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- [00:02]
Michael Stevens
Welcome to the Rest Is Science. I am Michael Stevens, and this is Field Notes. It is an exploration expedition diary where Hannah and I share cool thoughts, objects, and discoveries with each other. And from you, every week, one of
- [00:15]
Hannah Fry
us is going to bring in something to show the other. Bit like the rest of science's version of show and tell. Yeah.
- [00:20]
Michael Stevens
And together, we're building up a strange and spectacular library of our favorite items from the world of science.
- [00:26]
Hannah Fry
We also, by the way, would like to add in your questions, your theories, your thought experiments, anything you want to send us in a mailbag. So send them in to us. And look, we'll dust off a shelf, a metaphorical shelf.
- [00:38]
Michael Stevens
So later on, I am going to be showing off a book and also a scarf that cannot be cut in half.
- [00:46]
Hannah Fry
Oh.
- [00:46]
Michael Stevens
But first, we're going to go to your questions.
- [00:49]
Hannah Fry
I mean, Frankie, what are you doing cutting scarves in half? Anyway, Respect your wardrobe, Michael. Okay, first discovery, though, doesn't come from Michael. It's. It comes from. It comes from you guys.
- [01:02]
Michael Stevens
Here's. Here's one from Brian. Okay. Bees, like honeybees, can be trained to recognize simple shapes, colors, odors, and landmarks and follow instructions and perform calculations based on a given input. So can we train bees to simulate a universal Turing machine? I've also formatted this question as a limerick. You see why I wanted to read this one. I'm curious about bits and bees. I implore you to answer me, please. If meadows of flowers replace computational powers, will Google start making me sneeze? Okay, thank you, Brian.
- [01:40]
Hannah Fry
Brian. My goodness me. Way to wet both of our appetites simultaneously. A limerick for Michael and universal Turing machines for me. Thank you very much. Okay, I think I've got. Did some research for this. I think I've got a sort of answer because it is an amazing, amazing question, because Brian's right that bees have actually this phenomenal capacity. There's this one experiment in 2019. This was in Australia, where researchers demonstrated that bees can be taught how to add and subtract.
- [02:14]
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- [02:41]
Michael Stevens
Ugh.
- [02:42]
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- [02:59]
Hannah Fry
Hey, still got my hoodie?
- [03:00]
Depop Advertiser
Nope. But I've got tonight's dinner paid for. Start selling on Depop. Where taste recognizes taste list. Now with no selling fees, payment processing fees and boosting fees still apply. See website for details.
- [03:18]
Michael Stevens
This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.
- [03:21]
Hannah Fry
The word cancer comes from the Greek karkonos, meaning crab. And Hippocrates used that word because tumors can spread out like crabs legs.
- [03:31]
Michael Stevens
For a long time, cancer was poorly understood, and so I think because of that, it was almost scarier and. And people didn't even say its name. But what science has done since is replace uncertainty with understanding.
- [03:44]
Hannah Fry
But that understanding isn't instant, because cancer isn't just one disease. It's. It's hundreds of different diseases, each behaving differently depending on where it is and its genes. And that complexity is why progress in cancer research can feel like it's slow. But step by step, research is saving and improving lives now.
- [04:04]
Michael Stevens
That's why Cancer Research uk, the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research, supports work across more than 200 types of cancer, from the tiny changes inside cells that start the disease to better ways to spot it earlier and treat it more precisely.
- [04:20]
Hannah Fry
For more information about Cancer Research uk, their research and breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org there. So it wasn't a swarm computer, right? It was using sugar water and this Y shaped maze. Okay, so what you do is a bee flies into the entrance of this maze and it sees a picture with a certain number of shapes on it, right? So let's say it's got three squares on it. And then the researchers trained the bees that a particular colour would correspond to addition and another colour would correspond to subtraction. Okay, so if the shapes were yellow, the bees had to subtract one. And if the. If the. If the shapes were blue, they had to add one. Okay, so what happens is the bee goes in, it sees, let's say, three blue squares, right? If it flies deeper into the maze and then it sees this fork in the road and one path has two squares and the other path has four.
- [05:30]
Michael Stevens
Go to the two.
- [05:31]
Hannah Fry
But blue is addition, so it has to go.
- [05:34]
Michael Stevens
Shoot. Okay, man. All right. I wouldn't be a very good beat. So he goes to the four.
- [05:38]
Hannah Fry
Got It.
- [05:38]
Michael Stevens
This is really sophisticated math, isn't it? Yeah, I know.
- [05:43]
Hannah Fry
Isn't it? But, yeah, it manages to do. It does it every single time, kind of repeated. Once it's trained. It does it every single time, repeatedly and reliably. And then if the original squares are yellow, which means minus, then it will go to the two, and it will get the sugar water. Right. It's, like, amazing that these beads can sort of, first of all, count up four shapes. Notice the difference between four and three or four and two, but also have an instruction based on color as to which gate to go into.
- [06:12]
Michael Stevens
Right. I mean, they're. They're recognizing amounts for sure. And. And they're understanding what to do and what to look for next based on what they're finding. I don't think that they're necessarily, like, definitely doing math.
- [06:27]
Hannah Fry
Agree.
- [06:27]
Michael Stevens
But still, the fact that they're able to look at four squares and be like, okay, I know that three of them is less is pretty amazing because bees are not known for their brains.
- [06:40]
Hannah Fry
No. Although, I mean, you know about the waggle dance, right?
- [06:43]
Michael Stevens
Well, yeah.
- [06:44]
Hannah Fry
So this is. This is a way that bees communicate the presence of pollen to each other. So a bee will go into a hive, having found a source of pollen, and will basically wiggle their bum for a particular amount of time in a particular direction to essentially communicate to the other bees the direction perpendicular to the sun. I think it is that they have to. That they have to travel in order to find this pollen. And they tested this, by the way. Initially, people were like, oh, they're just, you know, they're just doing a little weird dance. And then people, like, maybe they're communicating it, but are they communicating it relative to where the bee is, or is it relative to the hive? They weren't sure. They got one bee, the one who was sort of communicating the dance, and they put little. A little, like, eye patch on her so that she couldn't. She couldn't see where she was relative to the sun. And then for the rest of the bees, they put in a big, bright light to sort of mimic the sun.
- [07:44]
Michael Stevens
Ah.
- [07:45]
Hannah Fry
And they managed essentially to make it so that she accidentally communicated the wrong directions. And all of these bees went off to. To some. Some. Some pollen that wasn't there.
- [07:56]
Michael Stevens
Wow. So that is also pretty impressive. Their brains are good, but their brains have very few neurons compared to other critters on this planet. So it's incredible what you can do with so few brain cells.
- [08:09]
Hannah Fry
Totally. So going back to this question and this idea of whether you can build a bee computer. Right. Whether you can build a universal Turing machine, I should just say, for anyone who hasn't come across this phrase of a universal Turing machine, this is one of many of Turing's really great insights. So this is way before computers are invented. And Turing comes up with this idea for a theoretical computer. It's like an imaginary compute, and it has this tape of infinite length, and it's divided into these little squares. And what the computer does, it reads a square, follows a rule to either change what's there or keep it the same as it was, and then it can move left and right. Right. And the idea is that given enough time and infinite tape, then this imaginary computer can solve any mathematical problem. So, I don't know. I personally think that Turing machines are. They're a bit abstract. So I have an example of how you could do addition with a Turing machine. Like a really, really simple example.
- [09:13]
Michael Stevens
Yeah. Let's try this, and then we'll see how bees could be coming. Yeah.
- [09:19]
Hannah Fry
Okay. So you could have it where I could take you and give you an eye mask with just, like, a tiny little slit in it so that you can only see what's immediately in front of you. So you can be the rule machine. All right. And I can give you a very clear rule about what to do. But in front of you, I'm going to lay out a series of plates. This is my infinite tape. Right. And each plate is either going to have a penny on it or it's not. That's it. And you're sitting at this chair, and you can see only one plate at a time. All right? I've given you, like, blinkers. That's all you're allowed to see. Okay. Now I'm going to set it up so that you can do addition of three plus two without you ever needing to understand what addition is, what your task is, or the output of what you're achieving.
- [10:06]
Michael Stevens
Okay. And you'll do this by just giving me a rule to follow.
- [10:09]
Hannah Fry
Exactly.
- [10:10]
Michael Stevens
Okay. Okay.
- [10:11]
Hannah Fry
So I'm going to set it up so that I have. In this long line of plates, they're all empty, apart from three, and then a space and then two. That's it. Okay. They're coming up to you now. Right. They're sort of on this. On this train. They're sort of coming up to you. And your job is, if you see a penny, you just move the plate to the right. Okay. If you look down, see a penny, move the plate to the right, go to the next one, see a Penny, move the plate to the right. So you do that. You're at the beginning of the run, and you do that three times. Okay? All the three pennies are to your right. Now, when you see an empty plate, the rule is you have to put a penny on it, move the plate to the right, and then switch to the next rule. Okay? Okay, so now there's four pennies, four plates of pennies to your right, and you're on the next rule, which is if you see a penny, you keep moving. Right? But when you finally hit an empty plate at the end of the line, you go back one plate to the left, take that penny away, and stop.
- [11:11]
Michael Stevens
So, okay, so in this example, we wind up with five pennies in a row to my right, which is three plus two.
- [11:19]
Hannah Fry
Exactly. You, without ever knowing that you're doing addition, without ever understanding anything that you're doing, you have managed to just successfully complete an additive task.
- [11:30]
Michael Stevens
I feel like bees could easily follow rules that simple.
- [11:35]
Hannah Fry
They could follow rules, but what bees can't do. So bees could read the penny, they could move things to the right, or they could move through a system.
- [11:45]
Michael Stevens
Yeah.
- [11:46]
Hannah Fry
But what they can't do is write. They can't add the penny. So for a universal Turing machine, what you need to be able to do is you've gotta be able to put a symbol down, move away, and then come back to it later as though it's a stored variable. Now, I should just say to, like, close this loop on the universal Turing machine thing. The reason why this idea was so profound, that example of pennies, I mean, whatever, it's a really simplified example. But the key point about this is that after Turing along called John von Neumann, and he was like, okay, I see this because the idea about a universal Turing machine is that if you have enough time, it can compute anything that is computable. Anything. So John von Neumann saw this and was like, I think there's a way to make this actually happen. So he built this architecture, and that is the basis of all modern computers. Right. Like, this is the origins of everything. We built our entire modern world on this stupid example of the pennies. Like, honestly, at the heart of it, this stuff is so absurdly simple. Yeah, it's just when you build up and build it up. And this is the thing about how people say computers don't know what they're doing. They don't understand what they're manipulating because they're the same as you with the eye mask on and the pennies. Right. You're just like, Performing this task.
- [13:11]
Michael Stevens
I don't know that I'm adding pennies. I'm just following some rules.
- [13:15]
Hannah Fry
Exactly, exactly. So this is the thing, right? I think that bees could not be a universal Turing machine, right, because they can't write, they can't place down the pennies. However, that doesn't mean that there are no biological objects that could be, because There was in 2011, a team of researchers, this is from Japanese university and an English university, so Kobe University and the University of West vi England. Right. And they decided they wanted to build a functioning computer logic gate using animals. Right. No animals were harmed or hurt in the process of this experiment. So they worked out, or they noticed, I guess, that there's this species called the soldier crab. And the soldier crab, most crabs, you know, obviously scuttle sideways, then kind of hang around alone. Soldier crabs, they, they live in these lagoons and they move in like really tightly packed swarms. And when two swarms of soldier crabs collide, they don't sort of fight and they don't scatter. They actually act a bit like soft billiard balls. They sort of combine and then they move together in this giant swarm. So scientists worked out that you could basically build an and gate, a not gate and an or gate. Right. Which is one of the rules that we were describing about computers. This sort of von Neumann architecture and so on. It's based on this idea of like, you get two bursts of electrical current that come through and it's like two inputs. It's like either both together an and gate, either one of them, the all gate or not gate. So they built these mazes, these Y shaped mazes, or these X shaped mazes, and then sent crabs through these mazes. And they combined in the ways that you wanted from these logic gates. So in theory, I mean, they demonstrated that it worked with like one logic gate. In theory, then you could, you could build a crab computer, a crab pewter, if you will.
- [15:23]
Michael Stevens
Yeah. So you set, you set up the groups with your question. You let them go, they just do their crab thing, combining into groups or not. And then out at the other end of the maze is your output, which is your answer. And not a single crab, none of them, none of those crabs knew what they were doing. So, I mean, this raises the question of, like, is that what life on Earth is? Maybe the original, you know, bacterial mats were placed here in a specific position by aliens. And they're like, look, give it 5, 6 billion years, we'll come back and we'll get our answer and we Are all with our own psychologies, we're just following the rules the aliens knew would happen, and we're doing their homework for them.
- [16:02]
Hannah Fry
I mean, this is. This is like a massive philosophical question of the ages. There's this giant debate that's going on about whether human brains are approximate Turing machines or not. Because the implication of that is that are we actually computing everything? Is there something going on in our brains where it's just computation and this feeling of consciousness, this feeling of being is a direct result of computation? Or is there something else going on? Like, is this experience of being in this room talking to you, you know, feeling the light on my face, Is that just computation? And at the base level of computation, the neurons have no idea what they're doing? Or is there something extra, Something sort of magical on top? I should tell you that I worked out that, of course, if a byte requires eight logic gates. Right. A logic gate, by the way, required about 80 crabs in this experiment.
- [17:00]
Michael Stevens
Oh, okay. Oh, that's good to know.
- [17:02]
Hannah Fry
If you were gonna do like a 1 gigabyte iPhone update, you'd require 640 billion crabs.
- [17:10]
Michael Stevens
That's less than I expected. I thought the number would be some number name that no one ever says.
- [17:17]
Hannah Fry
I mean, it's in the billions for one gigabyte.
- [17:21]
Michael Stevens
For one gigabyte. I mean, gosh, a gigabyte is a lot. Like, maybe this is coming from a guy who's old enough that I remember, you know, getting a memory drive that had a hundred megabytes on it and being like, whoa, it's the Future. So many MP3s.
- [17:36]
Hannah Fry
Yeah, yeah, this is true. This is true. But, hey, who knows, right? Let's say in theory, you got these billions and trillions and squillions of crabs, and then you put them in this setup and let them kind of compute stuff. Would the collective end up having consciousness as an emergent property? I mean, who knows?
- [17:58]
Michael Stevens
Well, I mean, this is. This is a topic for a future episode. Because I've been thinking a lot about it. Up until a week ago, I was very much like, yes, it must emerge somehow. You get. You get a big enough complex thing, and it's going to start. It's going to start thinking, you know what? I'm feeling this, and I'm doing this. I exist. I have a self. And I'm starting to not believe that so much now. I'm starting to wonder if experiences, phenomenons like feelings are just part of the universe, like electromagnetism and gravity. Yeah.
- [18:35]
Hannah Fry
Wait, are we talking about panpsychism here.
- [18:38]
Michael Stevens
Yeah, we are.
- [18:39]
Hannah Fry
Okay. All right. We're okay. Okay, stop what you're doing, everyone. We need to do an episode about psychic.
- [18:46]
Michael Stevens
Yeah, I don't feel like I'm ready yet for it, but I'm just feeling like when you really lay down what I believe and what I think we, we know, well, there's only a few conclusions, and it makes. It just seems a lot more elegant. It doesn't mean it's true.
- [19:02]
Hannah Fry
I should tell you, I've switched. I've switched, by the way. And probably, actually also definitely within the last month, I've switched. I think I used to think that consciousness wasn't an emergent property of complexity or intelligence, if you will, but that it was a property that came from, from evolution. And now I think I might change my mind.
- [19:28]
Michael Stevens
Yeah, I just. I worked really hard for years on consciousness. Clearly came about through evolution. How is it fit? But the problem is I don't. I just don't think that it's fit. I don't believe that a phenomenal zombie version of us would be any different.
- [19:48]
Hannah Fry
Brian, look what you've done.
- [19:50]
Michael Stevens
Whether agriculture helps feed you or it helps feed you and makes you feel good doesn't change whether you do it or not.
- [19:58]
Hannah Fry
All right, we're gonna park this one because there is, there is. I, I. I'm conscious that we've already gone through Turing machines, the evolution of consciousness, sort of infinite hard drives. And Brian just wanted to do a cute limerick.
- [20:13]
Michael Stevens
I know, Hannah. I was really shocked by where this went. I'm like, oh, she's going to tell us a story about bees. And then, you know, we'll move on to another question. And instead you're like, why do I exist?
- [20:26]
Hannah Fry
Should we go into another question?
- [20:27]
Michael Stevens
Yeah, let's do it.
- [20:28]
Hannah Fry
Okay, here's what I've noticed, Michael. We originally were like, oh, we'll just do half an episode a week on questions. We'll just quickly, dum, bam, bam, bam, bam, Quick fire. Turns out all these questions that people are asking, they're like episodes in themselves.
- [20:41]
Michael Stevens
We don't get questions like, hey, how long could a rabbit live? You know, we. We don't get Googleable questions.
- [20:49]
Hannah Fry
Okay, this is from Gavola. Kotas. Do languages and also accents shape facial features through the muscles they make us use and therefore give us subtle but unique characteristics?
- [21:02]
Michael Stevens
I love this question, because we don't totally. No. And yet it feels like it could be true. And yet many people believe that it's completely ridiculous that the language you speak changes the way your face looks now on the surface of it? Sure. Right. Like I'm using my lips and my cheeks and my tongue and, and, and my jaw to make noises. And so if I'm speaking one language or another my whole life, isn't that going to change the musculature of my skull? Now, here's some things that I found. First of all, it is pretty easy to get a computer to guess what language someone is speaking just by looking at their face, even just their cheeks and eyes. You can easily tell if a language is tonal or not by how people are moving their facial muscles. There's also an interesting little fact about this language called Ko. Ko was a two language from South Africa. And there was a linguist named Anthony Traill who learned it, and he learned this language and he spoke it for a long time. And he developed a bump on his larynx because of the sounds in this language. I don't know how this comes about, but biologically it did cause a growth on the larynx. And all the adult speakers of the language company have this bump. The children don't because they haven't spoken the language long enough to have developed the bump. But this South African white guy, Anthony Traill, I don't actually know the color of his skin. But the point is that he was not a native who learned CO as his first language. He developed this bump as well.
- [22:41]
Hannah Fry
What does CO sound like? Do you know?
- [22:43]
Michael Stevens
I don't know. I love how it's spelled, though. Exclamation point, capital X, O with a mark above it that's diagonal, and then O with a tilde above it. Co. Oh. It's a language that might actually have the largest number of phonemes of any language in the world, where a phoneme are the perceptually, like different speech sounds in a language.
- [23:08]
Hannah Fry
Wow. Oh, it's one with lots of clicks. Click consonants.
- [23:11]
Michael Stevens
It's got the clicks. It's got. And. And here's the thing that I also found. There are a lot of phonemes, like language sounds that are very common, like the M, the sound of the letter M, or the sounds of the vowel A. Those are. We see those a lot, but there are some that we don't see as often, and they seem to potentially correlate with certain lifestyles. So there are some sounds called labiodental sounds, and it is what it sounds like. It's the lips and the teeth. So the V sound and the F, F, F sound where I've got my lower lip hitting my teeth. There's a theory out there that those sounds didn't emerge in human languages until we were eating soft enough foods. And it is true that if you look at cultures around the world, tribal cultures especially, that, like, eat, like, unmilled grains, their teeth are more flat in the front. And I'm not sure how this works. I'm not an orthodontist, but they don't have their front teeth ahead of their bottom teeth, making the labiodental noises, the V's and the F's harder to do or just not more natural.
- [24:28]
Hannah Fry
Because if you run through the Alphabet, actually, there are. You don't touch your lips very often at all. Hang on, let me just work it out. I think there's only like three, three, possibly four letters where you actually touch your lips together, right? B, P, B, M, P and W. The set.
- [24:46]
Michael Stevens
The sound of W is like your lips are just teasing each other. They're not totally touching. If I. If they touch, it's a. It's an M sound.
- [25:00]
Hannah Fry
I found that very surprising when I learned that fact, because I. I think you sort of imagine that your lips are together all the time during speech, but actually it's really small fraction of the letters that you're using.
- [25:13]
Michael Stevens
Oh, man. There's even, like, a little riddle about this where it's like, what is different about these two sentences? And it's whether or not your lips touch during them. Anyway, I was really intrigued by this question, and I was amazed that we. I wasn't amazed, but I was even more interested when I found that we are kind of dancing around trying to answer the question. Because I also feel like people, even in the mid 20th century, like in the 50s, their just faces looked different. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Was it because they were talking different their whole lives? What I mean is, when I see an actual photo from, like, 1957 of people, I go, I believe it. But when a really great art designer and costume and makeup department recreates the 50s and they use the exact camera that would have been used back then, I still feel like I look at it and I'm like, I can tell that those people aren't real, really from the 50s. So I latched onto this question and the research I found by going, I think maybe the facial musculature could have been different because they. Their accents, their dialects were a little bit different. The words and the vocabulary they use day to day was different. As it turns out, maybe not. A lot of, like, researchers who actually are in this field say most of those facial differences purely come from grooming, style and diet. That changes over time. But this is something that I want to do a lot more research on, because it's a whole thing. The idea that you put Timothee Chalamet in a. In a movie set in the past and that no one believes that he's from the past, because why? They say he's got iPhone face. They say his face looks like a face that has seen an iPhone and you can't put your finger on exactly why, but it does not look like it belongs 200 years in the past.
- [27:05]
Hannah Fry
IPhone face.
- [27:06]
Michael Stevens
And I kind of get it. And then you watch, like, Karl Malden in some older movie, and you're like, that guy. That face doesn't exist anymore. That is a face from a generation or two ago. Now, I don't know what to make of all of these feelings and observations, but I think even language and what we say plays a role in it.
- [27:28]
Hannah Fry
I think you're right that it's like, even if. Well, the world needs to. A lot more research to really be able to tell for sure. But I think mechanistically, I think I can see why this might be the case. I sort of believe that there's a path that might cause this. I think I found your riddle, by the way. Is it this one? When you say the word touch, your lips don't touch, but when you say the word separate, they do.
- [27:56]
Michael Stevens
The way it works is that you play this game with people where they just say words, or you say words, and you say whether they touch or not. You'll say, lemons touch, oranges don't touch. And the person tries to guess what the commonality is. Why do lemons touch? Is it because they're, like, acidic? And you're like, nope, that's not it. And they go, okay, what about. What about bananas? And you're like, bananas touch. And they go, okay, what about. What about doors? And you say, doors don't touch. And they're trying to figure out the rule that separates the touching from the not touching, and it turns out to be whether or not your lips touch when you say the word. And it takes, like, in some cases, hours for someone to figure it out. Usually they don't.
- [28:41]
Hannah Fry
Monkeys touch, but gorillas don't. That kind of thing.
- [28:43]
Michael Stevens
Yes, exactly. That's the game. It's a fun game to play with someone.
- [28:48]
Hannah Fry
Oh, this is gonna infuriate everybody who knows me over the course of the following week. Should we go to a break? And then onto your object?
- [28:57]
Michael Stevens
Let's go to a break and we'll come back and we'll look at some things I brought. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.
- [29:17]
Hannah Fry
Radiotherapy is over a century old, but it is still changing. Cancer Research UK helped lay the foundations of radiotherapy in the early 20th century and has driven progress ever since.
- [29:29]
Michael Stevens
Radiotherapy remains one of the cornerstones of cancer treatment today. Every year, millions of people worldwide benefit From Cancer Research UK's work to to make it more precise.
- [29:40]
Hannah Fry
Scientists are still refining how radiotherapy is delivered and one example is an experimental treatment called flash radiotherapy, which delivers radiation in fractions of a second, up to a thousand times faster than standard radiotherapy.
- [29:55]
Michael Stevens
And early studies suggest that speed could make a real difference. Flash radiotherapy may cause up to 50% less damage to healthy cells, but scientists
- [30:05]
Hannah Fry
don't yet know why healthy cells seem to be spared. So Cancer Research UK are working to answer that, understanding it could be key to reducing side effects in the future.
- [30:17]
Michael Stevens
For more information about Cancer Research uk, their research and breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org TheresTestisscience Zootopia
- [30:28]
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Michael Stevens
We're the greatest partners of all new friends. Gary the snake and your last name
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the Snake Dream team and new habitats.
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Michael Stevens
Zootopia has a secret reptile population.
- [30:42]
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- [31:05]
Michael Stevens
Okay, welcome back. During the break, I had another thought about the touching game. What I love about it is that psychologically it's so. It's such a great demonstration of how little attention we pay to the physicality of word and speech production with our lips and tongue. Because people sit there going, apples touch, oranges don't. And they cannot figure out what touching means in that context.
- [31:30]
Hannah Fry
But.
- [31:31]
Michael Stevens
But if you know the rule, you're like, how do you not get it? It's so obvious. Then I started thinking, it wasn't even that long of a break, but I started thinking about touching and how when you touch yourself, you can actually change which, like, hand is doing the touching and which is being touched. You can switch in your mind which one is touching and which one isn't.
- [31:55]
Hannah Fry
That game reminds Me of. Of a drinking game that I played once at university. My friend introduced it to everybody, and by the end, we all wanted to punch him because none of us could work it out. And it was that he would say a sentence, and the rule was whether he started with an arm. That was it.
- [32:15]
Michael Stevens
Oh, wow. And I bet it took, like, all night, honestly.
- [32:19]
Hannah Fry
All night. All night. None of us noticed it was in. Honestly, it was infuriating. And I really noticed this, actually, that with all of my years of training, of being working on the BBC, I am so unbelievably sensitive to people starting sentences with so. But I think almost nobody else in the world notices it.
- [32:45]
Michael Stevens
I know what you're talking about, because there's a game called you can't say, and I played it over Thanksgiving with my family. And also, as, like, someone who presents a lot and write scripts a lot, I'm very aware of what words I'm saying. And it was trivially easy for me to not say certain words. But, like, everyone else in my family, like, struggled so much to not say or. And I just was like, aren't you aware of it right before you say it? It's like. So I think these are all skills that you can learn just like, once you know that touching means lips touching, you immediately get it, and you hear it all the time during the game.
- [33:23]
Hannah Fry
Yeah, I still say, like, too much, but, hey, that's my Essex background. All right, let's. Let's see what you got for me today, Michael.
- [33:30]
Michael Stevens
Okay, well, I got a couple of things. One actually came from a viewer, and I wanted to talk with you about it. So a listener named Michael, Michael Roark, who. Who, by the way, makes it clear that he's a Michael and not a Mike, just like me. I've never felt like a Mike. There's a guy I met. I'm not going to give too many details, but he calls me Mike, and I'm like, you don't know my soul at all, dude. Okay.
- [33:55]
Hannah Fry
I feel the same. Whenever anyone accidentally calls me Han, there's something inside me that just. Han.
- [34:02]
Michael Stevens
Oh, no, I'm sure you get a lot of Hannah Banana.
- [34:05]
Hannah Fry
Not if I can help it.
- [34:06]
Michael Stevens
Not if you can.
- [34:07]
Hannah Fry
Okay, maybe it only happens once, Mike. Okay.
- [34:10]
Michael Stevens
My daughter. My daughter calls you the Fry person.
- [34:13]
Hannah Fry
Yeah, I like that.
- [34:15]
Michael Stevens
She's really stuck on the fact that your last name is Fry and that's who you are.
- [34:19]
Hannah Fry
Oh, I like her.
- [34:20]
Michael Stevens
So, anyway, you know, we did an episode about time and about how the calendar and the. The numbering system for the Years came about. Well, Michael Roark emailed us a Holocene calendar that he put together himself. So the Holocene calendar starts with 0, not at the birth of Christ, but at the beginning of the Holocene era. Okay, so what, that. What does that mean geologically? It means the end of what we call the Ice Age, okay? When Earth started warming up again, suddenly there's. I mean, we don't know a lot about what it was like back then, but this was a major turning point in human history, but also the history of Earth. So it's kind of perfect. It's like both geological and anthropological. Anyway, this happened, what, like 10,000 or a few more years ago? And if you. If you count that as zero, it's. It makes it easier to talk about human history because you're not having to deal with bc, AD or, you know, BCE and ce. And of course, our current system doesn't even have a year zero. So it's really hard to calculate ages and stuff that span that gap. And I, personally, I've talked about this before. I. One of my biggest pet peeves is the way BC numbers work. And when people say things like, well, in the first millennium BC, my brain always goes, first millennia BC means 1000 BC, but it doesn't. It means everything before that. Because the first thousand years of BC mean as you go backwards from zero, the first thousand years, you hit, so 200 BC, 12 BC, 900 BC, that's the first millennia BC. The second. The second millennium BC is the 1000 BCS. Oh, I hate it. Whereas the Holocene calendar allows you to
- [36:10]
Hannah Fry
just say the year 8040. Whatever.
- [36:14]
Michael Stevens
Yeah, exactly. So, like, pottery was invented in the year 2000. There you go. Because zero is whatever. 12,000 years ago, to convert the current year to the Holocene calendar, you just add 10,000. So right now it is the year 12,026.
- [36:31]
Hannah Fry
Hey, we missed the great 10,000 anniversary of pottery.
- [36:35]
Michael Stevens
I know, we did. 26 years ago, pottery turned 10,000, and I forgot to get it anything. I was going to get it this really cool clay pot, and I thought, oh, shoot, that's you. But anyway, Michael Roark let me read you. He sent this email in about how we mentioned the Holocene calendar in that video. And he thought, man, this perspective is so cool. He wanted to visualize it. And so he put together a website, we'll link it here, where you've got the entire Holocene era and notable events from it, both from, you know, a standpoint of politics, science, all these different events, and you can scroll through it and see how close together they are or how far apart they are. You can even change how many pixels there are between every year, so you can crunch everything together or spread it out. But I actually had a hard time finding anything like this because I would love to be able to say things like, well, yeah, you know, Jesus was crucified in the year 10,030. Like that. I just. It's just more clear. I'd love to be able to say things like, the Mayflower landed in 11, 6, 20. Now, that's a big number. I get it. But it's better for B.C. things.
- [37:47]
Hannah Fry
But also, I think what this does is it just puts. Puts ourselves in a better perspective of our. Of our history and our ancestors. I think it connects us to the past in just a really different way because all of a sudden then, you know, I don't know, people going on about the Second World War and, like, political agreements after it, and it was such a long time ago and whatever. And it's like, when you put it on this scale. No, it really wasn't.
- [38:14]
Michael Stevens
I know.
- [38:14]
Hannah Fry
It really wasn't.
- [38:15]
Michael Stevens
I know, exactly. If you. If you have to talk about the 40s versus the 90s, it sounds like there are two different universes. But if you talk about events that happened in 11, 945 and 119 90, it sounds like they're really the same. And. And that better fits the actual scale of human history. I love saying, like, oh, yeah, the Great Wall was constructed in the 9007 hundreds. And. And I don't have to use BC because I think saying BC makes it almost sound like in fictional times, like it's a different world, but it's not. It's still the world that we are reacting to and living in in many ways. I mean, are we.
- [38:55]
Hannah Fry
Are we.
- [38:55]
Michael Stevens
We're still in the Stone Age. Look how much concrete we use every year. Give me a break.
- [38:59]
Hannah Fry
Also, copper smelting, 4,500. That just makes way more sense to me.
- [39:05]
Michael Stevens
Ah, yeah. In the 11,300s, black death time, not good.
- [39:10]
Hannah Fry
But only a blip when you consider the history, the history back to the beginning of the Holocene era. Yeah.
- [39:15]
Michael Stevens
And then in the 11 500s, we've got Galileo, we've got Shakespeare. I think people might be annoyed if I used this more often, but I really want to use it, especially because, like I said, I've been doing a lot of research on how consciousness has changed over time, as potentially revealed through the literature humans have written. And I hate that there was obviously such a change in the first millennia BC and the second. And I'm having to talk about BC in thousands of years ago. And I want to be able to just say, look, let me give these all positive integers. And then it's easier.
- [39:48]
Hannah Fry
I tell you what this really does, just scrolling through it, I mean, it's absolutely gorgeous. And I'm so, so impressed that he coded this over his Christmas break as well. But what this really, really hammers home for me is just the sort of exponential acceleration of progress and technology. Because this thing, you know, nothing happens for such a long time and then they start popping up, events start popping up, pottery, copper smelting, you know, domestication of the horse, the sort of the Bronze Age, ancient Egypt and so on and so on and so on. And then they start picking up around the turn of when the Romans come to be. But then you get into the modern era and it is like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. I mean, absolutely constant. These extraordinary, extraordinary moments, civilization changing moments happening, you know, literally all of the time.
- [40:46]
Michael Stevens
That's right. And it really makes me reflect on the difference between things happening and civilization relevant things happening. Because of course, between the domestication of the dog and pottery, a lot of stuff happened. People lied to each other, they fell in love, they had children, they lost loved ones. But the stuff that makes it onto a timeline like this is the civilization, technology based stuff, it's pottery, it's the kings and the battles, it's the construction of stuff, it's the moon landing, it's vaccines. And of course, as those become more relevant to what it means to be human, we're like, oh, there's so many now. But gosh, imagine if you lived at the beginning of the Holocene where nothing ever happened. There were no moon landings, there was no AI, there was no super bowl every year. But it's like, wow, that's a very biased way of thinking.
- [41:42]
Hannah Fry
Yeah, because you're missing the heartbeats of individual human lives.
- [41:46]
Michael Stevens
And of course, like writing only existed around like, you know, 3000 BC. So there's a lot of prehistory here where the majority of humans lived that we just don't have records of. Writing has only been around since like 3000 BC. We've only had written stuff for like 5000 years. Yeah. So to put this in the Holocene calendar, we're talking about, like writing didn't exist until the 7000s, but humans had been around living in settlements, participating in agriculture, had been happening for 7,000 years. Before they were like, oh dude, let's like write down, you know, how much oil you owe me.
- [42:24]
Hannah Fry
That's incredible.
- [42:26]
Michael Stevens
And from there we see the emergence of history as we know it. That's what history is, it's written accounts.
- [42:34]
Hannah Fry
What about art? Did art, like the cave paintings, when were those? I mean, those were, that's all the way through this, right? All the way through this. There were some forms of art in paintings and.
- [42:46]
Michael Stevens
Oh yeah, I mean art predates the Holocene. I mean depending on how you define art, there's human made artworks that seem to just exist for their aesthetic value potentially long before the ice age even ended. I mean humans were around, like anatomically, behaviorally modern humans were around before the ice age ended. But whereas the ice age ended, it's pretty cool. I mean so much of this is speculative, but it was quick. Ice melted, glaciers retreated really quickly, like within 50 years, oceans rose to a point where it was like, okay, we've got to move our settlement. And that could have spawned agriculture. In fact, a lot of that rising sea level at that time could also explain ancient flood myths and where they came from, that they really were in oral traditions that they were being shared as like, oh, you know, I've always heard that there was this flood and
- [43:40]
Hannah Fry
that may have been true, like Noah's Ark, for example.
- [43:43]
Michael Stevens
Noah's Ark, Gilgamesh. We see these flood myths all over the place and they may have, when they were first written down, they may have been the results of a long multi millennia game of telephone. That reminded me of this book. I wanted to leave you with some things from this book. It's called if and it's like, it's a great book for kids actually, but it's good for everybody. A mind bending new way at looking at big ideas and numbers. It's full of wonderful illustrations and visualizations of time and money and population. So like here's the page on life on Earth and it breaks down life on Earth into say like one hour. Okay, if, if the whole story of life on Earth was all condensed into just one hour, when would things happen? So let's, let's just say, let's just say that this gets compressed into the hour between noon and one. Okay, so noon is when the very first life forms looks like one. Celled organisms appear like bacteria. And one o' clock is today, this very moment that I'm talking. Okay, so here's what happens. First life forms form within that first second. But it's not until 1251 that fish appear on Earth. The dinosaurs arrive at 1256, and they only exist for three minutes. And then mammals appear at about 56 minutes and 25 seconds. The earliest birds appear at 1258, two minutes until today. And modern humans, the ones that we're related to that are, like, biologically and anatomically modern, they show up at 12:59 and 59.8 seconds. No, 2/10 of a second before right now.
- [45:36]
Hannah Fry
But hold on a second. That's still way before even the beginning of this calendar. Right?
- [45:42]
Michael Stevens
Yes. Yes, I know.
- [45:44]
Hannah Fry
Wow. It's nothing.
- [45:47]
Michael Stevens
And then here's something that's not related to time. Well, it's not related to history so much as it's related to your life. There's a page about if your life was a pizza. Here we go. Okay. So if your life was a pizza cut into 12 slices, here's what all those slices could represent. Four of them would be the time that you spend in school or at work. Another four of them would be the time that you spend getting ready to. And sleeping. Getting ready to sleep and sleeping. So you spend four of your slices sleeping, four of them at work. That's already eight of the 12. One slice would be spent shopping, caring for others, and doing things around the home. One slice would be spent traveling, whether it be to school, on errands, on holidays. One slice would be the time that you spend preparing food and eating. And that final 12th slice would be the time that you spend on leisure activities, whether that's recreation, exercise, games, surfing, the Internet.
- [46:48]
Hannah Fry
Wow.
- [46:49]
Michael Stevens
And that's your life as a pizza.
- [46:51]
Hannah Fry
I mean that really. There's a book by Oliver Burke, 4,000 weeks essentially says the average human life is 4,000 weeks long.
- [46:58]
Michael Stevens
Yep.
- [46:59]
Hannah Fry
And talks about how that should change your perspective of what you want to do with it.
- [47:05]
Michael Stevens
You know, I should check that out because I think about that a lot. I think about 4,000 weeks means that I only get, in my life, 4,000 Saturdays.
- [47:13]
Hannah Fry
Yeah, yeah.
- [47:14]
Michael Stevens
And then it starts shrinking as you start to say, well, but how many. How many rainy Saturdays am I going to get? How many rainy Saturdays with my daughter am I going to get? And the number becomes magnificently small.
- [47:31]
Hannah Fry
It really does, I think, especially when you think about, let's say, if you have parents who are around, you know, and you've left home already, once you start counting the number of times that you have left when you're going to get to spend really good time with them. Really good quality time. Exactly. As you said, it's vanishingly, terrifyingly small.
- [47:56]
Michael Stevens
I know.
- [47:58]
Hannah Fry
It's a good exercise, though. You know, I think it's so easy to go through life seeing the little bubble that you're in. But I think that stuff like this, like Michael has built of understanding the context of your life, your human life, in the much bigger picture of who we are and where we've come from, how it's so much bigger than you, and then looking at things like your if book of understanding what you have for yourself in the context of what you have left. I think it's a really useful exercise to do.
- [48:30]
Michael Stevens
I know it makes you think so many things like, gosh, if I spend a third of my life sleeping, which we all do, about a third of our life is spent sleeping, then I'm not 40, I'm 26. That's how much life experience I actually have.
- [48:46]
Hannah Fry
Are we counting the traveling time? I'm happy to keep the sleep bit. I just want to get rid of the traveling bit. That was the bit that was the most painful.
- [48:54]
Michael Stevens
Yeah, right. I mean, but at the same time, traveling can be worth it. You know, if you're traveling with people or even traveling by yourself and it gives you time to think through something. Maybe it's worth having a slice be just that. Not always. Depends on what you do when you travel well.
- [49:09]
Hannah Fry
Okay, everybody. I hope you enjoyed that mind expanding episode of Field Notes. Love doing field Notes episodes with you, Michael. Always, always fun. You can join us again next week. We're back on Tuesday with our usual episodes and another podcast expedition on Thursday. Next week, if you've got any questions you'd like us to answer, make sure you send them in to us. The rest is sites@goalhanger.com and you can
- [49:34]
Michael Stevens
join our newsletter at therestis.com science see you next week. See you next week. Thank you for spending some of your slice with us, Lifelock. How can I help?
- [49:58]
Hannah Fry
The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't.
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What do I do?
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Hannah Fry
My refund though. I'm freaking out.
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Michael Stevens
Don't worry, I can fix this.
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I'm so relieved.
- [50:15]
Michael Stevens
No problem. I'll be with you every step of the way.
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- [50:26]
Anita Anand
To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.
- [50:32]
William Duranpol
To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler.
- [50:39]
Anita Anand
Mao Zedong has one of the most recognizable faces in the world. Yet he started life in a muddy provincial village.
- [50:46]
William Duranpol
A rebel son who hated his father survived a 6,000 mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of titanic proportions From Empire.
- [50:55]
Anita Anand
The Goal Hanger World History Show. Anita I'm Anita Anand.
- [50:59]
William Duranpol
And I'm William Duranpol.
- [51:00]
Anita Anand
In this six part series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitter to explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong.
- [51:10]
William Duranpol
We'll track his rise from a bookstore owner to a guerrilla commander. And we'll witness his ruthless elimination to secure total power. And we'll descend into the dark experiment of the cultural reality revolution. A time when ancient temples were burnt, children denounced their parents and a nation worshiped a mango as a sacred relic.
- [51:31]
Anita Anand
Subscribe to Empire wherever you get your podcasts to listen now.