SciShow Tangents - Computers

Episode Date: March 8, 2022

Back in my day, a computer was a computer: It was big, tan, and was plugged into your living room wall. But now we've got computer cars, computer phones, even computer lightbulbs! And that's great! But I think we better keep an eye on them all, just in case...Head to https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley and Tom Mosner for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents. It's a lightly competitive knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green, and joining me this week, as always, is science expert reilly hello and our resident everyman sam schultz hello so all three of us are nerds in one way or another and i am the old one and sari is the young one but look it's the year 2022 so we all we all had computers uh growing up when am I? You're the middle one. Oh, okay. I thought I would be the cool one. No.

No, none of us are cool. That's not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about computers and our very first computers. Do you remember your first computer? I could not tell you the model of it, but it was an old- It wasn't a big enough deal. They were just around. Well, I was too young, I think, because it was when my dad was in grad school. So it was when we still lived in New Jersey. My dad was going to Cornell in Ithaca, New York, and we'd commute

back and forth. When he wasn't writing his dissertation, I would play Candyland on the computer. I think it was like an old Apple computer. And it got to the point where I'd played this Candyland computer game so many times. And the computer was so slow that I would already know where to click on the next screen to advance the story. So there was a mouse. Okay. So I'm getting some information here. There was a mouse.

There was a monitor. There was a keyboard. There was a... It was color, I imagine. Yes, it was color. mouse. Okay, so I'm getting some information here. Yes, there was a mouse. There was a monitor. There was a keyboard. There was a... It was color, I imagine. Yes, it was color. Yeah, okay. And it was like a tan. Spring chicken.

Tan-ish, like classic. They were all tan back then. That was the hip color. Everybody wanted it to be tan. All right, so that makes me think that I'm old. Sam? Mine, I don't necessarily remember. I do remember getting our first computer it was tan as well i remember getting the internet more more vividly because i remember going to nickelodeon.com

and having to wait all an entire night for one of the games to load up all right and it was two dogs and you click on one and one dog would smell the other dog's butt. And then think of like what the butt smelled like. It would think of like flowers or think of like a hamburger. Then they would turn around and you click it and they would smell the other dog's butt. And I waited all night for it. And it's one of the earliest like huge disappointments of my life as well. But I don't remember. That was it?

Like that was the whole thing? That was the whole game. Yeah. Back and forth butt sniffing Nickelodeon dogs. And you didn't do anything with the information that you got? No. It was just an enjoyment. I remember a lot of my computers.

I remember the first one that was in our house. I remember the first one that I got. They were all tan. I was very into the idea that I was going to be some kind of cool cyber person like a hacker or something yeah totally and like i did a little like i did a little bit of um i i achieved through various means access to places that i shouldn't have but not in like cute cool like a cybertron hackers with angelina Jolie kind of ways. I did hack the website of the Bloodhound Gang once.

That was my crowning achievement. I put a little Marvin the Martian in one of their images. That's what I would do. As long as the website, I don't think they ever noticed. Honestly. That's great. Yeah, that's what I would do. I would put Marvin the Martian inside of people's images.

This turned into a conversation I did not mean for it to be um i think the statute of limitations is up on hacking the bloodhound gang's website but that was well into my teens when that was going on when i was a little kid we had apple 2e and then i had like this like just monster compact that you could fit like a whole loaf of bread in. It was just like lots of space inside it. A whole loaf of bread. Like you could open it up and insert like a human child inside. It was so big. Even warm in there. A little incubator.

A little pokey maybe, but other than that, it's a nice little house. You could barely fit a crouton in. Probably not even. They filled all that space up with useful stuff. Where are we going to fit a crouton in. Probably not even. They filled all that space up with useful stuff. Where are we going to put our croutons, Sari? I don't know. I'm going to put one in my mouth. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic.

Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Sari. If I ask two plus two, you say four, and that's true, whether you just knew or you counted through. So if computers compute and you can do a square root, it's hard to refute that you're a computer to boot. But this podcast isn't about you or me, that we can calculate three times three. Instead, let us focus on technology that does operations in a logical spree. So there's desktops and laptops in the typical hall, but look at networks

and smartphones and kiosks at malls. If we were to do a catch-all roll call, we'd find devices both massive and small. So what is a computer? The constant refrain? Well, you can't run Pokemon in your brain. Although to a machine, our thoughts seem so arcane. So I hate to default to it's not my domain. But Sam, Hank and I will debate and then move on with the episode, I guess. Once again.

Once again. Yeah. I really, I thought about saying it and i was like i'm not gonna be that guy i'm not gonna be a game guy because i'll never hear the end of it the topic for the day is computers uh and we what and yes what what is a computer like that i don't know man what where do you draw the line this is like micro controllers could you really not do pokemon in your brain i feel like exactly like i can sort of think through pokemon for sure what's the difference if i played it a lot yeah you could basically play that shoots and ladders game in your brain because you knew exactly where to click all the time candyland i thought you were talking to sam i had no idea you said something so unspecific

yeah yeah but your brain can't really generate a random encounter i guess it can that's a dream yeah that's every moment of my life yeah there are definitely differences between computers and brains but they do do a lot of the same things i don't know when you ask like you can calculate what three times three is i was like you know what i can't like i can picture three threes and i can count them and like that's probably not how computers are doing it but i'm doing the same thing your brain can generate a random encounter to communicate to someone else's brain right computers have a hard time generating true randomness too they have to sort of look to nature a little bit to find it so what who knows man who knows you're supposed to know what is it okay i i kind of covered in

my poem i was hoping to avoid uh responsibility but alas, this is my segment. Sam has made you do it. So I think in a lot of cases, if you're using the word computer nowadays, you mean a digital machine that runs on electricity that can be programmed to do things. things and whether that's like computation like doing mathematical problems or finding probabilities or like picking out relevant data statistically significant data in a massive amount of it like SETI does or do like logical operations that it takes to like run a program so if this then that that's as far as in programming i got i took an intro python class and then was like ah i've i've programmed a room now i understand what that is i don't need to understand how to do it yeah and so like a computer system so a computer is like

what we think of as like the brain equivalent as as far as I can tell. And then a computer system is where you start including like the peripheral stuff. So like the hardware and operating system, which is like software and like the accessories to it. or monitor. Those aren't necessarily the core computer doing the calculations or running the programs, but they are devices that help you interface with it. And there's a lot of little computers everywhere. I don't know if they count. Is there a computer in my remote control? Kind of. The clear line in my head is things that processing or like we put an input and then they do something. That is definitely a computer. So like all the like water treatment machines or electrical grids or airplane computers or car computers to some extent. Apps and phones like smartphones. But that's weird because like a phone phone an old-timey phone i wouldn't

call that as a computer not a computer no not a computer no doesn't do enough thinking i i feel like i know what the etymology of the word computer is though yeah as uh i think it was originally a person who did computations oh not a guy named computer like in ancient rome or something those are like a job yeah but i guess I don't know where compute comes from. So there's that. Yeah, so computer, it does come from compute. It was first used in 1613 in a book by Richard Braithwaite as a job title. And the word compute comes from like the root word com, which means with or together.

And then from putare in Latin, which means to reckon or to prune i guess like to reckon like the the the numbers yeah to like get the numbers to agree with each other yeah so it's like you get all the numbers and then you you put them together or you take some out and that's competing basically how does all those numbers make me be able to see you on my screen right now? Oh, gosh. That's our... Oh, jeez. Why don't we make my friend Mario come in and jump around for me?

How does that happen? That's all of computer science. And nobody understands all of it. And altogether, everybody together does understand enough pieces of it to make Mario occur. Like we're one giant computer of many brains. That's right. Yes. We are definitely an organizational species.

It's like, have you ever done that writing exercise? I had to do it in high school and I was resentful for it. But how would you write a paragraph about a shoe and break it down to like all its component parts or like write a paragraph about how to make a sandwich? But you can't just say like get the bread because then where do you get the bread from? Like that's a good way in my brain to like trace back these questions. It's like, okay, if you want to figure out how anyone got these videos on the screen, what is like square one? Which is how do you get color into a pixel? And maybe that's not even square one.

Like that's probably like step 10. How do you build a damn pixel? What is a pixel even? Yeah. You got to start with like, okay, so everything's based on yes and no's. You either have something or nothing. So everything's based on yes and no's. You either have something or nothing. And then from just the signal of something or nothing, you can build other numbers.

So you can build twos and fives and eight hundreds and all of that. And then you can also, with those ones and zeros, you can build text. And then with all that text, you can build languages that actually interface with the computer itself, the machine language or whatever. and then it's very slow and it's very it's a lot of work and intro to computer science is like i thought i was going to learn how to compute program computers but really i'm learning how fucking everything works that's your short answer sam is you don't want to know but if you do want to know it's. But if you do want to know, it's like, think. If you do want to know, at brilliant.org slash SciShow, you could take some computer science classes. You can learn all about that. All right, everybody, I got a game for you that I would like to play. It's called computers. So there's a lot of creativity and ingenuity that's gone into the

creation of computers and all of the amazing computer-related technology. But even more creativity and ingenuity has gone into naming all of the various parts of the computer experience. There's, for example, Kerberos, the authentication system that's named for Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell from Greek mythology. So today, we're going to play a round of the scientific definition where I present to you a word that is related to computers and you will have to guess what it means and whoever gets closer to the actual definition will get a point as judged by me.

Do you understand the rules of the game? Yeah. Okay. Well, our first word, word number one is Okay, well, our first word, word number one, is blob. Oh, man. When you said Kerberos, I was like, I used one of those in college. I got really excited. You might get one of these. Any ideas, Sam? We just got to tell you what it does. There's an infinite amount of this shit.

Yeah, well, just give me some computer-y thing. Just look at a computer and be like, what do you it's a jerk binary library of bits it's a it's a filing system it's a binary library of bits a filing system what do you guys wow that was fantastic i would believe you if i didn't know that that was wrong. But I don't know what the right answer is. Okay, well. I'm going to guess like it's an earlier version of cloud storage. Oh, that's a good guess.

Like, oh, you just throw it in the blob. Put it in the blob. And then you like suss it out later. You deal with it later on. It's all mooshed up in there, though. You got to really reach in and get it. I like both of these answers, and they are both close to the actual answer but the sari is definitely not closer than sam because blob stands for binary large object wow and it is a way of storing data isn't it all the way of storing data really kind of it's a type of type of data that stores binary data versus letters and numbers. So you were right

about that. And it's compressed into a database and blobs are often used to store multimedia, like images or video or audio. So they can require a lot of space compared to other types of data. So one example would be you would use a blob in a photo album and the database would store the images as a blob and the photo as a string of actual words. So you have the blob is all of the binary data. I'm so impressed. I didn't think it was going to be an actual acronym. I take it back that I may now me making fun to say I'm going to get an egg on my face is on record. Well, you have a chance to redeem yourself because the next word is smurf. What's a smurf?

I'm going to say a smurf feels like, because it's a humanoid creature, it's like something to do with the user of a computer. So I'm going to say a smurf is like, not a noob, but like someone who cleans up programs. So like, there's a lot of like work that goes into programming but like mine were always really bad and bloated and like there are ways to do it more efficiently and it's like bring in the smurfs and then the smurf is the guy or girl or whoever the person who goes in and is like you could have done this way better and then makes it nice and then it's like here this is ready to go smurfurf is a little computer helper. So is a guy or is it a person?

Yeah. It's a human being. Okay. I mean, I know in gaming, smurfing is when somebody who's really good at a game will start a new account and they're really, and so they can like beat people really easily. So maybe it has anything to do with like a fake user of something, like a fake account you set up to get some kind of, I don't know,

extra permissions to do something. Like a fake account of some sort. That's where I'm going to leave it. I mean, Sam, fantastic again. I mean, not spot on, but certainly more so than Sari. So a smurf is a kind of attack. It's a denial of service attack so

dos attacks are when lots of different queries are made to a single server all at once to overwhelm the server so that like can no longer do its job and a smurf attack is a specific kind of of denial of service attack where the attacker spoofs the target server's ip address so it pretends to be the server that it's attacking. And then it sends out a bunch of requests to the rest of the network that is connected to that server. And it says, hey, I need information. And then all of the rest of the world then immediately replies back to the server, thinking that the server just asked for information. And so it's a way of having one person, instead of a bunch of people doing a DOS attack, you have one person who can do the DOS attack by making a bunch of people think

that they should talk to the server all at once. So the idea is that this like, lots of tiny little things overwhelming a bigger thing. And luckily, Smurf attacks in the 90s, they were a big deal, but then we figured out ways to get around them and not have them be so much of a thing anymore. right round number three you have the word demon what is a demon i see this one everywhere but i have no it's a male demon send back to you and it's like you

fucked up buddy it's some kind of like oh. Maybe because it's like you sent your email to somewhere it doesn't exist and it doesn't belong like hell. So it's some kind of like guardian of this phantom zone that pushes stuff back and is like, it's like a police officer for email and for other things. The email police officer. Okay. You should have let me go first because I would have gotten this even more wrong. Probably I would have just gone off in a direction because I forgot that male demons were a thing. Instead of a policeman, I want to give a substantially different answer so Hank can decide between them. I'm going to guess that it's like the keeper of emails.

It's like the platform on which emails are sent back and forth is a demon. So it's rather than being the guy that's like, no, no, no, this failed to send. It's like the train tracks or something. Yeah, it's like a train track or like the river sticks or whatever. It's like, I'm going to ferry your emails back and forth. And then sometimes it's like, oh, this one's bad. Back to the other shore.

Ding dong. This is a tough one because neither of you are quite correct. You're both close. But I think I'm going to I'm trying to play this as level as I can. I think I'm going to go to Sam because he said specifically that it was the police officer sort of hanging around in the background. And that is specifically what a demon is. It is a computer program and it doesn't have to do with doesn't have to be a mail thing, but obviously there is one for email. It is just a computer program that is always running in the background that is ready to be called upon if needed.

So it just like hangs out. And obviously like there is one of these running on email servers, but there could also be a program that monitors network activity and detects any suspicious communication. And while people sometimes think that this name is an acronym, there's been sort of a backronym created where people were like, this must be for a disk and execution monitor. It's actually a weirder origin than that. Maxwell's Demon of Physics and Thermodynamics is a thought experiment featuring demons sorting the movement of particles. And the people who created the first background computers were into that and thought that these things were related in some way. Nerds all the way down through the ages. All right, round number four.

Sari, it's your last chance to get a point. This word is picnic. A picnic is a person. Tell me what a picnic is. Oh, another hint. I'm going to guess that it's a person who, like Yogi Bear,

boards, or it goes, I forget, I stepped in it because Sam actually knows what Yogi Bear does. You don't know anything about Yogi Bear, and I'm just running through all the shit in my head that Yogi Bear does. And I know you're going to be wrong. I'm going to be wrong. He says, hey, boo-boo, let's get a picnic basket.

That's right. That's exactly what he does. And so it's a person who packages up files to then deliver to a person who then purchases the files. So it's like the last step in a

production process where you're like ah the picnic i gotta go to the picnic man thank you very much for my picnic okay he baskets up all the files at the end of the process to make sure that they're all delivered to the customer yeah based on as well the yogi bear symbology maybe some kind of like high value target of some kind of hacking operation or something like that he is the basket that you are trying to take and you are yogi bear i like that i'm gonna give that one to sari you were both pretty far off uh but the but but i think that sari was a little closer because you did use the word when you did a fake acronym. You used in, which is the right word for the second letter of picnic.

Picnic stands for problem in chair, not in computer. Oh, human error. Yeah, this is a it's a it's a IT support error message that is used derogatorily. A used um derogatorily derogatorily there are a few others of these um so there's another error message called the pebcac which stands for problem exists between computer and keyboard there's also the id10t error which uh if you just type it out it spells idiot people who like who know a lot about computers like to be mean to people who don't know a lot about computers. There is that, but there's also, it's just, it is a common frustration, you know?

Yeah. A lot of the ways that we communicate are meant to be inside of a group and they should not be broadcasted too far outside of the group. We just live in a world where that's very difficult to manage these days. Because of computers. All right.

Well, that means that Sam got three points, Sari got one, but only barely. Next, we're going to take a short break. Then it'll be time for the Fact Off. Welcome back, everybody.

It's time for the Fact Off. Our panelists have brought in science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they have presented their facts, I will judge them and award Hank Bucks to the one that I think will make the better TikTok video. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question for you. Here it is. When you picture a computer,

you probably picture metal or plastic shell with a bunch of like wires and silicon inside. But liquid computers are a thing. Entirely liquid computers can carry signals, turn on machines, do math, map the best path through a maze, or act as a robot brain. Liquid robot brains can, for example, use chemical reactions to

create a colored product that is then read by a sensor to help the robot navigate. In the history of liquid computers, when was the emergence of liquid robot brains? 20? 20. 20. 20.

Ooh, interesting. Okay. I'm going to guess 2017. Sari, coming in with a win and gets to decide who goes first. It was 2003. Whoa, that's earlier than I thought. I'll go first. I like my facts this week,

as opposed to all the other weeks, right? I know for a fact that the three of us all spend lots of time at our computers, whether handheld smartphones or laptops or what have you, tippity-tapping away and sharing our thoughts with other people over the internet like it's one giant bulletin board. And a lot of people do. But obviously, it wasn't always this easy. Back in the 1950s and 60s, we were before the days of personal computers. They were bulky, expensive machines that were mostly tucked away in research institutions and tech companies and seen as signs of money or power or other ivory tower things. They were mostly used by one person to run one program at a time. And a main way to store data was magnetic core memory, which was like a tiny crafting project.

It was a grid of wires with tiny donuts of a ceramic magnetic material called ferrite strung onto them. And those ferrite donuts could be magnetized and read to be either a one or a zero, which are the basis of computer streak, as we talked about. And I'm kind of going on a tangent within my fact, but I love talking about core memory

because it's so delicate and was often manufactured by women with microscopes or other tools because it was almost like sewing or other fabric work. But anyway, in 1973, some folks in Berkeley, California, tried an experiment putting a computer in a record store that acted as a kind of technological bulletin board. They called it community memory, and it was fairly straightforward. You could pay a quarter or so to add a message, or you could read any messages for free. And all of these were stored on magnetic core memory. So it's related. Some of their intentions were to make computers more accessible, decentralized, and user-friendly. So what

better way to do that than giving people a chance to broadcast their thoughts to the world? Hindsight is 20-20, of course, but from what I can tell at the time, they were surprised that people took so quickly to community memory instead of being skeptical or hostile towards it. People were curious and excited to interact with a computer, likely for the first time, and share information from posts looking for bandmates to weird poetry to recommendations for food to eat. descriptions of community memory that are stored in like a computation museum. I'm struck by how much of it feels really familiar to the internet we know now with like Craigslist and Twitter and Yelp and whatnot. And community memory and other later bulletin board systems only lasted for a couple decades and got displaced in most places, though there are echoes of them in online forums like Reddit, or there are like some bulletin board

systems that still exist, like Taiwan's PTT. I fell down a huge rabbit hole. Still a bulletin board system. A lot of people use it. So obviously, computers and all the programs that they run support so much of our modern society. But I think it's cool that even as we go back to these early, slow, chunky, memory-stored, and magnetic donuts computers, humans wanted to use them as a tool to talk to each other. And that hasn't really changed. I don't understand how this works, but it sounds very cool. I miss when computers had so much wood on them as this one does. We need wood computers.

It's very woody. Yeah. You have to put a coin into it? You have to put a coin in to post. But you could read for free and so you could either type in a command that's like add something to the bulletin board and that's when you had to pay and i think they had like a human being sitting like a nerd sitting next to it to be like this is how it works i just want to be sure i want to be clear about the kind

of human being that was sitting here yeah yeah that Yeah. That's awesome. I mean, that's very cool. And so all these things are archived and you can read what the people posted. And from what I can tell, it was like a local network. So like in Berkeley, California, the bulletin board was the same across machines. I'm not entirely sure if that's true or if that's me being anachronistic, but it's either they were siloed bulletin boards or they could communicate with each other. And so you could get a bagel shop recommendation from someone across the street. I mean, I remember trying to get on bulletin boards in the early days. Somebody had to tell you the address. You could go find it and be on somebody else's computer and leave messages and talk and do trouble, be rebellious teenagers.

Why did you want to do so much trouble, computer trouble? I don't know. I didn't have to do some kind of trouble. You should have just smoked cigarettes like me. You get it all out of your system that way and you don't hurt anybody except yourself very badly. Yeah. I don't think I got in any trouble. I really wasted my teenagers. Ever in your whole life?

No, I did it in college instead. So we just had to cut out a whole section of this podcast, but our next patron-only podcast may be all of the crimes we have committed. Yeah, and the cops will have to pay $8 to hear them all. All right, Sam, what do you got for us? Well,

well, first of all, I got is a bit of a content warning because this one's kind of a bummer and deals with cancer and some unpleasant medical imagery. So computer bugs are bad. And while most of the billions of computer bugs that I assume happen every day are pretty benign, sometimes they can be extremely harmful and even deadly.

So one way to treat cancer is with the use of radiation, which basically means shooting a beam of photons into a patient, targeting cancerous tissue in the hopes of destroying it. So using radiation to fight disease has been around for a long time, since like 1895, and was used very liberally for all kinds of diseases up through the twenties when we kind of figured out we shouldn't be doing that. So we stopped treating things like a lot of stuff with radiation, but we kept developing newer and safer ways of treating cancer with radiation because the benefits there tended to outweigh the risks. So by the eighties, we were using particle accelerators to shoot cancer. And one of the companies that made these accelerators was Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, or AECL. So in the 70s, they had released a couple of cancer-treating accelerators

called the Therac-6 and the Therac-20. And these machines were generally set up, adjusted, and fired manually, like by a person. They did have an optional computer that you could plug into the machine to help you control them, but you could also do it without the computer. These machines also had physical safety measures to prevent overexposure to radiation in the patients. Like if an operator accidentally set a beam to a lethal dose or mis-aimed something, a fuse would blow in the machine and it would stop working. In 1983, AECL released a new accelerator, the Therac 25, and this one was

the height of modernity. It was completely controlled via computer. All the manual adjustment controls were removed, as were all of the physical trip switches that would stop the machine in a dangerous situation. And instead, the computer program would detect danger and human error and not allow the machine to run. So thousands of patients used the Therac-25 with no problem. But alarming reports of accidents began to surface over the first two years of its life. One patient reported mid-treatment that he was feeling pain from a normally painless procedure. And five months later, he died of radiation sickness. Another patient ended up needing skin grafts after the beam burned a hole in her hip.

Another patient lost the use of one of her arms, and another one died from radiation burns on his brain stem. So AECL denied fault, stating that the computer controls made it almost impossible that a fatal dose could be administered, but after a number of accidents, the machiners were called for investigation. And what they found was a bug that would occur if you input too many commands too fast. The accelerator beam would go to the wrong place, but the program couldn't tell, and it would let the beam fire. Furthermore, the program running on the Therac-25 was the same program that ran on the optional computer from the older Theracs. And similar bugs were found in the older programming, but the physical kill switches were stopping those bugs from turning into fatal accidents. And then when those accidents weren't caught, it could lead to patients getting over 200 times the amount of radiation that they were supposed to. And to top it

all off, an FDA report said that the company seemed to have very little internal documentation of their own program. It seems like they just thought, this computer's smart and humans are dumb and they trusted the machine. And to me, the point of this is that this whole horrible situation brings to mind some more modern examples of potentially dangerous computer technology being deployed by companies who don't really think through all of the minute details of what they're releasing to the public. Because we still think, computer's smart. And you're clearly not smart. It does feel that way, doesn't it? It's like, look, algorithm.

See? It works. Everything's better now works it gives you what you ask for it gives you what you ask for and whatever you ask for can't be bad right gosh you guys that's a this is a toughie um i don't know i think that series is a whole lot cuter that's true and it's about social media and it's gonna be on a social media platform where you're like look it's about social media. And it's going to be on a social media platform where you're like, look. It is about social media, but it's social media that's like, good, because you had to put a coin in. If you had to put a coin in every time you tweeted, I think Twitter might be a cleaner place. But who knows? One might be surprised.

I am going to go with Sari for this. But because Sari had a big gap to overcome, I think that Sam is still the winner of our episode. Hell yeah. Very worthy. Well, that means that it's time for Ask the Science Couch, where we've got some listener questions for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. This one is from AtSavroge, who asks, what the heck is a solid state drive? How is it different from the hard drives that came before? Should I talk out of my mouth for a second here, Sari?

Or should you actually answer the question? Oh, if you want to. I would love to know. It's your choice. What you're going to say. I mean, I know. So the big difference is that the solid state drives literally don't have moving parts, whereas those old hard drives did.

And so the old hard drives were basically, you could imagine them as CDs that were readable on the reading right on the top and bottom. And there were little, you know, magnetizers that went around and they could read off of that disc and or right to the disc. And you could hear them clicking around in there and spinning and then breaking. And you knew when they would break. Yeah. And then they break and then they go, and you'd have that feeling and you're just like, oh God, oh God, it's making the noise. And then you get really mad and you can break them

and actually see the cool metal platters in there. Anyway, and then solid state is like, it's chips, I guess. I don't know how the chips work. It's flash memory. They're chips. Yeah, that's about as far as I get too. I don't know how the chips work. It's flash memory. They're chips. Yeah, that's about as far as I get to. I don't know how it's solid state.

I just know what that means. Yeah. Well, I don't know if I'm going to do much better, but I'll try. Going back to the very basics, like assuming, because I could use this explanation when I was researching them. So there are two different ways to read and store data in a way that doesn't go away when you turn off your computer. So there is like RAM, random access memory is used while your computer is on and like helps you jump between programs more quickly and as a way to like put little, basically like sticky notes or tabs in like, okay, we were doing this thing here so you can switch between programs fairly easily. But both a hard drive and a solid state drive

are ways to store memory. Once you've turned your computer off, it's like, it's there, it's written, we're gonna get it in the future. And so you basically describe the difference correctly hard drives if you open them inside they look like a record player to me kind of where it's like a little disc and a little little head um the disc is called a platter it has a really thin magnetic coating and it's been around for a while so like you can look at old computers like the IBM 650, RAMAC, I don't know how to say that, from 1956.

And it had 24-inch wide platters that held 3.75 megabytes of storage space. So very huge platter spinning around, very little storage space relative to today. to today. And the little head, which is like the needle on a record player, adjusts spots on the magnetic coding to a north or south pole to represent zero or one, respectively. And I think at first, data is encoded in concentric circles. But then as you start filling up a hard drive, that's when an issue called fragmentation happens, which is where you have a bunch of pieces of files stored around. Like you can't do one continuous track anymore for large files. And you start like putting it. It wasn't space.

So you have to like do-do-do-do and the head has to move a ton to read one file. That's when you get your machine working really hard. It's amazing to me that they made these little things so that that little thing can go tick-tick-tick-tick tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, it's so fast, so good, so small. It's amazing. Things just keep getting more amazing. So yeah, so like the biggest pull for like a hard drive in that way is like more storage for cheaper, but even that is like going away, like you were saying, Hank.

But then solid state drives in my head, they're more computery. I wrote this in my notes because I understand them less, but it's flash memory, which is the same kind of memory as like a USB drive. And flash memory is used in a lot of different circumstances. And to my understanding, they are semiconductor cells that can basically hold a charge or hold a magnetic field once that has been changed when there is no power going to

them, which is why they're used for this kind of memory. And like the size of these cells determines how many bits of data can be stored and there are different kinds and sizes and there are no moving components. And this is where it gets wibbly and I wish I had a better explanation, but because this is both why it's faster and it's less fragile and can store more in a smaller space because it's just made of these cells and these cells can like communicate or pass a current through them and either remain the same or change when you need them to, as opposed to like a physical head going da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Like the wearing out bit is that these cells can only be used, like can be written to and erased a limited number of times. And so if you are reading and writing to this memory a lot, then you might wear out your solid state drive. But for most users, you won't do that.

Like it's a very extreme case or like the machine itself, like as a whole will become obsolete before the solid state drive will. Well, if you want to ask the science couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon and ask us on Discord. Thank you to at Orion Amidala at First Man Down and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's super easy to do that. First, you can go to Patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents, where you can become a patron and

get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes where we'll talk about all the crimes we've done. And second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show. It helps other people find the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thanks for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz,

who edits a lot of these episodes, along with Seth Glicksman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Paolo Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistants are Deboki Trocrivarti and Emmett Douster. Our sound design is by Joseph Tunamedish. Our executive producers Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. Computers are like modern teddy bears in that we take them with us everywhere to feel more comfortable. And we don't just hold them when we go to the bathroom anymore. Now there are computers on toilets themselves that use deep learning to monitor everything that comes out of you from pee volume to poop texture. The toilet can then upload your data to the cloud securely

and store it separately from the data of anyone else who is also using that same toilet. Now you might wonder how it knows whose poop it's uploading. Well, it basically just uses facial recognition software. And you might be saying, Hank, but my face isn't around. Well, it's not using it on your face. It's using it on your butthole. And now we have nothing left for the computer overlords because they know absolutely everything about us and they can recognize us from our butts so that they can take care of us and make sure that they

know how we're doing those computers are going to be so mad when they gain sentience those why did you poop on me so much but then they like they're worried about some of us they're like butthole three six seven four eight74892 is really not doing good. I would vaporize you, but you're having a hard enough time as it is. They will at least be sympathetic to our plight. The computers will be like, how can we hate you? They'll be the ones who bridge the gap.

They'll be like, you other computers don't know what these guys have to go through every day. It's the one thing that will save us. Computers being extraordinarily sympathetic to humans because of just the awfulness of needing to poo all the time.

Computers are like, it's really gross. You do not want me to explain it to you. It's way better the way we do things