Dear Hank & John - 330: The Dear Hank Rejoinder

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

Can I use a mother's day coupon on myself? How much of a dollar bill do you have to have to use it? Why is the computer mouse cursor tilted? How do we know Alpha Centauri is the closest star? Can a smell be solidified? What does my dog know about mirrors? Will a badger respect my pee? Hank Green has answers!Music breaks in this episode:"Fall of a Raindrop" by Calm Shores"Soda Stream Jingle" by somebody in the '90s who probably got paid a LOT"The Bratwurst Song" by Stationary Sign"Street Life Educations" by  Off Cuts 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 Note: The podcast ad for the IMPACT app is unscripted and being recorded live. It may contain some slight differences. Please visit https://impact.interactivebrokers.com/ for full details of products and services. Interactive Brokers, LLC member FINRA/SIPC.The projections or other information generated by IMPACT app regarding the likelihood of various investment outcomes are hypothetical in nature, do not reflect actual investment results and are not guarantees of future results. Please note that results may vary with use of the tool over time.The paid ad host experiences and testimonials within the Podcast may not be representative of the experiences of other customers and are not to be considered guarantees of future performance or success. The opinions provided within the ad belong to the host alone.

Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John! Or as I like to think of it, Dear Hank and Hank, it's a podcast where two brothers and sometimes just one brother answer your questions, give you the best advice and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AF Sue and Milden. John, did you know the following true fact mathematicians have been aware of and obsessed with for many, many years is that four is actually in love with five, but is incapable of asking five out on a date. And they've been trying to figure this out for centuries.

And a scientist slash mathematician was recently able to finally get to the bottom of why four will never ask five out on a date. And it turns out it's because 4 is 2 squared. 4 is 2 squared. I've been wanting to tell that one for a while. And I just couldn't subject John to it. So I just subjected me to it and also all of you. I feel like I need to explain it.

Four is two squared and also it sounds like four is too scared. It's not very good. It's not very good. Anyway, John, right now, as you record this, you just called me, is in a fake Chuckie cheese as they record and create the movie turtles all the way down. So he was frantically trying to figure out how can I make Dear Hank and John today, how can I get away, how can I get to the hotel room?

And I was like, John, look, I took the last like four weeks off. You can take one week off, but then I was like, I feel bad about this because I can't take five weeks off in a row and John did a whole Dear Hank and John all by himself. And I think I was skeptical. I was skeptical going into that episode. And I think he did a fantastic job.

I'm proud of him. It seemed like it was really hard and he worked really hard on it. And so I have decided to attempt to do this as well. And one of the things that I thought was just a marvelous innovation from John was when he said to Tuna to give a little music. And so I would like Tuna for you to give me a little music and give me something that sounds like it was made and I'm sorry about this under the ocean.

Just some like it has under, we're now in an underwater ocean vibe everybody. Welcome to the underwater ocean vibe is just your hank and we're vibe and we're chilling under the water. Just to imagine you can still breathe maybe you got scoobagear maybe you're a fish maybe you're a sperm whale and you can hold your breath for hours and hours and you are just down there in the beautiful darkness having a little bit of peace, feeling not overwhelmed by the scale of your surroundings but comfortable in your sort of competent confidence. Your confident competence, there's nothing better than confident competence.

Imagine and you can't hear the motorcycle that just started up in the alley. You can't hear that, probably, probably can, I can. That's not a motorcycle, that is a squid. That's what squid sound like to sperm whales, and it's a lovely little noise, and you're just chilling. It's a nice time to take a deep breath,

and not worry about everything that you have to worry about just from moment. And then you can move on to having to worry about stuff during the part where we move on from the lovely music, the tune of underwater music, the tune of played for us to some questions from our listeners. And I'm mostly going to do science questions, but I'm going to start from one that's not a science question. It comes from Darcy who asks, dear Hank and John, I want to so to stream and they are

having a Mother's Day promotion and offering 20% off. Am I allowed to use the promo code mom 20, even though I am not a mother and it is not a gift for a mother. Arrived Darcy Darcy. Arrived Darcy Arrived Darcy Arrived Darcy Arrived Darcy. That one's been done before. Is this the same Darcy? Is that Darcy again or does Darcy, arrive at a Rived-Air Chi. That one's been done before. Is this the same Darcy? Is that Darcy again or does Darcy just know?

I think Darcy is a cute name. I had it set a friend who had a child and a twins and one of them was Darcy. So I love that. I love, I hope it's all based on Pride and prejudice. Anyway, can you use the mom 20? Yes. Yes, I don't think that this is a moral statement from me.

I don't think that I'm making a moral judgment on the world to say that it's fine to use the promo code mom 20, whether or not a mom is involved in the transaction with SodaStream. I will say I'm a SodaStream user myself. It is the appliance in my house that gets the most use. Luckily, my local grocery store exchanges cartridges, which is good because I go through them pretty quick.

I'm a soda stream fiend and I'm not allowed to, you can Google this. This is how much of a fan of soda stream I am. Google the following on YouTube. Google it on YouTube. Soda stream. Get busy with the fizzy, which was their 1980s slogan, and you can watch some like, do you remember the cocktail with Tom Cruise? You can watch some cocktail action where they're flipping the soda bottles around and wrapping in a suburban

home in the 80s about soda stream.. And I'm not gonna do the rap. I'm not gonna do that, but I am. I don't know, is this too much to ask? I'll send it to you, Tuna. I'm gonna download the audio file and I'm gonna send it to you so you don't have to do that all that work so that you can now hear this jingle.

It's actually from 1993. You're not gonna get the full impression because you're not gonna see their amazing 1993 outfits. And I believe this was from the UK. I don't think they ever ran it. Adverts in the US. Anyway, here it is. You are going to get to listen to the entire 30 seconds of the soda stream jingle from

1993. It's soda streams again busy with the physics. Create a fizzy flavor with water from the tap, crack the mat, run it and shake it like that. Sold a steam so get busy with the fizzy, cold lemonade, cherry and orange and sold a stream so get busy with the fizzy. Make up to one liter of your favorite fizzy flavor. Sold a stream, get busy with the fizzy. I mean, when it's just me, I feel like, yeah,

I have to do a little something extra because you're gonna get very tired of my voice and so instead you got that, which is, I mean, 1993, I was 13 years old, it seems like a long time ago, but to many people watching, it seems unreachably long ago because you're a full adult and that was before you were born. So, like, like a full adult, like you're 29 years old. It's fine. It's fine. It happens to us all.

We move through our, this is the natural state of things. We moved. Anyway, you are allowed to, so the coupon code is not there to say thank you to moms. That's not what coupon codes are. That's, that's not what the purpose of the coupon code is serving. The coupon code is to get you to buy a soda stream and it is worked because now you're like, ah, I will finally buy the soda stream. And maybe you wouldn't, you can't say for sure. Maybe you wouldn't have if you didn't have that coupon code. And now you do. And so you did it and you saved that money and it's good. And also, soda stream has you inside its ecosystem.

And they're gonna be happy to have you there getting refills of your soda stream containers. And maybe even buying their serps, which I'll tell you, you probably shouldn't do. My favorite thing to put inside of the soda stream, my absolute favorite thing is just a little bit of orange juice. The orange juice concentrate, I get the concentrated stuff from the store, put a little bit of that in my soda stream

and it's just delicious, it's refreshing, it's natural, it's lovely and everybody wins, except for, you know, the methane that was burned in released carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in order to concentrate the orange juice. But if that hadn't happened, they would have had to ship more orange juice, like it would take more volume and more weight to ship to my grocery store. So is the cold chain have a bigger impact when it's all the way frozen or when it's just refrigerated? It's hard to know.

It's very difficult to be a person in this. Let's just go back underwater. Let's spend a little bit more time with this nice underwater music that Tuna has gotten for us. I'm gonna imagine now that I am a deep sea octopus, like a blanket octopus or a dumbbell octopus and and I have a sort of control over Not just the movement of my body, but the shape of my body and that I can make my skin expand To scare away predators or to enclose potential food items that all of my limbs aren't just things that I control, but

they all have their own interconnected nervous systems. They can make decisions. They can almost on the edge of having thoughts of their own. So I am not just a single organism, but a kind of distributed nervous web of sensation and action and thought, and all of these different parts of B communicate with each other to create an organism at peace with all of its parts, and where it knows exactly how it should be in these moments under the sea, in the deep, deep sea, living a life that humans can have no effect on. There are still places on this Earth

where basically no human effect can reach. And that is the place where we imagine ourselves to be in this moment. Anyway, we're going on to another question from our listeners. This one comes from Lily and Ivy who asked, dear Hank, just me. We found the corner of a piece of a $20 bill on the ground at school, and that led us to the question, what percentage of a dollar bill is necessary to spend it? Money doesn't grow on trees, and neither do we. Lily and Ivy, though,

both of you are plants. Lily, Ivy, this is actually well communicated by the mint, the people who control money in the US. If you have any more than 50% of a paper bill, you can take that to the bank and they will give you an exchange, a full piece. If you have 49%, they will not do that, though I will get to some exceptions. So you give it to them and then they give you your money, but you cannot take that to the store and spend it. They'll be like, I don't want to deal with that.

You figure that out. That's on you now. So the bank will do this for you, but there are situations in which you could like half half of like more than half of the bill destroyed where you can still exchange it, but you can't do that at a bank. So if you like burned half of like more than half of it,

they'll be like, okay, well, there's not like another half sitting out there somewhere, but then couldn't you just like cut it in half and then like burn half and then the other half? Probably this is why they make you go to like a special like through a special circumstance and like maybe this happens when many hundred dollar bills are somewhat burned and you can sort of go and be like, I swear

here are the pieces of the ones that I have because otherwise it wouldn't be worth it. So I think that that's the situation, but there are two weird exceptions that I think are very interesting. One, if you have a piece of money that has been contaminated, there's also a whole procedure that you go through. So if you think that your money has like Ebola on it, the mint has a whole procedure for you to get new money and

to destroy the money that you think might be dangerous and covered in human pathogens, which of course they all are to some extent unless they're brand new. Everything's covered in human pathogens. This is why our immune systems are so wonderful. And then also, if you have a coin that has been destroyed, this is the weirdest thing to me. And it's what it says on their website. That's not money anymore. You can't take a nickel and be like, oh, this got broken. I need you to, I need the US Mint to give me a new, not broken nickel. It's like, disfigured or cut in half or something. They're like, no, that's just metal now.

And so they will buy it for the cost of the metal, not the value of the coin, which is exceptionally weird because for pennies and nickels, that value is actually more than the cost than like the value of a penny or nickel. So you get more money for a destroyed nickel than you would for a normal one. Now, if you destroy a bunch of nickels, I think they'll catch on pretty quick and that is illegal. So you can't do this on purpose, but you can, apparently, if your nickel gets accidentally mangled, you can go and get seven cents for it from the US Mint, which is wild to me. Anyway, that's the story. 51% like any more than 50% and you can use your dollar up, but you can't use it, you

have to go to the bank and get it exchanged. John, this next question comes from Kira, who asks, dear Hank and John, lately I've been playing a point and click video game called the Dark Side Detective and it has an interesting cursor design. It looks much like the standard mouse cursor does, except it's perfectly vertical instead of slightly tilted, and I hate it. I assume this is because I've been conditioned to like the tilted cursor, since it's what I normally see, but it made me wonder, why is the standard cursor tilted?

Who came up with that design in the first place? Best wishes, Kira. Oh, this was fascinating to research. Okay, so Kira and her actual question asked me, said which way that the cursor was tilted, and I've been exposed to this, and so now I know, and I also'm looking at my computer. So if you're not looking at a computer right now,

can you picture the direction the cursor is tilted or not? I think probably you can, but I cursor is tilted or not? I think probably you can, but I don't know for sure if I've just been swayed by the bias. So come up with the answer in your head, and then I will tell you now it is left tilted. So it's not straight up and down. The point is a little bit to the left. The bottom is a little bit to the right. That is how a cursor is. Does that line up with what you think? I'm curious to know. I'm on Twitter at Hank Green. Let me know what you think. So this fascinates me. Of course, like when I'm hovered over text, you get that little sort of brackity thing that's straight up and down, but everywhere else, or a lot of other places, there's different cursors for different

situations. You have this very slightly tilted to the left cursor. And if it was slightly tilted to the right, I would absolutely lose it. I would be like, if somebody hacked into my computer right now and switched it to the side, I would be so disoriented. Like there are set neural pathways in my mind that expect this cursor to be a certain way so that I use

it a certain way. And it makes me feel like the way to use the cursor is from like the bottom right of the screen to the top left of the screen. Like that's the natural movement. And like going the other way is a less natural movement. And that makes me think that this is also about a right and left handed thing. And so left handed people, is the mouse weird for you? I feel like it might be a little weird for, I'm very curious about this.

I'm on Twitter at Hank Green. Please let me know if it's a little weird for you because the way that you move the mouse, when you're sort of like, because what are hands do well is sort of like this up into the left motion when you're holding on a mouse up into the right, whereas up into the left is a little more awkward. You don't arc in the same way. Is this a thing?

Am I imagining it? Is it just because I'm used to it? Please let me know. But an answer to your question, yes, we do know who this person was, which is wonderful. So originally, it was an error that just pointed up, but they didn't have a lot of pixels to work with in the early 80s when they were designing the first graphical user interface at Xerox. And so they made it kind of big and they also made it tilt a little bit to the left, which made it easier to see. So it made it easier to sort of tell which thing, because like the

vertical lines didn't work as well to make it actually look like an arrow. And it was of course bigger than our mouse cursors are now to make up for that resolution. And then we know who did this. His name is Douglas Engelbart. And we know that because you've heard of the Engelbart tilt. This is the Engelbart tilt, the tilted side of the cursor. Everybody's heard of the Engelbart tilt, which of course no one has because I just made

it up. But from now on, if we can make that happen, that would be grand. Just everybody out there thinking of themselves, I need to use the phrase Inglebart tilt as many times in the rest of my life as possible so that it will catch on. And we can honor Douglas Inglebart, who is the person who tilted the cursor first to make it easier to see. And it's the reason that all of our cursors are left tilted. He had no idea the impact he would have on our world when he made that little, he was like, oh, let's just do it to the side a little bit. And now, 40 years later, we're all sitting here with our tilty cursors, with our tililti cursors, with our Tilti mouse cursors, still using mice on our computers because it's a fantastic interface.

Congratulations Douglas Engelbart. I don't know what you're up to, but thank you for your contribution to society, which is of course the Engelbart Tilt. He died in 2013. But thank you all for all of your hard work. And we honor you and your memory. This next question comes from Memeng, and I am doing a lot of sciencey ones, yes, because I don't know how to do the other ones. Who asks, dear Hank and John, how do we know that Alpha Centauri is the closest star besides our own soul?

What if there is a star hidden behind a dark curtain that absorbs all of the light? For that dark matter, the light, for that dark matter, I don't know we know that there aren't tiny little lurking black holes that aren't big enough to have sufficient gravitational effect on our solar system, but are closer than alpha-centari. Not alone, but far, meh-ming. Oh, that's interesting. Not alone, but far.

Wow. I don't know if it makes me think about stuff. Anyway, there's not a dark curtain of stuff. Well, there could be. Look, as I have discussed before, there is a number of chickens per light year that could be in space that we wouldn't notice. Like, it might be half a chicken.

It might be like a tenth of a chicken. It might be 20 chickens. I don't know what it is, but there's an amount of chickens for light ear that we wouldn't notice. A light ear is a very big space. So, look, if you want to hypothesize that there could just be like a really opaque wall that somebody put in space

to intentionally hide a star, okay, sure. Like, you could imagine, for example, a Dyson sphere, which is just a sphere of material built around a star to capture all of that star's energy, we would not be able to see a Dyson sphere. Like, it would not be warm enough for us to detect it in this sky, probably. Though it would probably get pretty hot.

So maybe, if it was closer than Alpha Centaur, maybe we could detect a Dyson sphere. Certainly farther than Alpha Centauri. There's detect a Dyson sphere certainly farther than Alpha Centaur. There's definitely a distance at which we couldn't detect it. Unless we were like pointing the gym some space telescope directly at it, which is very good at detecting infrared light, which is what comes off of warm things.

But Alpha Centaur is not that far away. And so the bubble, the sort of space bubble around us in between Alpha Centaurian us is small enough that we have catalogued it fairly like well. Like we've looked at all the parts of the sky with instruments that are sensitive enough to be able to detect brown dwarfs or like anything that has fusion going on inside it

and would be warm enough, that it would be casting off enough infrared light that we would be able to detect it. There are a lot of stars, like it's important to remember that there are a lot of stars that are not nearly as bright as our kind of star, the kind that our sun is. And they are a lot harder to detect. And that's why, you know, I used to think,

why do people always say, like, we don't know how many stars, like the range that they give with a number of stars in the galaxy is really wide. And I'm like, just count, just count, right? But it turns out, and our estimates are getting better, but it turns out that it's impossible to count because there are a lot of really dim stars.

There's also a lot of big clouds of gas. There's a lot of stars that include stars. Like we're looking lengthways through the galaxy. So when we see those pictures of the Milky Way, there's a lot of stars in there that are just sort of like from in the resolution that we can currently get, occluding each other. And that makes it very difficult. Now you can take stellar densities of certain areas of the sky and sort of add all of those up.

And you can make guesses. But it turns out the populations of different kinds of stars are different in different areas of the solar system. So there's different kinds of stars, made of different stuff, different brightnesses and different areas. So you can't really do a perfect estimate and that's why the ranges are still really big,

but close in, we have a really good idea of what's going on. And we can also sort of tell, I get the important part of your question, is that we can tell how far away Alpha Centauri is. We can tell that it's fairly close because this is how they do this. You know, you look a bit of star in the sky and you're like, there's no way you can tell how far away that is. Can you just like look by how bright it is? Because that's not going to work. There's lots of really brights. They're just bigger,

farther away but bigger and they're brighter. So what you do is you so at one point in our orbit around the sun and then the opposite point in our orbit around the sun, we are really far away from that point to the other point. And because of that, you could actually use those two positions that the earth is in to basically have binocular vision. So two eyes can judge depth by, you know, you have to have two eyes to have the depth perception. And so you can do that and basically have two different eyes at two different times, but you can line them up and be like, I see that there's like a shift

of how the stars all line up with each other when we're at these two different points in our orbit around the sun. And we can use that to calculate how far away stars are, which is just awesome. It is so good. And then once you have that, you can start to use other kinds of systems, because of course, there's certain stars that you can't use that system for, and there are also stars that are too distant to use that system for.

So once you have that sort of starting piece of data, you can use all kinds of other little tricks to infer the distance away that stars are, which is wonderful. And I'm glad that astronomers are always working on that. All right, Tune, can you play me another kind of music? I'm not going to do just a little break here before the middle point of the episode. I'd like to hear maybe some polka, do you have some polka? Just like 15 seconds of polka, that'd be great. ["Milka's Folk The

Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The

Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The Folk The All right, this next question comes from Emily who asks, Dear Hank and John, if a smell is made up of particles created by the thing making the smell,

could one hypothetically gather enough of those particles to create a solid smell? Would the solid smell be a copy of the thing or would it be an entirely new thing made up of pure smell? Smelling but not smelly Emily. I mean, so there's a couple of different worries I have about this idea. First, is the smell a smell if it is not in the air? So if you like, take out pure smell and you put it into a bottle. So say, okay, we have an orange. The smell coming off of the orange is all kinds of aromatic compounds.

These are molecules that are volatile. And so they go from a liquid state to a gaseous state and then they enter our noses and bind with receptors in our noses and our brains interpret that as a smell. This is how it works. It's pretty amazing. So you got that molecule, whatever it is, I don't know what it is, orange all. So you got orange all and then you can take orange all out of the atmosphere, out of the gaseous state and then liquefied, re-liquify it so that is now not gas anymore.

Is that orange all in a bottle? You got to, like, you know, you've got to put a cap on it so it doesn't evaporate. Is that liquid or solid? I don't know what it is. Is that smell, if it is not in the atmosphere? I don't think it is. I think that that's not smell anymore. That's not pure smell.

That's a compound. It's only smell once it evaporates. Now, second, an important thing to note, Emily, is that not all of the orange, we're not smelling all of the orange, we're not smelling all of the orange. We are smelling individual small components of the orange that are volatile compounds that are designed to be smelly so that animals could find them because the whole point of the fruit was to get the seeds into the animals so that the animal would distribute them farther

away from the orange tree or whatever other tree it was. So you eat the seed, you poop the seed out. That's how an orange tree gets to like grow way far away from another orange tree. That is its sire, its parent. So the orange has to have a smell to attract the things that it wants to commit it. So that is just one component.

Like you're not smelling all of the orange. You're not even smelling the sugary part, for example. That part doesn't, the sugar doesn't have a smell. You know this, unless you do stuff to it to make it sort of molacacy. So like pure sugar glucose on its own doesn't have a smell. And then you, you know, a lot of the cellulose and the rind and the, the little juice pockets, like that, stuff, so you couldn't like create an orange out of orange smell because the only part of the orange that is orange smell is the smelly part of the orange, which is, is particular volatile organic compounds. Like orange orange, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised

if it's called orange all. It's not. It is called lemanine though. It's not, there's a thing called lemanine. It is a colorless liquid aliphatic hydrocarbon classified as a cyclic monoturping. It's the major component of citrus fruit peels. Pfft. The major component of oil, of the component of citrus fruit peels,

the major component of oil of the oil and citrus fruit peels. So limiting and a bunch of other stuff and all of them, together make the different good citrus smells. I don't know a lot about how citrus happened or where citrus came from. So I assume that they are all closely related and that they've been domesticated

and that they're wild ancestoricated in that their wild ancestor. It doesn't not look that much like them. But God bless them, love and orange. So many good oranges out there. Big fan, like to put it in my soda stream water. Which reminds me that this podcast is brought to you by Lemonine. Lemonine, it's one of those mono-turpeens

that just makes your life a little bit better. This podcast is also brought to you by the Englebart Tilt. The Englebart Tilt. You didn't know it existed until today, and now you realize that your life would be a monstrosity without it. Also this podcast is brought to you by the Blanket Octopus that we all earlier pretended to be. The Blanket Octopus that we all earlier pretended to be. The blanket octopus that we all earlier pretended to be

at peace at the bottom of the sea. And also this podcast is brought to you by a bent nickel, a bent nickel. That's not a nickel anymore. That's just metal. All right, this question here, all on my own. I'm getting hungry. This is brought to you by Lulu, who asks,

dear Angen John, when I first adopted my dog four and a half years ago, she looked into my full-length mirror, jumped back in surprise, and growled loudly at the other dog she saw there. However, this only happened once, and nowadays even when I pick her up and look into the mirror with her and ask, who's that? She has no reaction. Does this mean that she understands that there's nothing there?

Has she come to the realization that it is her own reflection. Has she accepted that there is just a weird mommy doggy clone set that only occasionally appears in our house? Mirrors and marveling Lulu. You know, Lulu, I of course don't have an answer to this question. The minds of your dog is at least at the moment unknowable. I, you know that there's like a hat that guys wear sometimes and it says, women want me, fish fear me, on Twitter just the other day I saw a version of that hat that said, women want me, the minds of fish are unknowable. And I was just so pleased, one of that hat very badly,

except that I cannot wear a hat that says women want me. Even if the next line is the minds of fish are unknowable, I cannot pull off a hat that says women want me. But if you think you can pull that hat off, more power to you. Congratulations. So the minds of fish are unknowable. The mind of your dog is less unknowable, like you know things about what your dog thinks. And the more we explore, the sort of cognitive capacity of non-human animals, the more surprised we are to find that they aren't that different from us after all. Now, we don't think that dogs pass what we call the mirror test, where they can look at a mirror and recognize that the thing in the mirror is them, which is one way of testing, not the only way. Some people portray it as the only

way, but not the only way of testing, but one way of testing the idea of self-awareness, self-consciousness. I know that I exist. I... Here's what I'll say, and this is not a scientific statement, Hi. Here's what I'll say. And this is not a scientific statement, but one thing I have noticed through my 40 years of life is that we often come up with things that are unique to people, and we say this is what makes us different.

It's tool usage, opposable thumbs, it's like awareness of self. And then over a period of time, we're like actually a lot of things use tools. Actually a lot of things are aware that they exist and pass the mirror test. Actually a lot of things have opposable thumbs. Like there isn't a thing that makes us super ultimately unique. And I think that like, obviously there is a capability

that we have that sort of like launched a different way of being. And I think that that capability is pretty clearly at this point not the ability to, but the scale at which we communicate information. So dogs communicate information to each other all the time. They do that with body language and facial expressions and noises and pheromones and sense, but we communicate information extraordinarily in a very high bandwidth way.

That is the thing. And so this is not a matter of a thing that we have. It is the scale at which we have it. And the biggest sort of advancement that we had in that field, though not certainly not the last one, is what we're doing right now. Where I'm talking and you're listening and you're understanding the words that are hitting your ears, that all these weird noises that I am making that my mouth is working really hard to construct in a sort of ballet that just sort of neurologically is one of the most complex things

that we do. That is our, that was like our great leap forward. And so talking is a big deal and words and symbolic, symbolic language are a big deal. And like, but I think that all these things like all communication of information, self awareness, being able to notice yourself in the mirror, not human animals definitely do all these things, I would not put it past dogs to actually know that that is them in the mirror, but just to not think that it matters much in a way that would allow them to pass the mirror to. So like you put a blue spot on the dog's face, and then they're like, oh, there's a blue spot on my face,

and they turn to look at it like the way an elephant would. Maybe a dog is like, oh yeah, I don't care. That's not a big deal to me. I'm moving on. I got other things to do. I don't need to be looking at myself. That's not, that's not of interest. Um, I don't have, it's not that I'm not self-aware.

It's that I'm not self-conscious. Like I don't care. It's not a big deal. I can look however I want. I sometimes eat poop. that I'm not self-conscious. Like, I don't care, it's not a big deal. I can look however I want. I sometimes eat poop, like I'm a dog. I don't need to worry about a blue spot on my face. But, this is all, I don't freaking know. I don't know what the situation is,

but what I do feel strongly in my heart is that animals are a lot more complex than we often give them credit for. We like to think that we are super special, but it is not, it generally tends to be that this is not a matter of one, a thing that we have that other animals don't, but just the degree to which we have those things. So maybe dogs are self-aware. They're just a little bit less self-aware than the average human. And there are lots of humans. I've met them. Some of them

are out there making weird decisions that impact me and the rest of the world right now that I don't think are particularly self-aware. At least in some ways, they're not aware of the sort of, like dogs might be looking at some people and saying, hey, I think you may be own enough complicated companies. You don't have to have another one. But self-awareness, it's, uh, we only have access to it sometimes. All right, this question is, uh, surprisingly related to that last one, it comes to us from Felicia, who asks, Steerhankajan. We all know that animals pee on stuff to claim it as theirs. Recently, a badger has been hanging out right next to my house, and it got me thinking,

if I pee on my house, well, the badger realized that it is my territory and leave it alone. I would very much like to get rid of the badger, and this seems like it could be an easy solution. Would it work like the day Felicia? Felicia? First of all, maybe we could trade trade because I want a badger friend. I, I don't, I've never met a badger and I know that we have them here in Montana. I've never come across one.

I get the feeling maybe Felicia you are not from America because it seems like in the United Kingdom, like the European or in Europe. They're the, so we have, there's North American badgers that's what we have here. There's also European badgers. They are related. They are not identical.

And they're cute. But I think that the European ones maybe are a little bit cuter. But look, we don't need to pass judgment. It's not here or there. I get the impression that a North American Badger is like I would rather not be anywhere near you. Whereas, and correct me if I'm wrong.

It seems like in Europe and the UK, you have Badgers like raccoons where they're just like out and about like getting in your business, like going through the trash. I've never seen a badger. We have lots of them here. I've never seen a badger and I've been outside a lot. I've seen a lot. I've seen a moose. I've seen grizzly bears. I've seen black bears. I've seen, you know, like I've seen links. I've seen bobcats, I've seen a lot of animals never seen a badger. They're just, they did, apparently they're around, but I've never seen them. So I, I get the impression, this is just a guess, this is a different kind of badger experience

because like, they're weird enough for me that I'm like, please bring a badger around. I want to see one. Now, uh, so if, if a trade is out of the question, because there's a big ocean between us, then I'm pretty sure that I have to break the news to you that peeing on your house isn't going to help. I don't know for sure, because I don't know that anybody's tested this specifically on Badger's, but I do know one thing. Deer are a lot more timid in my imaginings than Badger. And have a lot more reason to fear humans, at least from my experience of what happens to deer

by humans in Montana. And deer are not afraid of human piece smell, which I think if I was a deer, I would be, I'd be like, oh, who's God, gotta get away from that. That doesn't seem good, I've seen what they do. I've heard about what happens when people are around. They carry those sticks, they make loud noises, and then you just fall over dead.

I think I would be afraid of human peace melt. But if it's not scaring a deer away, I can't imagine it's gonna scare a badger away. And I thought that it might scare a deer away because I saw in a movie once a person who peed on hunting sites to try and, because they were like, I didn't want hunting to happen. Pro-deer person, and that didn't,

that didn't, that worked in the movie, but it turns out it doesn't work in real life. So now you know that at least, and I also learned that today. But I feel like it was just not gonna work on it. Deer's probably not gonna work on a badger. I don't know how to get a badger to leave you alone. It's definitely not a thing that I'm an expert in

because in America, in my experience anyway, badger leave you alone way more than you'd like them to. Like I like, maybe just like 20 feet away in a nice way where I can like see a badger being cute and like I feel like I like kids with it, like babies, that would be great. I would, I would absolutely sign up for that experience. All right, before we had anything all important news from Mars and A.S.U.

Wimble then I would have Tuna play a little more music for you. This is going to be just some heavy metal. Here's some heavy metal. This week at Mars News, the Perseverance Rover has given us the best image so far of a solar eclipse on Mars. On April 2nd, one of Mars's moons, Phobos traveled across the Sun, casting its shadow onto the Martian surface. The eclipse lasted about 40 seconds. It's quite quick.

Phobos is trucking across the sky. We know that Mars has eclipses for a long time. We've been watching them since 2004 when Spirit and Opportunity Revers took the first images of one. And since then, other rovers like the Curiosity have taken pictures too, but Perseverance has the Mastcam Z camera. It's the first to take color pictures of the eclipse and it has a solar filter that allowed more detail of the moon's shadow to show more clearly, because it's not, it doesn't do like a full like on earth, the moon can cover the entire sun. Phobos isn't big enough to do that. It's not, we're not close enough. We'll have to be one of the

other, one of those two things. So all that means that this is the clearest footage we've ever had of solar eclipse, which is probably why you saw it on Twitter. If you were paying attention, if you were on Twitter that day, because it was all over the place, at least all of my feed, I guess I do follow some specific people who are maybe more likely to post about Mars news, because of who I am and what I like.

And in news from AFC Wimbledon, it's, look, I'm not gonna call anything yet, because I don't know exactly how all this works. Avesumalton is currently three points into the relegation zone, like they can't get out without getting three points. I think that that is impossible, but I don't know for sure,

because that's who I am. I'm not, I'm not that guy. They had a game on Saturday that they tied. They did get a goal. They tied their game, the game before that. They also got a goal and tied that game. They lost the game before that. They have one more game to play against Ackrington Stanley,

Ackrington Stanley. And so that's happening next Saturday at 530 in the morning and mountain time. So I don't know that I'm going to catch that one. But I think that if they won that game, they still could not make it out of the relegation zone. So I do feel somewhat bad. Then I'm the one breaking this news to you. Maybe it's a little bit easier on John to not have to deliver this particular bit of news. The team of the AFC Wimbledon, the fans, the spirit is alive. These people care more about their club than anyone possibly could about any other club. They care a great

deal. They will make, they will persevere, but it may be that this is the first time AFC Wimbledon is going to drop down a league in, in its, since it has been reformed, and it has been a tremendous story. So as, as you may have heard and expected, the, the miracle that we were hoping for, well, sometimes miracles don't happen. In fact, usually, and it looks like A. F. Suimland is gonna, is gonna be at the, uh, if I understand anything's correctly, which I may not be, they are, they, they may be headed next year into the other league, which I can't remember the name of. I apologize, but A.F. Summoning will rise again.

They will play great games. Their new stadium kicks butt. They will have cool new people on their team. And John will not stop caring about them. I will not stop caring about them. You will not stop caring about them. We will continue to love our beloved Wombles possibly. Thank you for listening to this podcast. It was surprisingly quite fun. Actually, I hope that you liked it. I have no idea if you did, but I will say, John,

and I will be back for a normal deer hankin' John next week. We've talked about it, we've planned it, we've, you know, he feels a little bit bad, which is ridiculous, he shouldn't. He's doing really cool, great stuff, and I'm very excited for him. And I also feel bad, because I was gone for a long time,

though I will say, I got a lot done, and I'm very happy to have was gone for a long time, though I will say I got a lot done and I'm very happy to have had a little bit of that time free and also went on a lovely vacation. So thank you, John, for filling in for me while I was out. This podcast is edited by Joseph Tuneum Eddish, who we have really been putting through the ringer with these episodes. So thank you Tuneum for the extra effort being put in. It's produced by Rosiana Halls-Rohas. Our communications coordinator is Julia Bloom, our editorial assistant, is Debuky Chocolate Party.

We'll also help me a lot with this particular episode. The music you're hearing now, and at the beginning of the podcast, it's by The Great Gonna Rolla, and as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome. Don't forget to be awesome.