Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Questions and Answers: Volume 46

Starting point is 00:00:00 What are the element Palladium, William Shakespeare, and this podcast episode have in common? Pladium is the 46th element on the periodic table. Shakespeare was rumored to have secretly written the King James Bible at the age of 46. In Psalm 46, in the 46th word from the beginning of the Psalm, it's claimed to be the word shake, while the 46th word from the end is Spear. And this episode is the 46th time I've answered your questions. Stay tuned for the 46 episode of questions and answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow?

Starting point is 00:00:54 Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing.

Starting point is 00:01:29 You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. Let's jump right in with the big issue this month, which comes. in the form of a question from Doug Huffer, who asks, How much do you care about the pronunciation of place and names, i.e. original versus typical American versus your own. In other words, Van Gogh is pronounced differently in Dutch versus American English, or Arkansas is pronounced differently versus Kansas versus Arkansas.

Starting point is 00:02:03 Well, Doug, this is one of the biggest issues I deal with daily when recording this show. And this month, it showed up in the episode I did on New Madrid, which I pronounced as New Marrador. Madrid. English is a weird language. We pronounce words differently in different places and some place names have unique local pronunciations that make no sense based on spelling alone. There's a city in Wisconsin called New Berlin, but it's pronounced New Berlin. And the change in pronunciation was deliberately done during the First World War because they didn't want to have it called Berlin. Some words in English just make no sense. There really is no reason why. There really is no reason why

Starting point is 00:02:44 Arkansas isn't pronounced Arkansas, or why Kansas isn't pronounced, Kansas. That's just how it is. English often has different pronunciations for foreign words, even if the foreign word is perfectly pronounceable in English. Rome instead of Roma, Paris instead of Paris, or Moscow instead of Moscow. In Van Gogh's case, the proper Dutch pronunciation uses a sound that really isn't in the English language, so it's pronounced differently. It would be van hoch. When you get to Chinese and other tonal languages, again, English doesn't even have tones, so words tend to be anglicized or Latinized, which wouldn't really even sound proper in Chinese.

Starting point is 00:03:28 In many cases, there is no good solution to the problem. If you use local pronunciations for all proper nouns, people will sometimes not even know what you're talking about, or you'll just come across as pretentious. Often, there's no way to know what a local pronunciation might be unless you've been to that area, especially if the place is more secure. And I've often used the example of Two Rivers, Wisconsin. It's spelled Two Rivers. But the people there call it Trivers, and you'd have no way of knowing that. While I will try to use correct local pronunciation whenever I can, I often have to make judgment calls. In the episode on Van Gogh,

Starting point is 00:04:09 I use the traditional English pronunciation Van Gogh, not the Dutch Van Hoche. I say Julius Caesar rather than Ulius Kaiser, which would be the proper Latin pronunciation. And while I recognize that New Madrid is the local pronunciation of the town, I also don't think New Madrid is the end of the world. Finley 211 asks, any activity slash game that you're outrageously good at, like how I found out my friend is a top brawl stars player? Well, Finley, I used to be one of the top ranked priests on classic World of Warcraft for a while, and I was ranked in the top 1,500 in the world on the Sporical Quiz site.

Starting point is 00:04:52 And about 25 years ago, we had a team that played the first-person shooter tribes really, really well, and I forget our ranking, but it was pretty high. I can't really think of anything else that might have to do with video games. Menigato asks, I think I've heard the sound of pages being turned when listening to some episodes. So my question is, do you read the script on paper or on a screen? If it's on paper, do you keep each episode? And if so, would you ever publish a book with the scripts of the episodes?

Starting point is 00:05:19 If you're hearing pages being turned, I have no idea what you're hearing. Absolutely, no paper is involved in the production of this podcast. The scripts are written and read on Google Docs. Maybe you're hearing my chair or some other background noise, but it certainly is not paper. Kristen asks, I know you try to make encore episodes the least listen to episodes, but I'm curious how many fewer times they've been downloaded. Thank you, love your show. Well, Kristen, an episode's download count actually has nothing to do with whether it's selected for an encore episode nowadays. The process is almost totally random. When I run one, I just look for something interesting that was published at least one year ago. And the truth is, there isn't a whole lot of variance anymore in the first.

Starting point is 00:06:06 in episode downloads. There's some, but it isn't enough that I'd make decisions around it. Moreover, if I did use downloads as the metric for encore episodes, I would probably pick the most popular episodes, not less popular ones. Ralph Mures asks, I just listened to the encore episode, the never-ending Voyager mission. These probes have been flying through space since the 1970s. How come they survive in space for such a long time without any protection

Starting point is 00:06:33 against cosmic radiation and things like that? If you look at the Tesla that was sent into space in 2018, it's heavily disintegrated because of the extreme conditions in space. While Ralph, for starters, the Tesla that was sent into space to test the Falcon Heavy Rocket has not disintegrated. It would take millions of years for cosmic rays and micrometeorites to cause any level of disintegration. So the structure of the Voyager probes are fine.

Starting point is 00:07:02 The danger to any deep space probe is actually a very. in the electronics. A high-energy particle can strike a memory cell or a processor and flip a bit, corrupting data or causing a computer fault. The Voyager probes protect themselves by hardening their electronics, having some shielding, and having redundancy in their systems. Darren Brownass, you've mentioned before that you're unsure who the winners will be in AI. Now that we're seeing reports of companies like Uber burning through their entire annual AI budget in just four months? And critics arguing that firms like OpenAI and Anthropic can't actually afford their own compute costs? Do you think the current tokenomics model, where companies

Starting point is 00:07:42 charged by usage, but the underlying infrastructure requires massive ongoing debt, is fundamentally sustainable? Or are we looking at a structural bubble similar to what we saw in the dot-com crash? Darren, I have no idea what the end business model for AI companies will be. I'm not even sure what the AI industry is going to look like, or if there will even be dedicated and, you know, AI companies. Things are changing at a fast pace, and I don't even think AI companies know what the future holds. Not only are AI models getting more powerful, but they're also getting cheaper and lighter. It's now possible to run some LLMs on desktop computers. I do think we are in an AI bubble. And honestly, that is almost to be expected. Everyone can see the potential

Starting point is 00:08:26 of artificial intelligence, just like how in the past, everyone could see the economic potential of the internet and railroads. Lots of money is going into AI, just like money flowed into railroads and internet companies before. And during those bubbles, most of the railroads and internet companies failed. But the ones that survived became giants. The valuations AI companies are getting are not justified by the revenue they're bringing in or their profits, which at this point are non-existent. I'm not an investment expert, and this should not be considered investment advice, but it seems like there will be a correction at some point. I don't know when it will happen.

Starting point is 00:09:05 I don't know how big it will be. But it pretty much seems inevitable. Kevin O'Keeffe asks, So now I have two granddaughters, two years old and six months old, and I'm constantly thinking about their future. Of course, no one can predict what our world will look like, but many people are starting to make educated guesses.

Starting point is 00:09:22 I think you would agree that there's been a huge shift in terms of what types of jobs we will have 20 years from now. With all the research you've been doing regarding learning, where do you think the younger generation should start these days? Well, Kevin, it is quite literally impossible to make such a prediction. About 25% of the U.S. workforce today works in job categories that didn't even exist in the 1960 census. About 60% of jobs are in categories that didn't exist as early as 1940. Of the job categories that existed in 1960, only one has been complete.

Starting point is 00:09:59 eliminated. Elevator operator. There's no way someone in 1960 could have predicted jobs such as web designer, podcaster, cyber athlete, or hundreds of other modern jobs. One of my personal mottoes is that the ability to adapt is more important than your ability to plan. When the World Wide Web was introduced in the 90s, I was in the middle of things and we just had to learn as it evolved. When a new programming language comes out, you learn it by doing it, not by taking a class. And right now, everybody is figuring out AI learning as they go along. Future-proofing yourself isn't about learning any particular set of skills per se. It's the ability to learn and adapt to whatever change might happen in the future. Heather Swisher asks, my daughter asked me which

Starting point is 00:10:52 animals hibernate and why some animals don't. I have no idea. Well, Heather, there are different types of hibernation, and the word is often used to describe different sorts of behavior in animals which simply reduce their metabolism for periods of time. While cold and warm-blooded animals can both reduce their metabolism, only warm-blooded animals truly hibernate. Some animals hibernate annually, while others hibernate as needed when food supplies become low. Hybernation is a technique used by animals to survive periods of low food supply. and that's why it usually happens in colder climates when food is scarce in the winter. Animals like bears gorge themselves to build fat reserves so that they can then live off that

Starting point is 00:11:35 fat during the winter hibernation. And this might just be a topic worth going into more detail in a future episode. Jacob Felty asks, I've got a few questions. Do you have a favorite skyscraper and why? And did you get to visit the Old World Trade Center before 9-11? Well, Jacob, my favorite skyscraper, would it have to be Taipei 101. This is simply because I visited it very early in my travels,

Starting point is 00:12:01 and at the time I visited it was the world's tallest building. They also have a massive mass dampening ball at the top of the building designed to counteract movements during an earthquake, which is actually very cool to see. I did get to visit the World Trade Center. It was back in I think 1998. I took a business trip to New York, and I always took a day or two after meetings to go exploring.

Starting point is 00:12:24 I went to the World Trade Center. Trade Center, but I didn't go up to the top or anything. I just visited the lobby in the plaza outside. The final question comes from Govin Chetiar, who asks, in the past couple of years or so, how has AI impacted your daily life, if it has? Well, Govind, if I can't find a photo I took, or if there isn't a stock image that works that I can't use on Adobe, I'll use ChatGPT to make show artwork because it's cheap, it's fast, and I don't have to worry about rights. Another use of AI, but I'm not really sure if it's AI, is Grammarly. I've been using Grammarly for over 10 years, and I've used it on literally every episode of this podcast.

Starting point is 00:13:06 It's basically a glorified spell checker. All the writers have accounts on Grammarly as well. It now claims to be powered by AI, and I'm not sure how much of that is true or if it's just marketing hype. And I'm also not sure what the difference is between AI and just a good computer algorithm. But I've noticed that Grammarly now does a better job of correcting grammar than it did before, and it can also correct spelling in context for proper nouns, which is actually quite impressive. In everyday use, I basically use things like ChatGPT for a glorified search engine. For example, I had a question a few weeks ago about potato consumption in Europe from the 16th to 19th centuries.

Starting point is 00:13:46 ChatGPT was able to perform an analysis on it quickly and much faster than trying to search for papers that may have been published. on the subject. In fact, as I'm sure everyone has noticed, even if you do a search on a regular search engine, you're usually going to get some sort of AI generated answer at the top of the search results. That concludes this month's Q&A episode. If you want to leave a question for next month's show, you will have to join the Facebook group or the Discord server because that is where I get my questions from. I also want to remind everyone about the Everything Everywhere weekly podcast. It's a weekly recap of Everything Everywhere Daily episodes that Joel Hermans and I record every single week. It's available to all paid membership tiers on Patreon.

Starting point is 00:14:35 The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast, and links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you too can have it read in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Questions and Answers: Volume 46

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