← Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More
Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More
Questions and Answers: Volume 43
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The month of June is upon us. It's the month of your solstice of choice, depending on your hemisphere. And the month of June comes from the Roman goddess Juno, who was the protector of the Roman state. She was also the queen of the gods, being both the sister and wife of Jupiter, which is in no way creepy. However, I don't think she must have been that great of a goddess if she had nothing to do with either questions or answers. Stay tuned for the 43rd installment of Questions and Answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by True Work. Working outside in the spring means dealing with chilly mornings, hot afternoons, mud, rain and whatever else the weather decides to throw at you. And cheap workwear can make all of that worse. That's why the T2 work pant from TrueWerk is different. Most workwear is made from cotton blends that restrict movement and get soaked after just a few raindrops. TrueWerk uses advanced performance fabrics designed specifically for job site conditions. The T2 work pant has four way stretch for bending, kneeling and climbing, a water resistant finish to shed rain, and nine intelligent pockets placed where the trade pro said they need them. TrueWerkGear has been tested and validated for over 10 years by real trade pros and with over 15,000 5 star reviews and it's worth experiencing the difference yourself. I have a pair and I wish I had them years ago when I was traveling because they would have made the perfect travel pants. The work doesn't stop just because the weather changes. Upgrade to the T2 work pant and stay comfortable no matter what the day brings. Get 15% off your first order at truework.com with code everything that's T R U-E-W-E-R-K.com Code everything TrueWerk built like it matters, because it does. This episode is sponsored by Mint Mobile. When people hear that Mint Mobile plans are only $15 a month, a lot of people wonder, what's the catch? Well, I can tell you that there isn't one. There are no gimmicks and no gotchas. Just unlimited talk, text and data with fast, reliable coverage on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your same phone with the same phone number and all of your contacts. All you do is pay less money. That's why I recommend Mint Mobile. To get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to mintmobile.comeed that's mintmobile.comeed cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.comeed that's it. There's no catch. $45 upfront payment required. Equivalent to $15 a month new customers on first three month plan only. Slower speeds above 40gb on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. Before I get into the questions, I want to start with a few housekeeping notes. The first is that Everything Everywhere Weekly is now up and available to listen to for all tiers on Patreon. Everything Everywhere Weekly is a recap of the previous week's episodes with me and writer Joel Hermanson. We give our thoughts on the topics, cover things that didn't make it into the episode, and just go off on tangents that are somewhat related to the topic. There are currently five episodes uploaded and we release new ones every week. The second housekeeping note is that next month marks the podcast's sixth anniversary. Instead of doing a question and answer episode, I'm going to be turning the episode over to you. Just like I did for episode 2000. I'm going to let you leave a message that can be played on the show. What I'm asking is for you to leave a brief audio message where you give your name, your favorite episode, and a brief explanation why. And please keep it brief or otherwise it might be subject to editing. As with episode 2000, I have created a page on a site called Speakpipe where you can record and leave your message. A link to that page is available in the show notes and on the podcast website's front page as well. With that, let's start with the first question, which comes from the ratmafia on Discord, who I recently rewatched Back to the Future 3, and something occurred to me that I never considered the last time I watched the movie 20 years ago. Why didn't Doc Brown distill his own gasoline? Crude oil was relatively accessible, and surely they had access to kerosene for mining lamps. Isn't oil refining just heating the oil to a certain temperature? Well, the rat mafia, you are correct that distilling petroleum is really just a function of heating petroleum. In the absence of oxygen, different heat levels produce different types of fuel, such as kerosene, gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. The process is called fractional distillation, and I think it's fair to assume that Doc Brown would have known that if he was smart enough to discover time travel. However, I would disagree a little bit about the accessibility of oil. According to the movie, Doc Brown traveled back to Hill Valley, California in 1885. Hill Valley is fictional, but Back to the Future 3 was filmed in Sonora in the Central Valley, so let's assume that it's somewhere around there. The first oil well in California was only drilled in 1876, nine years before the dock arrives in the past. The best information I can find is that several hundred barrels per day were produced in California around 1885, so he probably could have easily ordered a single barrel of oil had it been shipped by train. Approximately 20 gallons of gasoline can be produced from a barrel of crude petroleum, and the DeLorean had a 13.5 gallon gas tank. So in theory you could distill gasoline from something akin to an alcohol still, but it might be dangerous and rather inefficient. So it could be done, but it would take time to do everything and get the oil. Hijacking a train is much easier and makes for a better story Kevin o' Keefe asks Gary As a school teacher, I'm constantly struggling over AI. I teach second grade where they're not yet exposed to it yet. In 20 years they will clearly be living in a different world when it comes to learning. There's so much we can leverage using this powerful new tool in terms of learning and it being positive. Yet at the same time, it could be a crutch with students and the public at large using it in a way that could erode our cognitive abilities. With all of your research into learning for your book, and without giving too much away, what do you see as the future of learning? Well, Kevin, when AI Systems first went public, no one was ready for it. Kids found them right away and used them to do their homework and to write papers before their teachers knew what was happening. Many teachers have already adjusted for this by returning to in class essays written in longhand and other means of evaluating students that are basically AI proof. Like other tools, AI can be used to make us better or to make us worse. Having AI write a paper for you is an example of making us worse. There's nothing that's gained by having AI do this work for you. It's just a cheaper way of buying a paper. However, like with treadmills or gym equipment, AI can make you stronger if you use it correctly. In fact, I think if used correctly, AI can be the greatest advancement in human learning that the world has ever seen. Here's some of the research I have been doing for my book. The question of what is the best way for people to learn has been well known for a while. In 1984, an educational researcher named Benjamin Bloom identified a system of learning that was two full standard deviations better than regular classroom instruction. That is an astounding improvement. An average person using this method could perform at the 98th percentile of someone who received normal classroom instruction. What is the magic method? Individual tutoring Individual tutoring lets the student learn at their own pace, gets all of their questions answered personally, and allows the instructor to teach for mastery, meaning that you don't move on until the student has mastered the subject. There are no B's or C's or D's. And this isn't just after school tutoring. This is full time personalized instruction. There have been various studies that have produced different estimates of the benefits of individual instruction, but they all point in the same direction. There is of course a problem with this that might jump out at you immediately. You can't really scale individual tutoring for thousands of millions of people. Bloom calls this the Sigma 2 problem. The first real tool we have that can solve the Sigma 2 problem is artificial intelligence. Right now, as I speak, some kids, the bright and curious ones, are realizing that with AI YouTube videos and some podcasts, they can basically speedrun school. They can cover an entire semester long course in just a few weeks. If you don't believe me, try this yourself. Go to your favorite AI program and tell it you want it to tutor you in something that you know very little about. Ask it the dumbest questions you have that you might otherwise be embarrassed to ask someone. Ask it to explain it to you like you're 5 or 10 years old if necessary. AI is now capable of passing the bar and medical board exams and it's now solving unsolved problems in mathematics. In a recent panel of theoretical physicists, 100% of them were using AI to assist them in their research. The current system of schooling isn't set up for this world. However, there is a catch to this. You have to want to learn. If you have no desire to learn and are not curious, then all the technology in the world will not be able to help you. There are schools that are experimenting with this currently and the results so far are extremely promising. So my advice for a second grade teacher is to stoke their curiosity and to make sure that they have the basic reading and writing skills. Then in a few years give them the tools to allow them to really run with their desire to learn. Jeremy Mellon asks, hey Gary, since you've traveled the world in the past, is there a particular airport that was your favorite and a particular type of aircraft you'd rather fly on? The best airport in the world, without question, is Chiang Mai in Singapore. Vancouver also ranks very high on my list, and the type of plane is secondary to the type of seat. A business class seat on any plane is better than an economy class seat on any plane. Landon Shea asks, what is the most memorable or interesting conversation you've had with a stranger while traveling, never to see them again? Well, Land and I have had many, many such conversations all over the world. Maybe the most memorable was the night I stayed up drinking vending machine beer at a hostel in Tokyo with a rap group from Delaware who were there to perform. Had we both not been there, I probably never would have met these guys otherwise Joshua Felty asks, inspired by Memorial Day, have you or anyone in your family history ever served in the military? If so, any interesting stories? Little known fact I almost joined the Marines after high school to pay for college, but I didn't end up going that route. I went to the recruiter and got the highest score they had ever seen on their aptitude test, so I had that going for me. My dad served in the Marines in Vietnam, my grandfather served in the Navy in World War II, and my great grandfather was in the army in World War I. The the best story would probably come from my great Uncle Bob, who served in the army in the Pacific during World War II. He cut General MacArthur's hair while he was in Papua New Guinea. Findair on Discord asks what's something that you've heard repeatedly is very difficult to understand, but for you it comes rather easily. Conversely, what is something you've heard is really easy but you find it rather hard to understand. The thing I've never had a problem with was nuclear physics, that being the mathematics and physics of the nucleus, isotopes, radioactive decay, etc. I took a graduate level class when I was studying geology and I aced the course. To me it was much easier than something like organic chemistry, which I think is actually far, far more complicated because there are far more ways for atoms to fit together than what is going on inside the atomic Mackay on Discord which book series do you feel is well overdue for a film or TV series? Now that the Dune movies have been released, I can't say Dune anymore. However, Denis Villeneuve is going to stop after Dune 3, which is supposed to cover Dune, Messiah and Children of Dune. However, every Dune fan would really like to see God, Emperor of Dune, which takes place 6,000 years after the events of the original Dune book. Even if Denis Villeneuve doesn't want to direct it anymore, which I understand, I hope he would at least produce it and give the world the same feel as the first films. And I'll also put in an argument for a faithful adaptation of Isaac Asimov's foundation trilogy. The Apple TV series really shares nothing other than the name at this point, and can't even really be called an adaptation. Richard Welcher asks Every time I travel I feel like I have forgotten to pack something. Forgetting about something like a visa or passport. Have you ever gone somewhere and forgot that thing and then couldn't get it? Where you went, for example, a razor or toothbrush, and in the desert you couldn't get either. This really wasn't too much of an issue for me, because when I was traveling full time, I had everything with me all the time. Every time I checked out from a hotel room or something, I always did a basic check of the important things wallet, passport, camera, computer, phone, etc. And one thing you quickly learn when traveling is that you can pretty much get almost anything you need when you are on the road. Vlad Sander from Discord asks hey Gary, recently there was a meteor that was reportedly exploded off the Massachusetts coast. Could it have been something similar to the Tunguska event? No, it wasn't really that big. It was a daytime fireball, which is quite rare, and it was notable for that reason. But it was nothing on the scale of the Tunguska event, which was basically the power of a 10 to 15 megaton nuclear weapon. It was probably closer, or at least smaller to the Chabolinsk meteor, which landed in Russia in 2013. It broke windows and set off car alarms, but didn't kill anyone, although there were a lot of minor injuries from debris. The last question comes from sooner on Discord, who asks gary, can you see yourself in five years? If so, are you still doing this podcast? Or will you have turned the show over to another host and entered new opportunity opportunities? Let me put this very bluntly. I got a really good thing going on here. I'm able to research, write and talk about whatever I want. It took a while to get the show off the ground, but now that it's going, I have no plans on stopping. I have no intentions of having someone else host the show either. Maybe if I was hospitalized or something and I physically couldn't do it, I might get someone to step in temporarily, but the actual recording of the show is quite honestly the easiest part of the entire process. Now that I have some writers helping me, it's taken a big load off my shoulders and made continuing the show much more sustainable. Editing an episode takes much less time than writing and researching a full episode from scratch every single day, I might expand what I'm doing. I've considered doing live shows or expanding into another show, but I see no reason to stop doing this show. You have to do something that concludes this month's Q and A episode. If you want to leave a question for next month's show, you have to join the Facebook group or the Discord server, because that is where I solicit questions. 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.