Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Questions and Answers: Volume 21

Episode Date: August 3, 2024

In 8 BC, the Roman senate passed a resolution renaming the month of Sextillis to August to honor the emperor Augustus.  They chose Sextillis, which was the sixth month in the calendar because it was the month that he conquered Egypt. Fast forward several centuries and August had a permanent place on the calendar.  With that, prepare yourself for the August installment of Questions and Answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to Butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily at checkout to get $30 off your first box! Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & 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

In the year 8 BC, the Roman Senate passed a resolution renaming the month of Sextilis to August to honor the Emperor Augustus. They chose Sextilis, which was the sixth month in the calendar, because it was the month that he conquered Egypt. Fast forward several centuries and August has a permanent place in the calendar. And with that, prepare yourself for the August installment of questions and answers. On this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes share. 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 Thuleline podcast from NPR. Let's jump right into things with this month's questions. The first comes from Brian Faulkner, who asks, The name of your podcast is quite similar to a very successful movie. Was there any fallout, positive or negative, from the publicity during? and following the buildup premiere and theatrical run.

Well, Brian, for the record, I began using the phrase Everything Everywhere back in 2005. Well before the movie, Everything Everywhere all at once, was ever conceived. As anybody can verify by doing a Who-Is search, I registered the domain name

Everything-everywhere.com on April 17, 2005. I had previously decided to sell my house to travel around the world, and I knew I was going to have a website associated with the trip. I came up with the name while it was in my car thinking of possible names to use. Once I came up with everything everywhere,

I knew instantly that that was the name. What I didn't do, which I now regret, was register the domain name without a dash in it. It would have cost me $2,000 to get it, which seemed like a lot, but I had no idea I'd still be using the name almost 20 years later. I decided to stick with the name when I made this podcast. The movie wasn't the first time that some other entity used the name.

In 2010, T-Mobile and Ormobile, Orange Mobile merged in the UK, and the name of their new company was Everything Everywhere. They eventually stopped using that name and now just go by E.E. Mobile. I had a lawyer look into what options I had, and basically there was nothing I could do to them and nothing that they could do to me. We were completely different businesses, in different countries, so there was no confusion as to the name. As for the movie, I'd say the reaction was mostly positive. A few people I know discovered this podcast when searching for the movie. The only dead of the movie, the only dead. downside is that some people, not knowing the history, think I took the name of the podcast

from the movie, which is not the case. Matt Bittner asks, I've been enjoying your other podcast respecting the beer. What is your go-to type of beer? Well, for those of you who don't know, I am hosting another podcast with my friend and astrophysicist term brewer, Bobby Fleshman, called Respecting the Beer. The podcast covers the science history and culture of beer and brewing. Bobby is a truly fantastic brewer, and he makes a wide variety of beers in every style you can imagine. Stouts, ales, lagers, pilsners, sours, cass beers, nitro beers, and all kinds of others. His brew pub will usually have about 20 different beers on tap with other beers rotating throughout the year.

My favorite beer is usually something that changes throughout the year. Right now, I've been having Gosa. Gosa is a slightly sour, lemony beer with a low alcohol content, and it's great to have in the summer. In the fall, I'll probably shift to the October Fest beers that come out at that time. I'm also a big fan of barrel-aged beers, which I never really had until recently. These are beers that are usually aged for about a year in used bourbon barrels. I can't really drink more than about seven ounces, and it's more for sipping. And along those lines, my absolute favorite beer is Icebok.

Icebok is a barrel-aged doppelbach that is stored outside and frozen in the winter. It's made in very limited quantities and it's very hard to find. The reason why it's so hard to find in the United States is that legally letting beer freeze is considered freeze distillation, which requires a distilling license, not a brewing license, even though it requires absolutely no distilling equipment. However, if you import icebok, it's imported as a beer, not a spirit which is distilled. Tim DeLong asks, you've often mentioned the NFL, as an average. fan of auto racing, I'd like to know if you've ever been to an auto race, either in the United States or abroad.

Rhode America and Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin is a stunning venue. However, I'm partial to the Mid-Ohio sports car course. Well, Tim, I wouldn't consider myself to be an auto racing fan per se. I don't really follow the sport other than occasionally checking in a few times a year to see who's leading in the Formula One or NASCAR standings. That being said, I've attended several races. Growing up, my dad used to take me to the Wisconsin International Raceway, which is where the great Dick Trickle used to race.

In the course of my travels, I've attended two races. I attended the Grand Prix of Europe in Valencia, Spain in 2011, where I had the opportunity to ride an actual Formula One car that was retrofitted to allow passengers to sit between the wheels. I also attended a Formula E event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2018. For both events, I was accredited as media, so I had access to the paddocks, and I was able to see how everything worked behind the scenes.

Believe it or not, I've never been, to Road America, even though I don't live that far away. And for those who don't know what it is, Road America is probably the top road racing track in North America, and it hosts multiple racing events throughout the year. Tuba Kowie asks, all my life, I was told that there is nothing that can go faster than the speed of light. Then I heard a physicist say that galaxies are moving away from each other faster and faster until one day they will be moving away from each other at faster than the speed of light. Then I see online that a different physicist claims that four things are faster than the speed of light. Is there anything that moves faster than light? Is Einstein's

theory incorrect? Okay, Howie, as far as we know, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. And I say as far as we know, because you always have to leave open the possibility for some future discovery. When we say nothing can go faster than the speed of light, we are referring to a fixed starting point. For example, if you turn on a flashlight in space, the photons from that flashlight would move at the speed of light away from the flashlight. Now let's say the flashlight could shoot light in opposite directions at the same time. The photons from each end would travel from the flashlight at the speed of light. However, the photons would travel away from each other at two times the speed of light. Neither photon is traveling faster.

than the speed of light relative to their starting position in the flashlight. The fastest the space between two moving objects can increase would be two times the speed of light. In the example you gave of the galaxies, there's another wrinkle. In that case, space itself is expanding between the galaxies, which I confess is a very difficult thing to get your head around. This is a much bigger subject than I can answer in a Q&A episode, but suffice to say that no object or particle of energy can go faster than light, but that doesn't hold for space between objects. Larry Slavin's ass, since I was slow in asking last month, did you attend concerts in your younger days in Wisconsin and Minnesota? Favorite or notable shows? Did you attend concerts on your

world travels? And if so, were the U.S. International acts or did you seek out local acts? Well, Larry, this answer is going to make me very unpopular. And I know that I am in the minority on this subject. But the truth is, is, I really don't like live music or attending concerts. I have been to some concerts, and I didn't really enjoy the experience, because I hate large crowds and I hate loud music. I had a friend take me to see Prince when he opened up his Love Sexy Tour in 1988 at the Met Center in Minnesota, and I also went to see Guns and Roses at the Target Center in 1992.

I'm not into bands and performers like other people are. I am the opposite personality type of a person who, might be a passionate Taylor Swift fan, for example. That being said, if it was a very small venue and the sound wasn't amplified, I would have no problem attending. This would be something like a jazz club or an orchestra hall. The great Canadian classical pianist Glenn Gould held the belief that the advent of high quality recordings basically made live performances obsolete. I'm sympathetic to the idea, although I do understand the appeal of live performances. For me, it boils down to

to disliking large crowds and loud music. Jesus Chan asks, Hello again from Laredo, Texas, Gary, and you'll be glad to know that this question does not involve aliens. Do thoughts, ideas, dreams, and memories have physical weight or mass? If not, then how are they like memories

able to persist or exist for an entire lifetime? That's a fair question, Jesus. Information doesn't require mass. It requires energy. When you put data on a hard drive, the hard drive doesn't get heavy. heavier. You're using energy to organize the magnetic bits on the drive, assuming it's a magnetic drive, in such a way that the information can be read. If you write something down on a paper with a pen,

the total mass of the pen paper system is exactly the same. What you're doing is providing energy to provide order to the ink to store information. Think if you have a collection of letters for a letterboard. What is required to turn those letters from a random collection into something legible is the energy to put the letters into some sort of order. No mass has been added to the letters. And the same process goes on in your brain. Your brain uses a tremendous amount of energy. Your brain uses energy to build new circuits and connection between neurons, which is how memories are stored. So memories do not have mass any more than data on a hard drive has mass. It uses energy to provide order to previously existing bits of matter.

Yana or perhaps Janna Lc. asks, when you travel, do you prefer hard-sided or soft-sided bags, checked or carry-on, rolling or carry? Also, how many passport stamps, additional passport pages do you have? During the entirety of my travels, I used a soft-sided bag. My primary bag for much of that time was the soft-sided Eagle Creek Gear Warrior that had two wheels. And I always checked that bag when I flew. The reason why I checked a bag is because, because, because I had to. I lived on the road and I couldn't fit everything into a single carry-on.

Also, my tripod made it impossible to have a smaller bag that I could fit in an overhead bin. The times I've had problems with a checked bag, I could probably count on one hand. And three of those incidents involved Air Canada. I have no idea how many stamps I have. I've used three passports in the course of my travels, and my second passport has three sets of extra pages, which is something you can't even do anymore. Nick Cap from over on the Discord server asks, Your episode on statistics got me thinking, why do we have to learn advanced math in school?

When will I ever need to know what a sign or cosine is, or what the quadratic equation is used for? These are gripes I hear from high school students and their parents, but I don't really know what the good arguments are to support the learning of high school mathematics. Okay, Nick, there are several things I would have to say to that. And the first is, you don't know what career you're going to have

when you're in school. It's easy to look backwards and say, I didn't need to know that. However, it's impossible to look forward and know what you will need to know. If you don't study math, or science or history or anything for that matter, you're basically locking yourself out of a host of possible career choices before you even get a chance to make the choice. If you use the, I don't use that knowledge as the basis for what to learn, then for the vast majority of people, you don't have to learn anything beyond basic arithmetic and literacy. We could go back to not having to get anything beyond a sixth grade education. The second thing is that it's worthwhile to learn some things because they teach you a system of thinking. Mathematics teaches you how to think rigorously.

I've gotten value from almost everything I've ever studied, not because I use it every day, but because it's a way to think about the world. I've talked to many adults who feel that they're not quote, good at math. This is almost entirely based on their experience when they were in school as kids. I always suggest they go back and try learning it as an adult. Try learning it without the pressure of having to get grades or taking a test. There are plenty of resources online to help you do this for free. There are free courses at Khan Academy, for example, which will take you from 1 plus 1 equals 2

all the way through college level mathematics. and if you don't understand something, you can find some other source online to explain it in a different way. Finally, I do think that we should change how we teach mathematics. I'm very open to the idea that we should put a higher priority on statistics, which most people encounter every day, rather than things like calculus.

That concludes questions and answers for this month. If you would like to submit a question next month, just join the Facebook group or the Discord server, links to both of which can be found in the show notes. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers.

Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the completionist club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group, or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.