Questions and Answers: Volume 35

Podcast Transcript

October is here. Up here in the northern hemisphere, the leaves are changing color, the air is cooler, and suddenly, pumpkin spice is appearing in everything.

Retailers are putting up Halloween decorations way too early. Desiccated stalks of corn and pumpkins are showing up in places where they have no reason to be.

However, one thing that makes sense this month is your questions and my answers.

Stay tuned for the 35th installment of questions and answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Hehehe from the Discord server asks, What are your thoughts on studying abroad? I would guess that you are very pro-get out and explore the world, but does that extend to studying abroad? As a university student, I was thinking for a long time that I wanted to do a semester abroad in Greece or Italy, but after playing with my course load, I found that I could just graduate a semester early and travel the world instead. Do you have any advice, such as it is better to settle down and try to live there, or maybe take your time, explore more things than just one city?

I personally never studied abroad, but I know many people who have. My impression is that those who take a semester abroad almost always use it to party and travel. The classes they take tend to blow off classes to facilitate their party and traveling.

If you can graduate a semester early, I’d do it. There is no reason for you to pay tuition so you can go to Europe and spend money on top of that.

I think your instinct here is correct. I’d graduate early. Not only will you save money, but if you do go to Europe, you’ll have much more freedom to do what you want and go where you want without having classes and other obligations hanging over your head.

As for what you do when you are there, that is up to you. Personally, I’d play it by ear. If you want to stay in one place, then you can do that. If you want to roam around, you can do that too.

You really won’t know until you get there and experience things yourself.

Richard Short asks Loved your episode on mammals of Australia, and all three evolutionary branches of mammals are extant there. A semi-related question. Mammals evolved from reptiles, which evolved from amphibians, which evolved from fish, etc. What will evolve after mammals? What will a new class of animalia look like?

It is impossible to know this. Evolution takes place when creatures adapt to their environment. Adaptions that are successful get passed on, and those that are not successful die out.

Mammals weren’t guaranteed to evolve from reptiles. Mammals arose because of the unique set of conditions that existed.

Without knowing what conditions might exist in the future, there is no way to know what sort of adaptations might arise.

Evolution isn’t on a set linear path. Many people think that humans are the natural end result of evolution, and that is not the case. There were countless, improbable things that resulted in the world we see today.

Mammals are pretty adaptable, so it is possible that there isn’t anything new and strange, but rather we just get better adapted and different mammals.

I should also note that mammals didn’t replace reptiles. Many reptile species died off, but reptiles as a whole are still with us.

GongKing asks, Do you think time travel will ever be invented? How will the grandfather paradox be solved if we indeed invent time travel?

There are all sorts of different theories of time travel that people have thought of via science fiction.

If the version of time travel is one that lets you go back in time to any point, then I don’t think that will ever happen because if it were to happen, we’d have evidence of it.

There could, theoretically, be a form of time travel where you could go back to a particular point that was established beforehand. So if we made a time travel device, we probably couldn’t go back further than the creation of the time travel device.

That being said, it is entirely possible I’m wrong, and time travelers have already come back in time under controlled circumstances.

But if that did happen, the question we have to ask is, why didn’t they kill Baby Hitler?

Geronimo Ritcheson asks If there was a figure in American political history that you’d most want to meet, who would it be? Conversely, who would you least want to meet?

This is an easy one for me. The person I would most like to meet is Benjamin Franklin. He was a scientist and a philosopher and arguably the most interesting founding father. Not only that, but he clearly knew how to enjoy himself and I think he would be very entertaining to hang out with.

The person I would least want to meet…. that is a list that is very, very long.

Abdelrahman Wael asks Gary I’ve been getting into photography and content creation recently. What are some of the biggest tips you can give me?

Content creation generally and photography are two very different things.

The rough rule of thumb for content creation is that the more of it you do, the better you get. This is something I’ve experienced firsthand with this podcast and with my photography. I did hundreds of podcast episodes and took tens of thousands of photos to get to a point of competence.

As for photography, the main thing I recommend at a meta level is to practice using all the buttons and dials on your camera and to get to know what they do.

Know how to adjust your aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, and know how each one will affect the image. Depending on your camera, there might be certain setting that you can set to automatic, or at least let the camera determine within certain parameters.

Beyond that, you just have to practice. When I was traveling, I had the good fortune to take thousands of images by visiting photogenic places around the world. You need to get out and shoot, and do so in a very deliberate fashion where you are identifying your weaknesses and trying to improve them.

Walt from the Discord server asks, Hi Gary, my wife wants to know – What is your opinion on astrology and how it has evolved over time? Thoughts on the 13th zodiac sign?

Well, I don’t think too much about astrology. As pseudosciences go, it isn’t a very good one. There is no mechanism by which the stars can guide our fortunes.

All the horoscopes are different, and astrologers can’t seem to agree on the same predictions or set of principles.

Astrology would be very easy to test and to run experiments for, and yet after thousands of years, no validation of it has ever been shown.

Astrology developed from ancient astronomy. The signs of the zodiac were simply a way to divide the heavens into 12 roughly equal parts, which corresponded to the 12 months of the year.

As the zodiac is an entirely arbitrary construction, so would a 13th sign. As far as I can tell, the idea of a 13th zodiac sign is one that was developed in the 1970s.

If you can just invent a new zodiac sign, it sort of goes to show how arbitrary astrology is.

Laura Hairston asks I’m curious about Olivia Ashe. How did she come to work on EED? She’s done an amazing job, and I’m looking forward to hearing more of her work.

I know a history professor who works at the local university. I told him that I was looking for someone to help, and if he knew any history graduates, to let them know.

He spread the word, and Olivia was interested. We talked about it and that was that.

Curtis Poole asks I love your podcast, Gary! It’s really helped to fill the time during my commute to and from work! My son even asks to put on an episode on our never-ending rides to various practices. I’m curious, what are your top 3 Empires of all time?

That’s easy.

– The Empire Strikes Back

– Empire of the Sun

– The Last Emperor

Honorable mention goes to Age of Empires II and Empire Earth.

Jerry Gardner asks, I know that you have people from all over the world who listen to your podcast. I’m curious, is your podcast just distributed in the English language? Or is there an app or people that translates the podcast into different languages?

The podcast is only distributed in English. Overwhelmingly, the people who listen to the podcast live in English-speaking countries: The United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

Publishing the show in another language is possible, but it would require a lot of work, and the business case for it isn’t very good.

There are AI tools that will automatically translate the show, but I have no desire to do that.

Hiring someone to do a native translation probably wouldn’t be economical, given how non-English podcast advertising works.

I have heard of some podcasts that do translations, but there aren’t many, and I haven’t heard that they’ve had much success.

Glenn Folau asks I was watching an MLB game on YT, and there was an infield “fly”, and the team in the field purposefully let the ball drop. It created all sorts of confusion, not only were the players confused, it appears that the umpires and commentators were confused. The runner on third strolled across the home plate, only to be called back to third, and then subsequently awarded the run, which understandably caused a brouhaha between the manager and his players and the umpire. Could you shed some light on this most confusing of rules?

Glen, you are not alone in being confused by the infield fly rule. Most baseball fans don’t really understand it.

The premise behind it is simple. Runners on base can’t leave the base until a ball is caught. They have to wait until the ball is caught, and then they run.

If a ball is caught in the outfield, the base runner might have time to advance a base. However, if the ball is a fly ball in the infield, an infielder has an incentive to drop the ball rather than catch it. The runner has to assume that the infielder will catch it, but if he doesn’t catch it, they can actually get a double or maybe even a triple play because the runners are forced to advance.

The infield fly rule takes care of this. If there is an infield fly, the umpire can declare an infield fly, in which case the batter is automatically out. It is equivalent to the ball being caught, and it doesn’t give the infielder the option of dropping the ball on purpose. When the infield fly rule is evoked, the runners are not forced to advance.

This is uncommon, but not rare. There are about 2,400 major league baseball games played each year, and it is estimated that the infield fly rule is evoked about 300 times per season on average.

The final question comes from Kevin O’Keef, who asks, and I have edited the question down for length…. I know you will be addressing a lot of this in your book, but to me, you are the ultimate example of someone who loves to learn. I’m not sure if you’ve ever commented on this, but could you let us all know where this foundation of curiosity came from in you and how you ended up continuing to be a lifelong learner? I think this could be instructive for so many young people. They may have enthusiastic parents and teachers out there, but how can the average person ??stay invested and continue to love learning when there’s always another paycheck and another job and another course to get a good grade in…

I wish I could tell you that there is some formula or some secret, but there isn’t.

I think that everyone is initially curious. Children incessantly ask questions about the world. Most kids go through a phase where they are into dinosaurs, astronauts, or other such things.

The key is to let them explore wherever their curiosity takes them and nurture it.

Curiosity is usually stifled in kids in school. They have to do what they are told, not what they are interested in.

The problem is that you can’t quantify curiosity. It isn’t something that can show up in test scores, which is all that really matters for most schools.

Curiosity isn’t a result; it is the motivating force that leads to results.

Because of this we have a world of people who are not in the slightest bit curious about the world.

Thankfully, if you are listening to this podcast, that is probably not you. This audience is rather self-selecting in that regard, and that is one of the things I like about doing it.

That concludes this month’s Q&A episode. If you want to leave a question for next month’s show, you have to join the Facebook group or Discord server, because that’s where I announce it.