SciShow Tangents - The Internet

Episode Date: June 16, 2020

From the joyful to the hateful to the extremely weird, the Internet is all of the complexity of human thought given shape! And boy do humans think about cats and sex a lot! I hope you're all doing well!  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: Stefan: @itsmestefanchin Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreen If you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out SciShowTangnets.org!

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. As always, I am joined by Stephan Chen. Hey. What's your tagline? Yip-a-zip-a-doo-dah. Great one, great one. Sam Schultz also is joining us today.

Sam, what is Guler fluttering? Oh, it sounds like it would maybe be the heart would be involved in it. So it's like when the flappy part of the heart, it just falls off. Why? Is that right? No, the actual answer is that it is when birds wiggle their throats to cool off. Oh, that's cute. Is that like the pelican sticking its spine through its throat?

That is why i was thinking about because i was looking at that picture of the pelican sticking its neck into its throat oh my god and it's not it's not it's putting its neck into like it said like sticking its spine through its throat which is not what happens it just pushes its neck up into its pouch to increase the surface area for its blood vessels which if you don't know what we're talking about it's a terrible things that pelicans do to cool off sam what's your tagline small little man who lives in a tree stump sari riley is also joining us today what's your tagline too much dirt and i'm hank green and my tagline is always tick talking always right now

i'm tick talking. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts. We're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score and awarding sandbox from week to week. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but we're not always great at that, so if the rest of the team

deems a tangent unworthy, we will force you to give up one of your sandbox. So tangent with care! And now, as always, we introduce this week's give up one of your sandbox. So tangent with care! And now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. This week from Sam. What's the internet is a question you may be asked if, let's say, you are hosting a pop science podcast. And yes, from a technical standpoint, you could explain,

pretty concisely, that is, if you have a big brain, about dial-up and Wi-Fi and modems and servers, but that wouldn't express to the outside observer the strange path the net took to where it finds itself now. To do that, you'd need some way to explain to them how it went from nerds on Usenet discussing such matters as Picard versus Kirk and the orbit of Saturn to the dominant force in human society

with content of literally every variety memes like old sad Keanu and SpongeBob talking weird thousands of YouTube videos of sheeps being sheared one could find every known photo of Harrison Ford or learn the way to grow giant award-winning gourds instant access to socks from a sock store in peru and high quality torrents of mr magoo from the vital and righteous to the ugly and trite from a project at darpa to a human right the internet touches all from the leap to the noobs not bad for what is basically a series of tubes that i don't know if i don't want to like rate our poems from poem to poem because i don't want to like give bad ratings yeah but that one would have gotten a very high rating if we did that

oh thanks that was that gave me goosebumps so the topic for the day is the internet which There is only one internet yet so far. So I guess it's got a definable boundary in terms of what it is and is not. Sari, what is the internet? The internet as we know it right now is earthbound. And it is the earth wide system of computer networks. So all computers or internet connected devices, all connected to each other and talking and sharing data. So it's all of those devices and all of the connections between them? Yeah. All of the networks together are the internet. There's this thing where internet has,

we've decided that it's capitalized, which means that there is only one internet and can be only one internet which is interesting to me because eventually hopefully theoretically we will have another internet on other planets because of like this light delay between earth and mars for example like you'd have to have sort of a second internet it couldn't communicate the way we communicate easily with earth internet just call it mars net or something yeah we'd have to call it something else like the question is would the martians like the humans who live on mars would they call that the internet and in that case internet shouldn't be capitalized or would they come up with a different name for it and call it mars net or something probably better than that

that'll be really sort of hip and groovy that that only the like real martians will know why it's called that. And it was like a military thing at first, right? I didn't make that up. Yeah. Okay. DARPA net, ways for networks to talk to networks.

And then that becomes a network. And, you know, birthed the internet in 1969, which we are about to talk about in this week's Truth or Fail. One of our panelists, spoiler, it's me,

has prepared three science facts for your education and enjoyment, but only one of those is real. The other panelists have to figure out either by deduction or wild guess, which is the true fact. If they do, they get a Sam Buck. If they don't, then I get a Sam Buck.

So on March 10th, 1876, this is not about the internet. The first words were spoken over a telephone when Alexander Graham Bell said, Mr. Watson, come here. I want to be a way to communicate with your butler, apparently. It seems short-sighted to me, but that was the first word spoken into and over a telephone. But what was the first message ever sent over the internet? Well, we know the answer to this question, but it is not what you would expect. Which of these three tales is the actual story of the first message ever sent through something that could be considered the internet? So this was the first time the DARPANET was used. Fact number one, late at night in 1969,

Leonard Kleinrock was away from home working on ARPANET at UCLA. His wife had just called him on the phone to say that his daughter missed him and was getting tired of never seeing her daddy before she went to bed. So just for himself, while everyone was out of the room and no one was there, the day before they were supposed to send the first message, he sent a message over the network and he simply wrote, I love you, Jane, and hit send. And the message was interpreted as an error and never seen by anyone at the other computer waiting for it in Stanford, but it was nonetheless sent over the wires and was the first message sent over the internet. Or fact number two, the ARPANET computer that Leonard was using at UCLA was going to be used

to send a message to the Stanford computer all the way over the country. And the messages that they wanted to send were, the first message was a request to log into that computer. So Leonard was typing in the keystrokes for the login command and he typed L and then he typed O and then his computer crashed. But those two letters did go across the network. But those two letters did go across the network. So the first message sent over the internet was just the word low. Or fact number three, it was Christmas morning of 1969 when Leonard sent his first message from UCLA to Stanford. And so appropriately, he and his team got huddled around Christmas morning and they

wrote Merry Christmas to their colleagues and waited to hear back. Except they did not because the team at Stanford, unbeknownst to them, had not come into work because it was Christmas. Where's the dedication? That's such a nerd thing to do. Expect other people to be working on Christmas because you're excited about the internet. The three facts are Leonard either sent I love you, Jane, to his daughter because he was feeling sad and had to work too much. Or he sent low because he was trying to log in, but his computer crashed. Or he sent Merry Christmas to a bunch of people who didn't see it because they stayed at home because it was Christmas. I would think if you were sending the first message over the Internet, you'd make sure that the people you were sending it to are going to be there to see it. So I want to believe in the magic of Christmas, but I don't think I can believe

that one. I could see them sending it though. And just being like, I'm so excited. I've worked so hard on this project and I want to send it now. And wouldn't it be a great festive thing to have the first thing we send on the internet be Merry Christmas? I just like that all three of these are failure stories. Like something went wrong. I want it to be the I love you one because that's just like a nice sentiment. Oh, it's so sad though because she never saw it. She was a child asleep missing her dad and then he sent it to Stanford.

Then would he just tell somebody later like hey guess what i did or they saw it yeah they didn't see it no one ever saw it yeah that's a little weird something he got to like keep in his back pocket and tell the press later a lie he thought of for his child right well i'm gonna go with the LO one. It seems like the most mundane. And so that must be it. You've got to go with the most boring. Yeah. In the 60s.

It was pretty boring. Yeah. Nobody loved their children in the 60s. It was 1969. It was the summer of love. Possibly the winter of love. I'm not sure. I'll go with the Christmas one.

Well, I'm also going to go with the christmas one well i'm also gonna go with lo i i think i saw something about this so i could be wrong but it's the only thing that i know anything about so i'm going with it you can go to twitter.com slash scishow tangents and play along with us before we tell you the answer twitter.com slash scishow tangents there'll be a poll there you can take to play the game with us and see how you do all right well one thing you have to know about hank green is that if i was gonna make up this fact the word would have been log because that's way better than low so the true fact is that they typed low i wish they had gotten that G in, though, because I'd love for the first word

spoken on the internet to just be log. But it was, in fact, low. And once again, I'm just never going to come back in this game. Thank you for the single point, Sari. The first one about his daughter

I did just make up because I thought it would be a sweet story. The second one, though, the first text message ever sent was the words Merry Christmas. And it was sent on Christmas. Did it get received, though? It did get received. It was received and it all worked.

Whereas the LO command crashed the computer at UCLA. It was received. Of course, nothing was done with it in Stanford. They booted their computer back up, and an hour later, they were able to actually log in to the computer at Stanford. Because that's how long it took

to turn the computer back on, apparently. That's all I got for you out of this fact. I want so much to have points, but I don't. Go get your your guitar just do a little concert for it next up we're gonna take a short break and then it'll be time for the fact off Welcome back, everybody. Sam Buck totals. Sari's got nothing. I've got one.

Stefan's got one. And Sam has two. But now it's time for Stefan and Sari to try and up their game a little bit because it's time for the fact off, where they've got science facts to present to us in an attempt to blow our minds. And Sam and I get to choose the fact that we like the most to award our Sambuck to.

To decide who goes first, we are going to ask you this question. What year was the first ARPANET email sent introducing the name at system address that we recognize today. Well, if low happened in 1969, you said? Mm-hmm. I'm going to say 1970.

Well, I imagine that it would be pretty soon after the first message, so 1969. It was 1971. Took him two full years to get that first email sent the text of which was according to the person who sent it something like just me mashing my fingers on the key did not write any words what a waste it was just the top line of the keyboard is what he said oh i have to choose well sari goari, go first then, I guess. I start this off as we like to think, I like to think, because I'm an ignorant fool, of the internet as a fast way to transport information. And in many cases, it can be,

like with emails or messages or social media or things that I'm exposed to in my small bubble. But if you've ever tried to transfer a huge file, you know it can take a while to upload or download or send depending on the network you're using, especially if there are bandwidth limitations or things like that. So some people have taken to physically moving media to transfer electronic information, including by an old staple, pigeons. It's technically called IPOAC, which stands for IP over avian carriers, and was initially an April Fool's Day text release issued by the Internet Engineering Task Force in the 1990s. But it's actually been implemented for fun because humans are going to human. In April 2001, a group of Linux users sent nine pigeons carrying a network packet, each over five kilometers, and got four responses back. So I don't really know what this term means, but that's a packet loss ratio of 55.55%.

And it took those pigeons about 54 minutes to 106 minutes to deliver that network packet. So that wasn't the most efficient. But other tests have been more successful. network packet, so that wasn't the most efficient, but other tests have been more successful. For instance, in April 2009, there was a race to send four gigabytes of data about 60 miles or 96 kilometers in Durban, South Africa, with a pigeon named Winston carrying physical media, which I think was a memory stick, versus the local telecom company. And the pigeon delivery method took a total time of two hours, six minutes, and 57 seconds from uploading data onto the physical media to completing download,

at which time the telecom company transfer was only at 4% complete. And there have been a couple other tests, mostly for fun in more rural regions where the internet connectivity isn't the best. And there may still be a good reason for physical transportation of data rather than using the internet. I mean, this is true of pigeons, but also of cars. I think Complexly should invest in a homing pigeon set so that we can have, from the office to our individual houses, data flowing back and forth.

I would take care of them so good, please. So like with a memory card, like could easily be carried by a pigeon. We have to move them around. And like, as we have been not in the office, it has been kind of a pain to move files. It is much easier to drive a memory card to someone's house than to like send 64 gigabytes over the internet.

It turns out far faster. But pigeon would be even faster and also probably won't give you coronavirus. What was it called again? IPOAC, IP over avian carriers. So you're saying it's initially a joke, but then it became kind of not a joke and actually became part of the internet, kind of.

Kind of. It still is like done for fun rather than for important file transfers. As far as I know, there could be people using pigeons to transfer data. I would do that if I was a criminal mastermind. Would you actually officially call that part of the internet? Are these pigeons a branch of the internet?

I feel like they aren't. I feel like technically they must not be. Okay. Because it's not a network in the way that we mean a network. Unless we install plugs in the pigeons and they have to fly up to network like network receptacles and like plug in and then download their data yeah i mean that's the thing like you know when we first were doing this it was all over wires and now a lot of it's wireless but that's still internet even though that's a different kind of network and then there's like satellite communication is done very differently

than like local radio stuff. And so there's like, part of me is like, well, it's just another kind of wire. A pigeon is just a wire. If you created like a network of humans who ran back and forth with different messages to different houses to carry information around, It's like a network. Or if you take the Mars example, and you sort of have to dump huge sections of content, maybe physically, maybe probably initially physically, is that internet? And if that's internet, then pigeons are definitely internet. All right, Stefan, what do you got for us? So there's a May 2020 paper that was looking to directly compare face-to-face cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, to internet-based CBT for treating something called hypochondriasis, which is a form of health anxiety where people are excessively and persistently fearful that they have a serious illness, even though they don't have the test results to suggest

that and their doctors have reassured them that they don't have it. And in this paper, they estimated that up to 3.5% of the general population might have this and 20% in medical clinics, which seems very high to me. But for this study, they randomly assigned 204 adults to get either 12 weeks of CBT over the internet using a text-based message system. So it's not like doing Zoom calls or anything. And then half the people got face-to-face CBT sessions. And I thought it was worth pointing out that all these treatments were happening in 2017. So this was much earlier than the coronavirus stuff. And so in this paper, they found that the

online therapy was not inferior to in-person therapy. And the super interesting part to me was that with the online therapy, the therapist spent only about 10 minutes per patient per week. Whereas in the face-to-face sessions, they were spending 45 minutes per patient, which means that for this kind of health anxiety in this paper, online therapy was just as good and required a lot less time. And that translated into cheaper costs for the patients. And the researchers said they were able to achieve tough and required behavioral changes. I don't know exactly what that means because I couldn't get the whole paper, but it seemed like online just as good as in-person in this case. So it was like text-based therapy that was only 10 minutes long?

So I think what was happening is like if you did the in-person thing, it was just like a normal like 45-minute session. But if you did the online thing, you had access to like some, like a PDF or something, like some online resources, and then you could message with your therapist. And so the 10 minutes was sort of cumulative throughout the week. Oh, okay. So you could sort of like reach out at any given moment. That's interesting because like that seems a little like a different kind of connection, a different kind of therapy. Like it's adding instead of just replacing because it's a new

thing to have the ability to have conversations at the spur of the moment. Yeah. When you're thinking of a particular thing or in need of a therapist's help, you can get that as opposed to like logging it up for a week or two until you're there for an hour. It sounds very useful. And it's from 2020. So, you know know right in time alright Sam do you know who you're going to vote for?

I do. I do too. So will it be Sari's fact IP OAC IP over avian carriers that was initially an April Fool's joke but then was actually done as a fun project by people or Stefan's May 2020 papers that found that online text-based cognitive behavioral therapy

was just as good at treating health anxiety in patients as more traditional series of face-to-face CBT sessions. Three, two, one. Sarah. Stefan. Ooh. Oh, wow. The note is supposed to be the more mind-blowing thing.

And in this case, I, like, that's certainly the cooler fact. Sari's is the cooler fact. But I am a little bit, like, mind-blown that a really sort of less human experience can have, like, a sort of sane outcome. Not that I want that to be the future of therapy or anything. No, yeah. Figuring out like how to do it and the times when we need to do it is very good.

And also like maybe if there are ways to add to current therapy. This is very exciting. That's how I, it's not like replace in person. It's just like give people different options. I'm excited. I liked my I liked

Sarah's because it was like how Fred Flintstone would send an email now it's time to ask the science couch we've got a listener question for our virtual couch of finely honed scientific minds and this is from at air be dragons who says is there such a thing

actually as a deep web? Or is that more of like a nifty coding thing? Or maybe like a nifty branding thing? So the deep web is like all of the web that is, it's like all the web that you don't know how to get to, right? And then there's also the dark web, which is different from that. Evil internet. So, S Sari tell me do you know the difference

between the dark web and the deep web sort of on twitter there's this person at portergeist who was in the ask the science couch

like answering a lot of people's questions and was like I'm so excited for this episode I've worked on the internet for 10 years I'm very intimidated oh no he's gonna hate this

he's gonna hate this episode but I will do my best. You're right in that the deep web is a huge chunk of the internet that exists because of how search engines function. So to go back to the bare basics, the internet is the networks of computers and the servers that are stored or the information on your computer that you can then host and like share with others. The web or the World Wide Web, which is where the WWW come from, is the information that you can access via the internet. So like the internet is the infrastructure and the web is the service. And then we can use browsers to access the web is my email in the deep web because nobody can see it but me oh i have access to part of the deep web much of my email is even

inaccessible to me in that i choose not to access it yeah so you can choose to access or access it but it's not like you can type in hank's email on google and then get into your to see your unread emails or you can't fingers crossed yeah or you can't necessarily google this is just becoming a hank promotion an absolutely remarkable thing and the your like local libraries catalog won't pop up and show it you have to like go to your library's website then type it in then search it even that would be part of the deep web? Even if I can go get it, but I can't search it? Yeah, I think anything you can't search and that web crawlers don't access would be considered the deep web

because it's a layer under, I don't know, the surface web. So that's like everything. It's like most things, like almost all things. Okay, just like dark matter is almost all matter. It is analogous in that I feel like dark matter has a bad rap because it's called dark matter. So people automatically assume it's sinister. People automatically assume that the deep web and the dark web are sinister, probably because of movies that say, I bought this pot on the dark web. I don't know.

The dark web is a little bit sinister it's not all sinister but like a lot of the reason the dark web like in in terms of like places that you can get to but are sort of intentionally hiding from the rest of the internet like they don't want to be easy to get to a lot of the reason that those places exist is to facilitate some kinds of crime. Yeah. That's true. Not only. That's not the only reason they exist. Yes, some types of crime. I was like, on my list,

I also have political dissidents and whistleblowers, but I guess that is considered crime. Crime, crime. Also crime. That's just cool crime. Yeah. Sasha Tangents does not endorse crime except cool crime. Cool, but cool crimes, yeah.

So yeah, that kind of stuff is what the dark web facilitates. And how is the dark web different from the deep web? You need, I'm not positive this is to access every single thing on the dark web, but a software called the Onion Router or Tor installs onto a browser and basically sets up layers of encryption to help you be anonymous. And the hallmark of the dark web is that it requires additional encryption software that makes users and locations and everything anonymous. So things can't be traced back to individual people just based on ip addresses that's about as technical as my brain goes if i was 17 years old i would be all over the fucking dark web i would be it'd be such a disaster i did all that kind of i did that stuff when i was

when i was a teenager and like that didn't exist so much, but like even the, the, the mischief I got up to then, and now there's always, there's so much mischief. I hope I wouldn't get myself in too much trouble. You'd just be doing cool crimes. Right. But they'd still put you in jail for the cool crimes.

If you want to ask the science couch, your questions, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at CrystalR99, at Sky Sloth, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this episode. Ooh, Sky Sloth sounds great. Sambook final scores, Sari and Hank,

we've tied for last with one, and Sam and Stefan have tied for first with two, meaning that Sari is still in a pretty solid lead, and I am still in a pretty solid last. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's really easy to do that. You can leave us a review on iTunes or other places if reviews exist there.

That's helpful and helps us know what you like about the show. Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment from this episode. 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. I've been Stefan Chin. And I've been Sam Schultz.

SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and the wonderful team at WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who also edits a lot of these episodes, along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tunamedish. And we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled,

but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. The Internet of Things has led to Internet-enabled fridges, picture frames, and toasters. And in 2017, a wearable technology company released Internet-enabled pants. So they're yoga pants that connect to an app that's programmed with lots of yoga poses and it runs you through different workouts with a virtual instructor that can use haptic feedback devices that are woven into the pants

including on the butt. That's why it's a butt fact. To like vibrationally correct your poses into the right position. There are internet-enabled pants. What's the error code,

haptics? Like, the whole pants just vibrate? Yeah. Or somebody hacks your pants, they make you rob a bank with haptic feedback pants. It's not me.

My pants are evil. I got evil pants doing crimes and not the cool ones.