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Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More
Questions and Answers: Volume 42
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It is the first of May, which is celebrated around the world as May Day. In ancient Rome it was called Kalendai Maidai, the date on which a pregnant sow was sacrificed to the goddess Maia, mother of the messenger goddess Hermes. Today we don't do that anymore. Instead, we sacrifice questions upon the altar of Answers. Stay tuned for the 42nd installment of Questions and Answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by Mint Mobile. Most of you might have something that you're saving up for. Maybe it's the trip of a lifetime, your children, your retirement, or maybe even something nice for yourself. And if you're looking for some extra money, the easiest thing you can do is to cancel your current mobile plan and and switch to Mint Mobile. With Mint Mobile you can get high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network starting at only 15 bucks a month. Use your own phone and number, activate with ESIM in minutes and start saving immediately. No long term contracts and no hassle. That's why I recommend Mint Mobile. If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans@mintmobile.comeed that's mintmobile.comeed upfront payment of $45 for 3 month 5GB plan required equivalent to $15 a month. New customer offer for first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. This episode is sponsored by Quints. I recently moved into a new, larger place and I faced the challenge of decorating it. I of course am turning to Quince to help get the job done. In addition to clothes, Quince offers stylish home furnishings that makes my place look great at affordable prices. And I've also recently picked up a second cashmere sweater that I've talked about before just because I like it so much. The great thing about Quint's is that their prices are 50 to 60% lower than those of similar brands. How Quint's works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middleman so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. Everything is designed to last and makes getting dressed and decorating your home easy. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to quince.com daily for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q U I-N-E.com daily for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com daily. Let's kick things right off with our first question Kevin o' Keefe asks, how is the book on learning coming along? What's been the most difficult part of putting it all together? And have you had any light bulb moments or any nuggets that you could share with us to get us excited about the content in the book whenever you're able to finish it? Thanks, Gary. Well Kevin, I am making progress right now. I'm gathering data and doing research. I have a lot of ideas and now I need to put them together in some sort of coherent form. The biggest thing getting in the way of the book is, not surprisingly, having to do a podcast episode every day. I'm getting close to the point where I'll start actually writing, but it's going to be a very rough process. I imagine that it will take several iterations to get it to a point where it would be publishable. The research on learning is actually rather remarkable. What makes it remarkable is the strength of the consensus about how effective a single person learns and what actually works. There's also many things happening on the cutting edge right now, which is also another reason why the research can be difficult. I am excited to be working on it and I have absolutely no clue what the business case is for the book or if there's any at all, but that really isn't my concern at the moment. Linda Rocholt Hash asks, do you have to buy the rights to broadcast the little clips from movies, songs, or commercials you sometimes have at the end of episodes? Are there any other intellectual property aspects you need to deal with? And for the other angle, how is the content of your podcast protected? Alright, let me provide a brief explanation of copyright law in the United States. The Copyright act of 1976 creates exemptions for what's called fair use. Under fair use exemptions, you can use some copyrighted material for several things. This includes criticism and commentary, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, research, and parody. The other overriding principle is that you can't hurt the business of the copyright owner, so you can do something that wouldn't discourage people from purchasing or using the original copyrighted material. With that being said, and I know I'm biased, I think I've established a very strong track record over the course of almost six years of this being an educational podcast. No one is coming here to avoid purchasing albums or movies from someone else. I think I have a very strong fair use case for the content I use, as do many other podcasts. In fact, I think you could make the case that a podcast like mine falls squarely within the legitimate fair use exemption that Being said, the fact that I can make a solid legal argument for fair use doesn't mean that somebody couldn't make my life a real pain practically. Movie studios don't bother to pursue a lot of copyright claims unless someone is trying to copy, sell, or pirate entire movies. You've probably seen screenshots or very short video clips of movies that have been turned into memes online. A movie clip is not a substitute for an entire movie. It would be extremely difficult to prove that playing a short clip or taking a screenshot would somehow be taking money away from a studio. The music industry, on the other hand, will literally check every podcast that is published for the slightest bit of copyrighted content. They are notorious for filing claims for the slightest things even when they don't own the copyright. This is a major problem on YouTube channels that explicitly do Music education videos often receive strikes from record labels. Go check out Rick Beato's videos on the subject, for example. So if I use any music on this show, which I really don't do that often, I am almost always using music that is in the public domain. And this is really just a pragmatic decision because of how difficult record labels are, even though I think I have a very, very clear fair use exemption. For example, in my episode on Extremely Large Numbers at the end I played a short clip of the song Barney Google. It was recorded in 1923 and is in the public domain. As for my content, there isn't much you can do beyond claiming a copyright as with fair use. If someone were to use a clip from my show, I really wouldn't care because I think that's fair use. However, I've also had people who have tried to copy my entire show wholesale and and that would be a violation of copyright. Ultimately, anything and everything you want to enforce comes down to the law and how much you are willing to spend trying to enforce it. Neil Garrett asks, what are the most important lessons you've ever learned in life? That is simple. The ability to adapt is more important than your ability to plan. Darren Brown asks, how likely is it for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to be adopted for longer haul transport? Darren I think the odds are very low. Hydrogen is not an energy source per se. It is a method of energy storage. To create hydrogen, you first need to split water molecules, which itself requires energy. There was a brief period several years ago when everybody was talking about hydrogen and the new hydrogen economy and that never happened. The fact is, hydrogen is dangerous and very difficult to work with. Creating an entire infrastructure around hydrogen would be difficult and incredibly expensive. We've already seen that batteries have been adopted at a much higher rate than hydrogen fuel cells. In fact, there really aren't any hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on the market today, which kind of proves my point. Taranjokes asks if my count is right. This is the 42nd question and answer episode, so I must ask what is the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything Everywhere Daily? Well, Taren, the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything Everywhere Daily is to get out the next episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Swimming Ants asks what got you into podcasting and have you ever thought about doing a monthly theme for episodes? I've talked about the podcast origin several times in previous episodes, so I'm not going to repeat that here. As for doing monthly themes, that will never happen because the entire point of the show is to provide something different every day. If you're not interested in today's topic, then you might be interested in tomorrow's. My goal is to create an antidote to the content algorithms you experience online. Algorithms will feed you what they think you want to see based on your previous consumption. So if you watch a video on YouTube about one particular thing, it's going to keep serving you up the same thing over and over. This show is based on human serendipity where you might hear something that you didn't even know that you didn't know about. So the short answer is there will be no month long themes. Silagray asks, do you have any plans to do an episode on Korean culture and history like Hangul, the Korean Alphabet? Or how about the Battle of Myeong, which was Korea's own Battle of Thermopylae against the Japanese, which Korea won despite their massive numeric disadvantage thanks to their legendary Admiral Yi Sun Shin Ah. It's funny you asked this question. The writers and I have a weekly meeting where we cover what episodes we'll be writing over the next week. And one of the things I brought up in our last meeting was covering areas that have been under covered in previous episodes. One of the topics that I suggested was Korea, so the short answer is yes, we will be having some more Korean themed episodes coming up. Bam asks, is there anything on your list for future possible episodes? That was an idea sparked by watching a Ken Burns PBS documentary. I can't say that I've ever done an episode based on a Ken Burns documentary. That being said, there have been many episodes that I've done that have shared topics with Ken Burns documentaries. The biggest topic that Ken Burns has done a series on that I would like to cover in a future episode is the history of Jazz. I've tried to do an episode on jazz before, but I found the subject to be too vast to fit into a single episode. There isn't just a single thing called jazz that I could narrow it down to, and I became very frustrated. I'm sure that I'll try to tackle the subject again in the future, or at least try to put some parameters around it to make it doable. Drew Dr. C Clinkenbeard asks, if you could get an answer to one or two questions from any of your episodes, what would it be? In other words, what one unresolved mystery would you crack? The Everest episode made me think about this. Well, the question I would be interested in resolving is the authorship of Shakespeare's works. I've read quite a bit more on the subject since I recorded the episode on it, and it's shocking just how little evidence there is that a man from Stratford on Avon wrote the works that we attribute to him. Almost everything that we think we know about William Shakespeare has no evidence to support it. It's almost all based on supposition. And this isn't a conspiracy. There really wasn't anybody trying to cover anything up. It's just, I think, the greatest case of misattribution because someone used a pen name and wanted to keep their identity secret bananaman5000 asks what is your favorite hot springs? My favorite hot springs would have to be the Takini Hot Springs outside of Whitehorse, Yukon. They are about a 30 minute drive outside of Whitehorse and are especially great places to visit in the winter. But I give a very honorable mention to Hot Spring island in the Haida Gwaii Islands off the coast of British Columbia, and I say it gets an honorable mention because the hot spring was turned off after an earthquake in 2012. I have heard reports that the hot water has slowly started trickling back, but I haven't had it confirmed. Our last question of the episode comes from Eric Dombrowski who asks, hey Gary, I know that ever since you started this podcast you've been very focused on churning out a new episode each and every day. Much appreciated by the way. However, I also understand that you haven't traveled much during this time. Do you ever miss the travel photography days when you were constantly traveling the globe and going to far flung places? Do you have any international travel plans for the future? If so, where? Honestly, Eric, I have not been out of the country since I started doing this podcast. Having to post a show every single day has made traveling very difficult. That being said, I don't miss it as much as most people think I do. It isn't that I don't like traveling so much as I really got my fill from being on the road for so long. I have traveled more by an order of magnitude than most people ever do in an entire lifetime. That doesn't mean I'll never travel again. I'm fairly certain that I will. It's just that I don't have some desperate yearning to fulfill my bucket list, as I've done most of that already. It's kind of like asking someone who's just been at a buffet if they're hungry. Just because they're full at the moment doesn't mean they'll never eat again. That concludes this month's Q and A episode. If you want to leave a question for next month's show, you'll have to join the Facebook group or Discord. And I should also let everyone know that I have been recording Everything Everywhere Weekly with Joel Hermanson, one of the show's writers, where we cover the episodes of the last week, give our thoughts on them, and go over some things that might not have made the cut. This is available exclusively to supporters of the show on Patreon. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible, and I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast, and links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you too can have it read on the show.