Dear Hank & John - 306: Lemon People Bucket Problem

Episode Date: October 4, 2021

What is indigo? Do you study for your books or rely on past knowledge? Would we notice if everything in the universe got bigger? If I fell through a cloud, would I get wet? Why can't I melt wood? Who do you have so many publishers? 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. Thor is I prefer to think of it Dear John and Hank. It's a podcast for two brothers and so your questions give you to be advised and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon John in October, which means that I'm officially carrying around the pebble that I throw at people who sing Christmas songs before November. It's called my jingle bell rock. I enjoyed that. There's like a 40-50% chance that I've said that one on the podcast before.

I liked that one because I didn't see it coming, but at the same time, it was a punchline, which are really my only two requests of your jokes. Hank, before we answer questions from our listeners, there's something that we really need to get to. We do. Very, very rarely in the history of Dear Hank and John has anything elicited the kind of responses that we got to the question of what happens if a person made out of lemons standing on a scale puts one of their lemon hands into a bucket of water that's on a different scale. Yes. Goodness gracious, our producer Rosiana had to create a separate document called,

Women People Bucket Problem. I'd like to think which is how long it's 23 pages long, John. And I'm sure that we've both read all of it. I have read it. It is amazing. Y'all are wonderful. Some of you are wrong. Most of you are right. Certainly. There's still a little bit of debate out.

Hmm, there's not a lot of debate. If you are a lemon person standing on a scale and you put one of your lemon hands into a bucket full of water that's on a different scale, the scale gets heavier. That scale shows a heavier weight and you get lighter, yes, on your scale. Uh huh. Which is not what I expect. Like, it's not, it completes, definitely not intuitive. I saw somebody who I follow on TikTok. Tom Lumb was like, oh, this is great. I'll do it, I'll do it.

I got a scale, I'll put my hand in it, it won't change, right? And it changed and he was like, oh no. I, yeah. This is the outcome and science that you want, where you're like, I had hypothesis and I've proven it to be non-intuitive. Yeah, although it is intuitive, apparently if you understand, understand, Newt Wandsy, Third Wall, because all of the explanations that made sense to me were,

and this is the easiest one for me was from somebody named Michael who wrote too long didn't read Newton's Third Law means the bucket scale must go up by the same amount that the person scale goes down since the forces between the person in the bucket must be equal and opposite yes and I was like I I think I have it well yeah, I get that but but that doesn't they couldn't stay the same and that would not violate Newton's Third Law But yeah, then there's the other piece. There is the other piece, which is that our committee's principle tells us that the amount is equal to the weight of the water displaced. It's displaced. It's displacement. It's displacement.

It's not about the weight of the thing that gets put in. It's about how much of the water gets displaced. It's just a volume thing. Oh goodness. It was extremely complicated, but we got there. If you are a lemon person, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I now know what happens to you. If you put your hand in a bucket of water that's on a scale, the bad news is that you're made out of lemons.

Yeah. The bad news is that we have a saying here on Earth among the humans. Yeah. That when life gives us you, we squeeze you and put sugar into you. Wait. Whoa. Yeah. You were imagining the lemon people as aliens because I was definitely

imagining the lemon people as like a like a, here's what I imagined. Okay. Where do you think I was kind of thinking about a lemon, a lemon person movie. And what I was imagining is there's a lemon in a landfill somewhere that's rotting away and it's like turning, but then it encounters some sort of DNA, encounters and oh, no, I got it. It encounters an mRNA vaccine. And in that moment, the lemon, like, starts to become more like a lemon and then it sniffs out

other lemons. And suddenly there's like a lemon magnet kind of thing happening where all these lemons are coming together inside of the landfill. And then once they become a lemon person, that's the moment when they like emerge out of the landfill, they like emerge out of the garbage and like stand up to their full lemon height and are like I need to put my hand into a bucket of water. It's what the vaccine told me to do. There's so many.

I came here. There's so many auto injectors that don't get used for people who have like epinephrine auto injectors. Sure. So maybe it was one of those and an mRNA vaccine at the same time, I got bam! And then it's like, oh, I'm alive!

Just like that. Yeah, I don't know if you've ever actually injected somebody with an epiphenic, but I have, and it is, it's intense. For the person doing the injection? No, for the other doing the injection? No, for the other person.

Yeah, well, they do get that up and effort in them. It's a big, yeah, I could totally see how that could make a lemon person just want to stick their hand in a bucket. It's a good origin story, John. I hadn't really thought of it. It was a good origin story, John. I hadn't really thought of it. I really, I do really want us to use more lateral thinking in this podcast, Hank.

Well, we're trying to think of solutions to problems. And also just as the species, all of us together on Earth. Yes. Almost every day, I think about my favorite example of lateral thinking, which was when Ed Minne-Haley determined the size of England, like the government or whatever was like, hey, Hayley, we don't know how big England is. And Hayley was like, I got an idea. Here's what I'm going to do. We got a good map of England. I'm going to cut out the largest circle that I can cut out of England in this map. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to weigh the circle.

And then I'm going to cut out the rest of England. And I'm going to weigh the rest of England. And because I can figure out the area of a circle pretty easily, I can therefore figure out what percentage of the weight the circle is, which in turn will tell me how big England is. Yeah, that's pretty great. That's a smarty pants move. You can't fault that one. Very impressive lad.

Now, that's a man who could tell you about a lemon bucket situation. Oh, man, he would have had no doubt. Oh, man, you should hear dear Edminton Isaac, Edminton Hayley and Isaac Newton's podcast. Those guys, they got to figure it out. man, you should hear Dear Edmond and Isaac Edmond, Hayley and Isaac Newton's podcast. Those guys, they got to figure it out. John speaking of Isaac Newton, I want to ask our first question. It's from Angela who asks Dear Hank John, my five year old is fascinated by rainbows. Frankly, so am I.

However, after reviewing the color wheel and kindergarten level color theory and comparing it to the weather phenomenon that is a rainbow, I have a question for you. What is Indigo? Oh boy. It's not a primary color, it's not a secondary color. What is it doing in the rainbow? Why does the rainbow have six colors? Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. This makes sense. These are the colors that we talk about. This is me adding to the question, not Angela talking, because I agree with you. And if Indigo is a bluish purple,

don't all of the colors bleed into each other anyway? Why don't we distinguish a reddish orange then as well? Perception, precipitation and pots of gold, Angela. Do you know why, Angela? Do you wanna know why? It's because Isaac Newton said so. Are you serious? Yeah, yeah, he was working with prisms

and he was like, here are the colors. There are seven of them. Maybe to like be complimentary, because like seven is a nice number, or if it's like complimentary with, I don't know, other things that there are seven of. Right, it maybe felt a little bit like proof of God's plan or whatever maybe maybe I have always felt when I actually see a rainbow most of the time

that there are like three colors you know like right right I think because I was told that a rainbow had seven colors I'm always a little underwhelmed by actual rainbows. I'm always like, ah, I mean, I guess, yeah, it has, I'll tell you what it has. Color, which is incredible. Right, it's very strange. Wild and wonderful. Yeah, if you look at a rainbow,

like a really vivid rainbow really closely, here are the colors I see. Brown, orange, a lot of brown. Green, kind of purple, and then kind of blue, and then kind of purple, and then kind of blue, and then kind of purple, and then kind of blue. Because there's this thing happening that isn't just the rainbow.

It's like an additional rainbow upon rainbow sometimes, where you get multiple rainbow spots. Next to to each other, so you'll see the the latter part of the spectrum over and over again. So you see like this like blue band, purple band, blue band, purple band, blue band, purple band, which is really cool. But not what you think of when you think of a rainbow. Yeah, I mean, honestly, Hank, I don't really remember what rainbows look like. I don't know what that says about my imagination. Like, and it's lack of visual acuity. But when I close my eyes and try to picture a rainbow,

I mostly see the letters that spell the word rainbow. Hmm. Yeah. I, well, I Google image search them, which made it easier for me. And I'm having looked at them for a little while. I'm realizing that when you look at a rainbow, you might just be seeing a bunch of rainbows all stacked on top of each other and they like go back. But you can't see them because they're all in a direction. But I'm just guessing right now, I don't know this. Here's the other thing I want

to talk about rainbow stuff. So like there's this color-wheel thing that Angela brings up, we think about colors in the way that we experience them, which is that they all bleed into each other. And when you get to purple, like, you've got blue and then purple and then red. And purple is a mix between blue and red. We know this. This is definitely the case. We can functionally do it. But then there's this other, the way of like physically understanding rainbows where red and purple are opposites. They are, they are as far apart in terms of electromagnetic spectra as they can be before you get out of visual light and you get into the infrared and the ultraviolet. And so in our perception color all bleeds into each other in a circle, but in reality, there is a circle. But in reality, there is no circle, there is a spectrum from red to violet

and violet is as far away from red as can be. They do not come back around to touch. Despite the fact that in my perception, they come back around to touch. It's very weird. And that's not a human invention. It is a physiological thing. It is a physiological thing.

It is a, it's a cells. It's like receptors. The way that we understand this is so cool to me. And it is just so indicative of the fact that like we can very functionally see the world in inaccurate ways. And that's okay. And like, and there are, in that, in inaccurate ways, but in human ways.

I think the conclusion from it is actually that we need to always be aware of the fact that when we are looking at something, we are looking at it from our particular perspective. And that, you know, this whole notion that somehow you can get outside of your perspective and approach a subject from pure objectivity is, it's just over. Right. There is no future for that way of thinking. That's why all my favorite nonfiction books right now are nonfiction books that acknowledge that specific, um, perspective

and how profoundly that shapes one's understanding and experience. Right. Like even, even books about physics that I love do that. Like, uh, John DePrescott Weinstein's The Disordered Cosmos does an amazing job of that, of explaining cosmology and physics and the big bang, but while also acknowledging the particularity of their perspective, that's all I wanna read right now. And this is such a good example of that because it's not like the fact that color isn't actually

a wheel that goes around in a circle matters when you are trying to paint, you know? It doesn't like that. That's not like a... Or even when you're trying to understand color theory, like, so you're trying to understand like how humans respond to color, it's just that it's not how the electromagnetic spectrum works. So weird.

Very weird. So weird and cool. That reminds me of this next question that comes from Jay who writes, dear John and Hank, I was just reading an absolutely remarkable thing. And when I got to a part talking about Mayan numerals, it got me wondering, do you all study for your books or do you just rely

on past knowledge? Rhymes with May, Jay. Well, I didn't have any past knowledge, Jay. I, there, I was born knowing nothing. You should have seen me as a baby. I was in, I, I, I, I, I, I didn't know how to poop in a toilet. I couldn't decide my lack of, my lack of understanding of my in history. I couldn't focus my lack of understanding of my in history. I couldn't focus my own eyes. I could not, I didn't know how to lift my hand.

I didn't know who my mother was. Who was that? I knew she, I knew there was a person nearby. I knew that that person was around the lot. I just knew that there was like a food source. That was my first awareness. Yeah. But yeah, but the question is well taken.

For me, the whole joy of writing is in discovery. And a huge part of that discovery is sort of like within the own recesses of my imagination, you know, taking stuff I've known or experienced or thought about and trying to like reshape it, refashion it into language, but also a lot of it is new learning. So I don't know about my innumerable saying

what that was like for you, but for me, like, that's one of the things I love about writing is I guess you would call it research, but it doesn't feel like research to me. It just feels like learning alongside the characters or the essay or whatever it is I'm writing. Yeah, I mean, sometimes you are, sometimes you have to know more than the characters.

So you're not learning alongside of them in that way, but you're out there doing the, like it is, it is, can be one of two ways. Sometimes it is I encounter something that is really interesting and I'm like, I, that could be a tweet, that could be a TikTok, I could work that into a book, I could make it into a vlog, or this video, I could talk about in the intro to Dear Hang a John, where am I going to put that one? Yeah. And sometimes it like this, I love this so much, it's going to fit really well into this story that I'm telling and so you work it in.

And then the other way is like, I need a mystery or I need a representation or I need this to, you know, I need something to fill this role. And then you just like, you just start to look around. And it's very much the process of when I see a TikTok audio I would like to use. And I'm like, well, what should the joke be for that? What is the way that I can use this TikTok audio

in a way that is about science? And so I can sometimes think, ah, that would be good, or I can sort of look around and have that be in my mind for a little while. And when I come across something, it is just more likely to fit into the frame that I've kept present sort of on the back burner. And then you plug it in. And then you do deeper research and you find that there's actually something more interesting because that's always where the really cool little corners of the universe happen when you are actually rather than just being

exposed to whatever someone else has found when you're doing that research yourself. exposed to whatever someone else has found when you're doing that research yourself. Yeah. To use a very straightforward, very old example in my own life and work, I remember I was trying to think of a name for the character in looking for Alaska for Alaska. And I heard the Velvet Underground song, Stephanie says, where there's a lyric that's like, she's not afraid to die, the people all call her Alaska. And then I was thinking Alaska is like very big and far away.

And I like often misimagined in the imagination of people who don't live there. And I was like, that's interesting. And then when I was researching the history of Alaska and the history of the name, and if is it a name that's ever been used for people? And you know, because I never want to pick a name that's gonna make somebody's life worse.

So I always try to make sure that the name isn't associated with a person or else that it's common enough that it's not gonna be a problem for them. Anyway, but then I learned what the word means, like what the word that our name of for the state of Alaska comes from and it means the place, it means land basically, but in a more literal sense, it means that which the sea breaks against. And I was like, well, that's also very good. And, and so then I locked in. And so then I had a name. And so then I had a name. But really like writing something or creating anything,

like I feel the same way about making videos or you know knitting, whatever kind of creative work you do, it's always about trying to like fit in puzzle pieces. For me, it's like a, it's almost a way of puzzling through consciousness, like trying to make some kind of map or some kind of sense out of something that doesn't for me have an inherent map or sense, and that's what makes it so fun. I agree. John, our next question comes from Sophia who asks, do you, Hank and John, are recently watched an episode of Phineas and Ferb in which everything in the universe gets 10 times bigger.

And I assume, therefore, the whole universe itself, anyway, my brother and I were wondering whether this would be noticeable where it happened to our universe when it effect physics in some way, particular. Oh, God. Because what if it just happened, what if it just happened, Hank, what if I'm

10 times bigger than I was three seconds ago, and I don't know, I don't have any way of knowing because everything else is also 10 times bigger. Does it matter philosophically? Does it matter physically? Would it matter if everything just got 10 times bigger if nobody noticed? Vita, do I even know how big I am or do I only know how big I am relative to other things? No, yeah, you have no idea how big you are, John. You have no idea how big you are.

I could be very small. Yeah, you are. Or I could be very large. You are. Oh God. This is a thing that happens in high school where you watch some kind of film on a TV that talks about powers of 10. And they were they existed when when my science teacher was in high school, when I was in high, like they've always been around, but they're a bunch of them. And they

take a lot of different forms now. But the idea is like you start out at like the smallest thing and then you go like 10 times, 10 times, 10 times and you see how big everything is. The very strange thing about this is that we are like right in the middle between the smallest thing and the biggest thing. We are kind of right in the middle. We are not as close to in the middle. I also watch that.

And we are not as close to in the middle as I would like. Like, we're not right, right in the middle. I feel like narratively I want to be right, right in the middle. But also, we don't really know how... You know, like, right, what's the biggest thing? We don't really know what the biggest thing is and we may not really know what this ball is. We have some better ideas about what the smallest thing is,

but you're right, we don't know. We've been wrong before about this kind of thing, especially like we've been wrong about what this ball is think was several times. So I'm not willing to, Hank, I can't believe you've just been talking, like nothing's happening when I could be increasing and decreasing in size by factors of 10 every second.

And ever since you mentioned that to me, I have had a feeling of profound vertigo come over me and the only hope that I have. And please tell me that this hope is grounded in reality. The only hope that I have is the speed of light that this hope is grounded in reality. The only hope that I have is the speed of light because the speed of light is constant no matter what. And and and and and and maybe that's something that I can hold on to. Well, there are a bunch of constants. So so I think it would matter. I think it would matter. So, if we all, if the constants remain constant,

and like every atom, so it's like functionally, what does this mean? If we get 10 times bigger, does that mean we have 10 times more atoms? Because if that's the case, it definitely matters. If we get 10 times bigger and we are 10 times more massive, and we are experiencing the same gravity or even more gravity because the Earth is 10 times bigger, then we're pancakes. Like we are in a bad situation, we are not going to survive.

So you would notice that if just the atoms got 10 times bigger, but the particles stayed the same. So if the neutrons and protons and electrons all stayed the same size, but the atoms got bigger, everything would instantly evaporate and nothing would exist, because the strong and weak nuclear forces would not have changed, but there would be more space. That makes you feel better. At least you know, it's not happening. I love the idea of instantaneous evaporation of all life.

That's a fun one. That's a fun one. Yeah. Yeah. It's just a good one. There would no longer be things. Yeah. You know what? Let's take let's take that off the table. I'd rather I'd rather not. I'd rather not consider it. I'd like to remove that from the list of options. But but if you can just make it like, if you can make all of the particles bigger and you can also compensate all of the fundamental forces of physics to also match, then, yeah, maybe we could just be getting bigger and small. I don't know, maybe this is the one thing they haven't tried yet. Like maybe physics suddenly makes a lot of sense if you just take into account that we

might all constantly be changing size. And all, like all the constants aren't actually constant. you just taken to a cat that we might all constantly be changing size. And all the constants aren't actually constant. They just look constant because we keep changing size along with them. I love that you're you're proposing a novel idea in physics as if like I am 100% sure that all they've thought of as thought of that. Yeah, like a thought of everything. Yeah, that's that's that's been looked into extensive. So yeah, uh, just go ahead and do the math, math nerds and tell me whether or not we are changing size all the time. I don't understand any of your fancy integrals. So I'm going to

just be over here. Uh, podcast. Then thinking about frogs. Okay, Hank, if we could put aside gravity and we could put aside all the other things that would turn all the problems. Yeah. But Earth was the same size and all the other creatures were the same size. Uh-huh. And you had to be and all you had to pick for all of humanity. We're either getting 10 times bigger or we're getting 10 times smaller. What do you pick? Oh, 10 times smaller every time.

Me too, because most of the problems that we're creating, I feel like would be 10 times smaller if we were just 10 times smaller. Our houses would be 10 times smaller. Our cars would be 10 times smaller. The crops, the foods. And at this point, like the question is, would we get eaten by our cats? Like that is the, that's probably. Yeah. And so if you have a cat or maybe a dog, but definitely a cat, this may end up being a bad situation for you. How small is 10 times smaller?

I'd be 20 pounds. So I feel like I could take a cat. You could take a cat. You can feel like I could be a great fight. I mean, people would pay good money to see 20 pounds. If you were a 100 times smaller, that would be a big problem. If you're 10 or smaller, you're probably figured out. We'd have a lot of infrastructure changes we'd have to make.

Well, that goes without saying. Yes, a lot of things would be different, Hank. But I feel that we wouldn't get eaten by cats, which would be nice. I feel like the immediate problem, though, would be predation. We would have to very quickly develop strategies because all the coyotes would be like, oh, guys, great news. Find the people are finally edible. You know our biggest problem, not only has it been solved, but they're food now. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a lot of the reason why we're this size. I have maintained, you know, so we don't get even by coyotes and also so that we can eat and fight with things

that, you know, will become our food. People have heard me talk about this before, but I have always maintained that people should be much smaller. I look at my son who is five, gonna be five years old very soon. And I'm like, that seems great. Look how close his head is to the ground. It is much harder for him to hurt himself.

It's such a great solution to climate change to have us all be 10 times smaller than we currently are. Like, almost all of our problems are because we are trying to fit these ridiculous sized bodies into cars and trucks and things that go. And we're having to like eat all of this stuff that we wouldn't have to eat if we were just 20 pound little creatures, you know?

And like, listen, we could still be the dominant species on planet. We would have guns. Don't worry about that. Believe me, the first thing, the first problem that would get solved is how do you make a gun for that's 10 times smaller? Somebody would be like hours into this phenomenon. I like that. I like that.

I like that. You're thinking that everybody's first thought was, well, you still get to have a gun, though? Well, I am very worried about coyotes, Hank. Like, that's my note. That's my number one concern. Coyotes stay the same size. I get 10 times smaller.

I live in a place with a lot of coyotes, and I have looked into their eyes, and they want they're ready to eat me. Okay. So I'm going to need a gun that's 10 times smaller or some kind of system. Some kind of system. What are you going to do to the coyote, John? The thing we would do, Hank, is we would immediately build these like mechanized suits that would make a six feet tall again.

And we would go back to using all of our old infrastructure and we would continue to burn fossil fuels out the wazoo, that's what we would do. Now, that's my bet we would. People, well it's not like people are driving around in cars that are like the right size for them now. That's a great point. It's good.

Like we're trying to imagine this highly hypothetical world when, yeah. That's the reason. And people would go and they'd just be in and it's like, no, they'd be getting in the big, we don't even bigger. We know exactly what would happen if people were dead times smaller, which is that they would develop incredibly sophisticated strategies for driving current-sized minivans. All right, Hank, this next question comes from Jacob. Be right. Dear John and Hank, whatever I go to the dentist, I always find it awkward staring into my dentist's

eyes as he works on my face. But if I close my eyes, I still feel awkward because every five minutes he asks, are you okay? Should I leave my eyes open or keep them closed? Sincerely, Jacob. I try to look at my feet. You know Jacob, I try to look at my feet. You know, like I try to look at my shoes. You can look at my eyes. No, my eyes are open. You, yeah, I can look down. No, you can't look down.

If they're looking up, you gotta touch your hat up and open your mouth real big. No, you can't see your feet. I'm going to let you soon. So I, and I haven't been in, wait, wait, buddy. Why, slow down, slow down. What? You can to look soon. So I and I haven't been in Buddy, why slow down? What you can't look down? Not what I got a dentist in my mouth What I don't understand wait. Whoa. Whoa. So your eyes

Uh-huh. They're on the top the top above my above my nose and mouth when your face goes up Uh-huh. Okay. No, I want you to tilt your face your face goes up. Uh-huh. Okay, no, I want you to tilt your face up toward the ceiling. Uh-huh. Now I want you to look down at your microphone. Uh-huh. You see how you're doing that? You're looking down.

That's very good. I'm very proud of you. But you can look down when your face is up. Yeah, I can barely see it. I can see my cheeks moving around when I talk. I just try, I, I just try to look down. That's my strategy so that my eyes are open and the dentist isn't like, is he dead?

Right. But at the same time, I'm not making eye contact because I find eye contact uncomfortable in the most normal experiences. So that's my strategy. I want. I just want a VR headset that I wear while I'm at the dentist that does two things. Number one, it tells me whether my mouth is open enough because I always think this time,

I'm going to be so good at keeping my mouth open that the dentist will not have to say, can you open up a little because I always get distracted and my mouth starts to float close. And then the dentist is like, Oh, God, another, another one. I can't see any of the teeth. And so I feel like I'm a bad dentist patient. The second thing I want it to do is give me just an episode of Star Trek. The next generation that I can watch because I don't want to be here. I want to be on the USS Enterprise in the 24th century. Yeah, I've spent way too much of my life at a dentist's office. Yeah. But not enough of the last year and a half there.

Um, I do not want to tell you how long it's been since I've been to the dentist. Don't tell me. It's going to stress me. I can't, I can't handle it. I'll tell you right now. We got to move on. We're moving on. His next question comes from Trent and he writes, Don't tell me. It's gonna stress me out. I can't, I can't handle it. I'll tell you right now. We got to move on. We're moving on. His next question comes from Trent and you writes, do you John and Hank? Not that I was planning on doing this anytime soon, but if I fell through a cloud, would I get wet?

Oh, I have a great answer for this question, John. Great. What is it? So during the last... So when we recorded this, I have just gotten back from celebrating my 15th anniversary with Catherine, our 15th anniversary, and we were in California and we were in a giant grove of redwood trees. These giant, beautiful trees of varying ages, it's really intensely beautiful.

And it was raining. And I was, it was raining, but it was raining very sort of nicely. And so we were walking through this rainy redwood forest on sort of a sort of half path, half road. And then, and then suddenly we came out from one of the redwood trees and it wasn't raining anymore because it wasn't raining, John. It was just foggy, but the redwood trees were getting wet. And they were dripping all the water off of them because they got, they got all wet. And that's part of how redwoods are able to grow so high is because they can get water up at the top without having to pull it all the way from their roots because they can

get it from the sky. So you would, if you just sit in a cloud for long enough, you'll get kind of damp, for sure. Especially if you're cool, I think. I think you have to be more stuff will condense on you if you're cooler. But clouds are just a little droplet of water, so yes, you will get damp the more time you spend in a cloud,

which is just fog. So you can spend time in a cloud if you would like to. I feel like the question was more like, uh, if I fall at terminal velocity through a cloud, will I get wet? In which case the answer is no. You will get a little bit wet. I mean, yeah, yeah. Now, yeah, you won't, you won't be like, first off, you won't be like anything. But to the extent that you are like anything, you won't be like, first off, you won't be like anything.

But to the extent that you are like anything, you won't be like, I just got so wet, like that's not going to be on your list of concerns. When it's negative 43 degrees Fahrenheit and you're falling at 244 miles an hour. Sure. I want to assume that there is a, a parachute involved. If you fall through a rain cloud, you'd definitely get wet. Yeah, you would. There's a bunch of rain in there.

It's true. So who's smarty pants now? I just wanted to tell that story about the Redwoods because I was so amazed. I was like, why did it stop raining? Why is it, because it's usually the opposite. Like you go under a tree to get dry when it's raining. Yep. But it was only raining under the trees and not

out from under the trees. Yeah, it's really beautiful. I'm sure that was a lovely experience. I wish I had gone somewhere for my 15th anniversary. What did you do? Uh, Sarah and I went went through a walk through Crown Hill, the cemetery here in Indianapolis. Yeah. Yeah. So that was fun. Because we've been married for fairly similar times, huh?

Yeah, just a few months different, which actually reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by 2006, 2006, the year that many great marriages were formed. Uh huh. This podcast is also brought to you by 2006, the year that many great marriages were formed. Uh-huh. This podcast is also brought to you by Dear Isaac and Edmund, a new podcast coming at you from Isaac Newton and Edmund Hayley as they take on all kinds of thought problems that do and do not involve lemons.

And of course, speaking of lemons today's podcast and all of our podcasts for the rest of all time will be sponsored by the lemon man the lemon man formed in the pit of a landfill and now by auto injectors And now running rampant through the streets of I believe Pittsburgh Ah, I think that that's correct This podcast is also brought to you by pizza. Yes. We didn't talk about it in the beginning. Yes.

It's the first day of pizza miss right now, John. And if you go to pizza miss.com, there are all kinds of amazing products available for purchase. There are, there is a, a pizza, there are two. At least there were, I don't know if they've sold out yet. Two pizza mis blankets, which are so nice. And one of them is beautiful. And the other one is a very, uh, uh, statement piece. One would say. There's a lot of great stuff at pizza.com. It's available only for two weeks, only during PeetsMist this weird time of year where for some reason Hank and I celebrate my Mastashio face from 2008.

And as always, all of our proceeds and royalties go to charity. So check it out, PeetsMist.com. So many astonishing, truly astonishing designs this year. And objects. It continues to amaze me year after year. Go to pizzaMist.com to see all of the weird and wild pizzaMist designs that are only available during this year's pizzaMist. It's two weeks and also we're making videos on vlog where there's every weekday, like we did back in 2007.

I really love pizza mess, John. I like to clear out my calendar and being like, you know what I'm doing now? I'm just being a YouTuber, like I used to be and it's fun, it's a lot, but it's fun for sure. Yeah, it's a great time. So check out youtube.com slash vlog breathers too if you want to. If you want to. But no pressure.

There's lots of videos. We also have a project for awesome message from Johannes to Andrea or Andrea. I'm going to guess on Drea. Yeah. Okay. I love you so much. Yes, John. We're still together two years later and still send cheesy messages to each other via podcast.

Wow. That's so sweet. That's nice. Thank you, Johannes and thank you, Andrea. And thanks to everybody who donated to the Project Frost in this year. It's been lovely to read your messages all throughout the year. John, this next question comes from Kitty who asks, dear Hank and John, why can't I melt wood?

I was told in school that anything can be in any form of matter if it's hot or cold enough. So by that logic, the solid that is wood should turn into a liquid if it is heated enough, but it doesn't. Instead, it just catches on fire. I've been thinking about this for years. Kitty, Kitty is a great question. It's a great question. I thought about it a lot, and I am fairly certain that you cannot melt wood.

It's subhummar. So, you want to know more about this, John? Well, I want to know if it's just not true that everything has three states of matter, because I've always kind of assumed that it's just not true. Like, it seems to me that a lot of things don't have three states of matter. Give me another example. Well, now I'm struggling, but only because you've put me on the spot. The same way I struggle if somebody says like, well, what's a book that you've read recently

that you enjoyed? And I'm like, I just arrived here on Earth and I have only existed for one nanosecond. Just give me one thing besides wood that you don't think can evaporate. My first idea was books, but then I was like, books are made out of wood. Ha-ha-ha-ha.

Ha-ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha-ha. What can't evaporate? I feel, I mean, I feel like there's some kind of rocks that can't evaporate. Well, here's the situation, John. You could, you can melt the stuff that wood is made out of.

Okay, but sure. But wood is a, is a complex bunch bunch of like lots of different organic molecules. And some organic molecules are fairly simple and they can indeed, you know, carbon-based molecules, like methane is a great example. Like you can have gaseous methane or liquid methane or solid methane. You can do that. But wood is really complicated. And so especially if it's got some oxygen around it, it's going to catch on fire before it melts. But what if you say no oxygen, you cannot oxidize, no fire, we're going to put you in pure argon

and we're going to just get you hotter and hotter and hotter and see what happens. In that case, I'm pretty sure what would happen is, so these molecules have been built by the intention out, these molecules have been built by energy coming into plants and being used to construct molecules that are very stable, but they are not at chemical equilibrium. Like they, they, they are component pieces of them that would be at lower energy states. And as they get hotter and hotter and start jiggling around before they reach the melting point of wood, they

would dissociate from each other. Some gases would be released. Some, I think that it would probably look a lot like char, like, you know, burned wood, even if it wasn't actually burning. And you would end up with like carbon and like low molecular weight organic molecules that would eventually melt and then evaporate. And it would just be gas. So yes, you can melt the things that wood is made out of, but you can't melt wood because by the time you get it hot enough, I think that it would probably, I'm fairly certain that it would, you know, break into lots of different smaller pieces. Because wood molecules are like huge, huge carbon chains that would just break apart if

they got jiggled too much by energy. Hmm. What about bones? I feel like bones don't melt. Uh, I can do this all day. Hmm. I don't know. I can't this all day. I don't know. I can't.

I bones might melt. Don't you feel like bones are kind of the wood of us? You know, yeah. Yeah, I know. I absolutely. I don't have to explain it further. Yes. I think that bones are the wood of us.

Yeah. And so that's why I think bones probably don't melt that well because they're like, they're what we have instead of wood. Yeah. So I think that like wood, bones, that are all thinking would fall apart and then they would melt after all the pieces fell apart. All right, let's answer another question.

This one comes from Katie who writes, Steve John and Hank, I just reorganized my bookshelf and I was admiring my work when I noticed that John has had three different publishers, Speak Penguin and Dutton. Several other series I have are also published by different publishers. Why is this? Do publishers sell the rights of individual books to each other? Do you switch publishers like one might change jobs, copyright and categorization? Katie. Oh boy, you just opened up a whole bag of bones with this one. These bones don't melt. So then the short answer is that actually all of those books are published by the same

company. The long answer is lots of people do get their books broken up between different publishers and why it's very complicated. Did I get it right? Basically, Hank and I are two of the only authors who haven't changed publishers actually. So Penguin, Speak, and Dutton are all different versions of the same publisher. My books are published by Dutton, but then when the paperbacks come out for a long time, I don't think it does anymore, actually, but for a long time Penguin had paperback specific

publishers, and Dutton wasn't one of them. So it would have a different set of letters on the spine, but like functionally, for me, the publication experience was the same. And both of Hank's books are published by Dutton on the adult side just as my book, The Anthropocene Reviewed was. A lot of these names don't really mean much to people outside of publishing. Yeah.

And sometimes I have to explain that to people inside of publishing, outside of publishing. Nobody really cares that much about the name, but it can matter a little bit. Now most authors do change publishers the way that people change jobs or they change publishers because their editors move or because they're unhappy with the way that their previous book was published or because they can't get their next book published with the same publisher.

There's all kinds of reasons. But the thing that's really nice about having had one publisher, and Hank and I have both been incredibly fortunate in this way, and it's mostly down to luck. But the thing that is really nice is that when you have a new book come out, the publisher is highly motivated to also sell your old books because they also publish to them. Whereas if you have all of your books at a bunch of different publishers, it can be a little hard to get everybody organized around supporting a new book. And so I think there's some advantages to it, but there's a lot of different ways to have a writing life, and I don't know if ours is the right way.

Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, it comes down to a lot of different individual decisions and like opportunities and, you know, working relationships between people. Yeah. Yeah. You are right. It often comes down to a lot of luck. I mean, I would say that 90% of people like the rest of life. Some people ask me to say like how much is luck, how much is skill.

And I want to say it's 137% luck and 46% skill. Right, yeah, because you can't, even if you had the maximum amount of all of it, you still can't anticipate it actually happening. Yeah, it's definitely more than 100% luck. So the news from AFC Wimbledon. I mean, it's good and it's bad. Here's the thing. AFC Wimbledon have lost now three straight games.

Oh, one of those games, one of those games we lost to Arsenal, which doesn't really count. Right. We actually played pretty well. We lost three nil, which is a pretty good result. But I'll tell you what, we lost three nknew in front of 56,000 people. Yeah. And that's a 300,000-ish pound payday for AFC Wimbledon, which is massive.

Like, it makes the rest of the season a lot easier. And so that's obviously it would have been great to win the game, but playing the game was its own victory. And again, I thought we played well in places. It was a really stark contrast. A couple of years ago, we played Tottenham, another big Premier League team, and we just looked awful.

And in this game, there were stretches of it where we really looked competitive and where we were trying to express our own own identity and I thought that was great. We then lost to Shrewsbury or Shrewsbury, I guess they say, in the UK although that seems impossible to me, who were in the relegation zone and it was their first victory of the year and it was a really disappointing win on a bunch of levels. Like I just, we just played like we were off the pace all day long. And I was frustrating.

So the, the, the, the kettle is off the boil. Did I say that correctly? Yeah. A little bit after first. That's the problem we should never score first. I agree. It is a huge issue. We only come from behind. But, um, yeah. I agree, it is a huge issue. We only come from behind. But yeah, so we, that said, after nine games, we're in eighth place.

So I'm not in a position to complain. It's good, but you need to win some games. And the, yeah, and the dons are in third. When that's going on there. No, the franchise currently playing it's trade in Milton Keynes are in third. When that is going on there. No, the franchise currently playing at Stradin Milton Keynes is in third. The don's are in R&8, but I know what you mean. And yeah, yeah, they're good this year.

We play them in a couple of weeks and hopefully we can take them down a peg. Well, we just, so he just have to do whatever the teams that are winning a lot of games are doing so Get do that and that is the key Hank You've you've cracked the code. All right. Well, that's gonna I think that that's really gonna help fix things for it for you all Not that you're not that you need to fix that you're doing great. Yeah, it's not an emergency just yet So John do you remember the insight lander?

Of course do you remember that itight Lander? Of course. Do you remember that it's solar panels got covered in dirt? Yes. Dust and it was like, is this mission gonna end? And we thought it was gonna end, but we were waiting because maybe there was gonna be a nice big martian wind that was gonna clear up those solar panels.

Yeah, well, and yes, so we've been waiting for this. But one of the problems is this dust that's coating the solar panels is really fine. And so it's just like a tiny, tiny thin layer. And so the moment a breeze comes over, if it might knock a few bits off, but it just like sort of coasts over the rest of it. And so it has become a problem.

And it was worrying a lot of scientists. So what they did is they sprinkled some sand. So they picked up sand and they put it on the solar panels, which seems like that would make it worse. Because now you got bigger rocks on there. So they sprinkled sand onto the solar panels. But now when the wind comes by, that sand like makes it more turbulent onto the solar panels, but now when the wind comes by, that sand like makes it more turbulent and scours away some of and as the sand blows away because the sand isn't so even as the dust is, it is able to push away some of the dust along with it. And that has made it possible for insight to continue gathering data and it has been able to measure three quakes that are bigger than any it's ever measured.

So before the summer, the largest quake, the Landert Head Record, it was a 3.7 in 2019. On August 25th, it recorded two quakes with magnitude 4.2 and 4.1 and then September 18th, which also happened to be inside 1,000th Martian Day. So it seems like this thing has been there for a not very long time to me, but it's been there for a thousand days. It measured a 4.2 earthquake that lasted for almost an hour and a half, making it the longest and biggest quake the mission has detected. An hour and a half? Hour and a half long earthquake. Do I understand how that works? No. Don't ask me any questions. That sounds uncomfortable. That's a little one.

I don't think you'd even be able to feel it if you were a person. I don't know. We had a 4.2 earthquake in Indianapolis, like 14 years ago, and people still talk about it. So there's children who figure out where all these Mars quakes came from and what they are going to tell them about Mars. One of them came from 5,280 miles from the lander making it the most distant quake recorded and opening up the mystery of exactly what region the quake originated from. So like it's far away, but like we don't know exactly where it was when it happened. The lander was able to make those measurements because of that cleaning and without that

cleaning, it wouldn't have been able to do it. So smart engineers solving problems and whatever the way they can from a very, very, very, very, very, very long way away. I love the idea of eventually deciding the only chance we have to make this problem better is to first make it worse. Yeah. There's so many things like that in life. Uh huh.

Cleaning my office is the main one. Yeah. Exactly. Maybe I need to like come and like spray it down with something and then you'll be like, Oh, now I got to clean it. Smells like fish eggs in here. Oh, God. Uh, no, yeah.

I mean, it's just like everything ends up on the floor when I start cleaning. But boy, is it not great in here? Also, I may have to make my teeth worse before they get better. We'll ask the dentist when I get there. Oh yeah, yeah. Well, thanks to everybody for listening. And most importantly, thank you for all of your responses

to the Lemon People bucket problem. It was so beautiful to see our community come together around the needs of lemon people in such an astonishing way. And this is so fun. We are so grateful to you for listening. Thank you. I cannot believe that I get to do this every week. And so thank you for writing. And thank you for your many wonderful questions. We're off to record our Patreon Only podcast this weekend stuff, where we're going to talk about some things that are making us pleased right now.

So come on over to that if you want to see it. This podcast is edited by Joseph Tune of Mendesch. It's produced by Rosiana Halz-Rohas. Our communications coordinator is Julia Blum, our editorial assistant, is Debuki Chakravardi. The music you're hearing now and the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunnarola, and as they say in our hometown. Don't forget to be awesome.