SciShow Tangents - Listener Questions- Unlocked Patreon Bonus Episode

Episode Date: August 17, 2021

This week, we're sharing one of our Patreon bonus episodes with all of our listeners! Join us as we answer some questions from our audience, and be sure to check out Patreon.com/SciShowTangents if you want more content like this! Head to the link below 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! https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangentsA big thank you to Patreon subscribers Eclectic Bunny and Garth Riley 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: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreen

Hey everybody, this week we have something a little different for you. Each month over on the SciShow Tangents Patreon, we post a new episode of our bonus podcast, and we wanted to share one of them with our non-patron listeners. You'll be hearing the very first bonus episode we did, where we answered a bunch of listener questions. But since then, we've done a lot of goofy stuff. Like there's one episode where I quizzed my Brainiac co-host with questions from a high school science study guide, and of course, the infamous

Poopoo PPpedia episode. Members of the SciShow Tangents Patreon get monthly episodes like this, plus a newsletter and illustrated science poems, and of course, once we hit 500 patrons, we'll release a special commentary track of the movie Cars 2. You can check out all that and more at patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents. So I hope you enjoy this special unlocked patron bonus episode. And if you're already a patron, thank you so much. We couldn't do the show without you. 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. Sam's in a terrible spot. He's just... Sari's got a bunch of rainbow flying cats on her shirt. My friend Nicole Sweeney made me this shirt. I have a very stressful day today. So I'm using my college strategy of dressing fun. Put on funny clothes.

To help me through. 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, science-y.

Have you ever gotten an email from me that makes you feel that way? No. I have. Sam has. How are you doing, Hank? I'm okay. 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.

Oren's spring break is this week. Oren, my four-year-old, has a spring break. He's got to relax. His little life's probably really stressful. He's got a boss, too. He's got to do his homework. Yeah, he has zero bosses. Good Lord.

This morning he had a meltdown because he didn't get to scramble the eggs. And I was like, well, the eggs are already scrambled. I can't unscramble eggs. That's literally a saying. And then he was like and then he was like but there's more eggs and i was like i'm not gonna make more eggs just because 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 want to do you want to write a poem real quick it's gonna go like this i'm like

like you're you'll start and then i'll add a rhyming line and then we'll go back and forth like that so you you do a line and i i will always since i since i'm springing this on you i will always be responsible for actually rhyming okay i'm sweating now um we got some questions from our patrons gosh patrons um 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 crack under pressure. Let's look at these questions then. We got some personal questions and we got some science questions. Let's start with a short personal question just to get in the groove of answering questions. Okay. How do non-Newtonian fluids work? Perfect. 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, you know, 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 it will become a solid. And if you take a liquid and you decrease pressure, eventually it will become a gas, which 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 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 you've 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 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 yeah 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 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 i guess air is so if you squeeze air also a newtonian fluid yeah it's still gonna flow the same way yeah 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 when it's just then if it doesn't have yeah and i think that that is the difference. Maybe ketchup is a non-Newtonian fluid.

I'm pretty sure my friend George did a video for TED Talks about ketchup. I believe it. What? Why? Yeah. What was he teaching us? Non-Newtonian fluids. It's about how like why ketchup like in the bottle as like a clumpy. And I 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. Type in ketchup non-Newtonian fluid and you'll have all of your questions answered. 9.30 a.m. Sarah, you cannot answer your questions. You did your best, but didn't do good. Thank you to Caitlin for that question.

I'm sorry that we did not do it justice. We're going to do better on the next one. Sam, let's do a that question. I'm sorry that we did not do it justice. We're going to 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. 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 going to win this prize. He wins the prize. And we're like, well, if you're not going to stick with us, then you're trash. Now, what happened to Chincoins? Well, okay. 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. 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 that 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 him, but I just never did it. Because you felt so bad. That was part of it. You don't want to spend time 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 going to forget about that. You guys got to let us forget about it, though. Please. Okay. You want to 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 going to happen. You're going to hear something that you didn't expect.

And then you're going to make this noise. Like, that's not okay. That's not normal. Nothing else does that. That is, in addition to chins, the one other thing that is unique about humans. 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. Yeah, 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 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 going to 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 happen. 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? 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 just like fucking lost it.

And she's like, it had been, like, a rough day. So, like, it was tense. And, like, she was distracted because we had just, like, disciplined our son. Because this is 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 Catherine 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 yeah 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 katherine 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 like that interesting or funny. But because 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 expectation or of a norm. Yeah. Anyway, so that's the scientific formula for a joke. Violate something. Not necessarily in a bad way uh well ideally in a good way ideally in a good way let's do another

personal question what was the worst episode idea does anybody mrs brock also asked this one mrs brock really was putting our feet to the fire. Yeah. Mrs. Brock wants to get the real dirt. Yeah. I think our best episode idea was piss. I think 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. We 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 we just haven't done because we were like, there's no way we're going to 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 didn'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 are all our topics meshed 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 hole? 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 because 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'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. 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. 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 you can't see everything because there's so much stuff but you can almost not not the whole building but for some of the building you can actually see all the way through so you can you can get a kind of good idea of what the building right is like from that and just the fact that you can see you can't see through that part of the building means there's more building there yes you can make that i did address the metaphor at the end and my my idea was is like being in a building but there's more building there. Yes. You can make that. I did address the metaphor at the end. And my my idea was as 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 the 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 want to take, we don't want to take an edge on picture. No. That's not going to help you. No. 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'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. We're choosing much closer targets, like within the Milky Way, I think, to send probes and stuff to.

Okay, fair enough. So that Milky Way is a thousand light years thick. Where are we in it? Are we 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 disk 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 screwy 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 like 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 like 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'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 or 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, 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. Yeah. 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? It says, 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 like walk around and like they were studying gopher tortoises or something. And what struck me was how it was work. Because like up until that point, it had been magic. Scientists found out that the dinosaurs got destroyed by an asteroid. And scientists found out that we're like that we're 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 and fancy hard drives that, you know, contain hundreds of megabytes, which is very impressive at the time.

hundreds of megabytes which was very impressive at the time but like you know they're grizzled leathery skinned people out there like like doing doing the research that like uh that real that matters and like and i was like oh that's a 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, like 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 like that was a total of four years or something. So the fact that it's not like this like static body of knowledge, but that it is a thing that lots of people do and can be 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 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. 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. And I was just alone 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. 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 going to 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 the idea that you could know things not by deduction but by measuring. Like, oh, we can 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 ask, like either say two different topics and he would connect them using biology or ask like 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 like 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 like the molecules in us. So like 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 like brain is a whole separate thing but i like 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. There was nothing available. I still consider it sometimes in 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 handle all these fluids and understand them. And I think now I'm much softer. And I think it would be harder for me to depersonalize the work.

And so I can see that being hard. I don't know. This is not goofy anymore. This is a deep introspection into why I'm not a 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 been 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. Yeah, he's cute. We'll see you on our next episode of Tangents, which will be out shortly.

And in our next episode of the Patreon podcast, which will be out next month. Thank you, Sam. Thank you, Sari. Thank you, Tuna. Thank you, Hank. Have a lovely day. Bye. Bye. Bye.