these rocks. So how do we figure out what samples

we're gonna be keeping? Well, we have more information now about the planetary instrument for X-ray lithochemistry, which is shortened as pixel, which is a nice shortening. It's about the size. Oh, you always find a way to acronym it. It's about the size of a lunch box, and it'll hang on the end of the Perseverance Rovers arm, and his job will do a whole bunch of X-raying of various samples.

And most Mars missions have included an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer. And most Mars missions have included an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, but technology has been improving and Pixel will be using a super narrow X-ray beam that will be able to gather details about really small features on Mars. So they say it's going to be able to see pieces of Mars that are as small as the grain of salt and gathering this really fine detail and combining with all bunch of other chemical information about Mars is going to help scientists understand all the way back from Earth what they're looking at could even help us identify fossilized microbes if there are any, but most importantly, be able to identify which samples are going to be the most interesting

samples to store for potential later gathering and shipping back to Earth for serious analysis. Yeah, but it would be pretty cool if they happen to find some fossilized remains of bacteria. Oh, you know, it'd be fine. That'd be a, I would argue that would be a significant bonus to the mission. Yeah, yep, yep. Yeah, I'm just, let's just, let's just say that the more likely, the more likely outcome is that we get to do cool chemistry. Right.

Which is fun too, because in the end life is itself deep down just cool chemistry. Yeah. And on that note, Hank, thank you for partying with me. Thank you for making a podcast with me, John. I enjoyed it. I'm so glad that we get to do it. Yeah, me too. How lucky are we?

Super, super lucky. I'm sorry that we only got to four or five questions this week. Well, I mean, it's not our fault that that question about Superman demanded 30 minutes of our time. At least. You can email us your questions at Hank and John at gmail.com. We're off now to record our Patreon only mini podcast

this weekend stuff over at patreon.com slash dear Hank and John. This podcast is edited by Joseph Tuna Mettish. It's produced by Rosie on a house in Rohas and Sheridan Gibson. Our communications coordinator is Julia Bloom. Our editorial assistant is Devoki Chakravarti. The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Granarola. And as they say in our hometown,

don't forget to be awesome.