Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Questions and Answers: Volume 14

Episode Date: January 6, 2024

The month of January was named after the Roman god Janus who had two faces, one on each side of his head.  Janus was the god of waging war and making peace. Of beginnings and endings, and of change and passages. …and while there is no evidence to prove it, I’m pretty sure that Janus would have been the god of questions and answers. Stay tuned while I answer listener questions on the 14 questions and answers installment of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors BetterHelp Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month ButcherBox Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free steak for a year and get $20 off."  Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The month of January was named after the Roman god Janus, who had two faces, one on each side of his head. Janus was the god of waging war and making peace, of beginnings and endings, and of change and passages. And while there's no evidence to prove it, I'm pretty sure that Janus would have been the god of questions and answers. Stay tuned while I answer listener questions on the 14th question and answer installment of everything everywhere daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now.

Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The first question comes from Sean Vergaulvin, who asks, Curious as a Wisconsin fan, which we don't hold against, against you, what are your thoughts on the new Big Ten? Well, for those of you who don't know what the Big Ten is, it's a college sports conference. It used to consist of ten large colleges in the Midwest that would play each other in various sports, and these tended to be large land grant institutions like Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio State, Minnesota, and Iowa. In 1990, they expanded to 11 teams allowing Penn State to join, but they kept the name Big Ten. And this addition really wasn't that bad.

in 2010, three more universities joined, Nebraska, Maryland, and Rutgers. Nebraska sort of made sense, but Maryland and Rutgers were completely out of whack, and they took away from the Midwest nature of the conference. And recently, USC, UCLA, Oregon, and Washington announced that they would be joining the Big Ten, bringing the number of teams to 18. So my thoughts are, 18 teams is too much for a conference. And a conference. conference no longer has any regional focus. The reason this is being done, of course, is for money. College sports, especially football and basketball, are big business. The current trend of dismantling and emerging conferences makes no sense, especially considering that it's only for a few sports.

College football should consider a complete reorganization that only affects football and leaves every other non-revenue-generating sport alone. Even the current system of determining a national champion in Division I football is a bit ridiculous, selecting four teams by committee rather than determining the champion on a field. Graham McIntosh asks, how do you and other Americans celebrate the new year? Well, personally, I do absolutely nothing. I go to bed and wake up as if it were another day. That being said, I'd say the most popular things are fireworks and drinking. Some people watch the ball drop in Times Square in New York, and there's a tradition of singing

the song Old Lang-Zine, even though most people, people are the most people. don't know the lyrics beyond the first few lines. Gabriel Servantes asks, you've been all over the world shooting photographs. Where can we see your images? Well, you can see all of my images if you go to my website, Everything- Everywhere.com.

In the menu bar up on the top, just click on photography. There you can view the many tens of thousands of photos that I've taken from all over the world. Fabio Fidnaz asks, do you know practice computer programming? If yes, what is your favorite language? Thanks. Well, I used to sort of, but I haven't in ages.

Back in the 90s, I found myself at the right place at the right time. It was right at the beginning of the World Wide Web, and my roommate at the time developed a tool known as Cold Fusion, which today is owned by Adobe. It was a markup language with elements of a computer programming language that allowed you to easily and quickly integrate databases with websites, which was a rather difficult thing to do at the time. While he was building the product, some companies asked to have websites created with the tool,

and he didn't want to do it. So I began using the tool to develop these data-driven websites, along with SQL statements of varying complexity. I did this for a while, but I soon brought other people on board, and my focus shifted to running the company, not doing actual programming. I've considered going back and goofing around with some simple scripting to do things on my own network, but I usually never get around to it because I have other things going on, like this podcast. So the short answer is, I sort of did it in the past, but I haven't done it in a long time. Tubacow he asks, in all your travels, have you ever come across fellow explorers like

Albert Lynn or Josh Gates? First, just because someone's on TV doesn't make them great explorers, I know a lot of people who are far better traveled than most TV personalities. That being said, we once had Josh Gates as a guest on my old podcast this week in travel, but I wasn't on the show that week because of scheduling. I once met the Australian photographer Peter Lick at the Camui Caves in Puerto Rico. He was filming a show there for the Weather Channel. And I also stayed at the same hotel as Anthony Bourdain in Lafayette, Louisiana, during Marty Graw in 2018, just a few months before he died. Every morning, I'd see him outside the front

doors of the lobby, smoking a cigarette, texting as the crew got the equipment ready for the day. And I also know a fair number of online travel influencers that I've met in. my travels around the world. However, I've lost touch with many of them as I've shifted to podcasting. Darren Brown asks, can we determine the average length of an empire slash commonwealth slash superpowers reign? Darren, yes you can, but there's a problem with the question. You can get an average from any dataset. You can get an average from a set of random numbers. However, I'm not sure that such an average would be meaningful. Each empire existed with its own logic and forces that caused its rise and fall. Feronic Egypt, for example, lasted through 33 different dynasties

over thousands of years. Nazi Germany lasted a little more than a decade, and the Soviet Union only existed for 74 years. Moreover, technologies have changed dramatically, rendering whatever lessons we could learn from one empire, sort of moot. So, yes, you can calculate an average, but I'm not sure that it'll actually tell you anything. Matt Goulet asks, why do Americans call chocolate bars, candy bars. Well, Matt, it's because chocolate is a candy. Steve Gulliver asks, do you suffer burnout from researching so much? Well, the answer is, yeah, sometimes I do. I have no one to help me with research, writing, or recording the show. And the nature of the show is such that I have to get a show at the door every day. So the

production schedule of the show is akin to that of a newspaper or a TV newsroom. The only break I get are the occasional encore episodes. And thankfully, I've done so many episodes now that no one really seems to mind them so long as new episodes are still being produced. I.O. Abiola asks, would you use AI like ChatGPT to draft the script in a second? If you did, has it made this venture easier? Well, there's been a lot of talk about AI within the podcasting world.

While I recognize that there may be some use for AI, literally creating entire scripts just isn't possible. Just for the heck of it, I actually tried to get several AI systems to write a script. And the results were horrible. If I actually tried releasing something totally written by AI, I'm sure all of you would stop listening. Moreover, a great deal of what I've seen is simply factually incorrect. You'd still have to fact check everything, which is difficult enough even when you're not using AI. That being said, there are two things that I have found AI useful for.

The first is occasionally creating images for episode artwork. And the second is to create an outline of major points for topics that are extremely broad. Trying to summarize some topics into 10 to 12 minutes is extremely difficult, and AI can be helpful to at least help summarize it. Once it lists the major points, however, it's up for me to make sense of it and write and research the episode. David Javid writes, Gary, you are probably the most interesting person at any dinner table. but if you could host a dinner party, who would you host, living or dead?

Second, if you could live at any time in history or civilization, with, of course, the help of modern medicine, which time or place would it be? Well, David, I'm not really sure who I'd want to have at a dinner party. The obvious answer is usually some famous and accomplished people. However, some people I'd like to meet from history would probably not make for great dinner guests. Benjamin Franklin, Richard Feynman, and Peggy Guggenheim, I think, would make for great dinner guess.

I'm not sure that Ted Williams or the Emperor Augustus would actually be very entertaining to have around, however. Second, I wouldn't want to live at any point in the past. By almost every metric, things are better today than they have ever been. I wouldn't mind visiting the past, but I would never want to live there. Abdel Rahman Wael asks, Hey, Gary, love the podcast. I'm from Egypt where sports like baseball and American football aren't played often, but I have gotten to love football as I could understand it through movies.

but I can't do the same with baseball. How do I understand the rules of baseball and how do I get into it as a non-American? Much love from Cairo. Thanks, Abdul-Raman. Your view of American football and baseball is actually quite common. With football, it's pretty easy to grasp the gist of what's happening. Each team tries to march down the field and if you can get to the other side, you get points. There's obviously a lot more to it than that, but that's kind of the gist of the game.

Baseball is much more complicated. Basically, there are four bases you have to run around without getting out, and you have to go all the way around to score a point, which is called a run. There are a lot of obscure rules in baseball as well, many of which are hardly ever invoked. What I recommend to learn how the game is played is the same way I learned about cricket. I just watched games. When I encountered something I didn't understand, I just looked it up. At first, there will be a lot of things you don't understand, but over time it will become less and less.

I've done episodes on the history of baseball, but maybe an episode explaining baseball for people who don't live in baseball countries might be in order someday. Fin Dare asks, Have you ever gone into a topic for an episode expecting that you know a good bit about it, only to realize you were completely wrong as you continue to research it? Well, the only episode I can say where something like that happened was the episode on the serial killer H.H. Holmes. I had heard the story that most people have heard, but then as I started researching it,

I found that almost everything in the common telling of the story was exaggerated by tabloid newspapers of the era. I had to abandon the episode, and I put it aside for over a year. That was an exception. Usually I don't find something that is totally wrong so much as I find that there's just more to the story. Most historical events either have more nuance or details than most people are aware of. Dog on a swing ass. I believe in your last Q&A you mentioned that some episodes can take years to be created as you figure out how you want to approach the subject. What are some examples of episodes with long lead times? Well, dog on a swing. Yeah, there is often long times between coming up with an idea and doing an episode on it.

Sometimes, like the recent episode on Salt, it's just a matter of never getting around to it. Likewise, the episodes on how horses came to North America and the episode on the quasi-war took a long time to come to fruition because I just did other episodes. Other times, I'm just not sure how to explain a subject to an audience with a wide range of backgrounds. There are episodes on the standard model and quantum physics that I would like to do, but I'm still not sure how to structure the episode and how to explain it in an easy-to-understand way. And I'll conclude with a question from Oatmeal, who asks, What audiences do you think the podcast caters towards? Well, my intent has always been to create a show for people who are curious about

the world and love to learn. Regardless of where you're from or what your background is, if you're a curious person, and most people in the world are not, then this is the show for you. If you'd like to have your question answered next month, just join the Facebook group or the Discord server. The links to both of which are in the show notes. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiefer. As much as I try to avoid it, every so often, I do make errors and episodes that need a correction. The first correction I'd like to make comes from my episode on Babe Ruth. At the very start of the episode, I said 1941, but it should have been 1914. I transposed the numbers

one and four. The other correction is a dumb one on my part. In the episode on the mathematical constant E, I was explaining the exponential curve and how the slope of the line at one is one and at two it's two. That of course is incorrect. The slope of the line at one is E, and at two, it's E squared, etc. And the same holds true with the area under the curve as well. So, mea culpa, mea calpa, mea maxima calpa.