Episode 32 | Gets It Together
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A full transcript of this episode is available below thanks to donations from our Patrons!
“Gets It Together” originally referred to one thing, but should really be accredited to Ben Tippett, who kept this show on track by sheer force of Canadian will and charisma. He definitely leveled up with this one.
00:00:00 – Drinks and introductions. The intros technically came first, but the drinks dominate the show later on, so I figured they deserved higher billing.
00:06:07 – Guess who’s coming to Science… sort of?! It’s the return of the effervescent Sr. Nino. The esteemed gentleman of the climate explains why meteorologists aren’t to be trusted and how to save your family from global warming. Not to be missed. (Find his first appearance in Episode 7 - The Butterfly Effect)
00:26:29 – Saturn has a moon that looks like Pac Man in infrared. Do you really need more than that to intrigue you? Also Charlie is in his element and rocks some truly delicious science all up in your ears.
00:43:22 – Some things from Canada are good. Ben is one, Scott Pilgrim is the other. There’s a movie coming out (with a trailer first, hence the segment), but there were comics first. This segment doubles as Odd-Man Out for Charlie.
Go buy some sweet books!
01:00:33 – We like to keep it positive, and nothing gets us exciting like thinking we may all live in a wormhole generated from a black hole, but Ben has some bad news. I hope no one’s feelings get hurt.
01:23:04 – The Paleoposse says things to us. And we love them for it. The show is off the rails at this point. Charlie and Ryan are borderline incapacitated from booze; Ben keeps things on track and GETS IT TOGETHER!!
You’ve reached a SAVE POINT. Good job.
Music for this week’s show provided by:
Bottles & Cans – Rehab
Señorita – Los Lonely Boys
Satellite - Guster
Scott Pilgrim - Plumtree
Way down in the hole – Blind Boys of Alabama
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Episode 32: Gets It Together
Charlie: We still there?
Ryan: We lost Ben. Oh boy. Oh no. We've lost Canada. Canadaaaaaaaa!
Charlie: It's become detached.
Ryan: Oh boy. Oh boy. We were, we were doing so well.
Charlie: They're finally invading.
Ryan: Oh, now he's signed off line. Oh boy. Hey is online. All right Ben.
Ben: Sorry about that gentlemen.
Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Science sort of.
Music
Ryan: Hello and welcome to Science sort of Episode 32. The theme this week is Gets it together. So you would read about one, one sentence of Science sort of gets it together. Which will hopefully become clear later. We actually do manage to pull ourselves together. This week, I will be your host. My name is Ryan. I've got two Paleo Pals rarin’ to go and talk science and things that are sort of science and things that wish they were science and the first Paleo Pal of note is Mr. Charlie.
Charlie: Present and ready.
Ryan: And Monsignor Ben Tibet, from Canada.
Ben: Hey, buddy, my snowshoes are on and I'm all ready to go.
Ryan: Good. You're a trek through the snowy fields of science.
Ben: That's right. That's the metaphor we use up here for science.
Ryan: We’re start each week off as we usually do with the all important question, what are we drinking? So Charlie, do you have a beverage on tap for us tonight?
Charlie: Yeah, I'm drinking the Big Swell IPA from the Maui Brewing Company. It's hoppy, bold, and deliciously smooth. And I like this Maui Brewing Company because they serve everything and cans, which is very environmentally friendly and convenient on the island when you're at a beach or elsewhere. And it's just good for the islands and it tastes good too.
Ryan: Well, oh, one thing that's kind of interesting. I know that we're all environmentally conscious people, I guess green is the is the word that is used. And something that, that not a lot of people realize, but aluminum is the number one material that it actually makes sense to recycle. Have you heard this, Charlie?
Charlie: Yeah, I mean, it's energy intensive. So you have to, you know, burn a fossil fuel or use a nuke plant or other more friendly forms of energy to recycle it, but it's, there's none of it is wasted during the recycling process.
Ryan: And it's easier than mining new bauxite, which is the raw or mineral that we use to get aluminum.
Charlie: Right.
Ben: Okay, right. So what, what about rinsing out glass bottles? If you turn them into the redemption center does the company that reclaims them just rinse them out or do they just crush the glass and then...
Ryan: I think they have to go and actually remelt the glass and, and reform it. Yeah.
Ben: Has it always been that way?
Ryan: Probably.
Charlie: Well, what depends on the country. I mean, if you go down to Mexico or many third world countries, all your beer bottles and coke bottles are, are, have a nice matte finish to them. And that's because they're constantly reused.
Ryan: Which I mean, they used to do that here in the States. One of the reasons that Pepsi actually didn't have to declare bankruptcy back during the Depression was because they started selling Pepsi for a nickel instead of a dime. Coke was a dime and they were just reusing beer bottles to sell the Pepsi. So that was one of the reasons Pepsi was able to stay in business. Soda history Benjamin, speaking of soda, what are you, what are you drinking tonight buddy?
Ben: I'm drinking a Jones cane sugar soda. It's cream soda.
Ryan: That's a good one.
Charlie: Nice.
Ben: Yeah, it's pretty good.
Ryan: Like a hummingbird could survive on that stuff.
Ben: Pretty much it, it's very sweet. And cream soda-ie. What, where does the name cream soda come from? Like, there's no cream in it.
Ryan: That's true. It's a good point. I don't know.
Ben: I think I looked this up, but I forgot.
Ryan: Oh. You should look it up again. And people think, people think scientists are know it alls. We forget stuff too.
Charlie: Yeah, I don't know.
Ben: Anyway, it's delicious, guys. Totally Jones soda. This one has a, ah, a snowboarder on it. And this other bottle I have has an elephant on it. Class.
Ryan: Jones has cool labels. They really do.
Charlie: And good, high quality ingredients.
Ryan: Yep, they do that as well. Yeah.
Charlie: All right. What are you drinking Ryan?
Ryan: I got a Port Brewing Old Viscosity Ale from the Port Brewing Company in San Marcos, California. It says “It's not your dad's 30 weight.” And I don't even know what a 30 weight is so, just, I guess something old.
5:04
It’s, it's a nice even 10% by volume, aged in oak barrels. Which, I always, I like a good aged beer.
Charlie: Yeah.
Ryan: We talked to, ah, talked to Charlie Bamforth last week and he mentioned how, you know, in general beers are only as good as when they're first bottled or canned. So this whole trend towards aged beer is kind of bucking that idea. But I certainly appreciate them and I'm pouring it into my glass right now and it's much darker than I expected, which is always a pleasant surprise. But it's just as tasty as I was hoping it would be so. I really bought this one on a whim and I'm glad I did.
Charlie: Cool.
Ryan: Yeah.
Music
Ryan: If you haven't been in Santa Cruz as most of you haven't, we've had some weather lately. It's been a little, a little stormy here in the Bay Area, the lower South Bay Area. But fortunately we have just the person to come and explain what the stormy weather is due to and you may remember his voice from Episode Seven. And we love to reintroduce the mysterious, the enigmatic, the entertaining climatologist, the enlightening, Senor Escobar Niño.
Niño: Hello there, how are you?
Ryan: Hello Senor Niño.
Niño: Hello, hello, hello.
Ryan: We've already given you a glowing introduction that you didn't hear.
Niño: Oh, wonderful.
Ryan: Trust me, it's there.
Niño: Thanks so much for having me back on the show.
Ryan: Thank you. So for those...
Charlie: Our pleasure.
Ryan: So, for those of you that don't know, Sr Niño is our resident climatologist, he was a guest star on episode 7 of Science sort of. And we decided that it was it was you know about time that we had him back on to give us an update on the climate and what's going on. So first of all Sr Niño, are you enjoying, are you enjoying a drink tonight?
Niño: Um, absolutely, I'm having some fresh squeezed lemonade.
Charlie: That's awesome.
Ryan: Lovely.
Charlie: Where did you obtain the lemons from?
Niño: Just down the street, a friend of mine has a lemon tree.
Ryan: You're so of the earth Sr. Niño.
Niño: Indeed. What do you, what are you all partaking of this evening?
Ryan: Ah, two beers and a Jones soda.
Niño: Ahhh.
Ryan: Oh actually that, that's, that reminds me, so Sr. Niño, I don't think you've met Ben our resident Canadian on-call Paleo Pal.
Niño: Hello Ben.
Ben: Hello. Hello Sr. Niño.
Ryan: But Sr. Niño, if you, you were in Santa Cruz yesterday, there was there was quite a storm on Monday. We're recording this on Tuesday. Was that storm, was that caused by El Niño? I mean that's the question we started with the first time we had you on when we had...
Niño: It could be, it could be, ah there's a fundamental difference, I think between climate and weather, that's come up pretty recently in the news, in the popular press.
Ryan: Well, well, do you want to elucidate that for us Sr. Niño and explain to us just exactly what the difference is between climate and weather.
Niño: One of the main differences is the the scale that each works on. Climatologist depend on records from the past thousands of years, hundreds of years, even millions of years and then in turn reflect predictions into the future in terms of maybe six months. At the minimum, up to 50 years, 100 years, what's going to happen in 200 years in the future. Weather, on the other hand, works on timescales that are much more, much shorter. Like a weatherman has trouble predicting what's going to happen 10 days in the future, you know.
Ryan: Interesting. So, so when a meteorologist gives his opinion on global warming that's maybe not something that should be taken too seriously as compared to a climatologist.
Niño: I mean, you're talking to a climatologist, I might be biased.
Ryan: Let your bias shine Sr. Niño.
Niño: Yeah, I was just reading this last week that, what is it, half of TV weather forecasters believe global warming is occurring and and fewer than a third believe that climate change was caused by human activities.
Ryan: But, as a climatologist, can you just clarify how you feel about that?
Niño: Um, yeah, no, I agree with the majority of climatologists that there is human induced global climate changes happening around the world right now because of additional CO2 additional greenhouse gases being added to the atmosphere.
10:07
Ryan: Which is, yeah, I remember I was at AGU, which stands for the American Geophysical Union, their annual meeting last last winter in December, and I sent out a tweet, kind of tongue in cheek saying, like, wow, there's about 12,000 geologists here, and you know, they're all doing a really good job of maintaining a conspiracy that global warming is real. I'm glad we're all on the same page.
Niño: And it's true and when they poll geologists, it's mostly the ones that work for the oil and coal industries that deny the global warming.
Charlie: Yeah, they have a vested interest because their their companies are producing greenhouse gases.
Niño: Absolutely.
Ryan: Yeah. Well, that's pretty cool. So how, um, so I feel like we're kind of at the tail end of this year's El Niño, is that is that true Sr. Niño?
Niño: Um, yeah, we're nearing the tail end. Let's see. When I was on last fall, I predicted the El Niño would start and indeed it did and continued throughout the winter. And so it's been dubbed on El Niño. It's an El Niño enough to, to be knighted an Niño and it's supposed to continue through May they say. It's been a moderate El Niño this year.
Ryan: Which is also what you predicted, you predicted a moderate El Niño.
Niño: Oh, excellent. Okay. I should go back and look at my predictions.
Ryan: I went back and listened to it this afternoon in preparation to talk to you again and you did predict a moderate El Niño after the last Niño which was five years ago, which was a mild Niño.
Niño: That's wonderful.
Charlie: What is the cause of the, of the El Niño’s death or disappearance or waning? Or dissipation?
Niño: That's a, that's an excellent question. What causes the El Niño in the first place? It has to do with, a little bit, about the chaos that happens in the atmosphere and just chaotic variations in the atmosphere. And they plug in far too many factors for one person to, to try to comprehend into these climate models. And then people compile the climate models. So there may be 10 or 20 climate models that are all compiled together. And they essentially average the predictions of the climate models that are taking into account things like greenhouse gases, things like the sea surface temperature patterns in the Pacific, the the atmospheric conditions at the time, and the future predicted temperatures on a seasonal cycle. And all those things among other things go into these climate models, and, and they're the ones that are telling people you know, in May, that this will start to dissipate and go back to normal conditions.
Charlie: Is it because the southern hemisphere is, is moving on to a more winter state and so the surface sea temperatures are changing.
Niño: That's part of it, that’s part of it for sure. It has to do a lot with the equatorial Pacific and Atlantic.
Charlie: Okay.
Niño: And so that has to do with a lot, yeah, there's interactions between the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere. And it's just not a sustainable state. It seems like to always have an El Nino in our current, you know, configuration of the climate and the, the tectonics and the distribution of the continents to. to have a constant El Niño, at this at this time at least.
Charlie: Is it always followed by a La Niña?
Niño: No, it's not, often it is. La Niña is just the the reverse conditions. During an El Niño, the temperatures across the equatorial Pacific are pretty uniform. And then during La Niña the difference is much greater than usual. So the eastern equatorial Pacific would be very, very cold and the western equatorial Pacific would be much warmer. So who knows? It could be, it could be that we’re trending back towards the La Niña. That is a little bit too far in the future for even the climate models to predict.
Ben: Are the El Niños ah, they’re periodic aren’t they? Don't they come from like a weird temperature inversion that comes from like the thermocline of the ocean or something? Like there’s different layers of...
Ryan: Have you not listened to episode7 Ben? What are you doing man?
Ben: It was a long time ago.
Ryan: Uhhuh.
Ben: Yeah, well...
Niño: Yeah, absolutely. They're called, what's called semi-periodic. It happens on a cycle of every two to seven years. I don't know if you call that a period or not.
Ben: Okay.
Niño: Semi-periodic, semi-chaotic. And it's sort of, a, not known at this point, at least, what causes the strength of an El Niño. Like we just had a moderate El Niño, but in 97-98, over that winter, it was a very, very strong El Niño. And then once in the early 80s, too there was a very, very strong El Niño. So it happens every, I don't know 15 or 20 years that there is a really extra strong El Niño that has big effects for North America and Central America.
15:06
Ben: Okay, so the Vancouver Olympics didn't know that there was going to be an El Niño this year, and that everything would get washed out. And so it's not necessarily their fault that there was terrible weather.
Niño: Yeah, I'm not sure. When did they decide to have the Olympics there?
Ben: Oh, geez.
Ryan: They decide right after the previous Olympics, right? Because we knew that
Charlie: No, no, it's way in advance.
Ben: It’s before then. Yeah. It was like, not, not 10 years ago, but eight years ago, maybe? It was a long time ago.
Niño: Yeah, there’s no way they would have known. But in the months coming up to the Olympics, they should have, you know, been able to see that it was going to be milder than usual.
Ben: Yeah, well, VANOC is kind of, nobody who listens to this podcast knows who VANOC is, anyway.
Ryan: Wait, aren’t there...
Ben: El Niño.
Ryan: ...are Canadians not listening to our podcast, Ben?
Ben: Well, you have to be in Vancouver, so VANOC is the Vancouver Olympic commission.
Niño: Ahhhh....
Ryan: Ohhhhh..... See we're learning Ben, you can teach us, you can teach your Canadian ways.
Ben: Teach you all sorts of regional Vancouver politics, and, yeah...
Ryan: That's what we're here for. Welcome to, welcome to Canada sort of, the show that's all about things that are Canadian, things that wish they were Canadian, and things that are sort of Canadian.
Niño: Ben, I'm half Canadian. My relatives are from outside of Vancouver and I still didn't know that I'm sorry.
Ben: Oh, that's really fun. But I mean, your, your, if your parents, or your, your Canadian ancestors weren't from Vancouver in the last eight years so...
Niño: No, no.
Ben: Why would they know what VANOC is, it's okay. It's a new, it’s a new acronym word.
Ryan: ...his relatives were wearing beaver pelts and fighting, fighting Indians.
Niño: That's right.
Ryan: Well, um, I just I just said your name on air, as well, Sr. Niño, that's gonna get bleeped. Um, so do climatologists have an idea, maybe what's going to happen as the El Niño, La Niña cycle as climate change occurs?
Niño: Yeah, people have various hypotheses for that.
Ryan: What do you think? You’re the one speaking to the people's right now.
Niño: I don't want, I don't want to be the one who deludes the people.
Ryan: Don't dilude them. Just give them, give them the truth.
Charlie: No, I agree with Sr. Niño, as a scientist, he should, he should present a few different viewpoints.
Ryan: Well, go ahead, yeah. I'm giving you the platform right now.
Niño: So the way that they look at it is the, they look back at times when it was warmer and times when it was colder and say, okay, let's see if we can measure what El Niño was like during times when it was warmer and times that it was colder. And so, one of the, the more famous times that people go back to is the Pliocene when it was a lot warmer. And people like Christina Revela and Mike Warren at UC Santa Cruz have seen a permanent El Niño type of condition that happened at that time during the Pliocene, maybe 5 million years ago. And then people also look back at the mid Holocene and when climate was like slightly warmer, and some people I guess the majority of climatologist have predicted that or shown that El Niño was less frequent during the mid Holocene when it was just slightly warmer. So it could go either way. It's a toss up.
Ben: Did the way the continents were shaped back then have any effect on it? Like...
Niño: Oh, absolutely. The position of the continents changes ocean currents, it changes the position of the thermocline, it was changes a number of different atmospheric and oceanic processes.
Charlie: Crazy. Crazy.
Ryan: So is it gonna be bad? I mean, this is, I know, I know like, you know, science tries not to make value judgments, but what does this, what does this mean? Are we doomed? Are we're gonna die?
Charlie: Yeah, will the weather become like slightly more chaotic? Will it bandy back and forth between cold and wet in a more extreme fashion? Will it be the same as it’s ever been?
Niño: Oh yeah, there is consensus on the fact that storm intensity will increase. So we'll probably get about the same amount of precipitation in a year. But it might occur in more intense bursts and in terms of like hurricanes might get stronger, but then you'll have a period of drought. And so that will of course have an effect on human civilization.
Charlie: Is it right to say that there's more energy in the system available to create weather?
Niño: Oh, yeah. If the climate is on average, warmer if ocean temperatures are warmer than more energy in this the system for sure.
20:00
Charlie: Okay, and that, that drives things like storms and jet streams. And so I could see how the intensity may increase.
Niño: Exactly.
Ryan: What can people do Senor Niño to protect them, their families, against El Niño and against climate change?
Niño: Oh my goodness.
Ryan: Because, we were, you and I were talking about this earlier, we were saying how, you know, meteorologists predict, we've already mentioned this in the course of this discussion, but meteorologists predict tomorrow, maybe, with like a 50% accuracy, but you’re telling me what's coming. So do people need to be building shelters and stockpiling food and preparing for zombies? Like what's going on?
Niño: I don't think so.
Ryan: Okay. Just a rain jacket. Good umbrella.
Niño: Yeah, and maybe, um, worry about your friends in Tuvalu or in the Marshall Islands or in Indonesia or in you know, southern India. People who live in, like...
Charlie: The Maldives.
Niño: Yeah, very low lying and areas that are going to be affected by, you know, increased storm intensity or increased wave heights or, yeah, so, I don't know, think about those people, think about the people around the world.
Charlie: Don't build your house on a loosely consolidated recently logged hill slope.
Ryan: Good call.
Niño: That’s right. Um, maybe drive less. I mean that this whole thing is being propelled by greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere. Think about using, you know, your dryer. I don't know what Al Gore says these days about what, what choices we should make in order to alleviate the climate crisis.
Ryan: That's kind of a good note to end on Sr. Niño because I, like, I appreciate what Al Gore has done to promote the issue of climate change, but I think that he maybe was a little too alarmist about it, because and you would know this better than even I would, is that you know, we're talking about a long time here. Like this isn't an immediate an immediate thing that's going to be happening tomorrow. That's, again, the meteorologists realm. These, you guys, you guys look you play the long game, right?
Niño: Right. I can't tell you what it's gonna do five days from now. And and I wouldn't, you know, do you know base my future on what a weather caster says it's going to happen 40 years from now.
Ryan: Right, right. So people, don't, I mean, one of the things is, you know, there was, there was a joke they did and again, this is something you and I talked about Sr. Niño, you know, where, you know it had a blizzard in Washington DC so all the Republican senators suddenly said, oh, climate change isn't real. And these things happen on timescales that humans may not be inherently comfortable with or aware of.
Niño: True.
Charlie: But, it's just not psychologically compelling. It's not an imperative time scale...
Ryan: Yes.
Charlie: It's not like saber tooth tiger...
Ryan: It should be...
Charlie: ...is coming for you right this second, which is how we are evolutionarily trained to deal with threats. But the problem is is that because we now live in a society that has longevity, immediate threats are no longer an issue. And so we need to ascend from that position and realize that there are threats to our, our children and our grandchildren and will make society much more difficult in the long run, and that we should address those and that we have a responsibility to address those at the, at the present.
Niño: It's also an interesting problem in that one person doing things is not going to have any impact at all on the atmosphere, it's really going to take a united, you know, front...
Charlie: Right.
Niño: In terms of changing a lot of public opinion and public action.
Charlie: And there's these really depressing elements that philosophers have talked about like Jevons paradox, in which if you use a resource less, it's going to lower the price of that resource. And so then somebody else is going to be able to afford it and they'll just use it anyway.
Ryan: Right, which is one of the problems we talked about with the developing world where it's like, you know, the United States and India and China and Europe, we've kind of created this problem by using a lot of greenhouse gases. And now we're the ones saying the rest of you can't use the greenhouse gases that we used to get our leg up in the world. Which seems unfair, but how else do ya, it's a very tricky political, socio-economic issue to deal with.
Charlie: You come up with creative scientific, technological and political solutions.
Ryan: Are you saying science is the answer?
Niño: ... and world unity...
Ryan: And world unity...
Ben: Yeah, no, we have to...
Charlie: Education...
Ben: ...give the Third World money, subsidize the fact that they can't develop as quickly as, you know, the resources available at the...
Ryan: Well, we're descending into a discussion of politics and I say that we should all just agree that science is the answer.
Ben: This isn't political science, sort of.
Ryan: That would be a hell of an episode. We will certainly get some feedback. But if you believe that global warming is conspiracy perpetrated by the climatology scientists, well, there's there's someone you can email and it's not paleopals@sciencesortof.com, because we don't need the vitriol but that's SenorNiño@sciencesortof.com because he's got his own email address.
25:09
Niño: Send it my way.
Ryan: And I know that there's a lot of punctuation and accents going there but we made it easy. It's just senornino@sciencesortof.com if you’ve got any comments, criticism, critiques or praise for our beloved Senor Niño.
Niño: Thanks guys.
Ryan: And Niño, do you have any any final thoughts about how people should view climatology versus meteorology, climate change, greenhouse gases, all that stuff? What's your what's your message?
Niño: No, I think we've covered a lot of it. It's been a pleasure, guys.
Ryan: All right, thank you so much Senor Niño and have a safe travel off to Tejas. Don't worry, this this episode will be out, after you, you get back so you should be safe in Texas.
Charlie: Enjoy that lemonade, that sounds...
Niño: Thank you so much.
Ryan: And I know we have a lot of listeners in Texas. So you know I'm just teasing. All right. Thank you so much Senor Niño, have a great night.
Niño: You too. Take care.
Ryan: Bye.
Charlie: Alright, bye.
Ben: Bye.
Music
Ryan: Well, speaking of, speaking of objects in the sky, should we talk about Mimas?
Charlie: Sure.
Ben: Yeah.
Ryan: All right, Charlie, tell us about Mimas.
Charlie: Alright, so Mimas is a moon of Saturn. It is, let me think, it's somewhere between Janus and Enceladus. So it's fairly near the rings of, fairly close to the rings of Saturn. And it's about 400 kilometers in diameter. So it's, it's a small body.
Ryan: Say that in American Charlie.
Charlie: 200 miles.
Ryan: Alright, fair enough.
Charlie: Less than 200 miles. It has a very curious thermal signature that was recently measured by the CRISM infrared spectrometer.
Ryan: And that's where this this story comes from. Right?
Charlie: Yeah. And that's where this story begins to take off. So this is the Bad Astronomy blog from the Discover magazine.com.
Ryan: This is the blog is run by Phil Plait, who's a prominent skeptic and astronomer. He, he runs the Bad Astronomy website which is all about debunking people who think the moon landing was a hoax, so. Cool guy.
Charlie: That's that's a that's a valuable and noble endeavor. So this article is called “Waka waka waka Mimas waka waka” and so waka waka is in reference to Pac Man, but that only, I think that might be before my time. I’ve played a lot of Pac Man, but I don't know what, I didn't know what waka waka...
Ben: It's the sound he makes his he's munching the, he goes waka waka waka.
Ryan: I was thinking Fozzie the Bear from the Muppets at first like “waka waka waka” you know when he tells...
Charlie: Yeah, that's what I thought too.
Ryan: But then, so it took me a minute and when I saw the picture, it clicked and I thought about the you know, wonk, wnk, wonk, wonk, wonk, wonk, wonk of the Pac Man.
Ben: In this one wock is spelled with a ck and Fozzy Bear’s wocks , I think they're spelled with two k's.
Ryan: Makes sense. Makes sense.
Charlie: Perfect. Alright, so it's it's entitled “Waka waka waka” in reference to Pac Man because the thermal signature or the temperature map of Mimas, at least from the angle in which the CHRISM Infrared Spectrometer took this picture looks strikingly like Pac Man. There's a cold region, cold triangle that takes up the majority of the space and then the outer limb of the planet looks strikingly like Pac Man. It's circular with a V shape mouth wedge.
Ryan: Well, here's the, here's the crazy thing. So this isn't the first time we've talked about Mimas we talked about Mimas, I think last time Ben was on the show actually, Episode 26 with Matt Sturgis.
Charlie: Oh yeah because it looks like the Death Star.
Ryan: Right, but in this image with, and obviously we'll post a link to the story and I may very well use this image as the show episode’s artwork. But the way it worked out is the Death Star, like the laser portion of it, looks like the little ball that Pac Man is eating and then there's also a well placed crater that gives Pac Man a little eye up top.
Charlie: That's great.
Ben: Oh, yeah, I didn’t notice that, that’s great.
Ryan: Yeah, it really works, it's kind of insane.
Charlie: Yeah, so the coldest region of, of this spectral image, this infrared special image, is near the, the, the large crater, the Herschel crater on Mimas. And this is, this is kind of curious because the fact that it's coincident, I mean, it may not be kept coincident we can't see the other hemisphere of, of Mimas.
30:05
But it, it argues or suggests that that, there may be some relationship between these two objects and, and some of the scientists on the CHRISM team have made that suggestion. But others say you know, it's, it's too soon we need to see the other side of, the other side of Mimas before we make, make that call, the temperature of the other side. And the strangest thing about this is that that region, the hemisphere, I mean, the equator of Mimas, where this crater is located, should be the warmest because that's under direct sunlight. But it's not. It's the coldest and the outer limb, the Arctic, the polar regions of Mimas are actually recorded as being the hottest and so there's a bit of a conundrum here. It's not what we'd expect.
Ryan: So Charlie, had you seen this before I set out the story.
Charlie: No, I hadn't.
Ryan: And what it like what was your initial reaction when you saw it?
Charlie: I was like, that is completely fake.
Ryan: Right.
Charlie: So then I went to the Cassini webpage and started looking, I mean, it's it's a NASA generated webpage.
Ryan: I don't think we've talked about Cassini yet. Can you give people a quick rundown of Cassini and its mission and what it is?
Charlie: Cassini is a flagship mission launched by NASA to explore the Saturnian system.
Ryan: I just want people to know that I didn't edit out a pause at all, and that that was Charlie just bam, knew Cassini right there. Sorry. So give Charlie a round of applause.
Ben: Yeah.
Ryan: Thank you, Ben.
Charlie: It's kind of my job. So hopefully, I'm not screwing this up too, too, too badly.
Ryan: I was just impressed because normally, you're the contemplative one of the group and you think about things before you speak. But this time, I was like, what's Cassini? And you go, boom, Cassini.
Ryan: Yeah. So every decade NASA usually sends out a big flagship, large scale, multimillion dollar instrument that or, or it's really, really like a big bus with several instruments on it, to a target of high scientific interest so they sent things to Mars, to Jupiter, to Saturn, the Voyager spacecrafts in the 70s, that, that basically explored the entire solar system where these flagship mission type crafts. And so Cassini is the one that's operating now. And it's, it's traveling in this in the Saturnian system exploring all the moons including Titan. I don't know if you guys remember a few years ago when the Huygens probe landed on Titan that was launched from the Cassini spacecraft. So that was a spacecraft being launched from a spacecraft.
Ryan: Double win.
Charlie: Double win. And so yeah, it's continuing, continuing to do great things in the Saturnian system and collecting data. And now we found something very interesting with Mimas. Ah, a year or two ago, it found something very interesting with Enceladus, which is the next major moon out from Saturn from Mimas. It turned out to have geysers of ice and water, well, frozen water shooting From its South Pole, and Mimas, which was thought to be, you know, not nearly as interesting as Enceladus now has a very curious thermal signature on it that warrants and demands explanation.
Ben: Okay, so I've got some questions about the, so, I'm looking at these photos, looking at the PacMan photo specifically. Where's the sun in this photo, is it behind the camera.
Charlie: So, you're looking at the PacMan photo, and you can see that, you can see that there's a, just an infrared map of, image of, Mimas to the left. Right? And so, it's, it's well illuminated. And the way to tell where the sun is in planetary images, or even when you're looking at the moon in the night skies to look at the craters, and look at the shadowing in the craters. And so here you can tell the sun is coming from the left hand side of the image, slightly lower left and creating these these shadows on the left sides of the craters and bright walls on the right hand side of craters. You get that?
Ben: Yeah. Okay, I see that now. Oh...
Charlie: Yes.
Ben: So, what’s the, what's the problem here? It looks like the the illuminated side is warm and the part that isn't illuminated is cold. What’s the mystery?
Charlie: Well think about it a little bit more carefully. The North Pole should not be as hot as the South Pole, right? If the sun is really coming from that angle. I mean, there's, there's, there's craters in the north pole that are completely in shadow.
Ben: Oh, yeah, I see that. But...
Charlie: And there's such, there's such a striking contrast and temperature, specifically at the Vshape where PacMan’s mouth, I don't know, the, the vertex of PacMan's mouth is, usually when spherical objects are heated by a light source. They have a very circular or conical looking heat signature on them, right? Just as shading, any artist that is coloring a ball underneath a lamp would shade it in a circular fashion.
35:04
Ben: Right.
Charlie: So this has, this has hard angles and straight lines which defies, you know...
Ben: I see.
Charlie: ...natural intuition.
Ben: Yeah. What's the rotation rate like on this? On the moon, on this moon? Is it rotating like once a month like our moon does or is it rotating?
Charlie: Um, it...
Ben: Hardly at all?
Charlie: It definitely rotates. Well it's synchronous with its orbit. So that means that it's, it rotates, one face always faces Saturn and so it, its rotation period is the same as its year. Its day is, it is as long as it's year.
Ryan:I wouldn't get nearly as much done.
Charlie: Yeah.
Ryan: The one question I kind of had for you, Charlie, is what do you think are maybe some plausible explanations for why it looks like this?
Charlie: Well, I study Mars and different surfaces on Mars record different temperatures even though they're under the exact same sunlight at that same given time. So, one region of Mars directly adjacent to another region of Mars will have a different temperature, even if they're at the same latitude. And this is due to different materials. So one region has is made out of bedrock. And the other region is covered in dust. And just as you know, if you're walking on a beach barefoot, the sand can be a different temperature than the asphalt or the sidewalk, to your feet. And this is due to the thermal inertia of the material. And so thermal, thermal inertia is not a direct analogy to mechanical inertia, so mechanical inertia is just like, mass times velocity, right? Am I right? Help me out Ben.
Ben: Oh, it's just mass.
Charlie: Oh, it's just mass. So yeah, exactly. Sorry. So basically more massive objects are harder to accelerate. Objects or materials with higher thermal inertia, are, it's more difficult to change their temperature.
Ryan: So basically what you're saying is that if there's different materials under the surface of Mimas, it's going to heat differently, even if it's receiving the same amount of sunlight.
Charlie: It'll reach an equilibrium temperature more quickly if it has a lower thermal inertia.
Ryan: Okay. But the kind, I mean, the cool thing, the one, the one take home message that I was really hoping to get out of the story was that, I made a joke about this earlier, but people accuse scientists and other people that are intelligent or educated of being know-it-alls, and that's just not true. Because stuff like this happens, and we're all stumped. Right?
Charlie: Yeah, well, this is great, because now there's there's something...
Ryan: Something to do!
Charlie: Yeah, there's something to do. This demands an explanation. So we can look at you know, there is one region covered with dust and so that, it would have a lower thermal inertia. There is one region, you know primarily water ice, which has a high thermal inertia. And I mean the density of Mimas is something like 1.15 so that means it's primarily made out of water, 1.15 grams per cubic centimeter.
Ryan: Right.
Charlie: So there isn't much rock and but there's other objects in the Saturnian system like, damn what is that?
Ryan: I don't know.
Charlie: What is that moon? The moon that's red on one side and white on the other side. Iapetus. So Iapetus has one hemisphere that's dark and one hemisphere that's light and so there's, there's dust kicking around the Saturnian system. So maybe, maybe Mimas is primarily made out of water ice and has has a dusty surface that for some reason is near this Herschel crater which makes Mimas look like the Death Star and that's, that's affecting its thermal inertia, which in turn affects this thermal spectrum when detected from the Cassini infrared spectrometer.
Ryan: Right.
Charlie: I don't know. But, yeah, exactly there's, this is exciting because there's a lot, a lot of questions, a lot of work to do.
Ryan: The specific, the specific point is that Mimas has something different going on that we didn't expect. And the larger point to be made is that scientists aren't know it all, scientists, scientists relish not knowing. And I know, you know, we're not, we're not like a lot of the other science and medicine podcasts on iTunes, that we don't hammer home the idea of skeptical inquiry and skepticism and that kind of stuff. But we are, we are all legitimate scientists. We all, we are all about the pursuit of knowledge and you can't pursue knowledge if you're a know it all.
Ben: No, it's true. And the pursuit of knowledge is kind of, it's driven by your desire to answer questions, right? So you pursue knowledge that you can ask better questions next time you come on something that's really weird...
Ryan: Yeah.
Ben: Like this...
Charlie: Sorry, are you referring to, who was it Socrates or Aristotle, that went to the Oracle of Delphi?
40:01
Ryan: I think it was Socrates.
Charlie: Socrates and said, I know nothing.
Ben: Socrates, yeah, that's right.
Ryan: I mean, I'm not even I'm not even referring to that. I'm just saying to, you know, the Paleo Posse, the next time you're in a situation, I know none of the Paleo Posse would ever do this because they're enlightened enough to listen to this podcast. But the next time you hear somebody accuse, especially a science based person to being a know it all, you know, maybe you step up and say, well, science only functions because not all is known. If all were known science would fail.
Ben: Hey Charlie, does the plant, does this moon have an atmosphere or something? How come the temperature lines go out off the surface and trail off? Is it moving through crap?
Charlie: No, no, it does, it doesn't have an atmosphere. That's a, that's a very good question, given the image that, that we’re presented here. Yeah, it's, it's like I said, it's only 400 kilometers in diameter. So it has far to, it doesn't have enough mass to have enough gravity to hold on to an atmosphere. I mean, that's why Mars has such a small atmosphere compared, compared to Earth.
Ryan: Here I am trying to make this deep profound statement about the nature of science and Ben still looking at the stupid picture asking questions about the atmosphere. He's being a scientist, this is a great question, so I'll just cut to the, cut to the, the reason why it has this this blur at the edge of it, is just a resolution effect. The resolution of the Cassini infrared spectrometer is such that it can't resolve the disk of, of, Mimas from this distance, from the distance in which it took the picture. So it's just like your, your simple, like, making cool pics or Cannon, Cannon picture and you're taking, you're taking a picture of something really far away. It's gonna look pixelated.
Ben: I see. And so that's why, that's why there's no like cooling region in the upper crater because that's smaller than the resolution with the camera.
Charlie: Right.
Ben: I see. Well, that's cool.
Ryan: It is cool. This is, this is a cool story. I'm really excited by this and Charlie, I fully expect you with all of your planetary contacts to track down some of the lead researchers on this and get them on the show.
Charlie: All right, I'll do that.
Ryan: Good deal. And, ah...
Ben: Play PacMan against them.
Ryan: Yeah.
Ben: See if they’re any good.
Ryan: Exactly. Let's play some PacMan and speaking of video games, we should talk about Trailer Trash Talk, right Ben?
Ben: Yeah, Trailer Trash Talk.
Music
Announcer: Hey y'all, it's Trailer Trash Talk.
Ben: All right Trailer Trash Talk. Let's go. Okay, so...
Ryan: Yes, sir.
Ben: That’s right.
Ryan: Dr. Tippett.
Ben: Master Tippett.
Charlie: Proto Doctor.
Ryan: Proto Doctor. I like Master Tippett.
Charlie: I like that too.
Ben: I have an academic title, should be referred to it. Okay, so Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is this week's trailer. It's directed by Edgar Wright right? And it stars Michael Cera. And then some other people.
Ryan: Chris Evans is the other big name and Brandon Routh, apparently.
Ben: Yeah.
Ryan: He’s Superman. I didn't even know that. Brandon Routh was Superman in Superman Returns.
Ben: Oh, and it's also got Jason Schwartzman. So when this, when this movie first came out, the details of it, my wife was like, ooh, Jason Schwartzman. She loves this guy. Okay, so Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is totally awesome. And it's based on a comic book by a fellow Canadian Bryan Lee O'Malley.
Ryan: What? Forget this.
Ben: What?
Ryan: Scrub it. We're not talking about it.
Benz: Oh, we need to. This is very...
Ryan: If it's Canadian based I have no interest.
Ben: Not only is it Canadian based, it takes place in Canada.
Ryan: That's even worse.
Ben: Several famous landmarks in Toronto...
Ryan: Alright Charlie, I’m going to cut Ben out? Bye Ben. You’ve taken it too far. You’ve brought too much Canadian into this. I'm just kidding, Ben, I love Scott Pilgrim. Scott Pilgrim is amazing.
45:06
Ben: Okay.
Charlie: It’s probably gonna have good music then.
Ryan: Ben...
Ben: Oh yeah.
Ryan: Tell us, tell us the tagline of Scott Pilgrim the movie.
Ben: It's, okay, so the movie’s called Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and it's an epic tale of epic epicness.
Charlie: Right.
Ben: Anyway, um, okay, so a brief plot summary. There's this dude, his name is Scott Pilgrim. He's in his early 20s. He lives in Toronto. He has friends who live with them. And then a mysterious American shows up in town, and he falls in love with her. But then to date her he has to defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends. So in the comic books, each comic book, one of the seven evil ex-boyfriends shows up an Scott Pilgrim kicks their asses. And we're coming on to the last comic book. I think he's drawing it right now.
Ryan: It comes out in July, so.
Ben: Yeah. And then so in the movie he will fight them all, I guess. All in one movie instead of in seven.
Ryan: Let’s hope.
Ben: Right. So, so, as for the casting, it's, it's like it's starring Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Kieran Culkin, wow.
Ryan: I don't know who that is.
Ben: Anyway, so isn’t that, like, Macaulay Culkin’s, sisters...
Ryan: From Canada, Canadian celebrity that only...
Ben: It’s his little brother...
Ryan: It is his little brother, that’s creepy. I don't like that.
Ben: Anyway, um so, so it's interesting when you watch the casting on the trailer because I'm a big fan of the comic books and you can tell which casting selections they got right and which casting selections they got wrong.
Ryan: Oh yeah. Kieran Culkin is the wrong, wrong cast. He's playing, he's playing Wallace.
Ben: Oh no! Really?
Ryan: I know, right? Isn’t that terrible?
Ben: Oh, man. I keep thinking Wallace is Chinese.
Ryan: Charlie, this is practically an odd man out at this point. You've got to, you've got to step up and yell at us when we start talking about things that none of the listeners are going to know about. So yeah, Wallace...
Charlie: Yes. I don't even know what's going on. He plays the bass guitar. Michael Cera plays the bass guitar.
Ryan: Scott Pilgrim is the basis for a band called Bob-omb. I don't know. How do you how do you pronounce that Ben?
Ben: Sex Bob-omb.
Ryan: Sex Bob-omb. The basic premise is that, as Ben said, he meets the American girl of his dream, which is what every Canadian hopes for. And, really, no comment there Ben?
Ben: Well, I mean, that...
Ben: I'm sorry. You married an American, didn't you, Ben.
Ben: For one thing, I married an American. Secondly, Ramona Flowers in the books and probably, she shows up in his dreams. Like, that's the premise.
Ryan: Yeah, she literally is in his dreams. And then he meets her in real life after that, and so he's a bass player in a band. He's kind of a happy go lucky doing nothing, in his early 20s dude in Toronto. He was completely lovable in his own cute ineffective way.
Ben: Yeah, yeah. Nice Guy.
Charlie: Michael Cera.
Ryan: Right, which I almost am not sure about that casting.
Ben: I think it's a terrible casting decision.
Ryan: But let's hope he can pull it off.
Ben: Well, I don't think he will be.
Ryan: Well, have faith, Ben.
Ben: Well, no. I mean, Scott Pilgrim is at his very heart, a lovable, guy that's clueless, but he's kind of a man of action. If he knows what to do, he'll do it.
Ryan: Yes.
Ben: But mostly he doesn't know what to do. Kind of friendly. He's living in that magical early 20s time when everything's kind of lucky, but not very directed.
Ryan: That's where I am!
Ben: Yeah, but Michael Cera, you know, he knows what to do, but he mumbles about it and stares at his shoes. I mean, I've never seen a movie starring him where he's not playing, which, like George Michael Bluth.
Ryan: Yeah, this is basically, so this is gonna be Michael Cere’s breakout role because he's gonna have to be a kung fu action star to get through this film.
Ben: Oh, I don’t...
Charlie: Speaking of kung fu action, like throughout this film, there's, it reminds me of the 1950’s style Batman because there's like Kapow...
Ryan: Yeah.
Charlie: ...and...
Ben: Yeah, yeah. Right.
Charlie: Like comic book font, trailing the action with words that sound like, onomatopoeia.
Ben: Yeah.
Ryan: And there's also, there's also a lot of video game noise effects and things like that, which when we said speaking of video games in the PacMan and all that, there's a lot of, um, Bryan Lee O'Malley, the guy who did the graphic novels is clearly very influenced by video games of the late 80s, early 90s. Would you agree Ben?
Ben: Yeah.
Charlie: When was this guy born, what generation...
Ryan: He's your guys's age.
Ben: Our age.
Charlie: Yeah. Yeah, so he’s, I guess yeah...
Ryan: He's late 20s, yeah, late 20s. And so he grew up with these kind of video games. So Scott Pilgrim is, is heavily influenced, Scott Pilgrim the comic is heavily influenced by these style of video games.
50:00
And there's like in the, in the graphic novels, there are save points. There are one ups, there are stats, like, you know, Scott...
Charlie: That’s awesome.
Ryan: Scott will do something and he'll get plus three to charm or whatever. It's hilarious.
Ben: Yeah.
Ryan: It sounds completely disjointed. But when you read the books it works. Because Bryan Lee O'Malley is a really strong storyteller. Am I right Ben?
Ben: Oh, yeah, no, he's plugging into, kind of, cultural reference points for our generation, I think. And that makes it that, you know, if there was a kid from Indonesia, who's reading this book, you probably wouldn't be able to make much sense of it. Whereas we are like, oh, holy, that's the those are the hearts from Legend of Zelda. We know what the heck that is, you know. So I mean, it's not quite that obtuse, but even then there's a lot of visual stylings from it. And then, so, so in this trailer, what we see is during the fight scenes, at least, which are, most of the trailer is mostly fight scenes, in the trailer, you see these video game sound effects coming into play in the middle of the fights. Which is appropriate, given, given the style of the of the graphic novel, right. So I think they did that well, I think they did that really well. I'm actually looking forward to that part.
Ryan: Andrew Wright is really good as, like, kind of a kinetic director that has a lot of really quick things happening all at once. Um, so I think he was a great choice to direct this movie.
Charlie: If this truly is an odd man out segment in which I'm supposed to know nothing, and you guys are supposed to convince me to, to like, whatever it is that you're talking about. You've already won. I want to read the novels and I want to go see the movie.
Ryan: Well, Charlie, my question to you is before Ben and I had our nerdgasm of excellence. What did you think of the trailer? And Ben, you know, let's just keep our comments to ourselves and give Charlie the soapbox for a moment because I'd like to hear what he thought viewing the trailer blind.
Ben: I’m putting on mute.
Ryan: All right, good, good.
Charlie: I thought the trailer was confusing. I didn't have much idea of what was going on. I understood that he was interested in this girl and that she had what, she put it, baggage and the baggage was different guys. I didn't even know that they were ex boyfriends or lovers or whatever. But they were coming at Scott Pilgrim with what looked to me superpowers and he had to develop superpowers to fight them. And I was, just was, very confused.
Ryan: Well, Charlie, one of them's a vegan. One of the exes, the evil exes is a vegan that, I mean, they have superpowers...
Charlie: They do have superpowers.
Ryan: ...obvious.
Charlie: Yeah.
Ryan: But would you, before, before Ben and I talked this up ad nauseum would you have thumbs upped this or thumbs downed it?
Charlie: I wouldn't have gone to see the. movie.
Ryan: Really?
Charlie: Yeah, just because it looked like, I don't know, it looked a little too cartoony to me or something. It looked like it, it looked, it looked like the trailer suffered from ADHD or something like that.
Ryan: The book suffers from ADHD. It's fantastic.
Charlie: But, but now, that I mean, I have much more background from your guys's discussion, and that it I mean, I suffer from, I mean, I'm not diagnosed with ADHD but as, as an individual in my generation, I can't focus on a task for more than five minutes. And usually I have three things going on simultaneously.
Ryan: One of one of which is Sonic the Hedgehog.
Charlie: What? When I was a kid yeah.
Ryan: Well, yeah, it's all about, it's all about the video game references at this point, so.
Charlie: Yeah, no, I love video game references. I grew up with video games. I was four years old when Super Mario Brothers came out and so that's right when I was becoming,I don't know, cognitively online. And and I, I‘m depressed to say that I've put different events in my life in terms of video games. Like I think of publishing a paper as, as leveling up every once in a while. Not, not constantly that's not how I solely think about it. But when I, when I do, when I do put in the time to advance my life, I, I think of it as gaining experience and...
Ryan: That’s awesome.
Charlie: ...and promoting, promoting my my abilities and becoming better and better. And it's true, because to a certain extent, things get, get easier. The more I do them, the more I publish papers, the more I work on mathematics, or physics, the easier it gets and I become more leveled up. But I mean it, prior generations, that that would just be thought of as as having experience.
Ryan: Thought of as having experience points, which is very similar.
Charlie: Yeah. And so now I just, I don't think experience, I just think XP.
55:00
Ryan: As opposed to MP, which is how much Mana points you have for casting spells, you grade papers.
Charlie: Yeah, I haven't taken it that far. I don't believe any of us can cast spells and I...
Ryan: It’s true.
Charlie: ...don’t concern myself with Mana.
Ryan: We're pretty, we're pretty rational in our daily lives. Um, but I'm glad, I'm really glad we got you excited about this movie Charlie because I will give you this graphic novel series. There are five volumes out right now. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is volume number four but I have a feeling this movie is going to encompass the entire series. Volume six the final volume in the series is coming out right before the movie comes out. And the, this, unlike most comic books, this has been a series of graphic novels that hasn't been a series of issues. So you're getting this thick volume each time. We will put links to all volumes one through five on the site under the trailer trash talk heading. So you can go check them out, we highly recommend them. I'm going to give them to Charlie. Hopefully he'll give us a report back on whether or not he enjoyed them here in a couple of months, weeks, months, however long it takes him to get through them. However long it takes me to get them to Hawaii. But we've, we've rambled on long enough. So let's...
Charlie: Thumbs up, do the Hollywood Stock Exchange magic. And if you're unfamiliar with that, it's you can find the, hsx.com. It's so easy. We have a league, it's the Science sort of League. It's the second biggest league on the Hollywood Stock Exchange, which is awesome. Did you know that Ben?
Ben: Yeah, I did.
Ryan: Are you in a league Ben?
Ben: Yeah, I was doing really well. And then I, then I didn't, I made a mistake and fell. I was I was number, I was in 20th place briefly.
Ryan: Well, how do you feel about Scott Pilgrim? Are you going thumbs up or thumbs down?
Ben: Yeah, well, I went I went long on Scott Pilgrim really early. And that's that's how I got to number 20.
Ryan: Good.
Ben: I did really well. But you know, given Charlie's comments on it, I'm starting to doubt this trailer. Because I mean, I saw this trailer, in light of having read all of the comic books.
Ryan: For sure.
Ben: I was really familiar with it and the trailer seemed like a montage of my favorite parts of the comic books. And I was like, yeah. But you know, if I hadn't, this would seem kind of not very good, maybe.
Ryan: But it sounds like, it sounds like we're all going long.
Ben: Well, yeah, I'll go long, what can I say?
Ryan: Yeah, I gotta go long too. So we're triple, triple long at this point. And we'll make Patrick, buy that. But all so we've got a great, we've got a great league going at the Hollywood Stock Exchange, it’s the Science sort of League, so you should go join it. Join the stock exchanging fun. It really is. It's really cool. Yeah, and I guess this is probably the right time to mention, so last weekend, I went to the secret Film Festival here in Santa Cruz. Which is is a yearly event that happens at the Del Mar theater here in Santa Cruz where they show six movies from midnight on Saturday till noon on Sunday. So you basically have to pull an all nighter to go to it. And the movies, you don't know what they're going to be before you go there. Which is kind of insane. So, you’re sitting there sleep deprived, drinking coffee at three in the morning, eating espresso beans trying to stay awake throughout these movies. And the movies are all normally prerelease Indy kind of stuff. But I wrote up a brief synopsis of the six movies that I saw and my thoughts on those movies. And because of the Trailer Trash Talk segment, I compared them to the show, or at least to the trailers and one of the movies we'd actually talked about on Trailer Trash Talk before. Do you remember Terribly Happy Charlie?
Charlie: Yeah, that that movie looked awesome.
Ryan: So I saw it.
Charlie: I need to see that.
Ryan: It was, well it’s not out yet. I just, I have the magical abilities of the secret Film Festival. So if you'd like to, if you'd like to get my thoughts, they’re spoiler free. I didn't ruin any of the movies because that's not cool. But I posted them on sciencesortof.com, kind of a little mini blog post, something we’re trying out. So I'm curious to see if people go check it out, if they like it. If you do go read it, leave a comment, so I know you checked it out. I'll post a link to it on the Facebook page and on Twitter. And it'll be up by the time this episode comes out. So my thoughts on the movies I saw in a sleep deprived state at the Secret Film Festival, one of which was Terribly Happy, which was on the show before, so, yeah, I thought I would toss that out there.
Charlie: One thing I thought I'll toss out just, signing up HSX.com is really easy because I just did it.
Ryan: Thank you Charlie, about time. Send out a tweet while you're at it.
Charlie: I don't know how.
Ryan: Ha, ha, haaaaaaa.
Charlie: Speaking of random, disjointed attention deficit disorder jumps, let's move on to wormholes. All right.
1:00:00
Music
Ryan: So wormholes, right. All right so Ben submitted a story because he felt that he was uniquely qualified to discuss some wormhole nonsense but I, I don't understand it so it's up to you to get me there and get the listeners there and yeah. Drag us, drag us along with your wacky physics science, kicking and screaming, Ben, please, go.
Ben: Okay.
Charlie: Kick it you clue Euclidian style.
Ben: I’ll kick it lorentzian style. Okay, so um, the deal is that general relativity papers are very rarely reported in the mainstream media. And when they are they're usually kind of sexy. So one just got reported and the title of the article, not the research paper, but the article was “Our universe at home within a large universe? So suggests a physicist’s wormhole research”. Right. So it's based on an article which was published in Physics Review...
Charlie: Letters B.
Ben: Physics Letters B
Ryan: Which one is that? What does that mean? Explain.
Ben: Okay. Right. There are different, because there were, there were papers. There was, there was a journal earlier in the 1900s called Physics Letters or Physics Review. And eventually the number of physics articles being published was so overwhelming. They started to sort them by, you know...
Charlie: By category...
Ben: By categories, right. And so theoretical physics and mathematical physics and gravitational physics is usually in a thing called Physics Review D. Physics Letters B is kind of a strange place to see it an article like this. But anyway, so the, the paper he wrote was called “Radial motion into an Einstein-Rosen bridge” and it's by a guy named by named new Nikodem J. Poplawski from the Department of Physics, Indiana University. So yeah, this this is kind of sparked my interest. I noticed this articles and similar articles summarizing this paper being published kind of on, on broader, on the internet than the usual places these things get mentioned. And so I decided to look into this. So pretty much what the guy is trying to say is that he thinks that wormholes are feasible.
Ryan: First, let me cut you off for just one second Ben because I want to point something out to the Paleo Posse, who are receiving this in their ear holes.
Ben: Yes.
Ryan: You're a physicist, correct?
Ben: you're correct.
Ryan: So in chatting with you earlier this week, as we were preparing for the show, you've read the actual article published, not just the popular press, this, you know, popular press disseminations of it, right?
Ben: That's right. I’ve read both.
Ryan: So you are, you are at this point considered a secondary source, primary source.
Charlie: Second.
Ben: For what?
Ryan: Secondary source, you're a secondary source. The point, the point I'm trying to make...
Charlie: A well educated, informed secondary source.
Ryan: Right. Right. The point, the point I'm trying to make is that you are not, you are not speaking based on what the popular press has reported. You are speaking based on the actual data that this guy was presenting and trying to make a case for.
Ben: I mean, that's right, that's, yeah,
Charlie: Ben wrote the, wrote the paper on the physics of Superman. He figured it out.
Ryan: Right.
Charlie: So, he’s qualified.
Ryan: I'm just trying to make sure people realize how close to the the actual truth they are by listening to the words of Señor Ben Tippett.
Ben: That, that's right. Yeah.
Ryan: So please, please continue. I didn't mean to cut you off. I just wanted people...
Ben: No...
Ryan: I wanted people to recognize...
Charlie: Any closer they’d get burned.
Ryan: Exactly. You are close to godliness right now Paleo Posse. Canadian godliness, so a little less impressive, but still, still good.
Ben: We don't, we don't like to make big things in ourselves up here. Um, okay, so, so, right. The problem or interesting feature of popular press articles about these high intensity mathematics field research articles, is that they tend to go a little bit far in interpreting the consequences. For instance, the title of the popular press article was “Our universe at home within a larger universe? So suggests physics wormhole research.” Now the guy doesn't really actually mention the word universe in it.
1:05:02
Ben: Or speculate about where we live in the universe or speculate about what this guy has to say. And so the popular press article’s a little bit misleading. When you read it, you get all this idea that he's saying, hey, what if our universe is actually inside a black hole? Which is a fairly common speculation people make.
Ryan: So wait, what?! That's a fairly common speculation?
Ben: Yeah. Well, I mean, people looked into it. We probably don't live inside a black hole. But somebody looked into it. It, we've had that idea before.
Ryan: How do you look into a black hole? It's really dark in there Ben.
Ben: No, no, we imagined that our universe lives inside of a black hole.
Ryan: You're talking nonsense, man. Explain yourself.
Ben: It is kind of nonsense.
Ryan: What?
Charlie: Where does that, where does that universe live?
Ben: That universe lives inside of a bigger black hole. I don't know...
Ryan: Ben. Aawwg.
Ben: ...black hole... I'm not even talking about this, the topic of this paper...
Ryan: The cosmology is breaking my brain at this point.
Ben: Well it's not supposed to. All I'm saying is that this, the the popular press article takes a lot of liberties on the research article.
Ryan: Forget the popular press article, tell us what's actually going on.
Ben: Okay, so what's actually going on is this guy. His name again is Nikodem J. Poplawski, wants to make a wormhole. So what is a wormhole? It's like a black hole, but instead of falling through and getting crushed in the middle, you come out the other side and you say, Oh, look, I'm somewhere else. And it’s a popular...
Charlie: It’s a bridge.
Ben: Yeah, so they call this the Einstein Rosen-bridge. But it's a, it's tricky. So this guy, this Poplawski, he did a mathematical model, in essence, where, let me let me back this truck up one step and just tell you briefly about general relativity. General relativity is, kind of, the science of making these these four dimensional geometry models. And they have to be fairly simple because general relativity, because five, four dimensions is a really crazy geometrical system to be working in. And so we can only really talking about really, really simplified things. And so one particle...
Charlie: Four dimensions, you're talking about length, width, height and time. I presume.
Ben: Time, that's right. Yeah. And so to compensate for the fact that most of our models are fairly simple, one way we can generate more realistic models is to take pieces of different models and sew them together. Okay. So, what this guy did in essence, in his model, is he took a black hole, which sucks everything into it, and a white hole, which is, well imagine that you fall, somebody’s taking a videotape of you falling into a black hole. So you started outside the black hole and you fall closer and closer to it and then you pass through the surface called the event horizon. So he's filmed it. And imagine that he takes that film. And he plays that film backwards. So it looks like you come out of the event horizon and you fly screaming towards the filmmaker, right? We call that, that, that time reversal, the universe where you the this, this geometry spits you out, instead of sucking you in, we call that a white hole. So what Poplawski did was he took a white hole, and he took the black hole, and he cut out the middle of them. And then he sew them together. So he made a thing that it's a, you start out getting sucked in towards it, and then you get spit out of it. But he didn't do a very good job of it. And so, his model kind of has an infinite amount of energy, just at the, at the seam between the two. So it has an infinite amount of energy and the energy is this really exotic type of energy that doesn't actually exist. It's this exotic matter that causes gravitational repulsion instead of attraction. So what we have here is, I was really excited to see this article when it came up in this popular press article, which is, hey, it's general relativity. But then when I read the paper, the paper, it's just just this guy saying, hey, let's sew these two things together in a really bad way to get a really unphysical spacetime.
Ryan: So you say a really bad way, and you and I chatted about this a little earlier today, but you are not happy with this article.
Charlie: Well, wait, why was it published then? What about, I mean, it’s a peer reviewed journal.
Ryan: It’s published because it's theoretical physics and who knows what those guys think of.
Ben: Well, so the the sexy place to get these kinds of papers published, the place where lots of the discussion is happening is Physics Review D, and he got published in Physics Letters B. So my guess is it got published because nobody who knew what they were talking about, read it.
Ryan: Exactly. Yeah. So...
Charlie: Ohhhh.
Ryan: When it comes to theoretical physics, you know, it just seems like people, two theoretical physicists are so far removed from each other compared to two planetary scientists or to evolutionary biologists that even if you're getting another theoretical physicist to peer review your paper he might not know what you're talking about.
1:10:14
Charlie: Does B stand for backwater?
Ben: I don’t know.
Ryan: B is the notation for a magnetic field.
Ben: That's right. We learned that this week, didn't we Ryan?
Ryan: We did. Charlie: Good job Ryan.
Ryan: Thank you. Thank you Charlie.
Ben: Yeah, I'm not sure what B stands for. It might be high energy physics. I know this guy is...
Ryan: The point is, the point is, Ben, you're not happy with this article. You don't...
Ben: No, I’m not happy with this article. It looks like the physicist...
Ryan: Well tell us why, because the popular...
Ben: Well, okay.
Ryan: ...the popular press is reporting this, listen. wormholes and black holes are both sexy, right?
Ben: Yes, they are. They're so sexy.
Ryan: Um, so when you, when you say like our universe is part of a, part of a wormhole associated with a black hole, like, that’s sexy and you're going to get reported in the popular press.
Ben: Well, that’s so sexy...
Charlie: Yeah, it sounds crazy, it sounds cool.
Ben: I know, I was so excited.
Ryan: So, but the point is, it's, it's bunk and you've read the actual paper and you were dissatisfied. You didn't think it made sense. So defend that claim that this...
Ben: Okay, so, first of all...
Ryan: Well, first, I’m sorry...
Charlie: Because if I violates conservation of energy, is that what you’re saying.
Ryan: Well, well, let me say, let me say one other thing. Um, we kind of have an unspoken philosophy here at Science sort of that we want to be positive. Like, we're excited about science, right?
Charlie: Otherwise we yell and cuss at each other.
Ryan: Exactly.
Ben: Yeah.
Ryan: We love, we love science. Science is great, science is what we get up for in the morning, which sounds really corny, but it's true. So I honestly believe when Ben submitted this story before he read the full paper, that it was like, oh, man, wouldn't this be cool to talk about and then when Ben read the paper, he kind of just descended into this, this sounds like crap and I can't believe this got published kind of attitude.
Ben: Yeah.
Ryan: Right.
Ben: That’s right.
Ryan: So, so...
Ben: Okay, so...
Ryan: ...we love science, we're not trying to be negative. But sometimes even scientists come up with crazy ideas that don't make sense and can't be validated. And this is one of those instances. So never let it be said that we didn't thoroughly vet and, and we aren't harsh and we have to be harsh on other scientists, right.
Ben: Yeah. I mean, so they kind of speculated, so the title of the popular article, “Our universe at home within the larger universe so suggests wormhole research”. I mean, there are lots of articles out there that are kind of like that. There's ones that have these weird gravity theories that are like holographic gravity is, I saw one, that was kind of like this and, you know, they come up. I was actually surprised when I read the actual article that it had nothing to do really with this, ah popular physics article, popular press article. Ahh, yeah, I mean, okay, so, so, which do you want me to criticize? The fact that the write up was all weird? Or do you the actual science? Because...
Ryan: The actual science because, I think, I think...
Ben: Okay.
Ryan: ...It's safe to assume that the popular press is gonna screw it up.
Ben: Yeah. All right. So, so like I said before, it's very common in physics, in, in general relativity to take two geometries and sew them together to get a new geometry. So, for instance, you can take a cosmological solution, like the big bang solution, where everything is spread out and expanding, the one that we see outside in our universe when we take a radio telescope or a microwave telescope and look out. And you can, you can stitch that onto a black hole solution and get a solution that looks kind of like a big ball of gas collapsing under its own weight and turning into a black hole. And so yeah, it's very common to stitch two different geometries together. But there are rules to go about doing this. So that in the end, it's a geometry that a person could wander through this, this boundary. And in this case, then...
Charlie: Self consistent.
Ben: Yeah, well, right. So you want, you want it to be self consistent. And you also want this boundary that you're sewing together across, you want it to be traversable, you'd want to make it so that somebody can pass through it. And in this case, this guy his boundary, it has an infinite amount of energy density. So there's this weird exotic matter that violates the, so it's not gravitationally attractive, which is, and physical in itself. And then it's kind of pasted over this, this surface and it's got an infinite density, which isn't that uncommon, but still, it's ah, it's not all that kosher. There's no reason to believe, that, based on this guy's calculations, and he asserts this in his paper, that he'd expect some of the some of the black holes in our universe actually turn into wormholes. There's no reason to believe that he's right. Because he didn't break any new ground here, really. Which is too bad. I was looking forward to it. Wormholes are cool.
1:1511
Ryan: Hmmm. Well, it seems to me, so I've heard the theory before, that the black holes we see in our universe are just the end member of a white hole in another universe. Have you heard this Ben?
Ben: Yeah.
Ryan: What do you what do you think about that? So as far as I understand, let me give my brief explanation as a non-physicist, and you can tell me how wrong I am. Basically, the black hole in our universe is sucking matter and energy through its event horizon. And on the other side of it is a white hole which is spewing out of the matter and energy that it sucks in such that every black hole is really the big bang of another universe in this kind of bubble theory of multiple universes.
Ben: Ah, yeah, I've seen that put out there. So...
Charlie: Yeah, it’s put it out, it’s been put out there, but there's no evidence of this.
Ben: Yeah.
Ryan: What you're saying is, we've never seen the white hole of our universe, right Charlie?
Charlie: Never.
Ben: Yeah. We’ve never seen any white holes, right. Um, and then, in this kind of physics, it's extraordinarily speculative. You pretty much have to take your physical intuition and try to build a physical model that represents something worth looking at in it, right? Because the, the number of questions you can, the number of answers that you can get in general relativity, way outweighs the number of questions we have. So you have to kind of properly formulate your good question before you get an answer.
Ryan: Okay.
Ben: And there have been, you know, well established models that look like that. Usually, someone will evoke some extraordinary physics that happens inside the collapsing the, inside the, inside the black hole that keeps it from collapsing down. And so there are various, there are various justifications to want to say that a black hole turns into a white hole.
Charlie: Right, Ben, that was, that was a question I wanted to ask you. Why is there this desire among the physics community to want symmetry? In I think it's something to do with the fact that for a lot of forces, or different physical phenomena, phenomena we see symmetry and so is that is that part of it? Why people want to to postulate the existence of white holes?
Ben: Oh, that's that's a that's a good question. Um, yeah. So, the, the existence of white holes actually comes from, so the black hole solution came out in like, 1914, 1917, I think, by a guy named Schwarzschild, he was in the First World War, and then he died. And it was the black hole solution where everything gets sucked into the center. But then when they found that they could extend the solution to a broader set of coordinates in a sense, tell it, which told you because of the symmetries involved, that it was also possible to interpret these sucking things as if you took time and you switched it backwards, you played that film backwards, you would see everything, instead of crushing down inside the black hole, everything would be emerging from it. And that's nice symmetrically. But there's an important feature to black holes, which is once you fall inside a specific radius, which depends on the mass, it's called the event horizon. Once you fall within that any, any signal you emit, even at the speed of light won't be able to escape. And that has huge direct implications on what's going to happen to you. What it means pretty much is that you and everything around you are going to end up in the middle of your, in the very center of the black hole, and there's no getting out. There's just getting more and more crushed over time.
Charlie: And nobody can even hear you scream or see your laser pointer flash.
Ben: Yeah. It's all over. So Stephen Hawking actually has a philosophical interpretation to this. He said that the inside the singularity in the middle of the black hole, we should interpret that as kind of the end of the universe. Right. So this is the boundary of space time right there that you take a hole punch, and you put it in the middle and you punch a hole in the middle of your black hole. And you say, there's nothing past there. And then if you wanted to turn that to attach that black hole crushing thing into something that turned into a white hole, what you would need is some way of repelling things out of, so you start out getting crushed towards the center, and you would need an infinitely strong gravitational force that would push you out instead of pulling you in. And we've never seen anything in our universe that's gravitationally repulsive instead of attractive.
Ryan: Which is actually one of the really, that's really cool thing to mention because all the fundamental forces that we know of, except for gravity have a negative force like electromagnetism has both a positive and negative, right?
1:20:00
Ben: Yeah.
Ryan: And all the other forces that we know of, except for gravity have a opposing force. But gravity is only attractive.
Ben: Well, so in...
Ryan: As far as we know right now.
Ben: Yeah. So in electromagnetism, there are two different charges, right? So there's positive charges and negative charges. And positive positive repel, negative negative repel and positive and negative attract. In gravity, there's only one charge it’s the mass. But in, once you get to the other two forces, the strong force and the weak force, let's see, I don't think you can talk about, like there's more than one. There's color charges, right?
Charlie: Yeah, there's, it gets even more exotic.
Ben: Yeah, it gets more exotic. There aren't just two, there's like three and then they all kind of have to cancel out, or there's six actually.
Charlie: Yeah.
Ben: There’s red, blue, yellow and anti-red and anti-blue...
Charlie: There's color and charm and strangeness.
Ben: Oh, yeah, there's little things. Yeah...
Ryan: We're getting quantum. We're getting quantum. Alright, I'm gonna, I'm gonna cut this off because, honestly, we should do an entire episode on quantum. And that's probably in the not too distant future.
Ben: Oh, geesh.
Ryan: So Ben, I gotta ask you bottom line this, what's...
Ben: Yes.
Ryan: What's the take home message from this paper? As far as you interpret it, I'm recognizing that it's your interpretation. So it may not be what you know what the author claims or what reality suggests. But give us what you think.
Ben: The bottom line is that somebody who isn't as connected with the gravitational black hole literature, I think he's a, he's a theoretical physics physicist in his own right in his own fields. He seems to do other gravity research, but in black hole stuff, it seems like he's not quite familiar with the things he's using. And then in addition to that, some journalist who also didn't know quite what he was talking about read it, and got some very fancy ideas from these words, and wrote a very fancy sounding article. And at this point, we're two steps away from any science, which is kind of sad.
Charlie: It's a game of telephone.
Ben: Yeah. That's essentially what's going on. Sorry, guys.
Ryan: Speaking of people that are communicating with us in basic ways that we can barely understand we should probably move on to the Paleo POW segment, right?
Ben: Yeah.
Music
Ryan: This week on Paleo POW we gotta start with a bit of a self referential one. Ben, do you want to tell people what, what happened this week that's got us both kind of in the clouds as it were.
Ben: Oh, hey, that's a nice segue. Speaking of awesome equipment. Okay, so what happened is Ryan got a gig working for marvel.com writing about the physics of Iron Man.
Charlie: All right, what, technical explanations, engineering, environment...
Ryan: Ah, the science.
Ben: The science environment. Yeah. And so he is, every week he posts a thing about the science of the Iron Man suit and how he flies and all this great stuff.
Ryan: Well, Ben, Ben's giving me a lot of credit right now, but I was collaborative with this project. And Ben was a huge help to me. I couldn't have done it without him. Ben also brought in a couple of his friends and I brought in a couple of my old friends, all people that might at some point appear on the show. But without the efforts of Ben Tippett and David Tsang, is that how you say it?
Ben: Dave Tsang, yeah.
Ryan: David Tsang and Jacob Stump. I couldn’t have done these articles, but the point is, for the next month, there's going to be one article a week on Tuesdays, tech Tuesdays, as Marvel is calling it on the science of Iron Man. So the first article came out today, April 13, and it's all about the armor. Next week, Ben and I are working hard on getting an article on the flight of Iron Man finished, and there'll be a couple more to come before the movie’s released.
Charlie: Very cool.
Ryan: Yeah, I mean, I know I mentioned iFanboy last week, as far as comics and science go and my first iFanboy article comes out on, on Thursday before this episode comes out, which is the 15th. But it's, uh, it's been kind of an embarrassment of riches right now as far as science and comics goes for me.
1:25:12
Charlie: Yeah, that's fun. Right on.
Ryan: So I implore people to check out this article. I posted on the Facebook page, I tweeted about it from my own account, and from the Science sort of account, people seem to be digging it. I worked really hard with Ben and with my editors at Marvel to make sure that these were articles that were true to the science as far as it exists in the real world. But also, were extremely readable by a layman audience. So even if you're not an engineer or physicist, which I'm not an engineer or physicist, either, hopefully these articles are something that you can go and check out and enjoy. And I hope you do. Please send any feedback you have to Ryan@sciencesortof.com, cuz I know my editors at Marvel would love to see it and the more feedback and positive response I get from things like this the more they're going to let me keep doing it. So please, if you if you enjoyed it and checked it out, let me know in one form or another and that's only going to help me get to do more stuff like this in the future.
Ben: And people if you think that this, this, these articles are just going to be kind of pap, you know, like everything else on the internet, we watched through the the iron, the first Iron Man movie, and they must have had some really good technical consultants because, like, we found actual science there. It's, surprisingly, right.
Ryan: I was impressed. I really was.
Yeah, yeah, they don't even tell you that it’s science, they just kind of put it in these little clues that he's building room temperature superconductors and things.
Ryan: And the, the plasmic discharge from his chest reactor.
Ben: Yeah, well, okay is that blood plasma or?
Ryan: It’s ambiguous but we're just gonna assume that they got it right, because we're, but the, yeah, the idea is there actually is some really cool science going on and Ben and I have tried to crack the code and make it accessible to the layman audience. Yeah, it's, it was a lot of fun. And we've still got a couple articles left to go. So go check them out on Marvel.com. We'll post links up in the show notes. But it, it sounds insane to be able to say this out loud, but if you just go to marvel.com they've got this little area that scrolls through the top stories of the day. And if you go in the next week or so, the “Science of Iron Man” is one of those stories, so, marvel.com is all you need to find what Ben and I've been working on.
Ben: Hey Ryan, do you think if you do a really good job at this, then they'll draw you into the comic as, like Iron Man's technical consultant? I mean, I kind of look like Tony Stark Jr anyway, so. I got kind of the, you know, the black hair and the goatee and all that. So, let's hope Fingers crossed, fingers crossed. But moving, moving on from that, that's enough, that's enough patting me on the back. I really don't need any more than that. Charlie, why don't you tell us about your Paleo POW this week?
Charlie: Alright, so my, my Paleo POW is the iTunes review. And we often read iTunes reviews, but they're great for us because it helps promote our show on the iTunes format.
Ryan: We really, we really haven't been plugging the iTunes review lately, but...
Charlie: Actually, we haven’t, yeah, but...
Ryan: Let's let's take a moment because that's, I mean, those are really important to us. They, they're the main thing that iTunes staff uses to decide whether or not to promote our show and to feature us and do things like that. So the more reviews we have, and the more positive reviews we have, the more likely we are to be displayed in a, in a good position with a high priority on iTunes. And we can't emphasize enough how important those are to us and how much they help us out. And we're close to 100 so march to 100. Right, Charlie?
Charlie: Right. We're past 100 I think.
Ryan: We're past 100 ratings we're not past 100 reviews.
Charlie: Ah, so yeah, got it. I understand, so yeah.
Ryan: So, the march to 100 reviews please, Paleo Posse.
Charlie: So the this iTunes review comes from Landon and Amanda written April 10th. They write “Just listened to Episode 30. First I want to let the hosts know how relieved I am after hearing that, hearing their 30th episode. I now realize why I went on that murdering spree after starting my magnet therapy.” So they're referring to Episode 30, where we discuss how magnets being applied to the frontal lobe of your brain may affect your moral judgment. So I guess they're off the hook for those murders.
Ryan: I believe it was the right side temporoparietal lobe, actually, Charlie.
Charlie: Ah, one of those lobes.
Ryan: Alright, fair enough. Moving on.
Charlie: They continue to write: “I listened to tons of these science shows and being that almost all of them are skeptic based, this is such a relief to listen to. They aren't constantly bashing people who don't agree. They talk out the topics more. They're rarely long winded, they rarely have long winded rags on Christians, at least never without content to back it up.
1:30:07
A very thought provoking show. And now the first one I listened to out of probably 10 or so I subscribe to. If you're looking for mental stimulation where it is never condescending, and full of personality, this, then subscribe to this one first. And if you need more, look into the rest. Keep the content coming. Keep it fresh. And it's definitely one of your strong points.” Well, thanks, Landon and Amanda.
Ryan: Thanks. That was an awesome review. That one puts such a smile on my face because as we mentioned, the iTunes reviews have been a little slow. We haven't been pushing them as much. So when we get a really positive one like that without even having to plug it, it really it makes my day. I don't know about you, Charlie.
Charlie: No, it totally made my day. I mean, that's why I wanted to read this one.
Ryan: Yeah, yeah, but, but Ben doesn't have access to all of our awesome American reviews because he's stuck in Canada. So what do you got for us, Ben?
Ben: Okay, so the deal is that I get to see reviews written by my fellow Canadians. And they’re, they’re a cut above. For instance, all Canadians can count to five so all Canadians have given our show five stars.
Charlie: Fantastic.
Ben: Salty can, you cut that?
Ryan: No. that's really good. I liked that a lot. I wasn't...
Charlie: I liked that a lot, too, because I don't know if all Americans can count to five.
Ben: Yeah...
Ryan: Because not all Americans have 20 fingers and toes. We do stupid things and we lose them.
Ben: I thought all Americans...
Charlie: Jet skis.
Ryan: Jet skis are awesome. They're no jet skis in Canada because it's frozen.
Ben: No, we call them CDos, like skidos.
Ryan: You call them snow machines because it's covered in snow.
Ben: It melts for a couple months every year.
Ryan: So you claim.
Ben: Well.
Ryan: Read your review, Benjamin.
Ben: Alright. This one was written April 13, 2010. It's titled “Exceptional” by a person named Medep, M-e-d-e-p, and it says: “This is a pretty solid podcast with some great guys that are easy to relate to. The clever and casual approach to science does a way with stuffiness and jargon that might turn people off if they were to read a journal article themselves. The additional fun references to geek culture that all should love or a fun plus.
And Africa.”
Laughter.
Ryan: What is going on.
Charlie: That’s what I’m saying, that... the sentence structure is...
Ben: No that was a different. That was a, the “And Africa” was a different paragraph. Anyway, Medep, nice, nice review. Now, you guys, in Canada, you Canadian listeners, you got to know, that if you write a review on iTunes, the odds that I'll be reading your review are pretty high, because there aren’t that many of them. So, come on.
Ryan: Charlie, can I just say for a second how much I love Ben.
Charlie: You don't need to tell me that, the feeling's mutual.
Ryan: Ben is...
Ben: Thank you guys.
Ryan: I'm so happy to have Ben on the show. So, last week, Paleo Posse, I made a promise, a solemn oath that I would follow this “Oriental Yeti” story to the bitter end.
Charlie: Oh no.
Ryan: And I’ve, I've done so, if, I don't know, I’m going to go with ish, I've done so, sort of. I set up the Google Alert. And there seems, I've got an email a day with this stupid Oriental Yeti, since then, most of which has been “they’re sending the DNA to Beijing for tests which, whatever, I don't care. One of the words that kept coming up over and over again in the Google Alert emails that I was getting, and what Herbair 2200 Red which aka is Miss, Mrs. Loose Brock brought up, was, civet. AKA, the civet cat which, apparently, is a type of cat, it’s a type of cat.
Ben: It's the thing that eats the, eats the coffee beans and then poops them out and then people sell them for lots of money.
Charlie: Oh, I thought that was a bat.
Ben: Oh, well, maybe bats do that too. Civet cats are the ones that you get and they’re really expensive.
Charlie: Maybe they're multiple multiple species.
Ben: Yeah.
Charlie: That chew, that chews the choice coffee berries.
Ryan: It's a group, it’s a group, so the civet is a group of arboreal mammals, native to the...
Charlie: Are you saying it's not a Yeti?
Ryan: Yeah, I'm, I'm breaking the dream in half here.
Charlie: Wow.
Ryan: Okay, so the civet cat are small mammals, arboreal mammals, arboreal means “in trees” and they’re native to the tropics of Africa and Asia.
1:35:06
And they do, there is dung coffee associated with them, they do, which is, they, coffee comes in this this bright red berry and the bean which isn't technically a bean but we call it a bean, which is inside this berry. The bean, the bean is eaten, or not the bean, but the entire cherry, coffee cherry, which is this bright red cherry thing, is eaten by the civet cats and then the dung is excreted with the berries still, the beans still intact and the bean is collected and sold for an extremely high price because supposed to be special. I've never had dung coffee. If I, if a cup was put in front of me I’d drink it.
Charlie: Well the idea is the civet perform the quality control.
Ryan: Yeah.
Charlie: They selected only the choicest berries.
Ryan: Exactly.
Ben: Well, but no, it's more than that. They, they're, they're, they’re. They chemically processed the coffee to be even yummier, right.
Ryan: Something like that, yeah, cuz they, cuz they, well the, the coffee, the coffee seed that comes out of the cherry has a sheath on it, so the digestive, the roasting process normally removes that but if you are digesting it through a gut you get a different...
Charlie: Well, I'm a coffee fiend and a coffee snob so I might have to track down some of these beans.
Ryan: It's expensive dude.
Charlie: I'm going to give a full report.
Ryan: It's expensive.
Charlie: How expensive for a pound. So like Kona. Kona is like 50 bucks a pound.
Ryan: We'll look into it. We'll see if we can, we can get a hook up from some listener.
Charlie: Is it more expensive than Shackleton whiskey?
Ryan: Well, Shackleton whiskey is not for sale.
Charlie: I'm just checking.
Ryan: I don't know how much it costs, the coffee. But Ben seems to be typing furiously, so I'm sure he's looking it up.
Charlie: We don’t have to go into this.
Ryan: The point is I'd like to read so Herbair2200 sent us a tweet that said “I think the Oriental Yeti looks like a hairless civet cat. Another great episode. Keep up the awesome.” Which thank you very much herbair2200 we should point out that she has a blog called Bake it so which can be found at http://rosafuchs.wordpress.com. It’s the Bake it so blog, which is all about baking, cooking, crafting and general merriment. So go check that out if you're looking for some cool baking recipes. I'm terrible at baking. I like cooking, terrible at baking. But I, I completely agree with herbair2200 that I think a civet cat is, is probably the explanation we were looking for this entire time.
Charlie: Wow, thanks for pointing that out.
Ryan: And last week, we mentioned things like red pandas, and bears and other weird animals like that. And I think the problem comes down to, which Charlie kind of brushed off, but there was no scale in any of the photos that were given. But a civet cat is about 43 to 71 centimeters excluding their long tails, which was one of the confounding factors of the Oriental Yeti was its long tail. But that sounds about right based on Charlie's stick hypothesis.
Ben: Okay. That coffee costs 15 bucks per pound or 30 bucks per pound, here’s a website.
Ryan: Wait, are you talking Canadian dollars or American dollars?
Ben: That's the same now. (Laughing)
Ryan: Oh, screw you Ben!
Charlie: Screw us is really what happened.
Ryan: Screw is all. So the point is, we think the mystery is solved with the civet cat. I'll post some links to pictures of the civet cat. I think it...
Charlie: Yeah, I'm looking at one right now. I'm, I, I'm not gonna lose, I'm not gonna lose any more sleep over this.
Ryan: Yeah, I think we've solved the mystery. If you listen to last episode, you might think maybe we were hating on these Yeti. But I can say this and I feel that I speak for the Paleo Pals when I do say this. We hope there is a Sasquatch, we hope there is a Yeti. It, nothing would be more awesome than there actually being a cryptid ape running around the forest. Do you not agree that a cryptid ape would be awesome?
Charlie: Oh, yeah, it'd be fantastic.
Ryan: Right. So we're not hating on the concept of a giant cryptid ape running around the forest. We just want it to be real and not as a sickly cat.
Charlie: Yep.
Ryan: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah. That Yeti is totally a civet cat.
Ryan: Is the take home message. We're trying, we just want it to be legitimate when it actually happens. I would love nothing more than there to be a Sasquatch. I think it would be sweet. I would make it my friend and would teach it sign language. We would have adventures. But I want to be real, and not just delusional, sad cats that are probably in need of medical treatment.
1:40:09
Charlie: I'm glad to learn about the civet cat though, I'd never heard of that before.
Ryan: It’s a pretty, it's a pretty looking animal.
Charlie: Yeah, it's like half cat...
Ryan: It looks...
Charlie: ... half raccoon or something.
Ryan: It looks way better with hair.
Charlie: Yeah, it's got very cool. It's got stripes on the neck and then leopard spots on the body...
Ryan: It’s a very...
Charlie: ...and then a ringtail. It's, it's awesome.
Ryan: There's all kinds of cool animals out there. There's a lot of animals in this world, Charlie. You spend too much time focusing on planets, you forget about the cool animals.
Charlie: As a physicist, they're simply dissipative structures that consume energy and make waste.
Ben:They're more, they're more than that. They're miracles of thermodynamics. Look...
Charlie: Indeed.
Ben: Look how they shove their thumb in the nose of entropy. Fantastic animals, keep up the good work.
Ryan: Is this podcast over yet.
Charlie: Yeah. Yeah, it was over while ago.
Ryan: Oh my goodness, this is a good one though. I really liked it. I enjoyed recording it. I hope people enjoy listening to it.
Ben: Yeah, I think they will.
Ryan: Alright boys, thank you so much for joining me. Let's do the quick linkageness. If you would like to read the show notes, which we put a lot of effort into those show notes. So, where, where Ben, I'm going to quiz you, where can people go if they want to read the show notes for Science sort of?
Ben: Sciencesortof.com.
Ryan: Hecks yeah they can go there. And Charlie, what else can they do if they want to interact with us on the social networking media things?
Charlie: They can find us on Facebook at sciencesortof or on Twitter at sciencesortof.
Ryan: Okay, so we have, so the Twitter is twitter.com/sciencesortof and the three of us are also on Twitter. What a coincidence. Ben, what are you on Twitter?
Ben: I'll spell it for you. I mean spelling's important on Twitter. So it's spelled b-n-p-r-i-m-e.
Ryan: And, Charlie, you're also on Twitter. Theoretically.
Charlie: I forget my Twitter account name.
Ryan: It's Charles Barnhart.
Charlie: Charles Barnhart. I will check it.
Ryan: You’re ridiculous.
Charlie: Or Ryan Ryan will check it for me.
Ryan: No, I'm not gonna do that for you, you’ve got to do it yourself. Get it done. Get er done as you just said. So you’re at twitter.com/CharlesBarnhart. I am twitter.com/haupt. I'm just I'm too excited not to plug it marvel.com Science of Iron Man. I'll post links up. I'm really proud of these articles. Ben helped me out a lot. Also iFanboy.com for science and comics going up soon.
So thank you again for joining me. I've been your host Ryan. My co-hosts the inestimable Charlie, say hi Charlie.
Charlie: Hello and good night.
Ryan: And Ben.
Ben: Alright, everybody keeps sort of in your heart.
Ryan: Thanks again for joining me. It's been my pleasure to have you listening to the show and we will see you again next week on episode 33 of Science...
Ben and Charlie: Sort of...
Ryan: Good enough. You guys are ridiculous.
Charlie: Science sort of gets it done.
Ryan: Science sort of get’s it together, Charlie.
Charlie: Well, I'm from Oregon, so I say get er done.
Ryan: Fair enough, buddy.
Charlie: Got er done.
Announcer: Thanks for listening to Science sort of. Our show notes are available at sciencesortof.com which will have links to all the stories we talked about today. You can follow us on twitter@twitter.com/sciencesortof. You can get in touch with us at paleopals@sciencesortof.com or on our Facebook fan page. A great way you can support the show is by subscribing to our feed on iTunes and writing a review so other people have a better chance of finding the show. And if you have a friend you think might be interested, tell them to give us a try. That's all for this week. Thanks for listening and see you next time on Science sort of.
Music
Ben: Okay, so I've got this joke.
Ryan: Bad joke Ben.
Charlie: Why are you laughing?
Ben: It's not a very, it's not a joke in the, but what what are people who study like meteors called because a meteorologist is somebody who studies the weather, right? Do you call it an asteroidologists for astrologist, but an astrologist is something else. And that's
Charlie: Meteorassist. No.
Ryan: Meteorassist? That sounds like a medical condition. Like, I'm sorry, Charlie. The test came back positive. You do have a meteor cyst.
Charlie: I should know this because I'm a planetary science.
Ryan: You should. What are you doing?
Transcriptions provided by Denny Henke of Beardyguycreative.com
