Explore every episode of the podcast Let's Learn Everything!
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 68: Phrenology & Lego | 29 Aug 2024 | 01:42:58 | |
It's an infamous pseudoscience, but what haven't we learned from the rise and fall of Phrenology? And Lego are ubiquitous, which means there's a lot to learn and a lot of nuance for our love of these stackable bricks. Things we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Get the lego phrenology set now! just listing all the lego sets, academic racism, the head wasn’t always so important, the Cardiocentric Hypothesis, Minds Behind the Brain, ancient egyptians just tossed the brain, Aristotle thought the brain was a radiator to keep the heart from overheating, the brain doesn't Look like it does anything, Galen suggested the brain might be important actually, sperm for brains, Caroline enjoys tricking us by saying a person’s good ideas first, Cephelocentric Hypothesis, mapping the brain in the 1600s, NOT related to the frenulum, buzz feed phrenology quizzes, flexing your brain so hard it breaks your skull, Tom is proven to be not funny, our desire for personality tests and fortune telling, travelling phrenology salesmen, there shouldn’t be medical celebrities, phrenology was a passion of the elites, reading an actualy travelling phrenology sheet, “differently bumped”, edibnugrh fringe was a lot less fun when it was the phrenology capital, we checked and it’s actually mozambique have the best brains - just gotta take the L on this one, Marie Jean Pierre Flourens kicked ass and helped kill Phrenology with real science, it comes in like a fad and leaves like a fad, I only liked phrenology before it was cool, the scammers are making our racism look bad! we’re not harsh enough about phrenology, “repoliticizing” phrenology, when it’s built its just one thing but when its pieces it can be anything, shirtless lego jacob, 20,000 lego sets, Play Well - Le go, after enough fires lets just stop using wood, stud and tube design, the lego To Kill a Mockingbird set, mindstorm was ahead of its time, Caroline’s got their lego driver’s license from legoland, lego nerd culture, adults without kids spend more, “transbranding”, Ella had to read so much corporate jargon but it’s impossible to not talk about their business strategies , lego seismograph outside the eras tour, CERN lego, their story is better than ours dad, instructions for a lego skin cell printer, LEGO: expensive for toys - cheap for science equipment! David Aguilla’s prosthetic project, Tracey Williams’ Lego Lost at Sea project, plastic’s resilience is a positive and a negative, lego replay and reuse, this is a trust test of nuance and both things being true at the same time. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Recast: LLE on SIF - Eeny, meeny, miny, moe | 15 Aug 2024 | 01:05:38 | |
While we're sending Tom "Well Wissage" and a speedy recovery, enjoy Ella & Caroline on this tremendous episode of one of our sibling shows on the network, Secretly Incredibly Fascinating! Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 61: Whale Fall Ecology & Jury Duty | 25 Apr 2024 | 01:37:58 | |
What happens when the largest living animal becomes the largest dead animal? Just how complex could a dead whale be? And what are the differences, flaws, and nuances of the jury system, and can we be studying it better? Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: A bucket of mice, when whales die the people who love them will miss them, a jury of your cohosts will decide if your topic is boring, Tom stretching his arms to measure a 34 meter long whale, marine snow and whale falls, gettin ghastly gassy, a new mussel told us to go check out the whale fall, whales are mortal, deep sea mussel delicacy, how hard could it be to find a whale over 70% of the earth’s surface? let’s just wait for the carcass to come to us… wait actually?? welcome to our automatic zoo of dead things on the beach brought to you by the crown, sinking beached whale carcasses, the 3 stages of whale fall, Denial/Mobile Scavenger Phase can take 2 years, scavengers eat about one (1) Caroline of whale per day, Enrichment Opportunist Phase, Sulfophilic Phase, 7% of a whale is bone lipid, a sulfur bacteria carpet. did we walk into Caroline’s trap? This final phase can last 100 years! It’s not a trap if I’m asking you a question! 690,000 whale falls at any time, never in my wildest dreams would i be so lucky as to know the 12km distance from fall to fall statistic, whaling is deforestation for bacteria, Osedax or the zombie worm or the bone devourer or snot flower, there’s Drama in this whale fall ecosystem, dinosaur fall ecosystems, fossilized bones with fossilized deep sea snails, we got picked to talk about jury duty, UK US differences, a 900 day trial, there’s something wrong with Ella, the US is the only country to have so many civil juries, this topic has become a US UK debate, only the US requires unanimity, juror selection bias, racially diverse juries do a better job, I wish we could be surprised peremptory challenge is biased against women, oops it’s a british colinization topic, you could literally say too many asians, semi-jural systems, is this a philosophy topic about human nature?? our various biases, the confirmation bias against tom’s bad jokes, can we study jury bias? there hasn’t been any research on live jury deliberation. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 60: Near Earth Objects & Guitar Tabs | 11 Apr 2024 | 01:53:37 | |
What are all these rocks hurtling through space? Do we need to worry about them, and what can we learn from them? And what are guitar tabs, why don't people take them seriously, and why does Tom love them so dang much? Videos we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! e|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------| B|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------| G|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------| D|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------| (tabs via lucamashup) e|---------------- We also learn about: I thought you were just going to just teach us guitar, still on course to learn everything in a few months! everyone’s favorite part: semantics and exceptions, Tom is a perfectly unmovable object, it’s doxxing myself if people know I’m the center of the universe, the great attractor was my nickname in high school, “naturally occurring objects traveling through our solar system which are smaller than planets and aren’t moons”, you must be 1 meter tall to be an asteroid, asteroids are metally comets are icy, a song of rock and metal dust and ice, asteroid/comet -> meteoroid -> meteor -> meteorite, 1.3 million known asteroids and only 3,800 comets in our solar system, within 50 million km it becomes a near earth object, obviously we’re all thinking about the Tunguska asteroid asteroid, 80 million trees felled and it didn’t even hit the Earth, one of the oldest meteors we know is from 2 billion years ago, the vredefort dome, 2 billion year old nuclear weapon testing??? the only time the earth makes Shatter Cones is meteors and nuclear explosions, if the meteor had hit the water it might not have been so catastrophic for dinosaurs, but it was going 20 kilometers per SECOND, a force 10,000 times the world nuclear arsenal, the crater has to be DISCOVERED, what does it mean for 50% of species to go extinct, the asteroid also vaporized the ground and water, impact winter, stopping photosynthesis kicks out the base of the foodchain, the meteor that broke the camel’s back, land animals over 25kg went extinct, there were a few lucky ducks, LLE Meteor Insurance, as long as Aerosmith is alive we’re fine, Asteroid Watch via the Center for Near Earth Object Studies, people listening 100 years from now hope you don’t have any asteroids (sucks to suck), Planetary Defense Coordination Office, Double Asteroid Redirct Mission, I cheered when we smashed into that asteroid, activating asteroids, asteroids are loose remaining legos from the formation of the solar system, OSIRIS-REx sample return, a kid named Bennu, tom loses his mind at the video of Osiris booping Bennu, personifying Rex, OSIRIS APEX, Apophis will be closer than some satellites, POV Apophis shots, Astroid Quakes, “cute is a weird way to describe a spacecraft touching an asteroid”, casual Caroline classical guitar lore drop, Tom learns guitar by accident, “too bad I picked this up so late”, Ella’s youtube ukulele era, don’t stop believing, tabs aren’t shittier sheet music, Van Halen didn’t invent tabs, tabs feel modern but also obvious, just because words are more efficient doesn’t mean diagrams aren’t useful, I’m just trying to play Don’t Stop Believing I have to worry about context? Guqin tablature dates to the 7th century! music has a lot of racism, rockin out those lute tabs, I knew this was secretly a font topic! monospace fonts revitalized tabs, sheet music software is garbage, god did not want me to use LaTeX they wanted me to use my mortal hands, OLGA, reading Beyonce tabs is not the same as listening to Beyonce, Paul McCartney’s the one who plays Blackbird wrong, let the philosophy professor enjoy his guitar! why punish the people who love your work, tabs are in a gray zone still, ultimate-guitar has a monopoly, the gray zone may benefit publishers, thanks swifties, Thomas Chesney’s tab research, it’s not a million miles away but it’s not right, ooh this song’s so commercially viable! Polphia’s tabs, Pinegrove’s tabs released before the songs, Tom’s guitar tabs, being a part of someone’s music journey in a little way, this could have been a guitar tab podcast, a cozy review corner. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Preview: Rats! Cheddar Heist! | 28 Mar 2024 | 00:35:14 | |
With Tom as their DM, Ella, Caroline, and Ellen Weatherford team up for a dicey heist in the big apple. Only one catch: they're rats! Can Rex, Tango, and Muriel ratatouille their way to nab the cheddar, or will they crumble like feta? Believe it or not this is only the first quarter of the full 2 hour episode that you can only get by becoming a member at MaximumFun.org/join Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 59: Quantum Physics & Gossip | 21 Mar 2024 | 01:51:37 | |
Can Tom finally take on his science communication white whale: Quantum Physics?? And what is gossip, what did it mean in the past, and could it actually be... good?? Find out on a very special MaxFunDrive episode! See all the MaxFunDrive events, pins, and links here! Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: One minute of self indulgence, another bit?? when bugs gossip, Moby Dick was warning about the perils of teaching quantum physics, the word quantum is boring, every grocery list is quantum (except Ella’ infinite and continuous grocery list), Ocean’s 11 is a quantum movie, quantum physics is 100 years old, why doesn’t my toaster blast me with radiation, Lord Rayleigh is literally the why is the sky blue guy, Planck really didn’t want to be right, “an act of desperation”, you’re taught quantum physics in high school chemistry, Heisenberg v Pauli v Schrodinger beef, fully just saying jackass, even smart people hate quantum physics, “nobody feels perfectly comfortable with it”, YOU ALREADY KNOW QUANTUM PHYSICS, Newton has been redeemed! we almost called photons “quantums”, some of quantum physics is bullshit but not all of it is, what has quantum physics ever done for us? we do actually have a quantum phone and quantum machines at the hospital, Quantum Nuclear MRI machines, sometimes it’s nice to remember that, Schrodinger's Cat is the worst first thing to learn, “not a real experiment, does not prove anything, does not match physical reality, and was intentionally designed to be absurd”, it’s like learning about vision through only optical illusions, “but where’s the weird?”, making peace with your whale, as long as you support us we will live forever, no Ella, there’s nothing wrong with you, “debrief”, gossip can be positive! GODSIB MEANT GOD SIBLING, you wouldn’t bang your godbrother, Tom you don’t have kids, in the 12th century you could leave your kids to watch Dune 2 whenever you wanted, a gossip is someone you can tell anything to, gossips were backup for lecherous men, gossip was a neutral term for an essential supportive community, gossiping about witches gossiping “that’s gossip as well babe”, spoiler for most social issues it’s about class and power, scold’s bridle, “I love idle talk, I’m a witch”, coffee houses are just gossip houses, “oooh yeah, evolution and gossip, this is good stuff”, we wouldn’t be humans if we weren’t sociable and idle talking, gossiping is like primate grooming, animals would LOVE to gossip if they had language, I don’t care what you think as long as it’s about me, work stopping gossip seems neutral but isn’t, I’m not gossiping I’m receiving evaluative information about a colleague, it’s good the science doesn’t show bullying is cool actually, most gossip is neutral gossip, I wouldn’t compliment my boss - only in gossip, you think it’s not gossip cause it’s about Tom Brady?? It is!! it’s all preamble for review corner. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Go Fact Yourself MaxFunDrive Kick-off Spectacular featuring Ella Hubber, Tom Lum, Teresa McElroy, Ross Blocher, and Jordan Morris | 18 Mar 2024 | 00:20:39 | |
IT'S THE MAXFUNDRIVE!!! And we're kicking it off with a network-wide trivia competition with other MaxFun hosts! You can see all our upcoming events during the drive and become a member at www.LetsLearnEverything.com This special network wide event is a celebration of the MaxFunDrive! If you’d like to support podcasts you love for just $5 a month and get bonus gifts in the process, go to maximumfun.org/join. J. Keith van Straaten and Helen Hong from “Go Fact Yourself” are joined by: If you’d like to hear more hosts competing for trivia supremacy, visit Maximumfun.org for the full version of this show. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 58: Kelly & Zach Weinersmith, Mars Ecology, and Space Communes | 14 Mar 2024 | 01:16:00 | |
What would a man-made ecosystem look like on mars? Just how complicated could it possibly be? And are the human and societal issues just as complicated? Science communicators and authors Zach and Dr. Kelly Weinersmith ask and answer all of these questions and more! Check out: A City on Mars! Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: The superior Weinersmith, we almost have a Doctorate majority but not quite, having a PHD doesn’t make you smarter it just makes you poor and willing to suffer, back in my day Comic-Con was only 2 pence, we only just learned about high perchlorates on mars soil, all those images of glass habitats on mars would be SO DEAD, “this doesn’t sound appealing to me… to live under the dirt”, just rinse off all your dirt how hard could it be, the engineer brain thinking “if a problem is solvable then the problem is solved”, apologies to the rotating space colony community, space waste is a pain in the ass, cows aren’t efficient but BUGS are, Biosphere 1 is Earth, Lunar palace, there aren’t many experiments and we don’t really know how this all scales, if Sarah goes we’re fine and if I go I destroy the colony by BREATHING TOO MUCH, everything’s more complicated in space, Lungs help your facility PVNRT, humanity needs a plan B but “a backup that loses that much ground on human rights is not a backup i want!”, historiography of space: history of how we think about the history of space, being a wet blanket about frontier mythology - you are speaking to the right people, “there are beautiful dreams, but I feel like the beautiful dreams tend to crack when you look at them with a little more detail”, “cows are just a nonstarter in space”, goat cheese pizza was great for morale, finally we can stop poisoning ourselves with taro, vegans are great on mars, the only life threatening scorpion you can find the US makes it onto Noah’s ark, solar is great but not when there’s dust storms, we have dormant nuclear reactors in space, Simpson reactors, in conclusion: we’re not ready, it’s not as easy as making a terrarium, closed loop ecologies are not normal, who knows what happens 10 years in, “this is the problem with talking to Zach and I”, the superior Weinsersmith has subsumed the other in a violent coup, this isn’t a hypothetical: “there’s answers to these questions”, mars religion, you can’t take your barbies and go home on mars, literally no one wanted to do dish duty, SELL THEIR HOUSES TO WHO BEN FUCKING AQUAMAN, “being able to leave is HUGE for so many reasons”, “so Zach and I are both cowards”, speculating is good to imagine problems to avoid them which is maybe the least funny answer I’ve given, “you can’t jump back to roman law”, “I think the book is much better because of our conflicts”, going on research walks, we don’t have time for space law, “that’s not a common response Tom” Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 57: Don't Lose Your Head! and Constructed Languages | 29 Feb 2024 | 01:40:28 | |
Losing your head isn't good, but what actually happens, and what can it tell us about animals, ethics, and bad science? And what is a constructed language, when does it fail, and when can it be use to make great... art? As they say, Ni Lernu Ĉion! Content Warning that today's science topic can be a bit grim, so if you want, you can skip ahead to 54:54 Things we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Pretty clear cut or chopped, did we need to write this down? why do you die when you lose your head? let’s start with a deep philosophical question: are we our brains? Tom clearly doesn’t know Mike the chicken, Mike was the original pitch for Charlotte’s Web, mooching some slugs, The Mystery of the Beheading of Elysia Marginata, capital punishment comes from beheadings, the guillotine could behead 20 people per hour, “the most gentle of lethal methods”, …do you guys not have the death penalty? ethics of rat euthanasia, Canavero’s bogus self published head transplants, like the language you’re speaking RIGHT NOW, Auxiliary Engineered and Artistic Languages, Tom falls into Ella’s Esperanto trap, Esperanto was banned and persecuted, the benefit of Esperanto is it has no culture, English is a language of exceptions, 1850 to 1920 people were going WILD constructing languages, none of us had heard of Volapük, “a language without umlauts sounds monotonous, harsh, and boring”, the language wars, a priest and an eye doctor trying to solve the tower of babel, Esperanto has “dipthongs - ugly!”, “rattling an hard bony R”, Artlang POP QUIZ, for Tolkeins the languages came first, english is a tapestry of languages and artlangs can convey that, the use of purposefully meaningless artlangs, soo soo! NOOT NOOT! boyhowdy! nonsense languages have universality, citing the pingu fan wiki, is penguinese more universal than esperanto??? Toki Pona, newspeak, “and that brings us strangely and sharply to the end of the topic”, appreciating real turtles and robot turtles. Sources: BBC: The Chicken That Lived For 18 Months Without a Head Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 56: Are We Still Evolving? & Famous First Messages | 15 Feb 2024 | 01:42:59 | |
How have human beings evolved, and how could we evolve in the future? And what are some famous first messages, and what can we learn from looking at them? Images we Talk About: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! Timestamps: We also learn about: DANGER BOO BOO, Ella has her own discord?? homo sapiens were 300,000 years ago but humans were 2.5 million, homo sapiens coexisted with 8 other human species, homo habilis was chilling for a million years, the homo hunger games, neanderthals had sewing needles and clothing, they seem so human because they are, maybe it was our chins, it’s hard enough not to anthropomorphize other animals let alone other humans, humans were the same height 40,000 years ago, humans may have lost height from being shit at farming, we have smaller brains but that doesn’t mean we’re less smart, natural selection & mutation & gene flow & gene drift, the iphone gave us smaller jaws, melanin is about synthesizing that sweet sweet vitamin D, we have evolved the adaptation of diversity, physical appearance is mostly just vitamin D and warmth - that’s it, it’s not good genes vs bad genes, microevolution, “instead of a mass of clones, we are already starting to see a glorious riot of variations”, this is all speculation, “we’re very unpredictable”, hello world! I learned it by watching you!! shouting and switching places, Tom live writes fanfic, purpose & imagination & inspiration, no YOU hang up, WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT, hey is your daughter okay? tone poems, Ella bled for her art in *checks notes* We Will Rock You, the dynamic range of the alpine symphony, if found please return littered golden record to Earth, ooh criteria! images on the record are COPYRIGHTED, who knows if they’ll be in the public domain by the time aliens get it, the beauty of the calibration circle, pulsar map, Ella’s not inspired, Caroline inspires Ella a bit, mixing up the golden plaque and golden record, MIR LENIN SSSR, DISREGARD PREVIOUS MESSAGE USA FOREVER Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 55: Evolving Electricity & What's "Women's Work"? | 01 Feb 2024 | 01:43:31 | |
How did eels evolve electricity? And when is "women's work" neither women's nor work? Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Happy moisturizer to all who celebrate, Ella’s just here for moral support, when did they put batteries in eels, someone's just statically charging these eels, what did we call electric eels before electricity? why would we think lightning and a fish are the same thing? the necrotizing torpedo and the torpor eel, Aristotle was a shite time traveler, “in all of humanity, if people think they can pout it up their asshole they will”, Allessandro Volta what a convenient name, electric fish gave us the battery not the other way around, the electric organ, when did electricity evolve? electric organ discharge, electrogenesis, it’s not an eel! get in line with the other animals that need their names fixed, 90% of an eel is electric organ, what does it feel like? turning fish to stone, shocks can function like a neurotoxin, the electric doublet can make fish twitch, Ella has a revelation, the physics is the biology, it’s all electric baby, magnetic animals 2 electric boogaloo, the domestic arts, This Woman’s Work, it was never always women’s work, old socks, but what does this have to do with men?? Ella predicts the British stealing a sock, male knitting guilds, knitting fishermen makes perfect sense, knitting was “compatible” with many kinds of life, mechanized knitting made it feminized, of course it’s always intersectionality, you know what’s appropriate for a woman is to do this thing we don’t need anymore, being demoted as an art form, “male art vs female craft”, Caroline’s just doing this topic to show their crochet is art, weaponizing the male ego to bring back knitting, bequeathing a valuable and symbolic thimble, Tom gets emotional over a salacious thimble, if that’s not art what is, also I can't believe you actually read all these thanks <3 - Tom, spinning bees to defy the British and seize the means of production, “Artists’ Suffrage League”, Faith Wilding and Harmony Hammond, craftivism, it’s not “women’s work” it’s “everyone’s art”. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Recast: LLE on Creature Feature - The Bird Pee Technique | 18 Jan 2024 | 01:02:16 | |
While we take our January break we're rebroadcasting our appearance on Creature Feature! Katie pulled out some of the wildest facts for us, so enjoy, thanks for your patience, and see y'all in 2 weeks! Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 67: Epigenetics & The Overlooked World Games | 01 Aug 2024 | 01:56:30 | |
You may have heard Epigenetics used as a buzzword, but what is it really? Is it something we know about, something still new, or... both? And what in the world are the World Games, and what makes them better than the Olympics? Links we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Ella passes her driving exam Tom’s not bitter about John Oliver, what is y’alls familialarity, epi- meaning on top of, epigentics are like tabs or blacked out text in the book of your DNA, epigentics stop your brain from turning into bone, oh did other people help Rosalind Franklin with the double helix? bases and double helixes and histones, literally blocking DNA from being read, epigentics are less cyberpunk and more exercise is good for you, epigentics is why you go blind from masturbating, it’s simpler in animals, “I’ve been here the whole time!”, “you’re enough Tom”, 2 X chromosomes means you have an extra, X Inactivation, Calico Cats are Genetic Mosaics, your epigentic markers are like your browsing cookies: you clear them before giving them to someone, are pollinators plant cucks? Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance, is it nature or nurture? generational trauma doesn’t have to be epigenetic to be real, inherited cherry blossom mouse sensitivity, the effects are subtle, Ella might have a high epigenetic age from her rock and roll lifestyle, this is so new there’s so much we don’t know, the epigenetic advice: healthy diet and exercise, how different could the world games be? casting for sport, wait did you hear me say break dancing is this a bit, the worst SEO for a name ever, Rugby 7s started at the World Games, the World Games are as old as Beyoncé, let’s do our own thing we’ll definitely be more popular than the olympics, tried at the hague? we sure did! at the least the World Games are being honest about it being a bumpy ride, the “Memorandum of Understanding” reads like a parenting agreement, grouping by sport not nation, the curse of hosting the olympics, reviving forgotten sports like Tug of War, wait who was first?? guys come on have some respect for yourself! breaking records with fins, shark skin suits aren’t biomimicry, tech doping, fin swimming and barebow archery, murderball is an official world game sport, the NYTimes officially called lacrosse “frat boy” sport, mile long hundred person lacrosse, of course sports are spiritually healing, colonizing lacrosse, Haudenosaunee - the people of the long house, Tom cut it with the sad voice tell us what happened, “we wouldn’t be here without their medicine game… they need to be there”, we’ll have to see if the olympics accept the Haudenosaunee, if your games are as old as beyonce you dont have to worry about breaking tradition, “nothing is silly, everything should be respected and held up”, Ella goes OFF and takes over the topic. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| New Year Q&A | 04 Jan 2024 | 01:46:53 | |
It's our annual Q&A episode where we look back on 2023 and answer your questions to learn about our process, our favorite things, and each other! Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Ella gets on the album, Dodie is very frog people music, pigeons fruit flies and sloths, our favorite topics of each others, black holes and microscopes and extinct animals, there’s one whole picture of Ella and Caroline, I need more than 5 seconds of this lady, Nessie Krampus and the Jersey Devil, Who the Hell is Edgar? the cursed 2nd spot in Eurovision, just do it! build a portfolio and experience and find local stuff in your area, alergic reaction to Tom’s joke, Australian Ella, card games, moved to tears by taskmaster, Skip & Loafer and Frieren, Baldur’s Gate is a 10/10, Caroline can read?? Under the Whispering Door and Life isn’t Binary, struggling through house of leaves, DRCL, Barbie and Evil Dead, i hate the sandpaper slide, field common questions, people do actually want to know about methodology, questions that are best answered by a different question, getting your own field explained to you, our school journeys, different kinds of learning, programming decision anxiety, getting to code for a thing you care about helps you learn, FUN! we’re actually ahead of schedule to learn everything, attacking Tom from different angles, seagul-gate, Ella producing with Jono in the studio, listening to Story Break at Lunch, let’s just say the Eras tour is going to be very interesting this year, putting it into the aether, if you want to change something you’ll do it tomorrow, the mellotron and babatone, distance, fun.
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| 54: The HaLearnDay Extravaganza! 2023 | 21 Dec 2023 | 01:41:24 | |
It's the HaLearnDays! The time of year when we share gifts of fun facts from us and friends of the show! Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: I wish Katie and Alex were real, pooping every 20 minutes, a human creates 320 pounds of poop a year, when I think about dangerous, “when I think of dangerous bird boop”, cube pooped saves on the poly count, poopin and pleasin, Watching the Sky and Thinking a Thought, smuggling instruments to space, sonic boooooms, this is obviously a Caroline gift, The National Christmas Tree Association, liberals want you to burn your christmas trees, the ACTA is very different from the NCTA, bury me with my artificial tree in a cemetery under an artificial lawn, rudely scrutinizing a gift from Hank, Caroline’s read The Grinch who Re-tabulated a Fact they Got, $25 Barns & Noble Gift Card, Caroline and Ella negotiate money from Tom, identifying unwrapped baked goods in Japan, hot cross buns and melanoma, Ella Laterals us, British Scorpios can’t give blood in the US, we all definitely remember Ella was born in Germany, “destroying” cows, Janet pulled out all the stops with the science, vibrissae, wash bears, Ella ones up her fly sperm fact with Kangaroo Vaginas, whaaat’s the deal with the third vagina, false cloaca, kangaroos can house 3 kids at the same time, Ella’s in her kangaroo vagina era, our first favorite Tom piss on pity, running over Christ Tarrant’s foot, plougs and shootouts, should all our fun facts be forgot and days of old lang syne. Sources: Goose Poop Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 53: Making Superheavy Elements, and Celebrating Public Domain Day | 07 Dec 2023 | 01:23:46 | |
What are the superheavy elements, and how did we make them? And what is public domain day, and why is next year's going to be so interesting? Things we Talk About: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! Timestamps: We also learn about: It’s like we’re in school again, ordering the periodic table before discovering the electron, Mendelev didn't even like electrons, the nucleus is an atomic juggling act, atomic high jinks, the Fermi paradox, the Fermi problem, the number of piano tuners in Chicago, smashing elements into new ones, that’s why it’s called nuclear physics, receiving a Nobel and then fleeing Italy then learning your Nobel was wrong, accidentally discovering nuclear fission instead, we all so Barbie we knew this was leading to bombs, uranium neptunium plutonium, nobody cared because they didn’t want to draw attention to this during WORLD WAR 2, how does this keep happening i thought i was smart, the radioactive avengers, metropolis, I only scream about ice cream for anticapitalist purposes, none of this is legal advice, you know the patent stealing guy Edison, trademarks patents and copyright, JK Rowling patented a new kind of transphobia, the US constitution mentions copyright, the Micky Mouse Curve, even Bobel winning economists agree copyright extension is bad, happy hbomberguy video day, YouTube sucks at Fair Use, Mr Boop, Night of the Living Dead on Wikipedia, we’re IP pilled, SO MANY DISNEY MOVIES ARE BASED ON PUBLIC DOMAIN STORIES, it’s not open season on Mickey, “he can be naughty”, canine enthusiasm is unprotectable by copyright, Pride and Prejudice but Mr Darcy is a Vape God, Frank Capra is proud that It’s a Wonderful Life grew in the public domain, “battle lines will have to be drawn”, which two elements would YOU smoosh together? Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Submit Your Q&A Questions! | 30 Nov 2023 | 00:00:52 | |
Submit your questions for our end of year Q&A episode at letslearneverything.com/question or in our discord! Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 52: Amy Westervelt, Carbon Capture, and the Cartoonishly Evil Atlas Network | 23 Nov 2023 | 01:11:52 | |
Investigative journalist Amy Westervelt from Drilled asks us: what is carbon capture and is it good or bad or... complicated? What is the Atlas Network and why are they comically evil dark avengers of the climate world? And how do you go from recording a podcast in your car to creating an award winning podcast network? 🎤 See Tom perform comedy in Brooklyn for Earth Alliance! 🎤 Support us with a Max Fun Membership! Timestamps: We also learn about: Emailing the local radio station “Would you like an over-aged intern”, Ella’s a climate change fan, natural carbon capture, compressed carbon is a lot more dangerous than it sounds, fracking with captured carbon, “there’s a lot of creative math happening”, direct air capture, carbon capture needs to happen WITH decarbonization, warming waters make crabs produce neurotoxins, unfreezing zombie viruses, a silver lining to the climate catastrophe is the worm broth, moving the goalposts to 2050, historian of past futures, people used to think fridges were weird, are we just giving up on eating slightly less meat, greenwashing, if you’re an oil company everything looks like a pipeline or a combustion engine, direct air capture is actually cool! even if I have 0 silver bullets I can kill a werewolf with 100 brass bullets, Anthony Fisher battery farming turtles origin story, reader’s digest version of Friedrich Hayek, having an evil meeting in a chicken battery farm, now they’re cooking with gas, Margaret Thatcher’s cameo, “what a horrible avengers this has been”, THEY LITERALLY INVENTED THE OVERTON WINDOW, they’re a real life conspiracy theory, Amy gets in a debate, “I have a very difficult mother so tense conversations, I’m good at them”, narratives in climate not just look at my chart! podcasts can communicate the people hidden in stories, producing a podcast in a car, “I want people to come away really pissed off” Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 51: Carcinization, The Animal Algorithm Mystery, and The Many Lemming Lies w/ Ellen Weatherford | 09 Nov 2023 | 01:50:36 | |
Are we really all destined to turn into crabs? Why are there so many animal algorithms, and are they all legit? And just how many times have we been wrong about the lemming? Things we talk about: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! Timestamps: We also learn about: Endless forms most crab-like, the 2020 meme boom of carcinization, what is the extent of the carcinization crisis, watch it buddy you already got eight legs, hamburger style arthropod, BOY CAN I CAROLINE I'M GLAD YOU ASKED, it’s like CNN and Fox agreeing on something, crabs have ten legs my dude, vikavolt, crabs and false crabs and true Christians, its all human labels at the end of the day, crab shapes have evolved at least 5 times, the king, masked, coconut, and hermit crab, Ellen’s thinking like a crab, the leaf eating mangrove crab, the crab shape is good for many niches, guard your tasty bits, decarcinization, we should try decarcinizating our market share, I am THE crab researcher and y’all need to calm down, convergent evolution is like video game controller design, the Brazilian Aardvark, Ellen’s uncovering of this dark underbelly, this algorithm list is just a list of sleeper activation words, what is a metaheuristic swarm optimization algorithm? Craig Reynold’s Boids, the lateral line system, “ants aren’t smart, any colonies are”, multidimensional ants, coatis moving in the jth dimension, this is all super niche you can’t use multidimensional ants for every problem, no articles are talking about this this is Defunctland niche, Groth and the 2 Fairies, lots of these papers are not at all based on real biology, “cats do not form swarms”, the bee marriage algorithm is actually good! research for research’s sake is okay, lower your pitchforks but keep your pitchforks at the ready, things are shitty starting out i mean we named everything crabs, political cartoonists went wild for lemmings, we’ve been making shit up about lemmings for year, lemmings falling from the sky, Ole Worm’s pet coati, Popular Science’s lemmings returning to Lemuria, lemming population booms, lemmings are good swimmers, a truck full of the wrong species of lemmings, ALBERTA IS LAND LOCKED, lemmings are fight or fight, lemmings don’t explode, let’s unlearn everything about lemmings Sources: TheConversation: Carcinization Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 49: Goosebumps, (Not) Alien Pyramids, and Nessie & Cryptids | 26 Oct 2023 | 01:55:41 | |
Why do we get goosebumps when we hear nails on a chalkboard? Obviously aliens didn't make the pyramids, but how were they made and what does that teach us about humanity? And what's the story behind nessie and why the queer community loves cryptids? Things we talk about: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! Timestamps: We also learn about: The bumpies you get on your skinnies, the gem trade can be pretty shitty!, Tom read 5 books for this, ahhhh! oh wait have I got goosebumps? the many and few names for goosebumps, piloerection, I just got objective chills, animal goosebumps, famous geologist and pigeon lover Charles Darwin, “I took a stuffed snake to the monkey house”, porcupine piloerection, gustatory stimuli, grima, it’s not ew it’s euggghh, Easy Lovery by Phil collins, Screaming Ape; Loop. the Head Wizard tm, biomimicry, nails on a chalkboard, Scraping Sounds and Disgusting Noises, (SOUNDBITE OF FINGERNAILS ON CHALKBOARD), so is that better or worse? I guess the kids are listening to screeching sounds for music, prehistoric chalkboard monster, ruining Ella’s spooky cold open, 118 pyramids! you’re both racist! when did the ancient aliens theory stated, von Daniken’s racist conspiracy, the racism in believing only wwhite people could make architecture, plumbobs! moving 5000 pound limestone blocks, the genius post ramp system, it took 100 years to realize the painting was showing how to move stuff with water, Gregory Marouard’s demonstration of moving a block, the Nile used to run right by the Giza pyramids, the mundane power of having a lot of people, 20,000 people to build the great pyramids, the oldest papyrus ever found: the diary of merer, the pyramid builders weren’t slaves, the bent pyramid, the plesiosaur, cryptids that turned out to be real like the thylacinem, fake cryptids, cryptid comes from cryptozoology in the 80s, Nessie swimming down the nile, you gotta try Irn Bru, Columba the Monk’s encounter with nessie from the 565 AD, Columba was a dual class monk cleric, Marmaduke’s hoaxes, hippo leg umbrella, the Nessie-sary search, eDNA, you pee you poop you die, eels in the loch, cryptids and the queer community, cyptids are the people’s mythology, token straight scientist friend. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 50: 🎂 The Ig Nobel Prize, The 2023 Ig Nobel Winners, and the Ig Nobel Peace Prize | 12 Oct 2023 | 02:05:58 | |
For our 2nd anniversary and our 50th episode (which it definitely is, don't check) we cooperatively tackled a topic folks have been asking us to do for ages: The Ig Nobel Prize! Check out our new merch! Hats! Posters! Mugs! Images and Videos we talk about: Timestamps: We also learn about: Tom does an evil scientist laugh at Atto Seconds, Ella watch hours of Ig ceremonies, honoring achievements that make people laugh then think, the rotating category, six people have turned down the Nobel, comedy? with a question mark? trying to purposefully win an Ig is like recreating The Room, Limburger cheese, Andre Geim loves his Ig as much as his Nobel, “if people don’t have a very good sense of humor, they are usually not very good scientists either”, Roy Glauber the keeper of the broom ALSO WON A NOBEL, “all they wanted to ask about was that damn broom”, the 24/7 Lectures, Mandelbrot goading miss sweetie poo, Ella’s Favorite Ig-ventions, partially unboiling an egg on stage, Chernobyl Bra Face Masks, that laughing and crying human emotion, cadaver nose hairs with surprisingly few nose hair variations, we all stan replication, Tom’s dad was robbed of the Ig, boring teachers, backwards speakers, maybe their neurons work backwards, the taste of rocks, the trick condition, electric taste, sexism in the stanford toilet, statistically significant anchovy boning affecting the water column, the fish kama sutra, how can i turn that dead spider into a robot? necrobotics is surprisingly easy, anti peace prizes, Pauling’s Nobel burn on Teller, Tom gets recognized, Lal Bihari’s schemes to become undead, “Lal bihari died in 1976 but he is feeling much better”, MAMAAAA OOOoooOOOH, sweet caroline, working as a waitress, karaoke means empty orchestra, Shigeichi Negishi’s first machine, Inoue’s Juke 8 origin story, Inoue is up there with Jonas Salk for not patenting Karaoke, Inoue’s Ig Nobel standing ovation, I’m not going to cry, I just started crying what the fuck, don't tell Ella but Toms my favorite, sometimes three ding dongs can make a podcast Sources: About the Ig Nobels Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 48: Wikipedia w/ Annie Rauwerda, The First Boring Number, and Perpetual Stew | 28 Sep 2023 | 01:34:43 | |
We all use Wikipedia, but how did it come to be? What's the first number to not have a Wikipedia page, and what does that say about math and humans? And what on Earth is Perpetual Stew? Follow Annie and Depths of Wikipedia on Instagam/Twitter/Tiktok! Images we talk about: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! Timestamps: We also learn about: there’s more Wikipedia languages than google translate, Grendel would have loved Blackpink, how often do we think about the roman empire, the first encyclopedia was very wrong, all men think about is present Rome! Pliny’s child piss ab wrinkle cure, fortune did not favor the bold according to Pliny the younger, the encyclopedia Britannica, getting lazy on the later letter installments, door to door encyclopedia salesmen, Annie’s Mom’s excitement for the new encyclopedia, Encarta the forgotten digital encyclopedia, welcome to the 90s baby, webrings, soft core porn is the carcinization of the web, Jimmy Wale’s “Guy Oriented Search Engine” Bomis.com, the failed boring Nupedia, the wiki prefix from a Hawaiian bus, Cunningham’s Law, Wikipedia’s Bro culture, nostalgia.wikipedia.com, no search or sources on old wikipedia, it’s not easy but people were making this encyclopedia, this human element has always been a part of encyclopedias, Jimmy Wales got his admin privilages revoked by the community, the interesting number paradox, Ramanujan’s Taxi Cab Numbers, the OEIS sequence database, Sloane’s Gap, 20,067 sitting alone at lunch, a surprising recent number update, the notability standard of numbers, the highest negative number to not have a page is only negative 3!!! come to the dark side of the zero, the Wikimania, Annie is Taylor Swift at Wikimania, Ella’s years long Wikipedia War, Annie’s neuroscience journey, Annie’s Perpetual Stew, a stew love. Sources: Andrew Lih's Book "The Wikipedia Revolution" Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 47: The Abyssopelagic Zone, The Crystal Healing Boom, and Time Capsules | 14 Sep 2023 | 01:59:51 | |
What lies below the depths of the sea... and why should we stop being so afraid of it? Okay we know crystals can't heal you, but could they actually do... something? And why are time capsules more complicated than you'd think, and why should we love them anyway? Images/Videos we talk about: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! Timestamps: We also learn about: The Zones of the Ocean, the midnight zone, the hadal zone in the trenches, Tom forgets that water freezes, cold water and thermal vents, pompeii worm’s bacterial jacket, chemosynthesis, the deep see adaptation alarm, pisolite, it’s a myth that more people have been to space than the bottom of the ocean, the challenger deep, deep sea and moon exploration were happening around the same time, we actually DO know more about the sea than the moon, the abyssal plains is half the planet… but people don’t care, thalassophobia, there are no amateur deep sea explorers, the enigmitization of the deep sea, deep sea gigantism, why not visit the deep and eat delicious foot long shrimp, phantom jellyfish, venus flower baskets symbiosis is WILD, 500 sea pigs facing in the same direction, the burglar alarm atolla jellyfish, artificial E Jelly lure, gelatinous little guys, “i thought that bit was gonna be way better than it was”, lateral line, the cusk eel is the deepest fish, whales dive deeper to send messages farther, marine snow, Ella pulls a Caroline, deep sea nodule mining, we can still like things and not believe in them scientifically, crystals DON'T date to ancient Egypt, amethyst hangover cure, to be fair they didn’t even know what crystals were, bad economic or healthcare pressures may push folks to crystals, crystals do actually have vibrational properties just not those kinds! the piezoelectric effect, quartz watches and pickups, paranormal powers placebo or priming, a great psych experiment where no one had to take LSD, we love a repeatable study, the real benefits of crystals from placebo and community, confirmation bias is powerful and good, actually harmful crystals, don’t give babies crystals for teething, gems are just shiny, you can ship of theseus the voyager topic from every time we mention it, foundation deposits weren’t exactly time capsule but were cool, leaving notes in houses, Time Capsules are optimistic and kind of silly, the dissappointed norweigan time capsule kids, deciding what to put in a capsule is really really tricky, what is sublime and what is trivial? taking a picture of a polroid, the interesting complications of time capsules, the time travel fever, “artificial special collections”, Tom’s own time capsule from 6th grade, good teachers are so good. Caroline’s gonna cry again! Sources: The Deep Ocean: Life in the Abyss Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 66: What is a Species & What is UK Voting? | 18 Jul 2024 | 01:55:58 | |
It's a word we say all the time but... what IS a species? How has it been used in the past, and could the different answers all be right? And how does voting work in the UK? It starts with voting for knights, and could hopefully end in the future with something even better. Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Jenny Lec, the definition we know is wrong, has anyone taken my title On The Origin of Species? This is my favorite! Oh shit… generic and specific, thinking of species as logical units, Kingdom Phylum Friends Acquaintances Work Friends Genus Species, the anime dewey decimal system, dark fungi, the cognitive dissonance of science at the time, even Darwin didn’t have a good definition of species, 1942 is when the common species definition was popularized, Biological - Evolutionary - Genetic definition of species, species gerrymandering, there is only 1 species of giraffe but should there be 4? policy first science, you don’t need hard definitions to do amazing things, nature is constantly doing kickflips over our no skateboarding signs, you really put your whole polizzy into naming that hybrid, a ring of banging around the himalayans, ring species in actuality look like a biblically accurate angel, let’s just ask what definitions scientists use, you can’t tell if fossils ever fucked, we only knew about human neandrethal interbreeding since 2010, what’s so wrong with having multiple species definitions? there’s a lot to biology! in between “there’s one answer” and “there’s no answers” is “there’s many answers”, Lizzy Poll, you can just call an election early?? in the UK you just vote for your member of parliament, it’s actually really weird to have a separate vote for president, every 2 steps forward is brought 1 step back by “the monster raving loony party”, Elmo think women no need to vote, the house senate and president, coalitions, tea cups with electoral college members on them, electing knights in the first parliament in 1264, bloc voting lets you pick your top favorites, Cromwell was the first Footloose, we had discovered quantum physics before women could vote, First Past the Post was only establish in 1948 in the UK, what are the positives of First Past the Post and cockroaches? please let us loose to bash FPTP, tactical voting, Australia has a version of Ranked Choice, Tom finally gets to wax poetic about Ranked Choice Voting, france’s 2 round voting, if the definition of species should match the task why not the type of voting system? the 2011 voting reform attempt, it’s been the foundation of this country for generation, try ranked choice voting on smaller scales and locally, Ella falls in love with herself, happy hour gender confusion Sources Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 46: Lawn Loathing, Spelling Psammophile, and Guinness World Records | 31 Aug 2023 | 01:54:49 | |
Why are lawns so bad, and what could we grow instead? How much can we learn from an esoteric word like Psammophile? And why is the Guinness Book of World Records wonderful and terrible at the same time? Images/Videos we talk about: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! Timestamps: We also learn about: lawn enjoyer (derogatory), there are 6x more lawn than corn in the US, how we developed our lawn fetish in the 17th century, the pesticide and fertilizer boom after WWII, the more money and knowledge you have the worse lawns get for the environment, runoff powered sargassum seaweed, 30% of drinking water used for lawns, lawns aren’t even the best greenery for your mental health, “your granny cant push the lawnmower around” okay I don’t want her too! astroturf is even worse, when the sun engulfs the earth all that will remain is our plastic lawns, the no-mow-movement, the alternative lawn movement, make an animal crossing lawn! Ella and Caroline fail the spelling bee, what makes a word tricky, 3 letter words are the trickiest, Ella steals the word, ventifacts, sand actually holds water better, granular physics in a scorpion paper, sidewinder snakes drifting while doing the worm, snake scale fingerprint, ecomorphological convergence, the adorable Jerboa or Kangaroo Rat are in Dune unchanged, Jerboas can kick sand onto traps, foot drumming, “the rats would rather drum than fight”, sandy fungi, our childhood obsessions with Guinness records, people are weird! the origin of the Guinness World Records, I’ll prove to them who’s the fastest bird! the eccentric fact finding twin brothers, may we hope to turn heat into light”, the 4 types of Guinness world record, marketing records, the analog to digital downfall, over half of the top 100 brands have records, Guinness is a native advertising company, brands really need empowering, laundering governments apolitcally, most lightning strikes to a person, a good record makes you wonder Sources: Scientific American: The American Obsession with Lawns Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 45: Superseded Science, why is TB Still a Thing, and the Radium Girls | 17 Aug 2023 | 01:54:45 | |
What previous scientific theories would turn into the ones we know today, and what can they teach us? Why is Tuberculosis still a thing in the modern age? And who were the Radium girls, and what did they give us? Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Oh Fuck Tom and Ella and Caroline, theory vs pseudoscience, scientific glow up, the LLE game show theme, any time Tom isn’t talking he’s doing a little dance, preformationism, tiny growing dinosaur gametes, miasma, spontaneous generation, the amber effect, Darwin couldn’t sleep thinking about geology, what a nerd, the expanding earth, every theory can be explained by little expanding dinosaurs, Marie Tharp’s “Girl Talk, revisiting Vulcan, planet mnemonics, Ella snipes the answer, an actual Einstein name drop, Einstein was so excited to think he could solve the mercury problem, my topic superseded yours, what is Tuberculosis, TB is at least 9,000 years old, when TB was romanticized (by the wealthy), “how interesting he looks in dying”, TOM STOP DANCING!, people think this is a disease of old but it’s not, antibacterial resistance could be as big a threat as climate change, 1 Billion people have latent TB, the real enemy once again is capitalism, novel’s rapid test, there’s no Return on Investment with TB research, unless you patent the cure, J&J COULD SELL IT FOR A QUARTER AND STILL MAKE A PROFIT, only 40,000 people have received bedaquiline in 11 years, evergreening a patent is Sinister, amnesty period of science in the misc topic, even with nobel prizes scientists didn't realize how dangerous this stuff was, the Curies are buried in led coffins, Curie’s legacy is “literally untouchable”, Will It Radium? Radium Schokolade, it’s rejuvenating! radium quackery, radium silk, the government said it MUST have radium if you’re advertising it does, alpha radiation mostly hurts when ingested, glowing radium dust dresses, surely THIS is how they got poisoned right?? touching the brush to the lips was a cost saving measure, radiation poisoning sucks, the US radium corp claimed the women were just suffering from syphilis, hiding scientific investigations, the radium girls fight against capitalism and make labor history, radium girls lead to an international nuclear treaty, but they still sold radium tonics! Byers’ photograph helped ban radithol, the podcast make you old. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 44: Katie Goldin & Alex Schmidt, Space Birds, and the Bison Emoji 🦬 | 03 Aug 2023 | 00:59:39 | |
Special guests Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin from Secretly Incredibly Fascinating and Creature Feature answer: Have birds ever been to space? Why does Katie love birds so much? And how did Alex bring about the bison emoji to everyone's phones? Things we Talk About: The Quails in Space video we watched over and over The Club Winged Manakin's "Call" Support us with a Max Fun Membership! Timestamps: We also learn about: Birds have home field advantage here, DIY animal behavior major, baby elephant soccer coach, a big podcast stew, why can’t birds just fly to space, we all share one brain cell, the Karman line, Ruppell's griffon vulture once flew into a jet engine, or rather the engine ate the bird, vultures are actually clean birds, high altitude vultures have blood adaptations, don’t dope vulture blood, USA lost the birds in space race, space farming, cloacal docking with the ISS, the quails in space video breaks us, who will teach the first generation of space quails? Chernobyl birds, stop doing unjustified wars and send chernobyl birds to space, Chix in Space, Katie wants to put a hummingbird in space, Canadian goose alien, Katie’s childhood Wile E Cayoe trap, birds relatable alien adorably arrogant dinosaurs, club winged manakin stridulation calls, Alex’s 18 page bison proposal, bird aliens return to the feet of a bison emoji statue, how Katie met Alex, Katie’s Peanuts comics, all great friendships start with an amazing bit. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 43: Gravitational Waves, The Loneliest Animal, and Graffiti | 20 Jul 2023 | 01:50:14 | |
How long have we been searching for Gravitational Waves? What is the loneliest animal, and what does it mean to be lonely? And what really makes graffiti... graffiti? Support us with a Max Fun Membership! Timestamps: We also learn about: Invisible ripples in spacetime that move at the speed of light and squeeze and stretch spacetime, Aristotle would have lost his mind at gravitational waves, Einstein’s theory of general relativity, gravity is bends in spacetime, Einstein’s 1915 prediction, gravitational waves are stupid… unless? pulsars are cosmic lighthouses, binary pulsars are two bowling balls dropped in a lake that we think are big enough to ripple to our shore, Einstein predicted them and then we found them, I found a math drawing in space, LIGO finding gravitational waves 100 years after Einstein’s theory, thank you Yano, gravitational waves click with Caroline, LIGO can measure 1/10,000th the width of a proton, measuring the collision of 2 black holes 1.3 billion years ago, International Pulsar Timing Array, the hum of the universe, the background hum of hundreds of thousands of black holes merging, hypothetical one dimensional cosmic strings, i thought you said this was silly, have you ever been alone in a crowded room, "I want to know what loneliness is to you Ella”, the elusive snow leopard, “just tell me how snow leopards fuck Caroline”, lonely ants live 11 times shorter, giving mirrors to make cows less lonely, the song of the Kauai Oo, lonesome George sold out, Albert the Albatross’s theme song, Albie the Albatross, finding 52 Blue the whale from declassified hydrophones, capitalism isolates animals too! are we projecting and processing loneliness onto conservation, Tom’s contractual Carly Rae Jepsen mention, graffiti used to only mean ancient graffiti, farts for the old man, I am Hiyya! Lysias is Handsome, is graffiti art? Kilroy was here, Faulkner wants to write a Kilroy was here, remember the writer and the reader and me, transient and permanent graffiti, NYC Subway Graffiti, “How did they do that?!”, graffiti as high art, Ivan + Hayley, local graffiti, Taki 183, Warren Robinett’s Atari graffiti, fuck you I was here Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 42: Gender Complexity, Mars Water Deja Vu, and Pigeons | 06 Jul 2023 | 01:42:20 | |
How complicated is trying to scientifically study gender? Why does it feel like water get discovered on Mars every other month? And what's so great about these pigeons I see everywhere? Images we talk about: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! Timestamps: We also learn about: Caroline snipes Tom’s joke, let’s talk about sex, “I do it and I have one”, sex is a bimodal distribution, defining sex is like defining a tree, have you ever had a gender that… that…, women men girls and boys, gender as separate from sex, Money’s awful gender experiment, sample size: David, why haven’t they just tried… talking to people? Hasbro lobbying Big Hormone pink and blue brains have a lot of overlap, news of mars water is like news of the first gay Disney character, we found a full britta filter on mars, the first water on mars theory, Herschel thought people lived in the sun, all the things we’ve sent to mars, the “““first””” evidence of water on mars, “““recent””” water on mars, saying we found water on mars makes it sound like we’re tackling the same problem over and over, we’re learning all kinds of stuff about mars, yes there’s water on mars but first let’s define water, gender neutral martians, “sublimate” makes Caroline happy, there is sometimes and maybe water on mars, there definitely used to be water on mars, martian time periods, stop personifying mars Caroline, “the planet Vulcan’; the astronomers still watching intently”, the precovery of Pluto 15 years before its discovery, the rock dove became the pigeon, pigeons were domesticated multiple times, pigeons may be the first domesticated bird, 350 breeds of domesticated pigeons, met gala pigeon looks, endurance pigeons flying for 22 hours, homing pigeon navigation, reddit quotes, the pigeon origins of Reuters, these are kinds of jokes you can support with your donation, listener submitted comeback, world war pigeons, 36 Dickin Medals went to pigeons, feral domestic pigeons, pigeons are better pets than parrots, stress egg laying, Darwin loved pigeons. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Best Of Everything! | 19 Jun 2023 | 01:32:08 | |
It's our first Best Of episode! We sat down to listen to and talk about the topics YOU told us were your favorites! Temporal Illusions! Eurovision! Dodos, and so much more! Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: The handsome Dr. Ella Hubber, if a friend recommended this to you they’re amazing and didn’t start that orphanage fire, declaring Tom’s love for Carly in the first episode, the first “Comedy”, Tom’s Eurovision indoctrination, the grim Holiday Episode, *aggressively podcasts at man*, seeing Tom’s wheels spinning, Let’s Go To Therapy Together!
Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 41: Eyevolution, Eliminating Mosquitos, and Bagged Milk w/ Sabrina Cruz | 08 Jun 2023 | 01:46:39 | |
What are some of the wildest ways that eyes have evolved? What would happen if we got rid of all mosquitos, and how would we even do it? And how on Earth did some Canadians come to love bagged milk? Images we talk about: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! Timestamps: We also learn about: Ella you’ve made it! it’s bagged milk all the way down, organs of extreme perfection and complication, misquoting Darwin, this is cliche because this is where this came from, Darwin’s clickbait, Eyevolution 2 Eyelectric BoogEyeloo, eye diagrams on Tom’s dorm wall, octopi are aliens, we are the ones with backward photoreceptors, you’re perfect just the way you are, horizontal and vertical pupils, cats have built in sunglasses, taller animals have rounder pupils, using the blur gradient for depth perception most, birds have circular pupils, compensatory cyclovergence in goats, horror writers have rotating goat eyes, w shaped pupils in cuttlefish, heart shaped pupils, frog pupils are a mystery, “I ought to conquer the cold shudder”, it’s just 1 mosquito species or 3,000, mosquitos are on every continent, vegetarian mosquitos, blood drinking mosquitos only drink blood to reproduce, I thought we were capri suns, *joke about women here*, palette, no plant requires mosquito pollination, the mosquito fish, mosquitos are delectable… uh… for fish, does every entomologist eat bugs, dark clouds of arctic mosquitos, cleaning pools just lacks that wow factor, mosquitos annoy caribou to death, the ecosystem would hiccup and move on, the invisible hand of mosquitos, nearly half of all people ever to live have been killed by mosquito disease, extirpation, the classic sterile insect technique has been used since the 1950s, you are the third person I’ve known whose had to sex fruit flies, “Ella’s Virgins”, filling mosquitos with good bacteria, spider venom fungus to brutally kill mosquitos, why are you here Sabrina, casual Ella lore drop about living in Canada, milk with the skin on, you don’t raw dog the milk bag, a heavy cold hacky sack, metric system looking pretty sexy, the metrication of Canada, this new fancy bag milk technology, too much marketing brain, demetricating, DIY bag milk, Sabrina’s got big misc energy. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 40: Mitochondrial Eve, Climate Change CRISPR, and Telephone Music | 31 May 2023 | 01:50:47 | |
Who is the most recent human we all share our DNA with? How can CRISPR be used to help the climate crisis? And what do telephones have to do with music? Support us with a Max Fun Membership! Timestamps: Images we talk about: We also learn about: Dartboard topics, Most recent common female ancestor, that’s actually the topic! endosymbiotically engulfing mitochondria, every animal now has this little friend, a fly gets caught in a photocopier and now we can’t live without it, mitochondrial DNA is only passed down the female line, mitochondrial DNA mutates once every 8,000 years, mitochondrial eve may have existed 150,000 years ago, eve wasn’t alone but she was our common ancestor, the eve of sperm whales was only 10,000 years ago, for squids it was 35,000 years, “won’t somebody think of the men”, Y Chromosomal Adam may have come from 210,000 years ago, concestor, simulating the concestor in a simulation, it’s not really a family tree it’s a messy web that we can draw a triangle around, GMOs vs Gene Editing, cool rad interspersed short palindromic repeats, tell them about how repairs happen! just some extracurricular learning, tom guesses cow farts in one, fartless cows without editing the cows themselves, we could eat less meet or just genome edit our way out of this, blue ribbon cow fart judge, is this a bandaid? making plants work harder to absorb CO2, photosynthesis labor laws, it’s not just “eat more carbon” it’s also grow deeper roots, “adapting the world to suit our misuse, rather than trying to improve our own behavior”, who needs pesticides when you have ugly plants, the scientific community is carefully thinking about these things, head phones, switchboard operators, that’s so gool, tom puts the podcast on hold, the devil invented hold music, hold music and temporal perception. no music makes time slow down, the fans of hold music, Tim Carleton’s stereo mistake “yeah… sorry about that”, the vocal encoder, mmm whatcha say, “it is the identity of our artistic project”, Ella’s Sherlock ringtone, Dark Blue, a book about making ringtones, 346 certified gold ringtones, Beyonce is the ringtone queen, ringtone podcasts, can only hope we’re causing as many people bodily harm as possible Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Tom-nical Difficulties: Back in a Week! (And the week after that!) | 25 May 2023 | 00:02:25 | |
Tom threw out his voice screaming about the new Zelda game (not actually) so we're delaying the next episode. But! We're not shifting the release schedule so the next episode will still come out the Thursday after! In the meantime, check out the episode of Veritasium that Tom researched and wrote! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMQbHMgK2rw Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 39: The Pill, The 2 Highest Points on Earth, and Period Products | 11 May 2023 | 01:53:11 | |
What are the myths and facts around the hormonal birth control pill? Why are there two highest points on Earth, and does that teach us about our planet? And what are all the ways period products affect the world we live in? Support us with a Max Fun Membership! Timestamps: We also learn about: Now that’s a rabbithole I can go down, taking half the pill makes you bi, LLE now played in health classes across the nation, the Ebers papyrus, they weren’t just using contraception they were communicating it, ancient Egyptian RAs, can’t get pregnant when you’re dead from mercury poisoning, the witch bull, bundling is the x games of abstinence, Tom definitely knows how the pill works, it’s not that men don’t know about women’s health it’s that women have to know about men’s health too, 1827 we discover the egg, 1843 confirmed conception happens when sperm enters the egg, the worlds fair of contraception, the American Birth Control League, Ella has a revelation, if I were a contraception and you took me I’d be an oral contraception, the original pill was 66x stronger to try to prove it was effective, bogus bad faith birth control studies, don’t well me, the Earth is squished because it spins, Team Everest vs Team Chimborazo, what the fuck is sea level, NERD I KNOW YOU’RE DOING MATH, nonbinary sex ed is just learning about mountains, 8,000 meters above Church, the air-sea interface, the metonic cycle of 19 years, carrying sea level, that’s what Tom gets for planning a joke, the geoid, a slide from Everest to Chimborazo, the death zone, our third ancient Egypt reference, Hypatia throws a pad, i got you a 100 rock that’s what you need right? the black hole of period history, you can’t abstinence periods, if you’ve used a sanitary belt join the discord! using WWII bandages, menstrual products vs the environment, the menstrual cup recommended by 3/3 members of the podcast, period poverty, the pink tax and the tampon tax, menstrual contact “turns new wine sour” “hives of bees die”, the stigma and cost of menstrual products, efforts to reduce period poverty, sniping review corner. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| The Best of Everything 2023-2024 | 04 Jul 2024 | 02:00:03 | |
After much deliberation, the academy (listeners of the podcast) has voted on the best topics from the past year! If this is your first episode, you'll get a sampling of our favorite moments of science and sillyness, and if you're a long time listener, you'll hear some behind the scenes thoughts about the topics, as well as... a secret teaser at the very end?? Images we Talk About: Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: you gotta listen to the best ofs for the rock paper scissors drama, I’m not sure if Ella remembers our names, it’s not the same joke it’s a Call Back, superseding my superseded theories, Tom’s jokes are like the rain - you walk on through and hope it stops quickly, it gets Jalapeno business, I miss Comedy, Ella claimed review corner but keeps forgetting it, the art of topic writing is explaining but also what not to explain, our favorite topics of each others, wrote down the idea for public domain day the year before, Tom goofs up the La La Land Joke, ohh did you just finish episode 50? maybe, thanks everyone for the nice messages, Mum! “those stupid awards”, they’re all great episodes, we learned who in our family listens to our show, you guys wanna learn about ants?? Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 38: Ellen Weatherford, Can Fish Drown, and Real Pokemon | 27 Apr 2023 | 01:21:48 | |
Special guest Ellen Weatherford joins us to ask: just how interesting can water and fish be? And are there any pokemon inspired by strange but real animals? Check out Ellen's podcasts "Just the Zoo of Us" and "Spellbound and Gagged" Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: defining fish, “just be cool about it”, defining drowning, Ellen and Caroline teach Tom and Ella about where water oxygen comes from, history of breathing, where we’re going we don’t need bones, christmas tree worm, osmoregulation and ion gradients i love it and i wish i understood it better, keeping a salt backpack, gills and lungs, “sorry for the crisis”, I’ve been sleeping on fish, mmmmm actually gonna evolve back to the water, can I get a return on these lungs? but what we’re talking about is drowning. cold water more oxygen, arapaima, ding ding ding drowning yay! thousand mile dead zones, only some sharks need to move to breathe, Ram Ventilation vs Buccal Pumping at Coachella, buccal vs buckle, asmr buccal pumping, tuna need to swim or drown, letting arapaima rest in your arms, learning to love fish, Spiders and Commitment, alligators vs manatees, singing a B flat for gators, alligator snapping turtle, bringing Ellen to party, Wooper and Clodsire, the iberian ribbed newt, obliterating your future husband with a Whimsicott. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 37: Loving Toxicity, Future Warnings, and Better Burials | 13 Apr 2023 | 01:59:44 | |
Is there more to learn than to fear from toxic animals? How would we warn future humans about present dangers? And what are better ways for us to be buried? Things we mention: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: This ant can kill 1 million elephants, haven’t found a venomous mushroom… yet, a lot of my friends are toxic frogs, nom nom nom I eat poison, don’t touch shit, from none to death, the schmidt sting index, I want the data not the sting, what schmidts data was actually saying, some toxins don’t correlate with pain or lethality, venomous mammals are have in common that they’re disregarded, shrews beareth a cruel mind, arguably venomous slow lorises, expanding our definition of toxicity, letting tom load a joke, protecting the future from caroline’s savage burns, the waste isolation pilot plant, 573 known extinct languages, I can haz nuclear waste? skull and crossbones, cubed morphines, “this place is a message…this place is not a place of honor”, landscape of thorns, forboding blocks, it’s giving kiki, taking a photo on a spike for the gram, nucelar priesthood, ray cats, “they didnt really care what we said i think”, understanding our past to connect to our future, just leave a dvd of the mummy, we’ve been burying people for 120,000 years, inventing oven crypts in the 1800s, gotta workshop the name oven crypt, “I want to be in a big bone pit”, lots of places resuse plots, just walking past a pile of tombstones! blasting our relatives into the stratosphere, natural burials, fungus coffins, water cremation. Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Technical Difficulties: Back Next Week! | 06 Apr 2023 | 00:02:27 | |
Apologies all, Ella's computer kicked the bucket, so we'll be back next week with a fresh episode! Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 36: Scientific Language Models, The Smell of Space, and Forgotten Olympic Events | 23 Mar 2023 | 01:58:04 | |
See our Game Night Livestream Monday March 27th at 5pm EST! Get cool drive rewards and listen to our special bonus episode! Can Large Language Models be used for good in scientific fields? Could space smell... good? And what olympic events have we tried, abandoned, and completely forgotten about? Things we mention: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Using ChatGPT to break up with your partner, it’s all very dry, you have to know the knowledge going in, LLMs are tools not databases, ChatGPT as a co-author, authorship carries accountability, Galactica was only public for 3 days, you can’t use galactica anymore happy??? racist protien AI, Protien and Chemistry Language Models are amazing, transparency with AI, the Bloom Project, ChatGPT emotionally ends the episode early, be funnier, in space no one can smell you smell, Venus smells like eggs, Tom volunteers to smell space, how smell works, don’t breathe if you’re driving, olfactory epithelium, 40 million olfactory neurons. a 40 million piece slimy jigsaw in my nose, asmr smells, 1 atom per cubic centimeter in space, Tim Peake’s answer, the smell of static, getting a refund for Tim’s answer, making ozone in space, sexy dying stars, Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon, your grill makes star smell, raspberries at the center of our universe, a number so big it makes you laugh, the IRAM telescope, one of the largest interstellar molecules, I’ll show you Tim Peake! I was looking for amino acids but now I know what the black hole cloud might smell like, combining all the smells into a cocktail, who knows what the rest of space smells like! No, I’m going to fight you Caroline, Koribos wins the entire Olympics, the rise in wells, ancient pump up music, armor racing a car with 4 minds of its own, the 5 month long Olympics, putting the figure in figure skating, dueling flash mob, the wonder of demonstration sports, goal ball, Olympic tiktoking, hurting Caroline and Ella with the art Olympics, write fanfiction for us, at least they had standards to not give medals, that’s my dad on a bike! trying can be more poetic than poetry. Sources: How ChatGPT works Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| Recast: Just The Zoo Of Us: Rats w/ Let's Learn Everything! | 16 Mar 2023 | 01:11:08 | |
Today we're rebroadcasting our appearance on Just the Zoo of Us as we prepare for an episode coming NEXT week for the MaxFunDrive! On this episode we combine our shows formats to bring you a full Topic, Question, and misc, all about one of the most misunderstood, intelligent, and rascally animals: the rat! Join Tom at a MaxFunDrive Meetup! Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 35: Don't DeExtinct the Dodo, Humans vs Computers, and Art Forgery | 02 Mar 2023 | 02:02:11 | |
Is it really possible to bring back the Dodo, and what even really happened in the first place? Are there any games left that humans can beat computers at, and why might that be okay? And what can art forgery tell us about art and the art world? Images/Videos we Mention: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: The Cherished Dodo, tinction, what does a dodo taste i mean look like, dodo art telephone, only 1 full skeleton, actualy lots of things die this way, invasive species also killed the dodo, Alice in Wonderland’s trendsetting the Dodo, Caroline’s clearly a Dodo person, Dodo DNA, Jurassic Park was a Documentary, I hope to die in a funny way, bringing the Bucardo back, the first De-extinction, and the first Double Extinction, DNA vaults, the nicobar pigeon, Cloacas are “Fun” according to Ella, let’s reintroduce the Dodos too why not, “bring a little bit of magic back to the mauritious”, ancient egyptian tic tac toe, the Shannon Number, The Mechanical Turk, TuroChamp, Chess was the Drosophila of AI, bad AI predictions, Deep Blue vs Kasparov, The Googolplex of Go games, Dr Fill the Crowssword AI, 100% Rock Papers Scissor Win Rate, Poker AI, this really cool game called Superluminauts, what’s “unfair” in AI? the power of art comes from yourself, the art of forgery, Han van Meegeren, Dodo in Gearl with a Pearl Earring we all make the same dumb joke, new Vermeer, don’t arrest me it’s just a forgery, there could still be Elmyr de Hory forgeries, F is for Fake, “if my work hangs in a museum long enough, it becomes real”, Tom makes a totally normal and not embaressing mixup of Van Gogh and DaVinci, how to spot a forgery, carbon dating forgeries, just look at it closely, identifying craquelure, mass spectrometry, so much of this is just about money, Salvator Mundi Ship of Theseus, were these reviews forged? Go check! the laughing people Sources: Sources: NHM: Dodo De-Extinction Announcement Causes Debate NatGeo: The Dodo is Dead! Long Live the Dodo Smithsonian: Article on Colossal Biosciences Colossal Biosciences: The Dodo Nature: What Would it Take to Bring Back the Dodo The Atlantic: Article on the Dodo NatGeo: First Extinct Clone Created MIT: The Plan to Bring Back the Passenger Pigeon --- The TinkerToy Tic Tac Toe Computer --- Authenticity and Viewing Art Study Forgers Reveal Secrets of Paintings Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 34: The Replication Crisis, Human Senses, and Pride Flags | 16 Feb 2023 | 01:56:39 | |
Is psychology doomed, or could the reproducibility crisis a good thing? How many senses do we really have? And what's the history behind all the pride flags you see? Check out: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: We’re already learning! god i hate the stanford prison experiment, the four horsemen of the reproducibility crisis, the file drawer effect, honestly this horseman sounds like capitalism, what if we stopped saying “statistically significant”, Brian Wansink’s food studies and The Grad Student Who Never Said “No”, Brian this is a joke right? P-hacking the topic itself, failure to replicate isn’t the end of the world, “I Read ALL 100 Replications”, differences between the social and biological sciences, D.A.R.E for science! pre-registering a meta-analysis on pre-registration, the many good horses that work against the apocalypse, my eyes are named Dex and Sid, gustation, grilling my friends about guessing the 5 flavors, taste subclasses, touching our fingers together for half an hour, different receptors for light and hard touch, referred pain, feeling temperature in our bones, we have more cold receptors than heat, don’t test proprioception if you’re driving, it’s 10 o clock do you know where your limbs are?, the real sixth sense, losing proprioception, interoception, the holiday paradox, animal senses, ancient Egypt invented the rainbow flag, the RGB values of flags, Gilbert Baker, Harvey Milk “we needed something beautiful, something from us”, volunteers coming together to construct the first flag, oh they couldn’t just amazon a flag they had to make it, the pink is just impractical guys, the mile long flag, the Philadelphia Eagles Pride Flag, one flag to rule them all, lavender menaces, lesbian flag losing its lips. Sources: Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science --- Kokumi --- Stradley Ronon: Evolution of the Pride Flag Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 33: Immortality, Before Trees, and Emojis 💩 | 02 Feb 2023 | 01:47:55 | |
Is immortality possible in humans or other animals? What was on Earth before trees? And what can we learn from emoji?🤔 Things we talk about: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: Halloween in January, stories of immortality, the epic of gilgamesh, MR BEAST GRANTS IMMORTALITY IF YOU STAY UP FOR 6 DAYS, the first story of facing AND accepting mortality, teen alexander the immortal, shooting down 9 suns, making your own immortality serum, spoiler alert we don’t find immortality in this topic, the first blood transfusion, oh nevermind not really, testicle rejuvination solves all problems, how do we die? programmed death and antagonistic pliotropy, accumulating insurmountable damage, the Hayflick Limit, shoe telomeres, four nobel laureates behind atlos labs (aaaand also jeff bezos), we’ve never recorded a naked mole rat dying from old age, transdifferentiation in the immortal jellyfish, surprise immortality! the slow and old greenland shark, having to go through puberty and pay taxes is not worth immortality, “I sort of like that the animals are winning, and we haven’t quite got there yet”, you’d make a great tree, Caroline makes us define a tree, trees are “a human concept based on visual criteria”, NOTHING EXISTS, trees put oxygen in the atmosph- wait no that was algae, Caroline wants our bewilderment and fear in the questions, the Cambrian explosion, fossils of a tree fight, sharks are older than trees, what are these spires of life, cockroach t-rex, it really is the second Halloween episode, lovecraftian Earth, letters are pictures, emojis are language, our most used emojis, emoticons, codepoints, the first emoji, standarized emoji, no more flag emojis, people assume the internet keeps records of itself. Sources: Royal Forestry Society Tree Definition --- Nineveh --- Unicode Emoji Stats Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 32: The Ozone Success Story, Turning Heads, and Eurovision | 19 Jan 2023 | 01:52:00 | |
What's the story of how we successfully saved the ozone? Why and how can owls turn their heads around, and who else can? And can Ella convert Tom to the wonder that is Eurovision? Listen to Ella's Full Eurovision Playlist Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: defining ozone, not wrong but not right, the ozone layer is miles thick and not full of ozone, the sun is a deadly laser, tom feels stupid about the ozone, accidentally finding out about the ozone layer depleting, the dobson ozone spectrophotometer, “being an ignorant physicist”, this is why we monitor things, we need more metaphors actually, CFCs and HCFCs, the impact of humans on the planet, WARNING: MAY CAUSE DEATH FOR ALL FUTURE HUMANS, wait legal proceedings were slow??? supersonic flights between france and the UK only, you’re doing colonialism on US ACTUALLY, 198 parties ratified the Montreal Protocol, early action is important, why don’t we talk about this enough!!! thank your local environmental researcher today, owl 360 no scope, side-eyed Tom, pigeon slander, side and front facing, owls don’t have eyeballs, cone of death, I love it when there’s a but, the guiness book of world records is dumb, breaking the rule of 7, why hang upside down, the first Eurovision was formal, no english songs allowed, the big 5, bicameral voting, Britain’s losing streak, “nobody hates the british entry more than the british”, international politics and Eurovision, it’s like We Didn’t Start the Fire, “what else would we sing about”, it’s always been political, Ella’s favorite entries, Abba surprises Tom, how eurovision changes with the times, from ballrooms to tiktok, our future plugs. Sources: National Geographic: Ozone Layer --- Krings et al Owl Neck Rotation & Anatomy --- Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 31: End of Year Q&A 2022 | 29 Dec 2022 | 01:39:30 | |
To round out the year we learn about the most interesting thing: each other! We talk about the process of researching and writing an episode, future sciences and science fiction, and laugh and cry reflecting on our favorite things from 2022. Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: our favorite topics, this is why we don’t do topics on colors, topic lists, science ruining movies, science is just a job, anything goes as long as you don’t explain it to me, hacking the mainframe, the one flaw in the big bang theory, how do we research and when is it done? asking yourself questions, researching vs writing, research wormholes and topic duds, Caroline’s natural defense colors, London and NYC recommendations, religion and science, dealing with burnout, defeating Ella in battle, how we record, our Hollywood writers room, start a podcast if only to try, MUNA and Stromae and AJR, our favorite things this year, Everything Everywhere and Elf, Fortnite and Pokemon, Our Flag Means Death and Succession and Fleabag and Craig of the Creek and Dragula, Yotsuba, Two Headed Calf, making ourselves cry, Scoob & Shag, pandan and coke zero, our favorite pokemon, I am displeased with your lack of brevity, how each of us takes over the world, our personal take and our interest is more important than topic overlap, futue sciences, the birth of a topic, projected to finish everything soon so we can stop talking to each other, asmr speedrunning, today's topic is this pad of sticky notes, our podcast spotify wrapped, what we’re looking forward to (Breath of the Wild 2), really dumb content. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 65: Black Holes 101 & Tattoos | 20 Jun 2024 | 01:47:56 | |
What happens when a star collapses to a point of near infinite gravity? And just how hard could that be to actually... find? And why do we love tattoos so much, and how long have human beings across the world been loving them too? Check out Tom's first long form video that's finally out! Timestamps: Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: black holes are massive (mass) but not massive (size), nothing can escape a black hole, supermassive black hole by muse, the closest black hole is 1000 light years away so we don’t need to worry about them too much, matter can’t escape the Plunging Region, does your McDonald also have black holes? stellar evolution, “they’re just big gassy balls doing nuclear fusion”, the fusion in a star pushes against the gravity keeping it in equilibrium, Caroline’s fear of the sun expanding, stellar corpse, a neutron star is just made of neutrons - that can’t be right, if you add too much flour (mass) this will turn into an atomic bomb (black hole), stop saying massive and start saying voluptuous to avoid confusion, one in every thousand stars could be a blac khole, “surely that’s not sustainable” “have I got news for you about the future of all things”, theorizing a black hole in 1783, we only get the word Black Hole in 1964, betting on Signus X1, finding black holes by nearby objects’ bright hot death screams, it took 2 years to process the black hole image, sorry I think it looks like a butthole, Sagitarius A - our galaxies butthole, deslicious spaghettification, we’re all being spaghettified, I’m being raviolified here! where do you go in a black hole? into a topic for another day, “tom saw the topic on me”, no inheritance until you tattoo me onto your butt, Caroline got a tattoo to honor pigeons, the above skin - the skin - and the below skin, phagocytosis, microphages contain and become the tattoo! “the art is your immune system” and we only knew this in 2018, Ötzi the Iceman had 57 tattoos, ella regrets letting us guess what tattoos he had, ritualistic and therapeutic tattoos, egyptian women tattoos, old preserved siberian tattoo, the painted picts, Tattoo comes from the Tahitian word Tatau, famed tattoo afficianado Charles Darwin, the meaning of polynesian tattoos, sailor tattoos were inspired by polynesians but adapted to things meaningful to them, sailor tattoos were like sailing achievements, shark repeller tattoos, ancient greek tattoos were literally “skin-stigmas”, stigma affects culture and culture affects stigma in a feedback loop, “true on all accounts for my case”, gender norms in tattoos, “ooh another means by which to put down women don’t mind if I do”, biases in the workplace,”it’s literally only skindeep”, tattoos are so personal and human of course you can’t assume or speak to all of them, they’re an art and they’re universal across cultures. Sources: NASA: Black Holes Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 30: The HaLearnDay Spectacular! 2022 | 15 Dec 2022 | 01:27:10 | |
On a very special holiday episode, Tom, Caroline, and Ella give the gift of learning! We've wrapped up our favorite fun facts to give to each other, and even gotten a few presents from some special guests! Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: the the gin craze, no free gin advertisements, gin street and beer street, wrapping paper foley work, pumpkin toadlet balance, silly UK laws, yeah and maybebeallowedtoshootacrossbowatacathedral, keep your kite flying private, kite footloose, beached whales for the queen, suspicious salmon makes sense, honey tummys, more grenades on mars by 2025, dinosaur time breaks caroline’s brain, hey these brussels sprouts aren’t bad now, brussels sprouts hipsters, Britain’s dedicated tv popularity analyst, tom regifts a fun fact, and now I’m thinking about animal genitals, Cotesia and Drosophala: like a good cheese and a fine wine. Vine Pair: The Gin Craze Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 29: What's in a Scientific Name, How Many Cells are in a Human, and What the British Museum Stole | 01 Dec 2022 | 01:52:09 | |
What is the science of scientific naming, and could it actually be life saving? How many cells are in a human body, and why is it important to know? And how exactly did the British Museum... "acquire" all these artifacts? Watch Tom's PowerPoint Comedy Show! Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: what does tom smell like? naming is hard for computer science, naming is a science, reading 12 million paper titles by hand, single use acronyms, polynomial naming, Ranunculus mother of dragons, the dino hip mixup, smooth transitions, the fermium wars, we all know what happened to element 102, berkelium californium americium, should we name elements after living people, Ella is the only true Swiftie, half of all exoplanets are named Kepler, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now, why? she’s a millipede, Ella will get an answer, humans have 1 cell technically, c elegans has exactly 1031 cells, don’t embarrass yourself by saying how many cells are in a mouse, we enter the wheels and doors debate, Ella sperm fact rick rolls us, the number of kinds of cells, tom is bad at math, every time a scientist questions a number an angel gets its wings, Livers Georg, Ella is heartbroken we don’t have a number, what’s the point of counting cells? the British Museum keeps 99% of things in the disney vault, offering a replica of the rosetta stone instead, Britain legally cannot return items without government approval, all the stuff we never knew about Moai statues, what does queen Victoria need with a Moai statue, her majesty declares finders keepers, actualy these stolen things mean as much to Britain now, most Britains want the items returned, there is so much to learn from this! Sources: Judith Winston's Review of Binomial Nomenclature --- Number of Bacteria In Your Body --- Human Remains in the British Museum Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 28: Cerebral Organoids, Are Cats Liquids, and The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread | 17 Nov 2022 | 01:39:20 | |
How can you study a brain without a brain? In what ways is a cat actually like a liquid? And why do we say The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread? Images we Discuss: --- Watch the SciShow Episode Ella Wrote! Support us with a Max Fun Membership! We also learn about: brains are complex and hard to access, organoids, organettes, organittos, induced pluripotent stem cells are cool, Madeline Lancaster, DNA is amazing, scientific serendipity, try to make a brain and accidentally make a heart, human neurons in rat brains, ethical concerns, that does not make Caroline feel better, brain-on-a-chip, dish brain, great words, Pong, sentience, liquid cats, solid cats, gas cats, Slime, Ig Nobel, first make you laugh then make you think, atoms, God made cats a solid so you can pet them, mountains flow, Ella does not, the joy of the surface, scientists communicating science well, bread was invented in 1954, bread archaeology, cooking is a kind of fossilization, archaeobotanist, that’s what it means to specialize in bread, throwing it all into the bread business, SLICED BREAD IS MADE HERE, sound, sensible, and a progressive refinement, bread innovation, twin style bread, Caroline is not a world leader in bread innovation, a delicious stick of butter, idioms, a manifestation of the peculiar, irreversible binomial, to sell something for a song, don’t shit in the blue cupboard, the burnt bread crumbs of language. Sources: First Brain Organoids Paper --- On the Rheology of Cats --- NPR on 14,000 Year Old Bread Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||
| 27: Zoologist Ash Campbell, Kleptoparasitism, and Australia's Best Animal | 03 Nov 2022 | 01:26:31 | |
Today our guest Ashlen Campbell asks us: how do you stop a seagull from stealing your chips? And what can that teach us about the wild world of kleptoparasitism? Our Favorite Ash Videos: Erythrism, Blathers Exposed Ash's Follow Recommendations: @luccasbiohub @drkyliesoanes @zoe_kean_sci @sarawebbscience @astrokirsten Support us with a Maximum Fun Membership! We also learn about: Majored in zoology minored in chips, temperature effects on fish, dam spreadsheets, mosquitos don’t like skrillex, bee gom jabbar test, the beach scene, Miriam Rothschild & Theresa Clay coined Kleptoparasitism, bullying birds to throw up, not having a chip and getting hit by Ash’s ford fiesta, peacrabs have to steal to survive, messy definitions are interesting, stealing from siblings isn’t kleptoparasitism, neon cuckoo bees steal candies from babies, snails grabbing food from your throat, fossils caught stealing, mother feed me, taking care of other fishes babies, “he’s such a good father”, sneak spawning, The Real House Nest Husbands of Chesapeake Bay, swat raiding bees, kleptothermy, the answer is a seagull economy, kleptoplasty is eating batteries, floral larsony, hyenas change their sleep schedules to avoid thieving lions, green goblin otter hostage situations, eat worse chips, weighing the complexities of stealing, studying chip stealing, only you can stare at seagulls, the adorable and horny antechinus, “nothing here is okay”, nitpicking jurassic park, am I misrepresnting data? at least I have rainbow fish in animal crossing. being wrong on the internet, erudoot.
Sources: Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn | |||