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What do the element palladium, William Shakespeare, and this episode have in common?
Palladium is the 46th element on the periodic table.
Shakespeare was rumored to have secretly written the King James Bible at the age of 46. In Psalm 46, the 46th word from the beginning of the psalm is often claimed to be “shake,” while the 46th word from the end is “spear.”
And this episode is the 46th time I’ve answered your questions.
Stay tuned for the 46th episode of questions and answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Let’s start with the big issue this month, which comes in the form of a question from Doug Huffer, who asks: How much do you care about the pronunciation of names and places – ie original vs. typical American vs. your own? Eg., Van Gogh is pronounced differently in Dutch vs. American English, or Arkansas is pronounced differently in Kansas vs. Arkansas.
This is one of the biggest issues I deal with daily when recording the show. This month, it showed up in the episode on New Madrid, which I pronounced as New Madrid.
English is a very weird language. We pronounce words differently in different places, and some place names have unique local pronunciations that make no sense based on the spelling alone.
There is a city in Wisconsin called New Berlin, but it is pronounced New Ber-lin. The change in pronunciation was deliberately done during the First World War.
Some words in English just make no sense. There really is no reason why Arkansas isn’t pronounced Ar-kansas, or why Kansas isn’t pronounced kan-saw. That’s just how it is.
English often has different pronunciations for foreign words, even if the foreign word is perfectly pronounceable. Rome instead of Roma, Paris instead of Par-ee, or Moscow instead of Moscova.
In Van Gogh’s case, the proper Dutch pronunciation uses a sound that isn’t in English, so it is pronounced differently.
When you get to Chinese and other tonal languages, again, English doesn’t even have tones, so words tend to be Anglicized or Latinized.
In many cases, there really is no good solution to the problem. If you use local pronunciations for all proper nouns, people won’t know what you are talking about, or you’ll just come across as pretentious.
Often, there’s no way to know what a local pronunciation might be unless you’ve been to that area, especially if the place is more obscure.
While I try to use correct local pronunciation whenever I can, I often have to make judgment calls. In the episode on Van Gogh, I used the traditional English pronunciation, not the Dutch Van Gogh.
I say, Julius Caesar instead of Iulius Kaiser, which would be the proper Latin pronunciation.
While I recognize that New Madrid is the local pronunciation, I also don’t think New Madrid is the end of the world.
Finley211 Any activity/game that you are outrageously good at? Like how I found out that my friend is a top Brawl Stars player
I was one of the top-ranked priests on Classic World of Warcraft for a while. I was ranked in the top 1500 in the world on the Sporcle quiz site.
About 25 years ago, we had a team that played the first-person shooter Tribes really well.
I can’t think of anything else.
menegato asks: I think I’ve heard the sound of pages being turned when listening to some episodes. So my question is, do you read the script on paper or on a screen? If it’s paper, do you keep each episode, and if so, would you ever publish a book with the script of the episodes?
If you are hearing pages being turned, I have no idea what you are hearing. No paper is involved in producing the podcast. The scripts are written and read on Google Docs.
Maybe you are hearing my chair or some other background noise, but it certainly isn’t paper.
Kristen asks: I know you try to make Encore episodes the least listened to episodes, but I’m curious how many fewer times they’ve been downloaded? Thank you! Love your show ?
An episode’s download count has nothing to do with whether it is selected for an encore episode nowadays. The process is mostly random. When I run one, I just look for something interesting that was published at least one year ago.
The truth is, there isn’t a whole lot of variance in episode downloads. There is some, but it isn’t enough that I’d make decisions around it. Moreover, if I did use downloads as the criteria for encore episodes, I’d pick more popular episodes, not less popular ones.
Ralf Meuris asks: I just listened to the encore episode “The never-ending Voyager mission”. These probes have been flying through space since the 70s. How come they survive in space for such a long time without any protection against cosmic radiation and things like that? If you look at the Tesla that was sent into space in 2018, it is heavily disintegrated because of the extreme conditions in space.
For starters, the Tesla that was sent into space to test the Falcon Heavy rocket hasn’t disintegrated. It would take millions of years for cosmic rays and micrometeorites to cause any level of disintegration.
So, the structure of the Voyager probes is fine. The danger to any deep-space probe is the electronics. A high-energy particle can strike a memory cell or processor and flip a bit, corrupting data or causing a computer fault.
The Voyager probes protect themselves by hardening their electronics, adding shielding, and redundancy.
Derrin Brown asks: You’ve mentioned before that you’re unsure who the winners will be in AI. Now that we’re seeing reports of companies like Uber burning through their entire annual AI budget in just four months, and critics arguing that firms like OpenAI and Anthropic can’t actually afford their own compute costs, do you think the current ‘tokenomics’ model, where companies charge by usage, but the underlying infrastructure requires massive, ongoing debt, is fundamentally sustainable? Or are we looking at a structural bubble similar to what we saw with the dot-com crash?
I have no idea what the end business model for AI companies will be. I’m not even sure what the AI industry is going to look like.
Things are changing at a fast pace, and I don’t think even AI companies know what the future holds. Not only are AI models getting more powerful, but they are also getting cheaper and lighter. It is now possible to run some LLMs on desktop computers.
I do think we are in an AI bubble, and honestly, that is what is to be expected. Everyone can see the potential of artificial intelligence, just like how in the past everyone could see the economic potential of the internet and railroads.
Lots of money is going into AI, just like money flowed into railroads and internet companies before. During those bubbles, most of the railroads and internet companies failed, but the ones that survived became giants.
The valuations AI companies are getting are not justified by the revenue they are bringing in or their profits, which are nonexistent.
I’m not an investment expert, but it seems like there will be a correction at some point. I don’t know when or how big it will be, but it seems inevitable.
Kevin O’Keefe asks: So I now have two granddaughters- two years old and six months old and I’m constantly thinking about their future. Of course no one can predict what our world will look like but many people are starting to make educated ?guesses. I think you would agree that there’s been a huge shift in terms of what type of jobs we will have 20 years from now. With all the research that you’ve been doing regarding learning, where do you think the younger generation should start these days?
It is quite literally impossible to make such a prediction. About 25% of the US workforce today works in job categories that didn’t exist in the 1960 census. About 60% work in jobs that didn’t exist in 1940.
Of the job categories that existed in 1960, only one has been eliminated: elevator operator.
There is no way someone in 1960 could have predicted jobs such as web designer, podcaster, cyberathlete, or hundreds of other modern jobs.
One of my mottos is that the ability to adapt is more important than your ability to plan. When the World Wide Web was introduced in the 90s, I was in the middle of things, and we just had to learn as it evolved. When a new programming language comes out, you learn it by doing, not by taking a class. Everyone figuring out AI right now is learning as they go.
Future-proofing yourself isn’t about learning any particular set of skills per se. It is the ability to learn and adapt to whatever might change in the future.
Heather Swisher asks: My daughter asked me which animals hibernate and why some animals don’t. I have no idea.
There are different types of hibernation, and the word is often used to describe different sorts of behavior in which animals reduce their metabolism for periods of time.
While cold- and warm-blooded animals can both reduce their metabolism, only warm-blooded animals can truly hibernate. Some animals hibernate annually, while others hibernate as needed when food supplies are low.
Hibernation is a technique used by animals to survive periods of low food supply. This usually happens in colder climates when food is scarce in winter. Animals like bears gorge themselves to build fat reserves so they can live off that fat during winter hibernation.
This might be a topic worth going into more detail in a future episode.
Jacob Felty asks · I’ve got a few questions. Do you have a favorite skyscraper, and why? Did you get to visit the old World Trade Center before 9/11?
My favorite skyscraper, I would have to say, is Taipei 101. This is simply because I visited it very early in my travels, and at the time I visited, it was the world’s tallest building. They also have a massive mass-damping ball at the top of the building, designed to counteract movement during an earthquake.
I did get to visit the World Trade Center. It was back in 1998. I took a business trip to New York, and I always took a day or two after meetings to go exploring.
I went to the World Trade Center, but I didn’t get to the top or anything; I just visited the lobby and the plaza outside.
The final question comes from Govind Chettiar, who asks, In the past couple of years or so, how has AI impacted your daily life, if it has?
If I can’t find a photo I took, or if there isn’t a stock image that works, I’ll use ChatGPT to make show artwork. It’s cheap and fast.
Another use, but I’m not really sure if this is AI, is Grammarly. I’ve been using Grammarly for over ten years, and I’ve used it on every episode of this podcast. It is basically a glorified spell checker. All of the writers have accounts as well.
It now claims to be powered by AI. I’m not sure how much of that is true, or if it’s just marketing. I’m also not sure what the difference is between AI and a good computer algorithm.
But I’ve noticed that Grammarly now does a better job correcting grammar than before, and it can also correct spelling in context for proper nouns, which is actually quite impressive.
In everyday use, I basically use it as a glorified search engine. For example, I had a question a few weeks ago about potato consumption in Europe from the 16th to the 19th centuries. ChatGPT was able to perform an analysis on it quickly and much faster than trying to search for papers published on the subject.
In fact, as I’m sure everyone has noticed, even if you do a search on a regular search engine, you’ll usually get some sort of AI-generated answer at the top of the results.
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 where I get my questions from.
I also want to remind everyone about the Everything Everywhere Weekly podcast. It is a weekly recap of Everything Everywhere Daily episodes that Joel Hermansen and I record every week. It is available to all paid membership tiers on Patreon.