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Podcast Transcript
December is upon us, and we should be cognizant of the fact that December is based on the Latin word Decem, meaning tenth, which is why December is the 10th month of the year……except that it is actually the 12th month.
The reason why the 12th month is named the 10th month is because the original Roman calendar was perhaps the dumbest calendar ever used in all of human history, where they had a full two months that were pretty much unaccounted for.
Fast forward over 2000 years and December is just another opportunity for Questions and Answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Let’s jump right into this month’s questions. The first question comes from
Eddie Waters, asks, I need to know about beaches. Who doesn’t love a great beach? In your travels, I would love to know which beaches you found the most beautiful, relaxing, welcoming, etc… The US beaches are being gobbled up by development and franchise restaurants. Where is the best beach experience in the world?
Well, Eddie, you are correct. Lots of people love a great beach, but what makes a great beach?
For starters, there is a finite amount of beachfront property in the world. Without getting into the very tricky question of how you measure a coast, which is an introduction to fractal mathematics, they really aren’t making many more.
Many of the prime beaches in the world have been developed. However, you’ll be happy to know there are a lot of beaches which have almost no development.
I remember being on a beach on a small island in Fiji that was about a long as a city block that I had all to myself. There wasn’t another person on the beach by myself.
When I was in the Solomon Islands, I visited an island called Rennell. Rennell gets almost no visitors and has a population of maybe 2000 people. When I was there, they took me to a beach that they said no one had visited in several years.
Most beaches, especially in tropical areas, are actually very similar. The sand is made out of eroded shells and coral, aka calcium carbonate.
What makes for a great beach isn’t necessarily the beach itself. It might be the community around it, the people you meet, or the experiences you have.
There are some beaches which have great sand. There are a couple that come to mind.
One is Flamenco Beach on the island of Culebra in Puerto Rico, and the other is many of the great beaches on the island of Anguilla. Again, I’m evaluating these just on the basis of the quality of their sand.
If you want to find a great beach, just go somewhere that isn’t a popular tourist destination. It is usually as simple as that. That compromises an enormous part of the world. You just need to do some research to find these places, and it really isn’t that hard.
Jack Obergfell asks You mentioned having a degree in mathematics. Do you have any other ones? I think you mentioned some other ones at one point or another.
During my original undergraduate tenure, I had a triple major in mathematics, economics, and political science. This sounds more impressive than it was because it was largely a matter of efficient scheduling.
I was able to use courses in each department as electives in the other departments to pull it off.
My primary focus was economics and mathematics, and political science was mostly to pad by grade point average.
On top of all that, I actually spent a lot of my time traveling around the country competing at academic debate tournaments. As I’ve said many times before, debate probably did more to prepare me for doing this podcast than anything else I’ve ever done.
Years later, after I sold a business, I went back to school to study geology and geophysics. Technically, I’m a few credits shy of getting a degree in these subjects because I had a case of vertigo that prevented me from attending classes my last semester, and by that time I realized I wasn’t going to pursue a career in academia, and and come up with the plan to travel around the world.
I have no desire to go back and get the final few credits in geology because I don’t really care too much about the credentials. I care more about learning than I do the piece of paper.
On top of that, via self study, I’ve probably easily, gotten the equivalent of a bachelors degree in history, just from all the writing and research I’ve had to do for this podcast.
Granted, what I write isn’t the equivalent of an academic research paper, but I’ve also written vastly more than your average undergraduate would ever have to write. I’d call it a wash, but I’m sure a professor of history would probably disagree.
Barton Brierley asks In many of your episodes you mention a ? subject, and then say”that will be the subject of its own episode.” ? Do you keep track of all these loose ends? If so, is the list shr?inking over time or diverging to infinity?
On a related note, Steve Augustino asks At what point will your topics list become too unwieldy to be useful to you? Do you trim the list of related topics when you post a new episode? And have you considered licensing spin-offs as a way to address all the topics? (For example, Everything Roman History Daily)
When I started this podcast, I created a list of 100 episodes just to get me started. I created the list in a Google doc file.
Since then, I’ve added to the list when I have new ideas for episodes and delete from the list when I do an episode.
The current list had 935 show ideas. The list remains somewhat steady, but it will grow in spurts and then slowly fall back as I do episodes.
If I was more aggressive about coming up and documenting show ideas I could probably double or triple the size of the list.
What episodes I select is often nothing more than what I feel like doing on any particular day. I try to mix it up so that the same general subjects aren’t done in the same week.
As for spinning off a new show, that is a theoretical possibility, but I have absolutely no plans to do so anytime soon. I have my hands full just keeping up with this show.
If I were to spin off a new show, like a Roman history show, for example, it would have to be in a different format. I’m not sure bouncing around a topic would work for a show like that. A more linear format would work better for a single-topic show.
Abdelrahman Wael asks, Hey Gary, I have to choose between going to Athens or to Istanbul, which would you say is worth visiting more?
If it were up to me, I would visit Istanbul. That isn’t to say Athens isn’t worth visiting, but Istanbul used to be the capital of two different empires, and there is just so much to see in the old city of Constantinople.
Brent Forliberty asks, What is your take on cold weather?
Cold is a function of adaptation. Let me give a few examples to illustrate the point.
I was once in the Kingdom of Tonga when temperatures dipped to a very unusual 68 degrees Fahrenheit, or 20 degrees Celcius. Not unheard of, but colcer than normal. People there claimed to be freezing because they weren’t used to it.
I was in Key West, Florida, once when temperatures dipped into the upper 40s Fahrenheit, or about 8-9 degrees Celcius. Again, people were flipping out about how cold it was as it was nearing a record-low temperature.
On the flipside of that, I was in Whitehorse, Yukon, in the winter once when temperatures reached about -50F or about -45C. It was cold, but people went about their lives. They wore jackets, but many of them would walk from their cars to whatever building they were going to with it unzipped.
I was in Antarctica on a ship, and out on deck, I wore a sweater and a hat, but no jacket. Temperatures were a few degrees above freezing. I’d call that chilly.
However, other passengers from Australia were completely bundled up for the same temperature because they weren’t used to it.
So, cold is mostly an issue of adapting, accepting, and dressing appropriately.
Teresa Black asks What is your favorite (Wisconsin) cheese?
That is easy—fresh cheese curds from the DuPont Cheese Company in Marion, Wisconsin.
They must be eaten at room temperature, which is how you normally purchase them.
I’m not even sure if you can find them all over the state, as it is a rather small company.
Robert Alan Nassif Jr asks What custom, habit, regulation, or law have you encountered abroad that seemed odd, arbitrary, or absurd?
The dumbest law I encountered was on the island of Barbados. When you fly into many countries, especially island countries, they often require you to have an outbound ticket already booked.
That is reasonable, and I’m used to that.
However, when I first landed in Barbados, I was asked by the person at immigration if I had a ticket out of the country, and I said yes. I had a ticket to the island of St. Vincent in just a few days.
However, she then kept prying. She insisted that it wasn’t enough that I had a ticket out of the country, I had to have a ticket booked to my home country.
I was detained for two hours while they debated letting me in the country.
I later met representatives from Barbados and they said that they had never heard of the law and had never heard of such a thing happening before.
I spent hours searching for this law after I left Barbados, and I eventually found something. However, it was very obscure, and it was never enforced. I just happened to be the wrong person in the wrong line with the wrong immigration officer at passport control.
Ajayi Samuel asks Hey Garry. What are your favorite books?
Likewise, Atak Lumo on the Discord sever asks, Do you have any literary “must-reads” that you would recommend to your fans? What are your favorite books?
My favorite book is Frank Herbert’s Dune.
I have read Dune many times, and every time, I get something new from it. I’ve read all of the Dune Universe books written by Frank Herbert and almost all of the Extended Universe books written by his son.
I even have all of the adaptations of the book for both film and TV.
I’m also a big fan of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. I am less of a fan of the current Apple TV Foundation series, which seems to only share a title and some character names with the books.
I’m going to end with a question from Jesus Chan who asks, Why has no one since Ted Williams been able to hit over .400 in MLB?
Jesus, this is a very good question and one I could probably talk about for an entire episode.
For those of you outside of the United States or who don’t follow baseball, a batting average is the percentage of times you get a hit based on your number of at bats, which doesn’t include base on balls.
If you get a hit 2 out of every 10 times, you are probably going to be released or demoted to the minor leagues. If you hit .200 and remain on the team, you must have something else good goin on.
If you get a hit 3 out of every 10 times, you are one of the best players in the league.
Hitting .400 means getting a hit four times out of every 10 at bats, or to look at it a different way, it means failing 60% of the time.
Hitting .400 is extremely rare and if someone could do it, it means that are having one of the best seasons in all of history.
A .400 batting average has always been a major accomplishment, but it was more common before the Second World War.
The last player to hit .400 was Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox, who hit .406 in 1941. No one has done it in over 80 years.
The closest anyone has come was Tony Gwynn, who hit .394 in 1994, and that was in a strike-shortened year.
So, why has no one been able to do this for the better part of a century, and why is it so hard?
There are a host of reasons, but basically, the game isn’t played the same way it used to be. This mainly has to do with better analytics and statistics.
For starters, batting average isn’t as highly valued anymore as is home runs and total bases. Through analytics, people eventually realized that a .250 hitter with power was more valuable than a .300 hitter without power.
Pitchers have become more specialized. They throw harder and are replaced more often, which means that pitchers can throw their best stuff more often than they would if they had to pitch a full nine innings.
Also, every .400 hitter played under a 154-game schedule. Eight fewer games means more opportunities to fail and regress to the mean.
Finally, anyone who were to flirt with .400 nowadays would be the center of a media storm. Not only that, but every team would try to get this guy out every game they played against him.
All of these things have conspired to work against having another .400 hitter.
That being said, could it happen? I think yes, but the odds are obviously slim. There are things that happen in baseball every year that are unprecedented or that haven’t happened in decades.
I think the most likely scenario would be for baseball to implement some sort of rule change that would make it easier for hitters. Something like limiting the number of pitching substitutions in a game.
So, it is possible that someone could just put together an amazing season, I just wouldn’t bet on it.
That does it for this month.
If you want to ask a question for next month’s episode, make sure to join the Facebook group and/or the discord server, links to both of which are in the show notes.