SciShow Tangents - Bonus Backlog Bonanza - Ep. 1

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

This bonus episode was originally posted on Patreon on March 26, 2021 titled "Tangents Bonus Episode #1!"Original Patreon description: Hank, Sam, and Ceri answer your questions! Including: What happened to Chin Coins? Is there a scientific formula to a great joke? And how do non-newtonian fluids work? Featuring a snazzy new song by the one and only, Tuna!SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! And go to https://complexly.store/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on socials:Ceri: @ceriley.bsky.social@rhinoceri on InstagramSam: @im-sam-schultz.bsky.social@im_sam_schultz on InstagramHank: @hankgreen on X

Hello and welcome to our patron-only SciShow Tangents podcast, where Sam and Sari and I will answer questions from our patrons and also occasionally from other places. But I think right now we are loaded up with patron questions. So that's what we'll be doing today. How are you two doing? Good, it's the morning, which is weird. I know, we never do this in the morning. This is the earliest we've ever done it.

So contextually, I'm all fucked up. I'm not ready. I'm not ready. I'm not ready. Sam's in a terrible spot. He's just... Sari's got a bunch of rainbow flying cats on her shirt. Yeah, my friend Nicole Sweeney made me this shirt.

I have a very stressful day to day. So I'm using my college strategy of dressing fun to help me through. Put on fun clothes. Does that work for you? Sometimes. It sets an intention at the beginning of the day. But like I was telling Sam and Tuna before we started recording, I got two very panic inducing emails this morning. So I'm riding that anxiety, adrenaline rush of like,

well, I'll deal with that fire later. And then that's going to be the energy in this podcast. It's kind of frantic, sciency. Have you ever gotten an email from me that makes you feel that way? No. I have. How are you doing, Hank? I'm okay. I don't really look that often at how I'm doing. How are you doing, Hank? I'm OK.

I don't really look that often at how I'm doing. What do you mean? It seems like a dangerous game to check. You don't constantly do that and fret about your internal whatever? No, I usually just plow on through. I don't really think about me very much. It just doesn't seem necessary. I'm good.

Okay. We are going on spring break this week though. Orin's spring break is this week. Orin, my four year old has a spring break. He's gotta relax. His little life's probably really stressful. He's got a boss too. He's gotta do his homework.

Yeah, he has zero bosses. Good Lord. This morning he had a meltdown cause he didn't get to scramble the eggs. And I was like, well, the eggs are already scrambled. They can't unscramble eggs. That's literally a saying. And then he was like, but there's more eggs.

And I was like, I'm not gonna make more eggs just cause you didn't get to scramble them. You know what we did? Is we made some more eggs. Oh no. Oh no, you gotta lay down the law. Do you wanna write a poem real quick? It's gonna go like this.

I'm like, you'll start and then I'll add a rhyming line and then we'll go back and forth like that. So you do a line. And I will always, since I'm springing this on you, I will always be responsible for actually rhyming. Okay, I'm sweating now. We got some questions from our patrons. Gosh, patrons.

There's really only one I can come up with. And it's a weird one. It is, it is. They're like the male version of matrons, I guess, now that I'm thinking about it. That's an interesting observation. I don't want to write a poem anymore. Can we stop? I'm getting legitimately getting sweaty.

You're responsible for saying a sentence. Okay. I know, but I can't, it's hard. That's why I can't, you know. Okay. I have crack under pressure. Let's look at these questions then. We got some personal questions

and we got some science questions. Perfect. Let's start with a short personal question just to get in the groove of answering questions. How do non-Newtonian fluids work? Perfect. Thank you. Let's actually answer that one

because I didn't even try to research this one. Do you know off the top of your head? I mean, basically, so they work in different ways, I'm pretty sure. Like non-Newtonian fluids are just a fluid that doesn't behave in a pretty specific way, but it's like if something changes, is it always pressure? It changes the way that it behaves.

I think so. And so the traditional one is Oobleck, and basically what's happening is when it's under its own pressure, not very much, it behaves like a fluid, but if you add pressure to it, it kind of like forms a crystal structure and then it becomes a solid. And then if you let go not very much, it behaves like a fluid, but if you add pressure to it, it kind of like forms a crystal structure and then it becomes a solid. And then if you let go of the pressure,

it turns back into a liquid. So this happens with all things. Like if you add pressure to things, they change their state eventually. And if you decrease the pressure, like if you, you know, take water and you add pressure, eventually you will, well, water might be a weird example. In fact, it is, and it does not do this, but almost everything does. You take a liquid and you add pressure, eventually you will... Well, water might be a weird example. In fact, it is, and it does not do this.

But almost everything does. You take a liquid and you add pressure, eventually it will become a solid. And if you take a liquid and you decrease pressure, eventually it will become a gas, which does happen with water. But I don't know to what extent that is actually applicable to non-Newtonian fluids. So I don't know if I'm just talking out of my ass here.

But what I do know is if you put pressure, it forms a crystal structure and that crystal structure is solid. I think it has to do with viscosity. So like its ability to flow is what my understanding of non-Newtonian fluids is. So like, yes, if you compress anything, it'll turn into a solid. But it's like before that point, if you like squeeze water in your hand, it will not affect how water flows out of your hand.

And if you do that to juice or if you do that to soda, then those are all fluid, or if you do it to air. That's all water. That's all water, okay. There's not that, I mean, one of the things is, we forget about this, there are very few liquids at standard temperature and pressure. So there's very few liquids, like at, you know, standard temperature and pressure. So there's like water, alcohol, oils.

Okay, but then if you like expand to fluid, then air, right, is a fluid? Oh, air is a fluid, yeah, I guess. Air is also a Newtonian fluid. It's still gonna flow the same way. But then if you do like, if you do oobleck, or if you do ketchup, if you like move it or you squish it, then it'll flow differently than if it doesn't have.

Yeah. And I think that that is the difference. Ketchup is a non-Newtonian fluid. I'm pretty sure my friend George did a video for Ted talks about ketchup being a non-Newtonian fluid. I believe it. What? Why? What was he teaching us? Non-Newtonian fluid. Well, then I believe it. What? Why? It seems right to me.

Yeah. What was he teaching us? The non-Newtonian fluids. It's about how like why ketchup, like in the bottle as like a clumpy, and it was a long time ago that I watched this video, so I won't be able to describe it good, but when you shake the ketchup,

then like its flow rate changes. So because you can add that pressure of like shaking, which air squishes up into it and then it flows better. Basically, there's a Ted talk you need to watch. Yeah. Type in ketchup non-Newtonian fluid. We'll find a link to it. And you'll have all of your questions answered.

Uh, 9.30 AM, sorry, I cannot answer your questions. You did your best, but. Thank you. But didn't do good. No. Thank you you cannot answer your question. You did your best, but. Thank you. But didn't do good. No. Thank you to Caitlin for that question. I'm sorry that we did not do it justice.

We got, we're gonna do better on the next one. Sam, let's do a personal question. Let's answer a burning question that a lot of people have asked us. What happened to chin coins? Miss Brock asked us this question. Okay. What happened to chin?

So I don't know. We were like, Stefan, you abandoned us. How can we take on? We talked for a full year about how he's gonna win this prize. He wins the prize and we're like, well, if you're not gonna stick with us, then you're trash. Now what happened to Chin coins? Well, okay.

So- It's hard to explain when he's not there. That's the main thing We are soon going to start having guests on semi frequently Mm-hmm, and I just could foresee a lot of situations where it was weird that they were called chin coins People would be asking a lot of questions We wouldn't necessarily have have answers for and Hank bucks is much more self-explanatory because you're Hank. It's true, but at the same time,

people would be like, oh, what a quirky podcast. They like chins a lot. Yeah, that's true. I didn't think about that. Stefan's last name being a body part is also a little bit confusing. Chins, I have found out recently, are uniquely unique to humans.

So, uniquely unique. I feel bad about it. I mean, I kept trying, I was supposed to write an explanation for why we got rid of them, but I just never did it. Because you felt so bad. That was part of it. Spend time like thinking about stuff

and feeling bad about it. And God bless Devin. I miss him every day of my life. I talk to him every day of my life too, but still. So yeah, I mean, in my head, it was for the guest thing, just to simplify, kind of lightly reboot the show. Clean slate. We'll find some way to honor him. We will. And by which I mean, we're probably gonna forget about that. You guys gotta let us forget about it though, please.

Okay, you wanna do another science question now? Sure. Sari, is there a scientific formula to a great joke asked by Emma? Well, given that I'm not very funny, I wouldn't know this from experience, but I did look into the philosophy and psychology of humor because a bunch of nerds, being nerds throughout history,

are like, why do we think things are funny? Because it is so bizarre. It's so strange. It's like, here's what's gonna happen. You're gonna hear something that you didn't expect and then you're gonna make this noise. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Like that's not okay, that's not normal.

Nothing else does that. That is all, in addition to chins, the one other thing that is unique about humans. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I think animals are delighted by things that they aren't expecting. Like dogs and cats and stuff, their eyes light up when something wild happens.

There do seem to be laugh responses in primates, but they're not like our laughs and they don't make the dumb noise we make. Anyway, why do we make the dumb noise? So there are three theories that have kind of been unified into a fourth. So the relief theory is laughter is tension relief. So like nothing bad happened, We made it out just fine.

Awkward or nervous laughter falls into this category where it's like, I don't know what to do right now, so I'm just going to make this noise and ha ha ha ha. Everything will be fine. The second theory is the superiority theory. So this is schadenfreude or laughing at other people's expense. So like, it didn't happen to me, you fell on your face. I'm gonna laugh at that because I have not fallen on my face and therefore this is funny.

Yeah, that works for me except that like sometimes I fall down and I think it's hilarious. And so that one is incongruity theory, which is the unexpected happened. And that is sort of why anything random you can think of is funny. So like a joke that you construct with a punchline that is like all those, all those like kid jokes,

like why did the chicken cross the road? Because it farted, like that's funny because it doesn't connect in any logical way. Yeah, yeah. I mean, most jokes take that form. Catherine, I laughed so hard and she was so mad at me recently picked up a bottle of water and went to pour it in a cup ostensibly

and poured it onto her salad. And I was like fucking lost it. And she's like, and it had been like a rough day, so like it was tense and she was distracted because we had just like disciplined our son because he's a little jerk right now and he's yelling at me about eggs. And I just like fell onto my knees.

It was so funny. And she was like, it's not funny. I poured water all over my salad. So what you just described with Katherine and her salad is like part of the unifying theory that I found, which is the benign violations theory. So something that is bad or rude or a violation of some norm, like you don't pour water on salad,

but it's relatively harmless. To the person that it's relatively harmless to, it's hilarious. But then if someone else considers it harmful or bad or sad, then it's not funny to them. And that explains a lot of like why I might find something funny that someone else doesn't. Right, it's why Catherine did not find it funny

that she had poured a bunch of water on her salad. Yeah, it was not harmless to her, but it was harmless to you and therefore hilarious. Oh crap. Oh, that's not empathetic. That's not good husbanding. Did she eat it anyway? Yeah, yeah, we figured it out.

But yeah, then there are a lot of like weird social elements to it. Like we laugh to show that we're in an in-group with other people because we also find the same things funny. Right. It's when it's yeah, it's like when later on in this podcast where I will bring up a thing that we already talked about and it won't be that it won't be like that interesting or funny, but because we it's referencing a thing that already happened,

it will be funny for some reason. Yeah, and I feel like that's a lot of meme humor is just like, oh, I get this. Like every TikTok, yeah. Yeah, it assembles pieces of knowledge that I didn't think were useful, and that's fun. Or didn't think were related, which is again, a bit of a violation.

I like that because it's like a violation can be a lot of different things and it doesn't have to be bad it's just a violation of an expectation or of a norm and Yeah, anyway, so that's the scientific formula for a joke violate something Necessarily in a bad way Ideally in a good way ideally in a good way. Let's do another personal question What was the worst episode idea? Ideally in a good way. Ideally in a good way. Let's do another personal question.

What was the worst episode idea? Mrs. Brock also asked this one. Mrs. Brock really was putting our feet to the fire. Brock wants to get the real dirt. I think our best episode idea was piss. I think that's a pretty, that one is definitely up there. That's just recency bias.

Oh God. Yeah, but come on. Yeah, it is the most recent one we did. I don't remember ones that I thought were particularly bad, but there were some that were really hard. Like holes, I remember being weirdly hard. It just couldn't come up with any good science holes. I don't know, we usually pull it out in the end,

I feel like though. We do okay. I feel like our worst ideas. I don't know, we usually pull it out in the end, I feel like though. We do okay. I feel like our worst idea is we just haven't done, because we were like, there's no way we're gonna find four facts about nipples or something like that. And like have them all be different and compelling and things like that.

Yeah, those nipples are pretty straightforward. Time, I remember time being one that when it was over, I was like, I don't feel good about that one. Not a bad episode idea necessarily. Just... It's hard. Yeah, I think the harder episodes are where we spend so much time defining it. And like, that's part of the fun of tangents is like figuring out what exactly we're talking about and how all our topics mesh together by those definitions.

But if we get two in the weeds, then we're just like talking science and we forget to goof because we're like, no, what actually is a whole? What actually is time? And how are we keeping track of it? And it's all fake. And then we get overwhelmed instead of like goofy.

There are some things where it's the most fun if you treat it the sort of like most sort of, it's almost like we're abusing the topic. We're saying like, yeah, but what are you? What are you? And like really interrogating it. And that can be really fun, but with some things, it's kind of like with time, it's kind of not,

cause it's like, oh, now I feel weird. What is time though? We're all gonna die though, at least like that. We know that. Here though, at least. Like that, we know that. Here's another science question. How do we know what the Milky Way really looks like since we are inside it? I feel like it would be like knowing

what a large building looks like when you're stuck inside just one of the rooms, asks Derek Morelli. It would be like that if you could see through the building. So if all the walls were transparent and you also aren't on the edge, you're a little bit on the inside. I love this, I like the metaphor now.

There's a, you're inside of a big building and you're sort of like, you're not at the window, but it's entirely transparent building. You're not at the window, you're like a few rooms in, but then on the other side, there's like a whole like 400 rooms in the other direction. So you can look this way and be like, okay, well I can see everything that's between me

and the edge of the building. And then you can look through the building in the other way and it's like a bunch of stuff and you can't see everything because there's so much stuff, but you can almost, not the whole building, but for some of the building, you can actually see all the way through. So you can get a kind of good idea of what the building is like from that perspective.

And just the fact that you can't see through that part of the building means there's more building there. Yes. So you can make that. I did address the metaphor at the end. And my idea was, it's like being in a building, but you can look out the window and see other buildings, and then you can look in the reflections of those buildings

to see the building that you're in. And then maybe you can like peek up and down and like see a little bit, oh, I'm this far off the ground. And it looks like maybe there's this much above me. So I'm probably on like this floor. Yeah, it is also very helpful to be able to see other buildings and be like, ah,

well, that's what those look like. This building must be made out of the same stuff roughly as the building I'm in. Okay, so one thing is that I'm the dumb guy who didn't know that there wasn't a picture of the Milky Way. Seems like maybe we had one, but apparently not. No, we can't get out.

Can't get out. How long would it have to go away from us before we could get a picture of it forever? A very, very, very, very, very long time. Even if we shoot it out the thin side? Yeah. Well, we'd have to shoot it up because we don't want to take an edge on picture. No.

That's boring. So you want to do upper diagonal and either way you're talking, I don't know, thousands of light years, tens of thousands of light years, something like that. Do we have something going out there right now to do it? No. Eventually? No. No. No. We're choosing much closer targets,

like within the Milky Way, I think, to send probes and stuff to. Okay, fair enough. So the Milky Way is a thousand light years thick. Where are we in it? Are we on the, right in the middle? No, we're on an arm pretty far out to the edge. But like thickness wise.

Oh, I don't know how, I have no idea. In the middle, I assumed. Well, anyway, here's some of the ways we know what it looks like. Okay. So the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, which is like a flat disc with arms coming out of it. And there are also elliptical galaxies,

which are like big blobs kind of, I think. And there are irregular galaxies, which are just all kind of screwing in a bunch of different ways. Most galaxies we find are spiral galaxies, right? Like 70% of them. And I think that fact and looking at those has helped us figure out what ours looks like from making guesses and observations. But one way that we're pretty sure we're in a spiral galaxy is what we talked about a little bit, is the Milky Way itself, what we're named after, because that's where you're looking through

the thickest part, right? Of the disk that we're in. But then we mapped it out, and this part gets a little bit hard for me, but we can look at the radiation that's coming at us from space, and we can look at the phase shift, is that what it's called? Like the blue-red shift,

and figure out which direction it's coming from, which direction it's moving, how the star it came from was orbiting, and we can use all that information and put it together to figure out how far away the farthest stars are, which direction they're rotating around the center of the galaxy. And I think that's kind of how we know how many arms there are and stuff like that, which

I think at this point we do. But then also we just look at other spiral galaxies and compare it to what we observe in our galaxy. And there's like colors we can observe or like dust composition we can observe that we recognize in our in our own galaxy. And we can tell how far away stars are and so then we can tell that we are in a spiral galaxy and not an elliptical galaxy by sort of mapping out those stars and seeing that they exist in these bands. So we can have we have a pretty good idea of what the galaxy looks like,

especially our side, but it is it's amazing when you like you can go look at maps of the Milky Way. We've done like pretty extensive surveys at this point. And sometimes people will be like, how do we not know how many stars are in the Milky Way? Like, just count. That's how I felt. Just count. Like, it would take a long time, but like divide it up and like have a bunch of people do it together. But you can't see them all. Like, they are all overlapping each other in our galaxy surveys. When you get to a lot of the interior of the galaxy, which is where most of the stars are, you

know, there's a bunch behind a bunch behind a bunch behind a bunch. It's wild. You want to know a weird, weird, weird, weird science fact that I heard from Henry Reich of Minute Physics, if the galaxy, if the universe was infinitely old, the nighttime would be bright. Because if the galaxy is infinitely big, and it was infinitely old, all of the light from all of the stars would get to us. And they combined would be as bright as the sun. So there's still light from stars that are trying to get that still coming towards us. Yeah, like the only reason nighttime is dark is because the all the stars haven't had time for their light to get to us. If it's an infinitely big universe, which it seems to be.

Does the light ever dissipate? Would the light from the farthest star away from us dissipate eventually? Or would it hit us? There isn't enough stuff to stop it. Like there are gas clouds that can stop some light, but there's just not enough of that. I don't know if it would be as warm. Well, I don't know why it wouldn't be as warm

if it was as bright, I guess. Well, different radiations are different, but yeah. Plants would love it. They'd be having the time of their damn life. It'd probably be way too hot, man. Can I ask one from Luke Richardson? This is, what was the scientific fact that hooked you into what you do now?

I don't know that I had a the scientific fact, but I did have a very, I don't know, nerdy childhood. I don't know, I've always been super into technology and computers, but I remember my dad took me out to see some working scientists. They were ecologists, because my dad worked for the Nature Conservancy, and he took me out to walk around and they were studying gopher tortoises or something. And what struck me was how it was work. Because up until that point, it had been magic. scientists found out that the dinosaurs got destroyed by an asteroid and

scientists found out that were like that were made out of cells and So you sort of think of it in these in terms of these big breakthroughs but the reality that science is just like oh these are like workers they're like they they like trudge around and they dig and they have shovels and they have, they also have like computers and fancy hard drives that contain hundreds of megabytes,

which was very impressive at the time. But like, you know, they're grizzled leathery skinned people out there like doing the research that matters. And I was like, oh, that's a thing people do instead of it's like a sort of like body of knowledge that exists. But it's clear now to me as a person who has been alive for four decades,

there's just so much more we know now that we didn't know then. But at that point in my life, everything that we knew for the most part was known before I was born. It was certainly known before I was interested in science because that was a total of four years or something. So the fact that it's not like this static body

of knowledge, but that it is a thing that lots of people do and can be drudgery sometimes, but that that is a thing that lots of people do and is can be, uh, like drudgery sometimes, but that that's how you find out information that nobody knows the answer to was certainly not an individual fact, but I think that was, uh, really powerful for me. Can I ask you a question that might sound rude, but it's not supposed to be. Okay, please. Why did you decide to talk about it instead of do it? Well, I wanted to do it, but then I realized

that the thing that I liked most at school was when my friends were having a really hard time and I helped them. And I mean, as just discussed, science can be pretty boring drudge work, especially when you're just like a lab tech, which is, if I didn't go get a PhD, that was pretty much the future.

There were certainly other, like, I would have had a different career path and I'm sure I would have found satisfaction and joy in it. But then you wouldn't have known me. Yeah, but then I would have, yeah. And I was trying to, like, when I moved to Montana, I was trying to get lab jobs and there just weren't any. That was part of it.

The job that I got out of college was just so, it wasn't that the work was that boring, though it was, it was quality control, it was the same, you know. It was the fungus thing you were doing? Yeah, same like 12 steps over and over again every day. But I was the only person in the lab. You know, I had to focus too much

that I couldn't like even listen to an audio book. I was just alone. That sounds really horrible. And for nine or, for eight or nine hours a day counting spots. Weren't you friends with some possums or raccoons or something? Armadillos. Oh, okay. That's not nothing? Yes.

Yeah, I had them. They weren't always around though. Sari, what was the scientific fact that hooked you into what you do now? I feel like it was similar. The path from lab work to science communication was very, very similar where I didn't even have armadillo friends. I just had bacteria all around me and cell cultures in cow blood. And so it was truly just like me pipetting things and then being like, okay, I'm going

to grow you bacteria and now I'm gonna murder you to take your DNA and just like constant cycles of that in lab work that made me realize that it was not for me. But I think what got me, the twofold thing that got me into science was watching crime TV shows. I was very into forensics and like the idea that you could know things like like not by deduction, but by measuring, like, oh, we can like measure fingerprints and measure blood spatter and measure DNA

and compare those things. And I didn't quite understand it because all TV shows are kind of hand wavy. But then when I took my first biology class in either seventh or eighth grade, I also do not store long-term memories very good. My teacher was really good and he used biology to draw a lot of connections between things. He always had a time at the end of the class where we could either say two different topics and he would connect them using biology or ask a random question and he would take a stab at answering it using what he knew about biology. And that was really fun for me because it solidified that biology

specifically because that became my favorite thing about science could be used to explain so many things and you can trace so many questions back to answers about the molecules in us. So learning about DNA and learning about our metabolic pathways and learning about our organ systems can explain why skincare products work or why disease works or why... Brain is a whole separate thing. But I think I always was a question asking kid

and realizing that by understanding microscopic stuff, I could answer more questions more deeply and never have to take anything for granted. Why didn't you become a crime scene investigator? I thought about it. That's one of the places I applied when I moved to Missoula. Whoa. There was nothing available.

I still consider it sometimes in like imagining the alternate versions of myself. In applying to college and undergrad, I got into a forensic science program at a university and then decided not to go. I think I was calloused in a way in high school where I didn't know myself well enough that I was like,

oh, I could go in and look at dead bodies and autopsy them and like handle all these fluids and like understand them. And I think now I'm much softer and I think it'd be harder for me to depersonalize the work. And so I can see that being hard. I don't know, this is like not getting, this is not goofy anymore.

This is a deep introspection onto why I'm not a forensic scientist. That's cool. I didn't know that, that that was something you considered as a potential future. You guys could have been a team, a crime solving team. Oh, wow.

I guess I would have been your assistant because I never was even considering going to forensic science program. I was just like, I want to wash your glassware. Pay me minimum wage, please, someone. Well, thank you for joining us for this inaugural episode of the SciShow Tangents Patreon podcast. Thank you for supporting us on Patreon.

We're happy to, oh, Tuna's got a cat. Oh, Tuna's got attacked by a cat. I didn't even know you had a cat. I've only had it for like two days, so. What the hell? Congratulations. Thank you. He's cute.

We'll see you on our next episode of Tangents, which will be out shortly, and then our next episode of the Patreon podcast, which will be out next month. Thank you, Sam, thank you, Sarah, thank you, Tuna. Thank you, Hank. Have a lovely day. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Music