Episode 36 | Seen from Space
Touching you in space. Dirty.
A full transcript of this episode is available below thanks to donations from our Patrons!
00:00:00 – Ryan is the only one drinking alcohol this week. That’s probably the sign of a dependency issue, but he’d argue the Paleoposse depend on great content and that he’s just stepping up.
00:05:44 – There are holes in the Milky Way. Listener Angella Beshara is relying on the Paleopals to get to the bottom of it! Only Ryan stands in the way with his usual nonsensical sidebars.
00:15:41 – Beavers have been industrious up in the great wet north, but we have our eye on them… from space! Then Ben goes off on many tangents about Canadian history, because who would know if he didn’t tell us? They certainly don’t teach us about it in school.
00:30:11 – T-cubed this week is talking about the “documentary” Cropsey. What if the boogie man was real? Scary! What if he was from Staten Island? Well, none of us grew up there, so significantly less scary. And maybe fake. You decide!
00:44:29 – PaleoPOW is a doozy this week as the Paleopals celebrate a milestone, answer tough question from Charles Kressbach about The Flash without the aid of Tom Katers, and finally get inspired for new topics by Jaqueline F.
We set up a formspring account for the quiz show. Access and ask whatever you'd like right here: http://formspring.me/sciencesortof
Music for this week’s show:
Reasons to Quit - Phosphorescent
Holes to Heaven – Jack Johnson
O Canada – Celine Dion
Drinking at the Dam - Smog
The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance – Vampire Weekend
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Episode 36: Seen from Space
Ben: It's too bad that we weren't doing a galaxy story cuz then we could say something like a bolt and the beaver. Are you raking Legos? What's that sound?
Ryan: I was looking for my bottle opener.
Ben: Oh. Jeeze. Are you raking your laptop through the drawer?
Announcer: Hello, and welcome to science sort of.
Ryan: Hello and welcome to science sort of Episode 36. This week's theme is seen from space. And I'm your host Ryan and joining me as usual is the Paleo Pal in charge Charlie.
Charlie: Howdy.
Ryan: And all the way from the far northern reaches only visible by satellite, Canadian on call Paleo Pal Ben tippett.
Ben: Good day.
Ryan: When you say that I imagine you in a top hat with a monocle.
Ben: Yeah.
Charlie: Or a Mountie uniform.
Ryan: Or a Mountie uniform, definitely.
Ben: What's wrong with wearing a top hat and a Mountie uniform?
Ryan: Because Mounties aren't supposed to wear top hats. They're supposed to wear those special Mountie hats.
Ben: Yeah, but I mean, I'm not a Mountie, so...
Ryan: You're not?!
Ben: I can wear whatever I want. Right?
Ryan: I guess.
Charlie: Absolutely.
Ryan: All right. Well, you can also drink whatever you want. So Ben, why don't you, why don't you tell us what you're drinking up there in Canada.
Ben: Thanks, Ryan. Today I have juice instead of pop. And I'm drinking a Fuse Refresh Banana Colada. It's made by some company and it's in a plastic bottle with colorful photos of bananas and coconuts on it.
Ryan: Well, colada implies some sort of alcoholic component is at least possible.
Ben: I guess so. Maybe I supposed to mix it with the Rum
Ryan: Why not, I would, but that's, that's my speed. So um, yeah, what about you Charlie, what are you, what are you drinking?
Charlie: I'm, I'm playing it mellow tonight. I'm just drinking a San Pellegrino mineral water.
Ryan: Oh, wow, fancy.
Charlie: I get kind of addicted to these things cuz it's like it's fizzy and kind of reminds me of beer but it's not, doesn't come with the heaviness or the buzz. So if, if I feel like tricking my brain into thinking I'm drinking a beer without any other consequences or benefits depending on your perspective, then I go for San Pellegrino.
Ryan: And I guess the reason you’re probably taking it easy is it is your birthday. Hurray, happy birthday!
Ben: Hurray!
Charlie: Yeah.
Ryan: Dropping some..
Charlie: Yes.
Ryan: ...some audio spanks or something like that.
Charlie: Yeah, it's my birthday last night and my, my friends showed me a good time...
Ryan: Excellent.
Charlie: So, now I'm treating my body right today.
Ryan: About time. 29 years too late.
Charlie: Exactly.
Ryan: Well, I guess I guess I really hope my beer stands up then, but I got a pretty interesting one, I think, I don't know I can't pronounce it. Because it's from Norway. It's an IPA from Norway. It's got the it's got the “O”, with the diagonal line through it. Do either of you guys know how to pronounce that.
Charlie: Oh yeah, that means no smoking.
Ryan: Oh, okay, so this...
Ben: Or ghosts.
Ryan: Or ghosts, all right, neither of you are helpful at all. But it's got, so it's, n-o- with the line through it, g-n-e, and then another o with a line through it. So I'm gonna go Nog Nino, I guess. It means...
Charlie: Señor Niño.
Ryan: It means naked island in Norwegian.
Charlie: Cool.
Ben: Right on.
Ryan: So it's talking about all these islands that are off the seas of Norway's coast. Apparently this this brewery is on the southern coast of Norway. So they have a nice view of all those islands as they brew beer. And this is their IPA. I'm pretty excited about it. Because it, I was talking to Charlie and I had been a little bored by beer lately. I've been drinking a lot more cocktails and things like that but I'm really, really looking forward to this one.
Charlie: Sounds like a rough life burning, brewing beer at the southern tip of a...
Ryan: Oooohhh.
Charlie: ...peninsula.
Ryan: That's a really fruity, really fruity IPA. It's like a, it’s kind of a melonie taste to it, something like that. It has cascade hops and Chinook hops, which, I know you're a big fan of the cascade, Charlie.
Charlie: Yeah.
Ryan: This is Chinook as well.
Charlie: I'm not too familiar with Chinook hops.
Ryan: It's a, this is a really nice beer. Um, I think I'll enjoy it as the show progresses.
Charlie: Is it spelled, is Chinook spelled Chinook, like the salmon?
Ryan: Uh, yeah, it is.
Charlie: So I wonder if it's another variety of cascadian hops. Isn't that a Native American name?
Ryan: I don't know, I don't know much about hop varietals, or salmon varietals. I just like salmon and hops. So, I’m not that, I guess my palate isn't refined enough to be able to taste the difference between different types of hops, but I do have to give this beer credit. It's, it's really nice. It's really refreshing.
Charlie: Good. I’ll have to try it some other day.
5:01
Ryan: For sure. As I said, This week's theme is seen from space. And we're going to start off with a space mystery from the far reaches of the galaxy. Is it the galaxy? I don't know. Take it away Ben, tell me what...
Charlie: 5000 light years away.
Ryan: So that's still in our galaxy, right?
Charlie: Yeah.
Ryan: Man, galaxies are big.
Music
Ben: Okay, so the deal is there's this new telescope in the sky called the Herschel telescope.
Ryan: Have we talked about that yet? I think we have.
Ben: What, the Herschel telescope?
Ryan: I have a feeling we talked about the Herschel telescope before.
Charlie: I don't know. I mean, we've talked about several telescopes but I don't think we talked about the Herschel.
Ryan: Well, somebody break it down, who's a person who's not me and knows what they're talking about.
Ben: Okay, well, it's a telescope, and it measures in the infrared. And it's totally awesome.
Ryan: Why?
Ben: And it's in space. Why? It's probably got really high resolution or something.
Charlie: Yeah, it's, it's big, so it's got a really big collecting dish. So it's in, yeah, it's infrared. So it doesn't look at visible light. It looks at the light that's just slightly longer wavelength and infrared. It sees in the same vision that predator does.
Ryan: Nice. Man, we should have done that, we should have done that as our trailer this week.
Charlie: And let's see here. It was launched May 14, 2009, so a year ago, by the European Space Agency.
Ryan: We should also point out that the story was launched by a Paleo Posse member, Angela Bashara a little out of term Paleo Pal here. So she's, she posted the story in the Facebook page, which is why we're talking about it now.
Charlie: Because it's yeah, it's an awesome story and, and thanks for posting that, it makes our job easy.
Ryan: Well, what is the story because all I'm seeing is that there is a mystery and there's a hole in space, which doesn't make sense to me.
Ben: Okay, so, so imagine you're looking at the Milky Way, like a photo of the Milky Way, say, right.
Ryan: Okay.
Ben: There’s stars, it looks like an, it looks like an inverse ice cream sandwich. There are stars on the top and stars on the bottom and a big black band going down the middle. Okay, that band is dust. So there's just so much crap that, that, band in between should be where, like, there's the most stars.
Ryan: Right.
Ben: In the middle of the galaxy, right?
Ryan: Yeah.
Ben: But there's so much dust between us and the stars in between us, that it comes out as black. So the first lesson you need to know is that when you look out into the night sky in the visual band, essentially, there are big black spots everywhere. They're just dust, you can't see through them. And you know, it's, it's no good. So, what this Herschel Observatory lets you do is it lets you see through dust in certain cases, I guess. And they were looking at this one particular spot where they figured that there was a big patch of dust. So they pointed the big telescope at it to look through the patch of dust, and there wasn't anything. And they figured out, in this article, that this big black spot in the sky that they were looking at wasn't actually a big patch of dust. It was actually a big hole with nothing in it.
Ryan: But don't we already have those in space? I mean, they're just black holes.
Ben: Well, no, I mean, it was, it was a, it was...
Ryan: Right. I mean, I'm not, I mean, I'm...
Charlie: Well, a black hole, there's actually something there. It's a black hole.
Ryan: Okay, so we've got a black hole, and then we've got this other different black hole.
Ben: Well, no, it's more...
Charlie: Empty hole.
Ben: It's an empty hole. So right, so what, what astronomers figure is that there was a very young star nearby at a certain point in time, and it was just, it's radiation was so intense that it just kind of bulldozed all of the dust and other things in there away from it. And so it just left behind a big empty spot in this in around the neighborhood there. And that's what we see. So they figured that this big black spot was just dust between us and something interesting, when in reality, there was nothing there. And the lack of anything was the interesting part.
Ryan: But it sounds like they've already figured out how it was caused. So how is this a mystery?
Charlie: Well, they’re not certain how it's caused, these are, these are a few ideas that are being bandied about right after this discovery has been made.
Ryan: Okay.
Charlie: Because they still can't explain, I mean, all we see is what's, what's left. We don't have evidence for whatever it was that did clear it. So it's kind of like, you know, the Cheshire’s Cat smile, but we don't have to see the cat anymore. And so we're trying to figure out what, what, what caused it.
Ryan: Okay.
Charlie: And this, this is one of the most compelling ideas.
Ben: In introducing the story, I hadn't described what was going on. Okay, so I was saying that there is the big black spots. There's a specific cloud of bright black gas called NGC 1999...
10:00
Ryan: What a compelling name.
Ben: ...And then next to it, right, next to it, there's a big black spot. So that's what we're talking about specifically this NGC 199 thing with a big black spot next to it. So if you want to look it up, that's why...
Ryan: I was going to say, I’m sure there are so many listeners right now that are finally, just like, oh, that black...
Charlie: This is a very interesting location in space, because it's a stellar nursery. So there's several stars being born there. And so usually to, for a star to be born, it needs to self gravitate and collect a tremendous amount of material such that the pressures get high enough to ignite nuclear fusion. And so they are, they just assumed that there was a lot of material right there. But it turns out, in this, this, black region, that they just assumed was super dense with dust has nothing at all.
Ryan: Hmmmm.
Charlie: To talk about, like, how the infrared works, I thought one thing our Paleo Posse, Paleo Posse might be familiar, familiar with, is the Call of Duty 2, modern warfare video game. And when your enemies throw smoke grenades, you always want to switch to your thermal weapon. And so that's the same sort of thing where you're just using infrared scopes to see through dust.
Ryan: Oh, okay.
Charlie: And that's, that's all this this telescope is doing.
Ryan: Nice, good analogy.
Charlie: Um, Ben, a question for you is...
Ben: Yes.
Charlie: ...As the physicist, how exactly does radiation pressure work? How does energy in the form of photons from anything actually push dust away? Or push...
Ben: Okay, right. Photons have, they’re, they’re massless fundamentals, particles. Okay, so back this truck up. Right, so there's, radius so, so electromagnetic waves have momentum in them, even though they're just waves they have like, they have a certain amount of push to them. So if you have a light bulb say and you had a big sheet of aluminum foil, the aluminum foil would get pushed back by the light coming off a light bulb. And the degree to which this happens depends on the frequency and the intensity of the light. But yeah, that's, that's what happens. The photons coming out of a star act just like, I don't know, gas flowing out of it. And so, if, if a material is dense enough or properly configured to receive it, it can push against this, this, this gas. So yeah, the radiation pressure is just like a gaseous pressure. Only the the photons have a slightly different characteristic in their, in their gasenous than a regular gas does. That was a terrible answer.
Charlie: What's really cool is if you have a particular material that, that reflects, it's highly reflective at the wavelength of interest, then you get, you get kind of double the push, because...
Ben: That's right, yeah.
Charlie: ...photons bouncing off of it. And it's, you know, kind of like Newton's third law for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. And so the photon bounces off it and pushes the highly reflective surface in the opposite direction. And that's what they will, that's what they build solar sails out of.
Ben: That's right.
Charlie: To be a very fast mode of interstellar space travel. If we build those in the future.
Ryan: So, what are solar sails?
Ben: Well, solar sails, the idea is, it's just like Charlie said. So, so you get twice the momentum, twice the impulse off a photon, if you reflect the photon back to its source than if you just caught it. And the idea is what you, what you'll have is a whole bunch of really inexpensive kind of foily sails. Okay, so all it is, is just imagine a sail. Sails catch wind, right.
Ryan: Yes.
Ben: A solar sail will catch solar radiation. So, so photons off the sun will fly off and then bounce off this foil sail that you have outside your ship. And that gives it an impulse. And so you, it'll feel kind of a pressure putting it, pushing it out away from the star. And so the kicker is that even though you don't, the acceleration isn't really high from off a star using a solar sail, it's really persistent, so, and it's free. So all you have to do is kind of put your satellite out in orbit, with its great big solar sail here, your spaceship out in orbit with this great big solar sail, and the sun will slowly accelerate you away from it. And you won't need to use any rockets or anything expensive. And then once you arrive at you know it, you don't end up going all that fast I don’t think. But once you finally arrive out in the middle of Alpha Centauri or whatever, then, then you can use your solar sail to slow down as you approach the inner planets or whatever you want to see there. So solar sails are neat, and the same principle blows gas around in space.
15:00
Ryan: That is pretty cool. I like that.
Charlie: Good job, Herschel.
Ben: Yeah. Um...
Ryan: Well, hopefully, uh, hopefully when you're sailing through space, you don't run into any dams.
Ben: Yeah.
Ryan: That would be unfortunate. Especially, especially this new beaver dam they found in Canada, of all places.
Music
Ryan: So Ben, you wouldn't happen to know anything about this gigantic Beaver Dam, would you? Would you?
Ben: Oh, sure, it’s in Alberta, which is a province in Canada.
Ryan: What?!
Ben: Alberta's, okay, so Canada is a country north of the United States of America, the second largest country in the world.
Ryan: Isn't America number three?
Ben: No, China.
Charlie: America's number 1.
Ryan: Oh.
Ben: Ahhh, anyway, so Alberta is where Calgary is so, that, they're in the same province. Alberta is the province that Calgary is in. It's in the prairies. And to the north of it, there's this big forest called the boreal forest. And in the boreal forest, there's this monstrous national park, the Wood Buffalo National Park. It's one of the larger national parks in Canada. And it's named after Wood Buffalo, which is a kind of bison that lives in the woods instead of the bison that lives on the plains that you guys killed.
Ryan: They were asking for it.
Charlie: Sorry.
Ben: Right. Well, anyway. So the deal is that when you, when somebody looked at it from space, and notice this monstrous Beaver Dam and so there is a 2700 foot beaver dam creating a beaver dam lake that's large enough that you can see from space. This is the world's largest beaver dam.
Ryan: That's nuts.
Ben: Yeah.
Ryan: And beavers are so cool.
Ben: Yeah, they are. Uh it's my opinion that a video game based on the lives of a beaver, of beavers would probably be the best video game of all time. Because you could just kind of, you know swim around and you can cut down trees and drag them through the forest and then build the beaver dam and then your dam would kind of collapse a little bit and it would just kind of like online multiplayer...
Ryan: Yeah, I was gonna say it can't be any worse than any of the other RPGs.
Charlie: Yeah.
Ben: Well, it would just be really relaxing, you know?
Charlie: Like Sim City or something.
Ryan: ... even had Sim Ant.
Ben: Right. Sim Ant is silly though. This would be very fun.
Charlie: Why do they build dams?
Ryan: Oh, they build dams because they gotta deal with stuff like coyotes, wolverines and wolves. So what better way then then building a fort? I mean, that's what humans do in Canada to protect themselves from wolves.
Charlie: You have to dive underwater to get up into them.
Ryan: Yeah, that's...
Ben: Okay...
Ryan: ...really cool about them is that the entrance is underwater, but the lodge, well, that's a lodge, Charlie. So there’s...
Ben: That’s a lodge, yeah, you guys are being pretty ignorant about beavers, I gotta say.
Ryan: Well, I can clarify, I can clarify. So they build dams to create the lakes and then they build a lodge on the lake.
Ben:So why do they build the dam?
Ryan: So they have enough water to make a lodge.
Ben: But why, okay, so...
Ryan: Got some circular reasoning I through to...
Ben: Yeah. As far as far as I know, the reason they build the, the dams and they build, the reason they build the dams higher and higher is that they eat only a certain type of tree and this type of tree, well, they need easy access, easy and safe access to it, right. And so when they are in the water, they're safe. So what they do is they eat all the trees, you know, near the water and then build the dam a little higher, and then they have more trees to eat away and then they build the dam a little bit higher and they have more trees to, you know?
Charlie: What, they actually eat trees?
Ben: Yeah.
Ryan: So, so beavers are rodents, which...
Ben: Yes.
Ryan: If you, and rodents are pretty interesting because of their dental anatomy. They, the two incisors which are two big front buck teeth in rodents are highly specialized. And if you look at a picture of a rodent’s teeth, the two front teeth you'll see it and then they have this large diastema which is a gap in the teeth and behind that are all their molars, but those, those four incisors, two on the top and two on the bottom are interesting because the front half of them is enamel and the back half of them is dentin. And enamel is much tougher than dentin. Ah your teeth, human teeth are made with an outer layer of enamel and an inner layer of dentin.
20:00
Ah, but the way the rodents teeth work is, because they naw on stuff that's really hard like nuts and trees and things like that, they differentially wear the teeth down. So the dentin sloffs off first and the enamel, enamel stays longer. So you actually, you actually end up honing this really, really sharp edge to it. Or this really, really sharp point almost, and their teeth grow throughout their entire lifetime. So they have to keep an eye on stuff like trees to prevent their teeth from growing too big for their mouth. So, they maintain this really, really sharp point. So don't let yourself get bit by a beaver because it'll just go straight through your hand.
Ben: Oh, yeah, no, I've heard a story about a guy who got...
Ryan: I mean it's a nasty bite, like, because they're big, I mean, they're big enough to, you know, do some damage.
Ben: Yeah. Oh, here here's another interesting beaver fact. So they're, they're living in the, so, water has a big heat capacity compared to like air. And you can you can swim around in it...
Ryan: This sounds like a physics fact, not a beaver fact.
Ben: No, no, So, this is a beaver fact. So, the, the lakes they're in don't, don't freeze down all that far. Um, and so what they do is they, when they cut down a tree, they leave branches on, the branches that they eat, and then they'll put the tree, they'll pack it into their dam kind of underwater. And then when the winter comes, the the ice will freeze down, but they'll still have access to the lower branches, like in the dam. And then so it's like a refrigerator. So they just kind of swim out from under their odge and then they go get a fresh branch that's kind of been sitting in the dam and take it back into the lodge. And they're nice and warm, because, you know, they're underwater, so they're not that cold. It's not freezing. So, hey, beavers, look, I mean, people get a bad rap for being the kind of animal that manipulates its environment to its own to suit its own purposes.
Ryan: Right...
Charlie: People describe...
Ben: Yeah, yeah, I've heard, I've heard people describe themselves as, the human race, the human species as the only species that kind of does this.
Ryan: False.
Ben: But it's a false, beavers do it.
Ryan: And we like beavers.
Charlie: Beavers are cute.
Ben: Well, they're cute.
Ryan: Well, I mean, and you could say coral is manipulating its environment, creating giant structures. It's, it's a dumb argument to make, but that's the thing that makes humans different.
Ben: It's ignorant. People stop trying to make humans look unique.
Ryan: We're just, we're just particularly technological apes.
Charlie: Right.
Ryan: So the beaver, it's also the second largest rodent in the world, after the capybara.
Charlie: Capybara.
Ryan: Yeah, yeah. But it's cool because they have these colonies. So that's how you can get a dam this big. So it's not like one really industrious beaver, it's actually a group of beavers. And the suspicion is that this is a multi generational dam. It's actually been built up over a couple of generations of beaver, beaver family. And I'd be really, I mean, this is it's a really hard place for humans to get to, from what I understand because Canada.
Ben: Yeah, I mean, it's in the middle of...
Ryan: I don’t know how, I don’t know how humans even survive in Canada, frankly.
Ben: Well, we live in beaver dams. This is a science show, I can’t be lying.
Ryan: So, yeah, but it's, it’s just really cool. And I would, I would love to see a genetic analysis of the relatedness of all the beavers that are working on this dam together to see if there's actually a strong genetic relatedness component to it.
Ben: They probably are. Um, that's a beaver, beavers kind of do their, they, they can walk on land, right.
Ryan: And they're mostly mostly at night. They're nocturnal.
Ben: Right. Oh, I didn't know they were nocturnal.
Ryan: It’s just,see, just man, it's, we're learning all about beavers.
Ben: This is science, yeah, come on, guys. Um, so But yeah, they’ll cross, like mountain ranges in search of new habitat and land. But I guess here they just kind of stuck around their parents’ house and just kept on adding to the den.
Ryan: Such noble animals searching for better lives for them and their children, cutting down trees, swimming. These are all things humans can get on board with.
Ben: Yeah, and we can also trap them and sell their furs.
Ryan: That was my next point because you made a little snide remark about Americans killing all the Buffalo. Well, Mr. Canada...
Ben: Yes.
Ryan: Your Canadian economy is pretty much based on the beaver for its first...
Ben: It was!
Ryan: ...decades of its existence.
Ben: That's right. That's, there was a beaver, a beaver pelt hat was really popular in Europe for like 100 years or something. And that's how our country got settled.
Ryan: Pretty much. I mean, the beaver trade was huge. It was what allowed you to have like really good relations with a lot of the Indians because you were trading with them instead of fighting for land. And ah...
Ben: Yeah, well, our, the colonization of our country follows the old trade routes of the Hudson's Bay and the Northwest company which followed rivers up and they would, these people at the company would have outposts on the river that the local traders would trade in.
25:00
Ryan: Hmmmhmmmm.
Ben: And then these outposts kind of got settled in. And so most of the Western cities, at least in Canada, everything west of Ontario, is an old, was once a Hudson's Bay Colony. And so based on these rivers and ah, have old forts in the middle of them.
Ryan: Yeah. That's pretty cool.
Ben: They, it was mostly native people doing the hunting.
Ryan: And then just trading with Europeans.
Ben: And then just trading with Europeans who ran the trade routes. The actual settlement of Canada went something like, we settled, Ontario, and then some people, there was a British colony on British Columbia, like Victoria and Vancouver.
Ryan: Okay.
Ben: And then what happened was, the United States started expanding West really aggressively. And so Confederate, after Confederation happened in 1869 I think, they made a pact with and joined British Columbia to Confederated Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes. And then there was all this land that they bought in between, which made up Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. And they just kind of drew straight lines down the middle of cutting it up into three pieces. And then they just they and then they just had all this land they needed to settle. So they built a railway across it, and brought in Eastern European immigrants to settle the prairies. And so Canadian history is interesting people. We should call the show, Canadian history sort of.
Ryan: I was gonna say, if we don't get a couple of Canadian iTunes reviews out of that speech you just gave then Canada has seriously failed to support this show. And now let's all, and now let's all sing, “Oh, Canada, our home and sacred land.”
Ben: Home and native land.
Ryan: Home and native land. Through patriots blood... wait, how...
Ben: True patriot love, not blood! Come on!
Ryan: ...All thy salted hands. I don't know. I don't know the song.
Ben: You’re doing pretty good? That's about as far as I can make it in the American national anthem.
Music and Canadian National Anthem playing in background...
Ryan: I like the Canadian national anthem. It's a good one. It’s got patriot’s blood in it.
Ben: I think it needs more cannons and men shouting like the what the Soviet national anthem was pretty, stompy wasn't it? I don’t know. National anthems should sound cool, in my mind.
Ryan: I think Americans were raised to just feel nothing but terror at the sound of the Soviet national anthem.
Ben: Well...
Ryan: Cool, well, that was a lot, that was a lot about Canada. But as we mentioned, the Canadian economy, based on the beaver. But it still is based on the beaver because it’s on your coins. One of them.
Ben: On our nickels, that’s right.
Ryan: Our nickels just have some dead president on it. I wish we had beavers on our nickels.
Ben: Our coat of arms has a beaver on it too.
Ryan: Nice. Well, the one last thing we should mention about beavers, is that, okay, so we said they are rodents, which means they're obviously mammals. But, unless you're Catholic, and then they're not mammals, they’re actually fish.
Ben: Oh really.
Charlie: Oh, you can eat them on Friday?
Ryan: You guys don’t know about this? Yeah, they were, they were...
Charlie: Oh, I didn't know about that.
Ryan: They were defined as fish by the Catholic Church, specifically the Bishop of Quebec.
Ben: Oh.
Ryan: Well, he was the one who brought it up. And they the church ruled in the 17th century that the beaver was a fish because it was part of the Indigenous People's diet prior to Europeans. And they were, you know, looking to convert as many as they could. So they figured they'd toss the indigenous peoples bone by letting them eat beaver on Fridays and during Lent.
Ben: Don't cut that joke.
Ryan: And the, ah, yeah, they it's looks like so apparently,Animal classification according to Thomas Aquinas was based as much on habitat as It was on anatomy. So...
Charlie: Yeah.
Ryan: You know.
Charlie: And acquiring converts, it sounds like.
Ryan: Yeah, I think it was a little, that was that was definitely a goal. But I thought that was really funny.
Ben: Well, they're underwater most of the time.
Ryan: That was the exact logic they used. They were like, is a beaver a fish? Well, probably not. But it's underwater. So go ahead.
Charlie: Yeah.
Ryan: I don't know. Well speaking, okay, so as we said beavers are nocturnal, so speaking of other things like a bump in the night, the Boogey Man.
Charlie: Du, du, duuuu.
Ryan: What if the Boogey Man was real? Trailer trash talk,talk talk.
30:10
Music
Announcer: Hey, y'all, its trailer trash talk.
Charlie: This week's Trailer Trash Talk or T-Cubed focuses on Cropsey. And it's in theaters June 4 2010 and it's a documentary.
Ryan: What is a cropsey? What is that?
Charlie: I don't know.
Ben: I think it's a local movie. Like, um, you know how kids are always demonizing some local figure saying that he's evil. He's...
Ryan: Oh, here. Got it. Yeah, it's the legend of Cropsey. You're absolutely right Ben. So Cropsey was an escaped mental patient who lived in the abandoned mental institution. Well, wait a second. That doesn't make any sense. Did he escape and then the institution shut down. Then he came back.
Ben: Maybe he escaped to get into another mental institution.
Ryan: That is a horrible, I guess maybe that's the last place you would take the look, right?
Ben: Also, he...
Ryan: For an escaped mental patient.
Ben: He has mental problems, so he wouldn't be thinking rationally about it anyway, right?
Ryan: Yes, maybe. I don't know. Maybe he's more rational than we can even understand.
Ben: Yeah.
Charlie: Maybe.
Ryan: But basically that, ah, Cropsey is used as the Staten Island Boogeyman. And these filmmakers decided to do a documentary on what they thought was an urban legend. But apparently they uncovered all this stuff about some kidnappings that happened in the 80s.
Charlie: Right.
Ryan: Yeah.
Charlie: So five children went missing in Staten Island during the 80s. And fear, fear ran rampant throughout the community.
Ben: Did they, did they think that it was this Cropsey guy or is that, just, like kids, talking.
Charlie: It's like, it was an urban legend all along, like way back in the day, like this crazy mental patient. And then all sudden, this urban legend became true. So I mean it, the trailer doesn't go into this at all but I almost wonder if it's like, you know, life imitating art sort of thing where maybe cropsy was aware of this urban legend and he began to fulfill it.
Ryan: Or, or this is a Blair Witch thing where it's not really a documentary.
Charlie: Yeah.
Ben: There was a lot of running and shaking with the camera in this...
Ryan: I, I'm not convinced that this is real.
Charlie: Yeah exactly.
Ben: I'm not convinced that it will be enjoyable.
Charlie: I mean, I was I was six years old in 1987. I would have been freaked out if I heard something about this. I don't remember.
Ben: I know, right? Boy, man, kids talk about things like this, even if they weren't true. Terrible if it was, you know.
Charlie: Yeah. Stranger danger.
Ryan: I actually, I actually kind of avoided looking anything up on whether or not this was a joke before recording the show because I want, I kinda wanted to come into it blank. But, like I'm not I honestly think this might be a Blair Witch type thing. I don't know.
Charlie: I don’t know either. I mean, it seems a little too good to be true... Mental institution...
Ryan: Right.
Charlie: Creepy guy running around, sometimes he has a hook for a hand. Sometimes he had an ax in the trailer.
Ryan: Well, I, there’s, so they find out about this, this, this killer, or this kidnapper guy who was kidnapping the kids in the 80s was caught according to the trailer. So there's all this really creepy imagery of this guy who just looks really...
Charlie: Yeah, he's got weird eyes...
Ryan: I mean, I got goosebumps watching this trailer. I'm not gonna lie, like...
Charlie: Yeah.
Ryan: It's one of those things where, you know, as, as rational scientific people, like, we don't believe in ghosts, but that doesn't mean an abandoned mental institution isn't creepy. Like I still get chills seeing footage and thinking about being inside an abandoned mental institution. That's still an uncomfortable place.
Charlie: Totally.
Ben: Yes.
Charlie: So, well, they were they weren't, it was just so ignorant back then. Like it wasn't a place of healing at all, it was a place of containment.
Ryan: In the 80s? In 1987.
Charlie: No. When the, the legend, the legend stems from, the urban legend.
Ryan: Oh, okay.
Charlie: Like the abandoned, the abandoned Willowbrook Mental Institution.
Ryan: Oh, okay.
Charlie: Horrible place.
Ryan: Oh, okay, I didn't know, I've never heard anything about it before. So I believe you though because that doesn't surprise, this was more like a sanatorium type place?
Charlie: Yeah.
Ryan: Yeah, I saw um, Shutter Island and that that movie was messed up.
Charlie: Totally.
Ryan: Which, it was actually good. I enjoyed it, but..
Charlie: Me too.
Ryan: Yeah. So what do you guys think of this trailer?
Charlie: I don't know. I, I liked the whole way they're playing with like, are they taking the piss or is it real? Or how much of its real, how much of it is embellishment and urban legend? And kind of like that, that boundary they're toying with and so I'm gonna give it a thumbs up because I think it looks, psychological thriller.
Ryan: Like that's the thing. Like there's this, there's that scene in the trailer where they're inside the mental institution. There's all this crazy graffiti, there's even like a graffiti that is looks like cropsy, I guess, it’s supposed to be. It looks like a scary face basically. But then they do that whole wait, look back over there and they pan back over there and the light, the light shines and then they both scream and start running. And I actually paused and there's nothing there like I don't, but I still got goose bumps so...
35:21
Ben: But I mean, isn't this, isn't this format kind of overused and, I mean, we've had 10 years of ghost hunter TV shows where that's exactly like...
Charlie: Yeah.
Ben: ...like, this is a haunted castle in all of Ireland.
Ryan: But, but, those ghost hunting shows pretend to be science, you know, and this, this is just about a dude who's an escape, escaped mental patient and those are real, like that's not a ghost. That's a real thing that happens, is people, well, maybe not escaping but...
Ben: From mental institutions and they’re... on the street...
Ryan: I don't know, but it's just it's more plausible than a ghost. You know? It?
Ben: Well, I don't think that they actually think that Cropsey is haunting them and is about to jump out at them and hook them to death.
Ryan: Right.
Ben: I don't think that's feasible. I think that that's what they're suggesting in the trailer. And I'm like, well, didn't they catch the guy that...
Ryan: You're giving this a thumbs down Ben is what you’re saying.
Ben: I'm giving this a super thumbs down because I don't even know what it's about. Is, are they doing a documentary about this, this Boogeyman? Or are they doing documentaries of the child abductions? Are they relating the two? Are they running around being scared through the, through the woods?
Charlie: Right, right.
Ben: I don't know.
Charlie: What are your thoughts Ryan?
Ryan: I liked, I enjoyed Paranormal Activity when I saw it. I thought it was one of the better horror movies I'd seen in a while specifically because there's no big reveal. It just is. You know? Like there's never, the curtains ever pulled back to show badly CGI monster, aka, Signs with our, the M. Night Shyamalan... so the fact that it was, stayed ambiguous the entire time keeps it creepy the entire time. And if this movie can also pull that off with hopefully not so much shakey cam that I get sick, I’m down. I mean, I also like, I liked Cloverfield, I liked Paranormal Activity, like I like those kind of movies. So...
Charlie: I mean, that's, that's like the Hitch... like Hitchcock's...
Ryan: Exactly.
Charlie: Stanley Kubrick's in the Shining...
Ryan: Yes.
Charlie: Like, I mean, the true, the true monster is the inner monster and what your imagination can generate.
Ben: Yeah.
Ryan: Well, I'll give this a lukewarm thumbs up because of that. I don't, you know, I don't know if it's gonna be a big screen necessity for me, but it could be a good rental or, you know, date night on the couch type movie. So...
Charlie: Yeah, right.
Ryan: Yeah, that's what I’ll give it.
Charlie: Cool, Cropsey. I just want to read it as corpse or something.
Ryan: Yeah, well, it's like you talked about last week where you just look at the first letter and the last letter and jumble up the letters.
Charlie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ryan: I mean, that's those sentences are so cool. Have you ever seen those Ben where they give you a sentence of just...
Ben: Yes.
Ryan: And you can still read it? It's awesome.
Ben: That's right. Yeah. Actually, yeah, I was just thinking that Cropsey is a pretty great name for a boogie man. Like it's homey enough that you kind of feel at ease. But then it's got those hard R’s and P’s and S's in it, and you're like, ooh, that's a, it's a scary sounding word, and you don't know why. It's kind of off putting. And then when they're like, it's a boogie man, your imagination goes wild. Man, it must have been fun being a kid in Staten Island.
Ryan: I have a buddy who's from New York, who would agree that it was never a good time to be a kid on Staten Island because he hates Staten Island, but...
Charlie: The accents were just blowing me away throughout the trailer. I was just like, man, that is some thick New York accent going on.
Ryan: Yeah.
Charlie: It's crazy. how different the accents are just between the different boroughs? Like, I mean, Northwest seems to have all the same accent.
Ryan: It's the same in a place like London, though.
Charlie: Yeah.
Ryan: I guess you’re around long enough and each area gets its own cultural identification.
Charlie: Right.
Ryan: I’m sure.
Charlie: Before the advent of modern transportation.
Ryan: Yeah, maybe I don't know a couple hundred years from now the sunset of San Francisco might talk different than the tenderloin.
Charlie: Right. Yeah, I think the sunset already talks differently than the tenderloin.
Ryan: But that's not necessarily cultural. It's more, probably education.
Charlie: Yeah. socio economic.
Ryan: Yeah. Well, it's...
Ben: Do you think the United States will ever grow, what are they called? Not elite accents, they're called ah, prestige accents.
Ryan: No, because I think the United States thrives too much on Independent spirit and doesn't care to be prestigious. I mean, I’m serious, I just think that we've got such an independent streak of doing things our own way that will never conform to how people think it's prestigious to talk...
Charlie: Yeah, yeah, it's kind of in our psyche to like, want to punch somebody that pretends to have a fancy accent.
Ryan: Yeah, exactly.
Ben: What, what like, what if Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt started elongating their L’s or something like that and then it kind of caught on is a fad for all the...
40:00
Charlie: Well, Madonna adopted a British accent and everybody is like that’s ridiculous.
Ryan: Yep.
Ben: But that’s because it’s like a recognizable accent. I’m just saying, what if what if one of these celebrities that we didn’t think of as terribly pretentious started doing something with their language that just kind of caught on as a fad then pretty soon a whole class of people was doing it. So anybody who buys the weekly tabloids would say their A’s with weird accents.
Ryan: I mean we already have yuppies and nobody cares what they do anyway. Yuppies and hipsters, right. We just kind of let them do their thing. The rest of us just work and live our lives.
Ben: Maybe, you know how every generation find a way to piss off their parents? Maybe the next generation of kids will have like weird accents just to piss us off. Because I mean, it’s obviously something that’s kind of taboo. I don’t want to hear my kid talking with a weird Welsh accent, I mean, no wait, edit that out.
Ryan: Well I mean, I mean...
Ben: Edit that out Ryan.
Ryan: ...develop their own slang but they probably won’t develop their own accents. I think, I mean there’s definitely...
Charlie: Right.
Ryan: There is such a thing, there are such things as temporal accents. You know, you listen, you listen to old recordings from people in the 20s and 30s and part of the reason they sound the way they do is that the wax cylinders were tough to record on so you had to yell pretty loud to get your voice heard. But also it’s just people talk differently over time, you know?
Charlie: Yeah, I’ve noticed my manner of speech has changed since moving from Seattle to San Francisco.
Ben: Oh yeah my accent, my accent is really fluid, it’s going all over the place. I’m like, unrecognizable to myself sometimes.
Ryan: I love those old temporal accents. “Now let’s check in with the boys overseas.”
Charlie: Yeah, where did those come from, those are awesome.
Ryan: “Get those Nazis boys.“ “Don’t forget to buy a book of stamps.“ “Hitler’s going to get what’s coming to him.“
Ben: Why don’t you do the whole podcast with that accent.
Ryan: But yeah so accents, well what I was gonna say Ben, is that you know there are temporal accents but then every generation develops its own slaying and that goes a little bit back to the social economic differences in speech that Charlie mentioned a minute ago in that, it’s, it’s been found by linguists that people in lower socioeconomic groups tend to have their language evolve more quickly because they often don’t have an educated, large enough vocabulary to express complex concepts and ideas. So, they just make up words to do that and the words are affective and catch on as cultural memes.
Ben: Well that’s fascinating.
Ryan: Yeah it’s really cool. So it’s actually the less educated you are the more likely you are to improvise with language and develop new ways of saying the same things.
Ben: Do you think all the Tea Partiers are going to start talking like Sarah Palin?
Ryan: I don’t know.
Ben: For the next five years.
Ryan: I’m not sure. But I mean...
Charlie: I’m going to move to Canada if that happens.
Ryan: But she’s from Alaska Charlie. That’s like America’s Canada.
Charlie: What ah, I had a great roommate for awhile, a couple years ago, who’s from Alaska and he didn’t talk like her at all.
Ryan: She’s definitely got more of like a Minnesota-Dakota thing going on and now we’re gonna get hate mail from those states. But, it’s not what, it’s not the way she talks, it’s what she says with the words. Let’s be honest.
Charlie: Yeah, exactly.
Ryan: Einstein could have talked like her and been just as smart. It’s, it’s not her manner of speech, it’s the content. But speaking of...
Charlie: And sometimes I wonder how much of that is voice acting. Like, I don’t know if she really talks like that.
Ryan: Yeah, I think she lays it on pretty thick for the cameras but that’s not in this, I mean, we’ve ventured into Sarah Palin territory before and it hasn’t gone anywhere scientific so we should avoid that today. But we should, ah, we should take a gander at how the listeners be talkin’ to us, right ya’ll?
Charlie: Sure for.
Ryan: Exactly. So, Paleo POW!!
Music
See, we improvise with language too, we come up with things like Paleo Pals, Paleo Posse and Paleo POW. For your birthday we’re going to let you go with your Paleo POW first.
Charlie: Alright, well, this Paleo POW goes out to everybody then, the entire Paleo Posse and us Paleo Pals are very excited to announce that we are going to hit 100,000 total downloads this week, and, couldn’t have done it without you.
45:05 Ryan: Hurrraaayyyyy!
Ben: Good work everybody.
Charlie: It’s a huge accomplishment...
Ryan: That was applause for all you Paleo Posse out there.
Charlie: All you Paleo Posse that are regular listeners, specially to you that have spread the word, word of science to your friends and possibly printed off a flyer for your school or workplace or bus stop and...
Ryan: Or fridge...
Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Print one off and stick it on your fridge at work.
Ryan: Yeah, I think Ben’s, I think Ben’s got the right idea. So, we talked a lot and not necessarily super consistently, about different ways you can help support the show. But, you know, the main way you can help support the show is just by listening and enjoying, that’s step one. And we can’t thank, can’t thank you all enough for doing that in the first place, cuz just downloading it is a great thing for us.
Charlie: Here, here. Alright, Ben, what do you have for us this week?
Ben: Alright...
Ryan: That’s all, there’s not a bigger celebration? We’re not getting a telegram from the queen? Ben, why didn’t you get us a telegram from the queen for our 100,000...
Ben: You only get one of those when you turn a hundred.
Ryan: This is a 100,000, that’s way more than a hundred I think.
Ben: It’s a volume thing, not temporal thing. Queens only care about endurance. They don’t care about power.
Ryan: So, so, what if we hit a hundred episodes? Will we get a telegram...
Charlie: Yeah, we’re 1/3 of the way there.
Ben: I could probably get some kind of queen to congratulate us.
Ryan: Listen, Charlie is the one in San Francisco, he’s got a way better...
Charlie: Yeah, I’ll sort that out for us.
Ryan: Getting us...
Ben: Right on.
Ryan: ... a queen.
Ben: Okay, so, my Paleo POW comes from our Facebook page on the wall where Charles Crestback, Crestbach, ah, wrote in, “All this talk about super heroes had me thinking today, wouldn’t the Flash’s costume be affected by blue shift.” Alright...
Ryan: Whoa, okay, let’s break this one down. So, the Flash, for those who don’t know, is a DC comics superhero named Barry Allen. He’s, well, the original Flash is from the Golden Age but the most modern Flash is Barry Allen who was created back in the 50s and his costume is a bright red, basically full body stocking suit with, with some yellow lightning bolts on it. So he’s, he’s called the Scarlet Speedster because he’s very bright and red. But, ah, Ben, why don’t you tell people what blue shift is.
Ben: Alright, so, blue shifting, it’s, it’s like the Doppler effect. So, I’m sure you’re, you guys are all familiar that when there’s...
Ryan: (makes a car approaching Doppler affected sound)
Ben: That’s right. You get a plane...
Ryan: Light sabers, light sabers...
Ben: A plane or a train. Do, I don’t think light sabers do the Doppler effect.
Ryan: They do! That’s how George Lucas recorded the noise. He had, he had a microphone give feedback into the speaker and move the microphone back and forth to create a Doppler shift.
Ben: Oh really?
Ryan: That’s where the quintessential light saber noise comes from. (Makes light saber sound.) Yes.
Ben: Alright. Um, It, okay, ah, but our sense of motion isn’t quite present in that. But that’s very interesting.
Light Saber sounds...
Ryan: I’ve turned on the iPhone app and it’s fighting and music...
Star Wars music plays
Charlie: Alright. We get it.
Ryan: Alright, done.
Ben: That’s pretty awesome. Um, okay, so, ah, so right. So, the idea here is that if you’re moving towards somebody and emitting a wave, the wave will be compressed as you move towards them and so the wavelength will be shorter, ah, once it gets into the air and travels towards your buddy, as, it will be a shorter wavelength than a wavelength, than the one you thought you emitted, right. So, we call that red shifting if you’re moving away from somebody, the waves get stretched. And so, ahh, an attenuated wave will be lower frequency and if you’re moving towards them the wave get’s compressed and so it goes up in frequency. Which is why you hear, the classic example is trains which isn’t that good except that they kind of had elongated whistles right. So, it’d be like (makes train whistle sound).
Ryan: Or a, or a siren on an emergency vehicle...
Ben: Yes! Sirens are great...
Charlie: ... European siren.
Ryan: What do European sirens sound like Charlie?
Charlie: I don’t know, they’re like... (makes siren sound).
Ben: So what does ah, what does a Doppler shifted one sound like?
Charlie: I’m not doing that. You always see it on the movies...
50:00
Ben: Okay, anyway, so, so the deal is that light is a wave that things emit as well, and so, it, ah, thanks to Einstein’s special relativity theory, light will also blue shift and red shift. So, if I emit white light, if I have a light bulb, 100 watt light bulb in my hand, plugged into a power source so it’s emitting white light, and I’m traveling towards you, you will see a blue shifted light so it will look blue to you. Whereas, if I’m moving away from you, my lightbulb that I’m holding up that’s white, will look red colored. Okay?
Charlie: By the way this is one of the reasons that scientists know that the Universe is expanding because most all the stars look like they have a red shift to them.
Ryan: So, what you mean is that they are moving away from us at a high speed.
Charlie: Right.
Ryan: What kind of...
Charlie: Well galaxies are...
Ryan: What kind of speeds do we have to achieve to get this shift to be visible to like, a naked eye.
Ben: Very good, that’s the greatest question ever. Okay, so, ah, first, so, so are we on to the question of the Flash.
Ryan: Sure, yeah, let’s talk about it.
Ben: Generally to get a visible shift in the spectrum you need, ah, something, a speed that’s comparable to the speed of light or you need really, really sensitive instruments. So, astronomers measure the speed of stars and you know, as they rotate around each other or as they are moving away from us or towards us or whatever, using very sensitive instruments. Whereas the eye isn’t all that sensitive. It’s pretty sensitive but it’s all that sensitive to these shifts. And so to see a visible shift in color you’ll need, you’ll need to be moving somewhere near the speed of light. So, 10% of the speed of light or higher will cause a really visible shift.
Ryan: Okay.
Ben: Okay. So, so, the question, wouldn’t the Flash’s costume be affected by blue shift, ah, so, the thing about the Flash is that I don’t know very much about the Flash. All I know about the Flash is listening to the conversation, the Flash Podcast. So...
Ryan: Which is a good podcast and if you’re not listening to Tom VS The Flash you probably should. We had him on the show a couple, a couple weeks ago.
Ben: Yeah, he’s rad. So, first off, the question, wouldn’t the Flash’s costume be affected by blue shift depends on two things. The first thing is, does the Flash’s speed have to obey certain laws of physics. It’s not clear that it does or which specific laws he obeys. I think my general rule of thumb when it comes to superhero physics is that every superhero get’s one violation of the laws of physics. And past that it’s kind of tongue and cheek.
Ryan: Here’s the deal with the Flash. So, the Flash’s power comes from this thing called the Speed Force which is this nebulous thing that grants certain people super speed.
Ben: Right.
Ryan: And apparently Barry Allen, the most, the current Flash actually exudes the Speed Force, it comes from him. Not really sure how or why, so he doesn’t really have a limit to how fast he can go but when speedsters go too fast in the DC Universe they actually can merge with the Speed Force so if they go past the speed of light they kind of merge with the Speed Force and loose their identity, loose their consciousness into the speed for and for all intents and purposes, die. But he can, he can achieve light speed is the point I’m getting at.
Ben: But yeah, even then, I mean, there are various questions I need to ask. Like, is he super strong, does he have to deal with the drag of the wind around him...
Ryan: So, his costume, the red costume that is causing this issue in the first place is specially designed to be frictionless and all that.
Ben: Even if it’s frictionless, like you take a kite and you took a frictionless kite, you’d still be able to fly it and you’d still be able to, you know, you could make a frictionless parachute that still works. It’s not friction that causes the drag on objects, like the Flash running. If they’re going fast enough, it’s not surface friction it’s, it’s...
Charlie: ...physics, it’s just momentum, momentum transfer.
Ben: Well, no, it’s, it’s like geometry, right. You’re just trying, somehow, all of the atoms in front of you need to get behind you without passing through you. And so they kind of bounce around on the surface and make these flow lines and sort it out themselves but after a certain point they get turbulent and after another certain point their shockwaves form and it gets a little bit complicated. Um, so the question, yeah, so there are various questions. It’s not clear to me exactly how the Flash goes that fast. And so, I need to put that damper on what I’m about to say because, I don’t know, it might come to me at some point in time, here’s the fantastic way the Flash goes so fast. But, baring that...
Ryan: The Speed Force, I already told you. The Speed Force.
Ben: That doesn’t make any sense Ryan.
55:00
Ryan: Speed Force.
Ben: Alright. Well, anyway, so, let’s suppose the Flash, so his costume is red, the question is how fast would he have to go to shift the color of his costume as he ran towards me for it to turn blue. This is feasible, ah, using this redshift formula, I crunched the numbers and the answer is he would have to go 432 million km an hour. Let’s put that in context. Ah, the Earth is 40,000 km in circumference, so, if he went that fast, for the Flash to go that fast he would be able to travel around the world 3 times in a second. Ryan, is it feasible that the Flash could travel that fast?
Ryan: If he, if he needs to to complete the story.
Ben: Okay...
Charlie: What fraction of the speed of light is that?
Ben: Well, that’s...
Charlie: The speed of light is 3x108 meters per second.
Ben: Yeah, right. I think that’s 40% of the speed of light.
Charlie: Okay.
Ben: Um, just, so, I did a basic calculation to see how much drag this would cause him just running straight and this is kind of called, what we call a back of the envelope calculation, but it gives you an order of magnitude and for him to run that fast through the Earth’s atmosphere. This isn’t accounting for things like shockwaves so, it’s kind of, it might be an ignorant calculation. I’ll have to ask a rocket scientist or an aerospace scientist but, you know, just, the back of the envelope says it would take a yada watt of force, ah, sorry, a yotta watt of energy, a yotta watt of power. So, a watt is 1 joule per second and a yotta is 1024. Right. It’s, it’s a thousandth of a hella. Remember the hella?
Ryan: I do but I’m going to refuse to acknowledge it. I wasn’t, I wasn’t happy about it.
Ben: It’ll take a ridiculous amount of energy expenditure to keep him going that fast through the atmosphere. Um, if he was able to go that fast he’d be able to make an entire circle, so he could follow the Earth’s orbit around the sun if the Earth ran along, say, a roller coaster track or something...
Charlie: That’s so much energy. You could, you could, that’s a billion atomic bombs.
Ryan: It’s enough, it’s enough to get Marty McFly back to 1985 several times.
Ben: I think he, yeah, no, thousands, millions of times. He only needed a gigawatt, a gigawatt.
Ryan: 1.21 gigawatts and I just want you to know...
Ben: Oh, 1.21?
Ryan: Yeah, yeah, so... you know how like, 93 million miles is an astronomical unit...
Ben: Yeah...
Ryan: I think 1.21 gigawatts should be, like, the Back to the Future unit of energy. We should just, we should do calculations in that unit.
Ben: Well, the people do that sometimes. They use barns to talk about the...
Ryan: Yeah.
Ben: ...area. So they’ll be like, oh, that’s barns in size, you know. Like, you could hit the side of one. Um, okay, so, if, if ah, if the Flash was to go that fast he could go around the sun in one hour, follow the Earth’s orbit in one hour. It takes us a year to do that. That’s how fast he’s going. Or he could run to the sun and Mars and back in an hour. So, he would have to go really, really fast.
Ryan: Well, the Flash is really, really fast. That’s the whole point.
Ben: Well, I mean, I was hoping we could interview Tom Vs the Flash about this or something. Cause I don’t know, I just don’t know if it’s feasible that he could go this fast.
Ryan: I’m telling you, he can go as fast as the story requires.
Ben: Well, if the story requires him to go that fast then yes, he could blue shift however he might not be following the regular laws of physics.
Ryan: Wouldn’t he be red shifting if he was coming at you?
Charlie: No, that’s blue shift.
Ben: He blue shifts.And then he red shifts as he goes away. In fact, he would be shifting the color of his uniform from red into the infrared...
Ryan: Could Herschel see him as he hurtled off in the...
Ben: Yeah, that’s right. But you couldn’t so, you couldn’t see the Flash as he ran away from you because his color, if, you know, of light bouncing off him, would be in the infrared, so how’s that? That’s pretty cool.
Ryan: So you would...
Ben: So...
Ryan: That’s crazy. That’s nuts. So you wouldn’t... and he could do that run physically because Green Lantern could create a track for him to run on with his power ring.
Ben: Oh, that’s good. Yeah, he could. That would work.
Ryan: So he could actually make a track from here to Mars and back for the Flash to practice this on.
Ben: He could bring Martian Manhunter some cookies.
Ryan: Martian Manhunter does love cookies and we’re not making this up. Martian Manhunter really does have a thing for Oreos. But, ah, I think we’ve probably beat that one into the ground, I think.
Ben: Yeah, right, anyway, ah, Charles Crestbach, keep the good questions coming. Ah, the answer is, Flash could, hypothetically, run fast enough to blue shift but he would have to go really, really, really, really, really fast...
1:00:12
Charlie: It’s possible.
Ben: Sure. Way to go. Next question.
Ryan: Yeah. Totally, next question. And we are gonna do the quiz show here in a week or two so, ah, if you do have more, good questions like Charles, and don’t want to put them on the Facebook page, you can email quizmaster@sciencesortof.com or give us a voice mail call which, we’ve been a little lax, Paleo Posse. Step it up, I want to hear your voices. That’s 312-Paleopals. Or 312-725-3672. And I think I plan on setting up a form spring for us on Twitter so if you are active with us on Twitter you’ll be able to ask your question there. And I will set that out and send out a tweet and post on the Facebook page as soon as that’s done, probably before this episode even comes out. So, keep that in mind too. As far as my Paleo POW this week, ah, it was an email that was sent to all of us from Jacqueline, Jacqueline F, I don’t know, how do you say that Canadian boy?
Ben: How’s it spelled.
Ryan: It’s spelled like, it’s spelled like it’s French.
Ben: Oh, Jacqueline...
Ryan: Jacqueline, like that. Alright, so, Jacqueline, I think, should I read this in a French accent...
Ben: Yes.
Ryan: “I just wanted to let you know that I really love your podcast...” I don’t know, that’s probably not good... probably...
Ben: Keep going.
Ryan: No, I don’t think, I don’t think I will. I think I’m going to stop. “I just wanted to let you guys know...”
Ben: That’s exactly what French people sound like.
Ryan: Really? Did I nail it.
Ben: Yes.
Ryan: Are you just mocking me.
Ben: I’m sure I’m not.
Ryan: Anyway...
Ben: It’s a passable French accent. It’s very funny.
Ryan: She continues that “she commutes to school so drives can get a bit tedious without good music or a good podcast. So, thanks, the topics are always really interesting and I will continue to listen for as long as you produce the podcast. While all science is interesting, it would be really cool if you guys covered more environmental issues. I’m an environmental studies major so this topic is particularly interesting to me and I would love to hear it talked about more on the show. The topic is definitely popular enough attract listeners. And with all the green washing and people in denial of global warming, it is important that people realize what they can really do to have less of an impact on the environment. There are a lot of topics in the area that could be made interesting by your podcast while also teaching people about really important issues. I hope you’ll consider this suggestion, keep up the great work, Jacqueline.”
Charlie: That’s an excellent suggest.
Ryan: Well, we have had, had Sr. Niño on. He’s our environmental guy.
Charlie: Yeah, but I like her idea talking about different things each individual can do to lower their carbon footprint.
Ryan: Alright, so, ah, you’ve, you’ve caught the ear of Charles and it sounds like something we’ll do soon. So thank you again for the suggestion. We’re glad we’re able to make your commute that much more pleasant.
Ben: Right on.
Ryan: Okay, now for the nitty gritty stuff. Let’s just blow through this real quick because I’m sure people are tired of hearing it if you’re a regular listener, but, there’s plenty of ways you can get in touch with us. You can go to our website. What’s our website Ben?
Ben: Sciencesortof.com
Ryan: And we’re also on Twitter which is twitter.com/Sciencesortof and we have a really nice Facebook group which we pulled our question from Charles from and that’s a lot of fun. And all of us interact on that including Ben. I have to stop Ben from interacting so he doesn’t answer people’s questions before, you know, before we have a chance to talk about it on the show.
Ben: Yeah...
Ryan: Because you’re excited, that’s good.
Ben: Yeah, that’s right.
Ryan: Right, and ah, speaking of Twitter, Charles, are you ready for your Twitter follower count of the week?
Charlie: Sure.
Ryan: You’re at 26. No Tweet yet.
Charlie: Nice.
Ryan: So, if you remember from last week, Charles is waiting for 50 followers before he sends his first tweet. And it’s going to be glorious. He’s probably crafting it now. All 140 characters of it. But Science sort of itself is on Twitter as are the rest of the Paleo Pals, Ben included. If you’d like to email the show, ah, if you have a question use the quizmaster email but if you just have general things to say like Jacqueline did you can email that to paleopals@Sciencesortof.com. And I think that’s about it. We absolutely adore iTunes reviews and a good one literally makes our day. At least me personally. I see a good iTunes review pop up and I’m, I’m smiling for awhile, so.
Charlie: Absolutely.
Ryan: Those are really appreciated, more than we can even say so please continue to send those in. And, ah, anything else, you know, like we said, we don’t get a lot of suggestions for stories to cover. Even topics like environmental studies are good but send us a story that you thing would be interesting for us to talk about and we’ll, that’ll make it that much easier for us to tackle it. But I think that’s, that’s pretty much it. So, thanks again for listening. This was episode 36 of Science sort of. The theme was seen from space, hopefully the theme made sense with all our beaver damming and black holes that aren’t really black holes.
Ben: Black spots.
Ryan: Black areas.
Charlie: And we even got into accent theory for awhile for no reason.
Ben: We did.
Ryan: I, I really enjoy linguistics. We should try and get a linguistics person on.
1:05:02
Ben: Or computational linguist.
Ryan: I don’t know what that means.
Ben: They’re people that teach computers how to listen to people yammering.
Ryan: Oh.
Charlie: That’s good, that’s a nice tie to actual science because otherwise we’d just be running down the rabbit hole of philosophy. Which is an awesome rabbit hole but...
Ryan: Ben, find us a computational linguist. Go! So, thanks again for listening and now we’re going to try something that Ben hasn’t had to do yet but hopefully he’s been listening to the show enough that it’s coming so this was episode 36 and we will see you next week for episode 37 and a little bit more Science...
Charlie and Ben: ... sort of.
Ben: Sort of.
Ryan: Oh, Ben nailed it, that was perfect Ben.
Ben: You made me do it before. I did it last episode I was on.
Ryan: Did you?
Ben: Yeah but I don’t get to do my sign-off anymore.
Ryan: Well, you can go, do your sign-off.
Charlie: Go for it, lay it on us.
Ben: Hey everybody, keep science in your hearts.
Announcer: Thanks for listening to Science sort of. Our show notes are available at sciencesortof.com, which we'll 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
Ryan: I don’t think, I don’t know, I’ll probably cut that, that joke didn’t go as, over, that’s what I do. That’s the beauty of being the one that gets to edit is I... anytime my jokes fail it just gets cut.
Ben: I’ve noticed that. One, ah, one, well, I mean, if you have, Charlie, Charlie will tell me to cut something and I will. So, you know, you can declare that a failed joke of your own gets cut.
Charlie: Oh...
Ryan: That is allowed.
Transcriptions provided by Denny Henke of Beardyguycreative.com
