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- [00:01]
A
Hello and welcome to the Rest Is Science. I'm Michael Stevens.
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B
And I'm Hannah Fry.
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A
And today on Field Notes, Hannah has brought something or she's going to show me something. She sent me an email while I was asleep.
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B
I did, but don't open it yet. Don't open it yet.
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A
I don't. I haven't opened it yet because the subject line said, michael, do not read until we record later at 2:201am she sent that.
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B
So we are in different countries. To be fair. This is sort of by the bye, but I'm going to send it to you on WhatsApp because I think if you open the email, it'll immediately be obvious what the surprise is. Okay.
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C
Okay.
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B
All right. The object that I'm bringing today is something that we found in my ex mother in law's loft. Okay. Now, important piece of information is that she's called Mary. She's absolutely amazing. I adore her. Still adore her, Will continue to adore her forever. She was born and brought up in India, um, and she's lived in this house for a very long time. We were going through some boxes. On you go.
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A
Okay, so here it is. I've got a video from you. I can already see like a cardboard box with like some rope coming out of it or, or wires or something. Should I hit play?
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B
Off you go.
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A
Okay, play.
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B
That's what we found.
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A
Okay. So the, the, the rope I saw coming out was just part of a handle. Now there's a whole bunch of crinkly paper holding. Oh, it's a tiger head.
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C
It is.
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A
It's a taxidermied tiger head which we
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B
found in her loft. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.
- [01:52]
A
Our bodies are incredible machines, worrying away, making more and more DNA to build the proteins that keep us alive.
- [02:00]
B
In fact, in the last minute, your body has made over 200 million new cells and enough DNA to stretch to the moon and back to the moon and back.
- [02:09]
A
That's so much DNA that if you compared it to the size of the cell it fits into, that would be like squeezing the London Underground into a suitcase.
- [02:18]
B
By the age of 50, you have copied almost 6 trillion miles of DNA. But every time that your body copies DNA, it risks making mistakes. And over time, those mistakes can accumulate and, and that collection of errors can lead to cancer.
- [02:33]
A
But incredibly, Cancer Research UK scientists can spot these errors. And by finding them, They've helped double UK cancer survival over the last 50 years and are driving even more discoveries that could tackle over 200 types of cancer.
- [02:48]
B
For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org restiscience. Okay, there's a story behind this, right? She's not just collecting large animal taxidermies in a sort of weird and horrible and creepy way. There's this full story behind this. Let me give you this one. Okay, so I'll just sent you another link.
- [03:22]
A
Okay. Okay, so I'm loading the second video, which is a great view. It's out of the box now. I was a little bit sad when I first saw this decapitated tiger.
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B
Of course, it isn't decapitated though, to be fair.
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A
But then your second video does have you saying just kind of. I don't know the context, but you say in the background of the video, okay, so once they start eating people, they don't stop.
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B
Exactly.
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A
Was this a man killer?
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B
This was a man eater. Okay, so she grew up in this village in India, which is right next to Nepal. Right. So the sort of the northern part of India.
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A
So up north.
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B
Yeah, it's this area called Uttarakhand in India. And there's lots of wild tigers all around there. And this particular tiger was a man eater, had been attacking people in the village and killing them. This is like way back in the 1940s, 1950s, by. By the way. And her dad was this quite important person in the village. And what they would do when a tiger started eating humans, they knew that it wouldn't stop. Like, humans are very easy prey.
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A
And they're delicious.
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B
And they're delicious. Thank you very much. Still hoping for that invitation to eat some genuine human flesh, I see.
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A
Me too. Yeah. Well, I thought you said speaking for yourself.
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B
No, I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that.
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C
All right.
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A
I'm still waiting. Yeah, you're right.
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B
But once they realize that they can very easily kill and eat humans, they don't tend to stop. And so when you get a man eater, it's sort of quite important that the village goes out there and hunts down this particular tiger and essentially takes it out of the question. So a group of men from the village, including her dad, went out and they. They found the tiger. Essentially, they create this platform in the jungle and they dangle meat from it and they wait for the correct tiger to come past. They sort of know the different tigers by sight, by their patterning and so on. So this was the tiger ended up in her loft in this, like, nice old lady's loft, like thousands of miles Away from where it started. But what I wanted to talk to you about today was in general this idea of man eating tigers. Because this is something that still absolutely happens. And the different ways that they try and approach it and tackle it, it's like a kind of crazy idea that you could just be wandering around near your home and then have an actual predator come and attack you.
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A
I know, I know. Actually, let me tell you, I encountered something like this when I was in Kenya. I went there many years ago to speak to YouTubers in Kenya, and a lion showed up and it was very cool, you know, oh, look at the lion. Snap some photos. And then I saw a guy walking out with a gun, like a big gun. And I said, well, you can't shoot a lion, right? Like they're like endangered, you know. But they did. And it was explained to me that first of all, lions Panthera leo is not endangered. It's vulnerable.
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B
Right?
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A
But the lion is too dangerous to the community, especially the children. And so once they've come that close, more lives are saved. I guess the human lives are saved by getting rid of that lion.
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B
So where were you when this happened? Were you out in the national park or were you sort of in much more of an urban environment?
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A
I don't know where I was. So it was the morning after the meetings and a friend and I just asked a guy if he could take us out and we just drove a little further out to a different village. And I don't even remember the name
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B
of it, but it was a village. It was like a sort of a human settlement.
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A
Essentially it was a human settlement. This was not on like a reserve park or anything. This was more like, oh, and here's the place. In fact, it was a place we stopped in because I hadn't had any caffeine yet that day. And they, they were selling Red Bull, so we stopped to get a Red Bull. And I remember just being really annoyed because they didn't have sugar free Red Bull and I didn't want all the sugar. So I was like, gosh dang it. And I got this in the caffeine, only in the sugar only made me more irritable. And then a lion showed up and the lion was hanging out around the bathrooms.
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B
So wow, that is dangerous.
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A
We drove near them and we saw the lion was just chilling, just like, yo, what up? And I'm like, oh, so cute. And then that's when I saw the men coming out with the guns, like, like big automatic weapons. And I was like, oh, that, that lion Came into the wrong place. Do they have to do it? And I was told that they had to.
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B
Yeah. I mean what I will say in India now, I mean tigers are extremely endangered, extremely protected. So when this happens there's this whole set of circumstances that, that, that come into play. But just, I think, let me just talk very briefly about the types of danger that, that they actually can pose to humans. So there's, there's one very famous story that called the Champawat tiger, which is, it's about a three hour drive from where my mother in law grew up. Right. So really close. Okay. This Champawat tiger, it started off, this is like 1895, something like that. And she started killing some humans in this, this tiny little village in Nepal. And hunters went in to try and kill her as a result of this. But she managed to evade them, carried on hunting. Eventually the Nepalese army come out to try and track her, but fail and yet managed to push her over the border into India. And then when she was in India she would just pick off victim after victim after victim. And often they would be young women and children who were going to the forest to sort of collect firewood, to feed livestock, whatever else it might be. Also she just became bolder and bolder and bolder. She would make these kills during daylight. Whereas like a lot of the tiger attacks happen at nighttime and across the entire region, like people were really genuinely paralyzed with fear. So they would hear her roaring and then nobody would leave their huts for ages afterwards because they were like, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not going to risk it. Anyway, they think in the end she killed 436 people.
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C
Wow.
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B
Yeah. Which is phenomenal. Phenomenal. In the end there was, there was one young, youngish girl, 16 year old girl who, she, who she killed and that allowed them to sort of, by following the torn clothes and trail into the jungle, they, they managed to find her. And when they, I mean I do think that if there's one animal who's responsible for 436 deaths of villagers, you know, it's not great. But I do see the argument that actually the safety of the humans is really important.
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A
Well, yeah, if you don't have any other options, like I think it would be better if we had the resources to capture the tiger and relocate it or re home it, which is what
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B
they try and do now. But this is like over 100 years ago. But they found that when, you know, after she was, they found that actually she had some broken teeth. They think that maybe she had been like shot or clipped by a bullet when she was much younger. And the theory was that that was the reason why she then became a man eater. Oh, that. Actually tigers generally don't try and hunt humans, but if they find it harder to sort of attack prey on their own, Right. Then humans are easier to attack. And so you go for the humans and instead. Right, Fast forward to the modern day and now when there are attacks and they still happen, incidentally. So in late 2010, early 2011, there were four people who were killed in around this same area, right, in the same area where my mother in law grew up. And what they did is the tiger who they thought was responsible, they went off and found it. But they also managed to recover DNA samples from the attack sites, from the sort of the remains of the people who had been attacked by the tiger. And as a result, they did this forensic analysis in the same way that you would do if there was a human murder. And they managed to prove after the fact that the tiger had been the guilty party. Right? They did DNA evidence against the tiger. They proved he was the guilty party. I think it might have been a female tiger, actually, on that instance, the, the female tiger was the guilty party and she'd killed these humans and that was fine. Okay, so her sort of taking her out was okay?
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A
It was fine. So they had the trial after the execution and luckily it was okay.
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B
But now they do the trials before the execution. Okay, so now what they do, you know, if you accept that actually having a tiger that's hunting humans is a really bad thing, and that that tiger needs to be removed from that situation in some way or another, then you need to be sure that you are getting the correct tiger. And so what they do is they take the DNA from the crime scene and then they go around, they sort of try and stalk the different tigers that are in the neighborhood and they manage to get DNA from the tigers from like urine samples, from like brushing past leaves. They basically do a full forensic analysis, right? A full forensic, like crime scene thing, then run what is effectively a trial, right, to work out who the guilty tiger is. And then they like start with this process of like, can we dart the tiger, put the tiger in a zoo? Can we relocate the tiger? Is there anything, anything we can do? Killing the tiger does still happen, but it's the absolute last resort now.
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A
Well, that's all really good to hear. I love that, I love that we're giving these like, human rights to the animal criminals. And this should be an Episode of some, like, crime show. There should be like, the animal detectives who are like, okay, I got a urine sample from a tiger. We're gonna bring it to the lab and we're gonna find out if they're the criminal, if they're the murderer.
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B
Totally.
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A
Well, I wanna know. So first of all, this taxidermied tiger head that your former mother in law has.
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B
Mm. It's the full tiger body. It's the full tiger body. If you watch the second video, it's the full body. It's the full tiger body, paws, everything. It's unbelievably beautiful. Unbelievably beautiful.
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A
Oh, my goodness. So what a special story also to have from. From her life. Why did she not have it on display?
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B
Because I think it's not that nice, you know?
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A
Yeah, it's a little un. Nice. It's a little macabre. It's a little like. You need to explain the context.
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B
Yeah. I mean, you. That's the point, Right. I think if you've got the postie coming around your house, you know what I mean? Some plumbers come around to fix you, to fix your sink, and then it's like, oh, yeah, massive tiger on your wall. That's quite the thing.
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A
How did you acquire that?
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B
How did you. You'd have to sort of put a plaque next to it, being like, it's okay. This is not game hunting. This is not sort of big cat hunting. This is not like a trophy kill. This is like, you know, in the service of human life. And I think, actually even in that situation, I think that some people still would not be happy about it. Incidentally, by the way, this particular tiger skin, it can stay in their family, right? It can stay in the family behind to Dan. But you can't sell it, you can't trade it. I think carrying it across borders is extremely difficult. Quite rightly, all of the rules of these things of like tiger skins, of elephant tusks, all of that have completely clamped down in a really, really serious way. And since the 1970s, actually, you haven't just been allowed to go out and kill tigers only in a situation where, you know that they're a man eater has even been on the cards that they could be shot.
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A
Wow. Well, yeah, I mean, it's such a. We don't always think about it. I know there are. There are, you know, bears and sharks. We. We are prey on this planet still to a certain degree. And it's. I think it's good to be reminded of that, that we are just Sharing this planet. And sometimes things are going to get a little dark.
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B
A little bit dark. One thing that I would say, that old assumption based on the. On the Tiger that killed 436 people, that she had this tooth broken and that was the reason why she was hunting for humans. With all of this DNA evidence that has been going on in India in the last 15 years or so, they have tried to work out essentially what percentage of tigers are problematic, by which I mean interacting with sort of human humans themselves or with livestock that the humans keep. And the old assumption was that there'd only be one or two tigers if they were her, who would do something like that. But actually, now that they've done these DNA swabs on livestock carcasses that have been sort of dragged into the jungle by these tigers, it's more like 40% of the tiger population. It's like, hey, it's like a Big Mac, right? It's like this. Look at this easy lunch that's just right there. Why would I. Why would I not.
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A
Well, yeah, I mean, I was just thinking about that. Like, I was using the word criminal to describe these animals. And yet I don't think that's a fair description.
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B
It's literal fast food. You know, it's.
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A
Yeah, they're just getting fast food. They're just getting a nice little snack the same way they would with any other animal. They're. They're not. Their intentions are not, Aha. I'm going to get away with this. I'm going to commit an act that will weigh on my conscience, and I don't care, because it won't, because I'm a psychopath. They're just eating meat as they do.
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B
Yeah, of course. I mean, and the thing is, is that, like, hold on a second. That livestock were going to get eaten anyway. You know, it was just gonna be. It's like, hey, that's my food.
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A
Rather than, that's right, you stole our food. Or you, hey, you ate food, but it's not the food we want you to eat. So penalty is death.
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B
Golly, no. So actually there's you. You. You cannot kill a tiger if it. If it attacks livestock. Livestock sort of not quite fair game, but there's no, you know, tiger. In a battle between tiger and cow, the tiger wins every single time. There is something you can do about it, though, which is very humane. I really like the simplicity of this as a solution. So in the 1980s, people noticed that the way that tigers hunt, sort of like some folklore about this as well, but the way that tigers hunt is that if they sort of stalk their victims and then if they feel like they've been spotted, they'll give up and they'll go find something else to eat. So what people did in the 1980s when in West Bengal, this is because you have people who were out there in the jungle, in the forest, you know, collecting honey. Fishermen, woodcutters, whatever it might be, they gave out these, these sort of helmets that had faces on the back of the head.
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C
Oh.
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B
And it turns out that the number of tiger attacks just really dramatically dropped because tigers thought that the people were looking the other way and so didn't bother killing it. Now tigers have got, they've got smart to it. So now it doesn't work quite as well. However, on cows. This is. I'm going to move across to lions now rather than cows. But in Botswana, there was, there was one study. This is really recently, right? This is like 2020, I think that the paper was published. What they did is they got cows rumps in Botswana and they painted eyes on them. And it basically dropped the number of lion attacks, lions eating the cows to zero.
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A
No kidding.
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B
The lions just stopped eating the cattle just stopped. Just, just didn't, didn't bother.
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A
Like the old butterfly trick. Just put some big eyes.
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B
Just put some big eyes in the right place. Yeah.
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A
Well, you know what this is all making me think about? Have you heard of Osama bin Laden?
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B
His name's come up.
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A
The elephant.
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B
No.
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A
There was an elephant named Osama bin Laden in the Indian state of Assam.
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B
Wait, named after the man or just
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A
in coincidence with it was named after the human because this elephant was a rogue elephant that killed 27 people and was not afraid of fireworks. Which is, I guess, how they normally get rid of rogue elephants, right? Yeah, it's my favorite Wikipedia article. Well, it's in my top 20 because the article is titled Osama bin Laden elephant. Just to be clear, we're talking about the elephant. And this elephant, unfortunately also got executed for its not crimes, but behavior.
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B
How did it kill them? Trample people?
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A
Well, it doesn't even say. I, I can't find any articles describing what it did.
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B
I like the idea that it was just slapping around the face with his trunk instead. Okay, well, I'm going to read the Wikipedia page for Osama bin Laden and the elephant while you guys go for a break and when we come back, we'll answer your questions.
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A
All right, see you then.
- [21:07]
D
Hello and welcome to Doing It Anyway, a brand new series from Goal Hanger. I'm Kati Kaye. I've spent years studying the science and art of confidence, writing books about how we can close the confidence gap between men and women, and talking to experts and younger women about how to pass it on. Confidence means taking risks, acknowledging your fears, and, well, doing it anyway. In this series, I'll be talking to psychologists, entrepreneurs and business leaders to unpack how you can rethink challenges and grow your own confidence. We'll talk about how to spot the difference between confidence and competence, how to deal with office politics and stolen credit and yes, handling rejection and ultimately, how you can become a better leader, teammate, and yes, a better person. Doing it Anyway with Katty K Every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts,
- [22:07]
B
This episode is broadcast to you by Cancer Research uk. What if your immune system could learn to recognize cancer cells?
- [22:14]
A
That's immunotherapy. One type is CAR T cell therapy. T cells are your body's watchmen, and doctors can now extract these and reprogram them to spot cancer.
- [22:25]
B
They've started showing this real promise in treating cancers of the blood like leukemia because unlike most cancers, blood cancer cells, they float around separately and that makes it easier for CAR T cells to seek them out and and destroy them.
- [22:38]
A
And now Cancer Research UK funded scientists are designing CAR T cells that can tackle solid tumors too, making them tougher so they can survive a more crowded and hostile cancer environment.
- [22:49]
B
Now, these approaches are experimental, but they do start to show where treatment might go next. And over the past 50 years, Cancer Research UK's pioneering work has helped to double cancer survival in the uk. I mean, this shows you how far research can take us.
- [23:03]
A
For more information about Cancer Research uk, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org restiscience this episode
- [23:15]
C
is brought to you by Google Health. Stop chasing someone else's definition of health. What matters is what's healthy for you. Google Health offers a new kind of coach built with gemiini for effortless tracking, sleep insights and holistic coaching tailored to you. Visit google googlestore.com to learn more and start a new relationship with your health requires Google Account, Google Health app Internet and Google Health Premium subscription features subject to change. Availability and results vary. Not intended for medical purposes. Works independently of Gemini apps. Check responses for accuracy.
- [23:50]
A
Welcome back. We are now going to dive into questions from you, our listeners. I want to start with this one from Logan Osorio who asks why is eating food so much more pleasurable than drinking water? I would expect our evolution to make drinking a far More dopaminergic activity because we can't survive more than a few days without water, but we can go months without food.
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B
Did you make up that word, Logan? It's a great word.
- [24:19]
A
Dopaminerd, Jake.
- [24:22]
B
It's a new one on me. I like it. I'm going to use it from now on.
- [24:26]
A
I don't know, Logan. I mean, speak for yourself. I love drinking water, but I think, I think it is a really interesting way to think here because, yeah, we definitely have all kinds of foods that we love, but you would think that water being even more important to have would be more like, even more pleasurable. What I think is that there might be a little bit of a super normal stimulus thing going on here where compared to our, like the diets that we had as we evolved a hundred thousand years ago, water was really good and water can be really good. We've all had that sip of water that was just like so perfect because we needed water at that moment.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And that, that pleasure we get from eating and drinking is, is a way for our body to say, yes, you need to be doing this. But, but we have since manufactured foods to be so good to take advantage of exactly what our bodies are trained to give us pleasure for, that we've been able to make foods that are like so much better than anything you would just find out there.
- [25:46]
B
Such a good point. If you're eating gruel, you know, eating gruel and drinking water, then actually they're quite similar in terms of the joy that they're going to give you, right?
- [25:57]
A
Well, yeah. I mean, don't get me wrong, I think like a seared antelope steak probably did really hit the spot when you were hungry. But now we can baste that antelope steak in butter with some herbs and we can raise the, the, not just the antelopes, but we can raise cattle to have like all this fat marbling in them. And food has just become so much better. It's not a normal stimuli anymore. It's super normal. And Hannah, you and I have talked about this on the podcast and in real life before. But like, you know, the processing that we can do to food to make it just so good, water can't compete. Now we have processed super normal liquids that are like more delicious than anything we would normally have found. For example, what am I drinking right now? I'm drinking a vanilla flavored, no sugar, Coca cola. So I'm getting like no nutrient value at all from this. Not even food energy. I'm just getting these Flavors. And I can drink 12 of these during a podcast. You know, you'd be quite burpy. You'd be quite burpy. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, I still think that Logan is onto something here where, like, I've. I've definitely eaten food and been like, oh, my gosh, this is so good. And although I sometimes really enjoy a beverage, I've never had as strong of a pleasure from a beverage as a food.
- [27:36]
B
Do you think so? I think I have, you know.
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A
You do?
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B
Yeah. If it's like, it's mostly cold beer or like. Or like a really, really, really good glass of white wine, like, crisp and dry and delicious in the right setting, where it's like, just give me more. I've definitely had that sensation. I mean, it doesn't last very long, and there's a point where you're like, actually, after about two of them, I'm like, okay, I'm done. But. But I definitely, yes, I. For me, I think that there's like, a similar satiation, as it were. I'm not a foodie, though. Right. I think if someone was a foodie, they might.
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A
They might privilege food. Yeah. I think. I think that everyone's a little bit different, but I still think that at a. At a fundamental level, I think you're right, Logan, and here's why it might make sense. And this is just me coming up with a hypothetical, you know, speculative answer. But I think that when it comes to beverages and hydration, there really is this upper limit to where you can't drink anymore because it is actually dangerous for you. And we've talked about this all the way back in our first episode. We've talked about water poisoning, but if you find a food source that's going to give you a lot of. Of. Of energy to live, there isn't so much of an upper bound because your body can take the excess calories and convert them to fat to store that help you survive in case you don't find food later. And so, of course, under that thinking, I would get why food would be more pleasurable because your body has evolved to say, yes, have more of this. Have more, have more, have more, because we can store it for later. But when you drink a beverage, your body might say, ah, yes, the hydration we needed. But also, don't keep going because it will make you uncomfortable. And there's no benefit beyond a certain point at this moment. What we should have evolved to feel pleasure in is in storing potable water. Like, oh, yeah, pour that stream water into A canteen.
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B
Mmm.
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A
I love doing this. But we didn't.
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B
That would have been useful.
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A
Maybe if we had sensory organs in the canteens, it could have happened. But I think that's probably what's going on. Your body is like, look, we need to encourage the food eating because it's always worth it. But the beverage, we're gonna limit more so you just don't get the same dopaminergic effect from beverages.
- [30:09]
B
I like the idea that you could even have the water storage pouches, you know, maybe on your hips, just like, extra.
- [30:16]
A
Yeah.
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C
If.
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A
If we had biological water storage pouches evolved into our bodies, then I think we would. Would feel the same, kind of like, oh, this is so good. I gotta order more. And we would just, like, over drink all the time.
- [30:31]
B
Okay, next question. This one's from Timothy. Timothy says, dear Hannah and Michael, what are some of your favorite ratios? Narrowing it to just one seems too difficult. Here's some of mine. Height of tallest mountain, height of tallest building, 10 to 1. Distance of the Earth to sun against the diameter of the sun, a hundred to one. Isn't it amazing that Everest is only ten times taller than the Burj Khalifa? And yes, it's a long way from the Earth to the sun, but the sun itself is very large. I really like this question. I've got some on my own. I've got some of my own ratios. You feel free to jump in as well, Michael, here. Obviously, I think we should start with the Earth, sun and moon, right? That the sun is 400 times wider than the moon, and by pure chances, it's 400 times further away. That seems like an absolutely extraordinary ratio.
- [31:19]
A
It's extraordinary. What a great coincidence.
- [31:22]
B
Yeah. There's others, though. Do you want to hear others?
- [31:24]
A
Yeah, please give me some more.
- [31:25]
B
In the 1930s, Paul Dirac was trying to work out the ratio between the electric force, Right. Sort of subatomic particle level and the force of gravity. And he worked out that ratio was 10 to the 40. So that's a one followed by 40 zeros. And then he was like, oh, but you can turn something else now. So he worked out the age of the universe, measured in atomic ticks. How many times a clock, the sort of size of an atom, basically has been beating since the beginning and ended up with 10 to the 40 again. And he was like, that can't be a coincidence. This is. I don't believe in coincidences in the physical world. So he was like, okay, surely there's something going on here. Maybe gravity. Maybe they started off as one to one. And the gravity itself must be slowly weakening as the universe ages. It's just doesn't make sense that they'd be the same number. But there's a few other places where the same number pops up. So in Jupiter, this might be my favorite one. I think in Jupiter. Jupiter's got three moons, right? And in the time that Ganymede loops Jupiter once, Europa goes around exactly twice and IO goes around four times. It's like, that's a weird coincidence, isn't it? Isn't that a weird coincidence that you've basically got this actual sort of clockwork moon system that's just this absolute clean 1 to 2 to 4, you know, I think that's a weird coincidence. Anyway, there's lots of these and it makes me question the existence of God.
- [33:03]
A
Yeah, right. One that I really like is that almost exactly halfway between the Planck scale and the size of the observable universe. So right in the middle between the smallest and the biggest things is a human cell.
- [33:21]
B
That's good. That's coincidence, isn't it?
- [33:23]
A
Yeah. A few tenths of a millimeter is right there in the middle. So what we are made out of is just right there in the middle. We are average.
- [33:31]
B
Isn't that interesting?
- [33:32]
A
Just as much stuff is bigger. There's. There's just as many measurements bigger than us as smaller than us in this universe we find ourselves in.
- [33:40]
B
Freaky. Freaky and unexplained freaky.
- [33:45]
A
Thank you, God. Here's a question from the rest is science subreddit. This comes from drunk socks.
- [33:53]
B
I didn't even know we had a subreddit. I'm very excited about this news.
- [33:56]
A
Oh yeah. All of you out there, I'd love to see you there. Bring. Bring your questions. Your comments. Tell me how unkept my beard now looks. I apologize for that. I'm just not around the kinds of equipment I need to tend it well. But I will be.
- [34:14]
B
Oh, I didn't think it looked. You know what? Until you pointed it out, it hadn't occurred to me.
- [34:19]
A
I feel. I just feel a bit rough. But look, here's. Here's drunk socks question. Hello. I am investigating what makes a good question because I'm developing an app to have good and interesting conversations based on what people are curious about. I've come to the conclusion that there are some archetypes of questions that open up something interesting. What good question have you been asked? And what's your favorite question this podcast has addressed? I would love to see your list of question Archetypes, Drunk socks. Because I've never thought of questions in that way. I've never thought of what. Is there a taxonomy of types of questions or ways a question can be constructed? But when it comes to a good question, I've been asked, man. I think kids, of course, always ask the best ones because they're not afraid. And sometimes the way they. They phrase the question shows a connection or a lack of connection that we all. All the older ones of us have all just assumed. Once a kid asked me, hey, what's the opposite of a duck? And I was like, whoa, I love this. Because it really forces us to question what opposite means.
- [35:36]
B
Yeah.
- [35:37]
A
And it's also got room for a lot of creativity because you could say, ah, the opposite of a duck is a jump. See, I'm interpreting duck as in, like, to duck down, to crouch down, and you get to do some word play, and then you start to. Then you start to wonder about, like, why words mean the things that they mean. And so, yeah, I don't know. I just. I keep going back to that question.
- [36:00]
B
I like that a lot. I mean, I guess. Sorry, I'm just thinking about the duck question. It's just a really good one because the duck is comfortable on land, water, and in the air. Right, Right.
- [36:10]
A
So the opposite would be a creature that's not comfortable anywhere. Yeah, it'd be me.
- [36:16]
B
Yeah. You are the opposite of a duck. I also think that it's about. I think that the really good questions are ones that actually the duck question fits into, which take something that feels really familiar and then give you a route to sing in an entirely new light. I think those are the really good questions that start on common ground and take you somewhere completely original and unexpected. I think those are really good questions.
- [36:48]
A
Yeah. Yeah. They don't always have clear answers, but a good question is more about directing and disrupting thinking. So I'm gonna be at Open Sauce soon, and I'm gonna be on Hank Green's podcast.
- [37:06]
B
Nice.
- [37:07]
A
Where you ask him questions before you arrive, and he tries to prepare and give you answers. I'm very excited, but I asked questions like, how big do dogs think the world is? Like, you know, like a. A dog might, you know, live in. In North Carolina, and then it. It moves with its family to Florida. Like, what does it think happened? Is it like, what, whoa, I'm far away? Or is it like, oh, hey, all the smells are different? I wonder what happened. I also asked, if humanity suddenly forgot the concept of love, would we ever? And if so, how long would it take for us to rediscover it?
- [37:51]
B
Oh, that's a nice question because we
- [37:54]
A
still have, we still have all the related feelings of companionship and loyalty and all of that, but how long would it take for us to be like, hey, I think these all are fitting into a thing that should have its own name. Let's call it love. And I don't think that there is an answer to that in the same way that there is an answer to the question what's the average height of a human? I think instead, good questions just make you stop and think very differently about stuff that you normally. Well, that was normally left unquestioned.
- [38:25]
B
Yeah, that sounds really good. I'd always be tempted with the Hank Gray one. I'd always be tempted to ask him something quite sort of deep and human about himself too.
- [38:36]
A
Well, I did. I also, I don't know which ones he's going to choose. I had to give more than he's going to pick. But I also asked when was the loneliest you ever felt? We'll see if he's brave enough and trusts me enough to tell me.
- [38:51]
B
That's interesting. Wait, when's that coming out?
- [38:53]
A
I have no idea.
- [38:55]
B
Well, we'll watch out for it. We'll watch out for it. Those are all excellent questions and all the questions from you guys were excellent as well. I've just been on the subreddit for the rest of science. It's, it's really lovely in there. It's just loads of lovely people talking about things. Just really enjoyable. Maybe we should do an AMA at some point.
- [39:10]
A
So where should people go to participate in our subreddit?
- [39:14]
B
Just to r the rest of science,
- [39:17]
A
but we should definitely do an ama.
- [39:19]
B
Maybe we should do a rule where it's like it has to have a certain number of posts or something and then we'll do it.
- [39:25]
A
I don't want to hold. I don't want to hold that hostage. I don't want to force people because then they'll all join, we'll do the AMA and then they'll all just leave. We gotta earn this the old fashioned way. So yeah, we, we do look at it. So leave questions there. R slash. The rest is science. As always. You can email them to. The rest is scienceolehanger.com we love those questions. Keep them coming. And thanks for watching.
- [39:51]
B
Yes, indeed. We will see you next week for our normal episode on. What day does it come out now? I'm not sure. Sometime on Sunday or Monday, depending on where you are in the world. And then another field Notes episode. See you then.