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you have to have a very high IQ to understand Vsauce

Tobashi — Mon, 20 Nov 2017 19:12:04 +0000

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Vsauce. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also Vsauce’s optimistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation - his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realize that they're not just funny- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence, people who dislike Vsauce truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in Vsauce's existential catchphrase "Hey Vsauce, Michael here!" which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev's Russian epic Fathers and Sons I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Michael Stevens’ genius unfolds itself on their television screens. What fools... how I pity them. 😂 And yes by the way, I DO have a Vsauce tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- And even they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand.

Michael here

Tobashi — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 11:26:38 +0000

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. This is Earth as seen from Saturn. That is us right there. And if you look closely, ok, see this little protuberance? That's the Moon. This image was taken by the Cassini spacecraft on July 19th, 2013 at 21:27 Coordinated Universal Time. The thing is, NASA gave the public advanced warning of when it would be taken, which means that this image of Earth was the first ever taken from space that some people on Earth were actually posing for.
Our planet looks so small, insignificant, fragile. I recently attended the premiere of Sky 1's upcoming "You, Me and the Apocalypse" with some cool YouTubers and it got me thinking. In the show, the characters find out that they're only 34 days left before a comet smashes into Earth that's likely to end humanity. They all react in different interesting ways, but what would I do if I found out that there were only 34 days of human history left? Ok, my first priority would be to get back to America to be with my family. But after that? I don't really have a bucket list. Except that is exactly what I would want to spend my last few weeks doing. Making a list to put in a bucket that I would then send far out into space away from Earth's impending vaporization.
The list would contain information about us, all Earthlings. So that if libraries and monuments and YouTube videos were all destroyed, a record would still exist somewhere of what and who we were. Like a stone thrown into a lake, the ripples your life causes last long after you vanish, the tree you planted is climbed by future generations, the books you donated inform future readers. But what if it's not just your stone that vanishes, but the entire pond? Perhaps it's arrogance or vanity, but getting cosmic messages in a bottle out there, before the end, diversifies our archive and gives a better chance for future alien visitors, or whatever is left of humanity, to find out that we were once here, to show what we learned. Maybe even to warn future life forms of what we did or what we didn't prepare for. We have already sent some messages about humanity out there, beyond Earth, and if Earth is completely destroyed, those messages will be all that's left of us. What are they?
Ok, first things first. How do you write something for the future? I mean, the distant future. The message might not be found for millions of years or billions. It might be discovered by an audience that's completely different, not only in language, but in senses? What if they can't see or hear or feel or taste or smell like we do, or at all. What if their bodies destroy the very material we write the message on? What language do you even write it in? Well, in general, math and physics, which are believed to be the same everywhere in the universe, have been what we write outer space bound messages in.
Like the Arecibo message, written by Frank Drake, Carl Sagan and others, which was blasted towards the M13 star cluster in 1974. It's composed of a semi prime number of binary digits conveying some info about us and it should reach the center-ish of the M13 cluster in about 25,000 years, at which point, if something intelligent lives there and detects it, they can respond and their response will return to us another 25,000 years later. We won't be around for that.
But Earth has also been broadcasting its radio and TV signals into space. Currently it's about 200 light-years in diameter. Compared to the Milky Way, it's about this big. Aliens within that bubble could tune in and listen to programs we sent out through our airwaves, but these signals thin out as the bubble expands. Across very large distances they may be essentially impossible to tune into.
Maybe a physical time capsule would be more permanent, but it can't be buried on Earth if Earth is about to be ravaged. A time capsule in orbit might be smart, like LAGEOS-1, a satellite put into orbit in 1976 that allows for very precise laser measurements of positions on Earth, but also contains a plaque designed by Carl Sagan, upon which is written the numbers 1 to 10 in the binary, and the arrangement of the Earth's continents 250 million years ago, today and their estimated arrangement in 8.4 million years, which is how long we believe the satellite's orbit will be stable. Drag caused by the thin atmosphere up where it orbits and influences like solar activity will eventually cause it to fall back down to Earth, but its plaque will serve as a time capsule - a message from us today to whatever happens to be alive or intelligent here on Earth 8 million years in the future. To put that in perspective, the pyramids were only built about 5,000 years ago. 8 million years ago, there weren't even humans on the Earth. The latest common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees was around though. 8 million years from today, when LAGEOS returns, what will intelligent life on Earth look like? If Earth's surface is barren of life at that point, LAGEOS-1 will be alone.
But what about satellites in geostationary orbits? These orbits are far enough out that they're much safer from atmospheric drag and could remain above Earth much much longer than satellites like LAGEOS. These satellites are our pyramids. They're smaller than monuments built by past civilizations, but impervious to anything that might go wrong on the less stable surface of our planet. If alien archaeologists come by in a billion years or so, these satellites may be what their alien encyclopedias use as the picture for the humans article. So far we have erected about 450 of these geostationary monuments. When such a satellite wears down and ceases to be operational, it takes a lot of energy to slow it down so it can move out of the way and fall to Earth to burn up in the atmosphere. So instead, they're usually pushed into what's known as a graveyard orbit. A shell around the planet where they can be part without interfering with important operational satellites. It's fitting that we call these graveyard orbits because tombs are often the most stunning things we have from previous civilizations. These graveyard orbits are tombs in a way. Not for kings, but for machines. Junkyards that will out-exist the very societies and people they so largely define. Luckily, a few contain more than just our craftsmanship.
They also contain a record, like EchoStar XVI, a communications satellite launched into geostationary orbit in 2012. Aboard it is a silicon disc created by artist Trevor Paglen, containing 100 images of Earth and Earthlings. Now, unlike LAGEOS, EchoStar XVI will likely remain in orbit for billions of years, safe from discord and change down here. But here's the thing. What if our entire solar system is lost? Or what if life out there doesn't decide to ever visit our system?
Well, in that case, we have sent interstellar messages. At this moment, so far, there are 11 distinct human made things on trajectories out of the solar system into interstellar space. They're all related to five probes. Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 and New Horizons, the thing that recently made a Pluto flyby. These objects are our most distant hellos. Over the next ten thousand, million, billion years, they'll pass close enough to other star systems, maybe even planets, to possibly be discovered by other intelligent life forms. We had the foresight to include special messages on these probes.
Pioneer PlaqueThe Pioneer plaques are attached to Pioneer 10 and 11, which launched in the early 1970's, were the first human-made objects to ever be sent on a trajectory
to not just leave Earth, but to leave the solar system entirely. If discovered by other life out there, these plaques, designed by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, could be our first chance to say "hello, we exist," or, depending on how long humanity lasts, our only chance to say "Hello, we existed. This is what we were." But will the plaques makes sense to aliens? Many human scientists have had trouble deciphering their meaning, but here's what they say. At the bottom is a map of our solar system with a path showing the Pioneer probe itself and where it came from. This element has been particularly criticized for being human centric. I mean, an arrow? Who's to say aliens will know that this depicts a path and not some structure in our solar system? Also, it's an arrow. Arrows might convey this way only two civilizations that hunted or developed pointy projectiles. Anyway. Up here, we define units. You can't tell aliens about humans or Earth by using seconds, kilometres or light years, because we made those measurements up. Instead, the plaque uses hyperfine transitions to communicate distances and time.
The hope is that curious intelligent life forms who find this will understand that this is a hydrogen atom - one proton, one electron. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, so hopefully its properties will be a common point of understanding. Now sometimes, if you've got enough hydr

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.

Tobashi — Sat, 14 Oct 2017 01:22:28 +0000

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. According to the U.S. Census Bureau right now, in America, there are 106 people named Harry Potter. 1 007 named James Bond and eight people named Justin Bieber. They're just aren't enough names to go around. There are more than 300 million people in America but a hundred and fifty thousand last names and five thousand first names is all you need to name 9 out of every 10 of them. When are we gonna run out of names? Perhaps it's already happened to you. If it hasn't, when? Ten years, twenty years, a hundred, a thousand. When will someone with your exact name become famous? So famous in fact that your legacy changes forever to just being not the person people think of when they hear your name. And for that matter, when will every reasonably memorable pronounceable band name or brand name be taken? When will authors have no choice but to just start reusing book titles? According to Rovi Corp, owner of AllMusic.com, the most used band name is 'Bliss', followed in order by 'Mirage', 'One', Gemini', 'Legacy', 'Paradox' and 'Rain'. In the past when fewer bands had already been created and you couldn't just Google up every single band, overlap was easier to get away with and one word band names were plentiful. But now, after years and years and years of band formation, well, we have The Who', but we also have 'The What?', The Where', 'The When', 'The Why', 'The How' and even 'The The'. In order to stand out now, and have your own unique name, you have to be a bit more creative. O', 'Diarrhea Planet' or 'Betty's Not a Vitamin', which, by the way, is no longer true. Betty became a vitamin in 1994. What about Twitter handles or email addresses? Have we already reached peak username? We already find ourselves often having to use abbreviations, initials, numbers or just choosing something completely different. Will our children or our children's children live in a world where the only remaining Gmail addresses is are just random strings of alphanumeric characters? Are we approaching a name crisis? And if so, should we even call it a name crisis, lest we use up yet another precious name? Maybe you already share your name with someone famous. But if you don't, how long will it be until you probably will? I mean, new famous people are popping up all the time faster now than ever before because of the Internet and they are gobbling up top Google search billing. Maybe it won't happen until long after you've been dead but shouldn't the reservoir names, not taken by notable people, eventually run out? Computer scientist Samuel Arbesman approximated how many famous people there are alive today and I think his calculation will be helpful. You see, he points out that if we allow "famous" to simply mean "being notable enough to have your own Wikipedia page", well, because there are 700,000 living people with Wikipedia pages right now, that means one out of every 10,000 people on earth today are famous. Assuming at the least that that proportion remains constant since 255 people are born every minute, that means every hour a future famous person is born. Their name destined to become primarily associated with them, not everyone else who shares their name. All of those people will be relegated to disambiguation or the post-nominal, not the famous one. Luckily, if you do the math, you'll find that even at a rate of one future famous person born every hour, it would still take dozens of millennia for most of us to expect a future famous person with our exact name to emerge. Plus names change. New ones become popular, others obsolesce, but for fun, let's not focus on names we popularly use and instead look at how many possible names there can be. The Social Security Administration allows up to 36 letters for a complete name. Now, including spaces, 27 letters filling 36 spots, with repetition allowed, means 3 sextillion possible combinations. That's more than Earth has atoms. So let's refine our limits. How many pronounceable names are possible? For that, I say we look at what Randall Munroe, the author of the fantastic 'What If?' did when asked about naming stars. If you want to give every single star in the observable universe a unique but pronounceable English name, how long would the names have to be? His approximation is really fascinating. If we define a pronounceable word as a word that contains consonant-vowel pairs, we can roughly figure that there are about 105 different such pair possibilities. 105. That's not too much different from 99. So, funny enough, there are about the same number of consonant-vowel pairs possible as there are two-digit numbers, which means we could give every star in the observable universe a sayable unique name with just 24 letters, the same number of digits it would take to just number all of them. So, the bottom line is we may each have to give up uniquely owning a word or name that's common today, but the potential number of names that can be made is really hardy. In fact, before we run out of those our species will likely evolve to communicate in a completely different way. Also, names aren't just labels. A name on a screen, a username, a handle, a screen name doesn't always act exactly like its owner. User names can travel more quickly and more widely than flesh-and-blood people and do things that their puppeteers wouldn't normally do away from the keyboard. It's called the online disinhibition effect. If you can't see the people you're interacting with and they can't see you, you're all just online hiding behind different names than usual, why hold back? I mean, clearly such a system can't be serious business. On the Internet no one knows you're a dog. Why be nice or tell the truth? The subreddit KarmaCourt investigates and uncovers people who may think that the less face-to-face nature of the Internet makes lies easier to get away with. Like this person, who posted an image suggesting that they've been single for a year but had users found out posted three months earlier a picture of my girlfriend's cat. These behaviors aren't just what humans do when they can be anonymous or can hide behind different names, these behaviors can also be caused by the names themselves. Studies have found that the username you use can impact how you behave. Your own pre-existing stereotypes and expectations of certain words, shapes, colors can be confirmed by your behavior, in the same way that studies have found NFL and NHL players play more aggressively when wearing black uniforms. Studies have also found that the more sexualized an avatar is you make someone use, the more conscious they will be of their own body image. And the more an avatar resembles you, the more correlated you watching it exercise is with you being more likely to exercise more. It's called the Proteus effect. The features of a cyberspace version of yourself, a username and avatar can actually change you, the meat space "IRL" you. Usernames and avatars then aren't just handles attached to us. Psychologically, we often interact with them as if they're friends, distinct beings we created. They help us out but they also can influence us, egg us on, dare us to do things we wouldn't normally do because they offer us protection, entertainment. Some make us feel safe, professional, funny, dangerous, attractive. We want cool ones. The cool ones make us look cool. As we go about our daily lives and vie for attention, we are more and more frequently doing so with another name and exclusively through that name only. So, it becomes quite interesting that we're not going to run out of them anytime soon. In fact, they might run out of us first and may, in many ways, run us. And as always, thanks for watching.

Am I Awesome?

Tobashi — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 20:39:50 +0000

Hey! Vsauce! Extraterrestrial baby monkey here!
Am I...awesome?
Yes! I'm completely huge, and...kinda immortal. And when I shit, I can fill an entire room. That is a lot of feces.
I like to think about plankton, which of course leads us to..YOU! I dont know what you're doing with your life; its a fairly simple question, you should be able to answer it. But...you are a thousand times dimmer than my cat. Just thinking about how far away you are from the rest of humanity, its sad. But dont bother crying over it, because your eyeballs are hopeless.
As for the rest of your body...its not 'human' shape...What are you? Do you smell that?...It might be...you. A person standing down wind from you might vomit. We humans are quite sensitive to your... smell.
You are merely poop, and so ugly, a blind person can see it...
And, as always, Go away

Hey vsauce

Tobashi — Fri, 06 Oct 2017 10:11:37 +0000

When... is green?
In 1859, noted French thespian Sarah Bernhardt famously declared: "Sometimes I like to lie down on my bed and dream of potatoes." Potatoes...
Potatoes were a currency among shoemakers during China's Tang dynasty. Tang... sounds suspiciously like the Pre-Columbian Arawak word 'Google', which means... calendar. Did Xi Dúo secretly sail over from Tang dynasty China to the Caribbean and tell them about calendars? Maybe...
But how... is 'and'? Albert Einstein once won a contest in Reader's Digest with the famous words "Seventeen is more than sixteen." Every school child in Bhutan is taught to recite this fact.

Where are your fingers ?

Tobashi — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 11:17:54 +0000

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. Where are your fingers? Seriously. It's a pretty easy question. You should be able to answer it. But how do you know? How does anyone know anything?
You might say, well, I know where my fingers are. I'm looking right at them. Or, I can touch them, I can feel them, they're right here and that's good. Your senses are a great way to learn things. In fact, we have way more than the usual five senses we talk about. For instance, your kinesthetic sense, proprioception. This is what the police evaluate during a field sobriety test. It allows you to tell where your fingers and arms and head and legs in your body is all in relation to each other without having to look or touch other things. We have way more than five senses, we have at least twice as many and then some. But they're not perfect.
There are optical illusions, audio illusions, temperature sensation illusions, even tactile illusions. Can you turn your tongue upside down? If so, perfect. Try this. Run your finger along the outer edge of the tip of your upside down tongue. Your tongue will be able to feel your finger, but in the wrong place. Our brains never needed to develop an understanding of upside down tongue touch. So, when you touch the right side of your tongue when it's flipped over to your left side you perceive a sensation on the opposite side, where your tongue usually is but isn't when it's upside down. It's pretty freaky and cool and a little humbling, because it shows the limits of the accuracy of our senses, the only tools we have to get what's out there in here.
The philosophy of knowledge, the study of knowing, is called epistemology. Plato famously said that the things we know are things that are true, that we believe and that we have justification for believing. those justifications might be irrational or they might be rational, they might be based on proof, but don't get too confident because proven is not a synonym for true. Luckily, there are things that we can know without needing proof, without needing to even leave the house, things that we can know as true by reason alone. These are things that we know a priori. An example would be the statement "all bachelors are unmarried." I don't have to go survey every bachelor on earth to know that that is true. All bachelors are unmarried because that's how we define the word bachelor. Of course, you have to know what the words bachelor and unmarried mean in the first place. Oh, you do? Okay. Perfect. That's great. But how do you know?
This time I mean functionally, how do you know? Where is knowledge biologically in the brain? What are memories made out of? We are a long way from being able to answer that question completely but research has shown that memories don't exist in the brain in single locations. Instead, what we call a memory is likely made up of many different complex relationships all over the brain between lots of brain cells, neurons. A major cellular mechanism thought to underlie the formation of memories is long-term potentiation or LTP. When one neuron stimulates another neuron repeatedly that signal can be enhanced overtime LTP, wiring them more strongly together and that connection can last a long time, even an entire lifetime. A collection of different brain cells, neurons that fire together in a particular order over and over again frequently and repeatedly can achieve long-term potentiation, becoming more sensitive to each other and more ready to fire in the exact same way later on in the future. They're a physical thing in your brain, firing together more easily because you strengthen that pattern of firing. You memorized. This branching forest of firing friends looks messy, but look closer. It could be the memory of your first kiss. A living souvenir of the event. If I were to go into your brain and cut out those cells, could I make you forget your first kiss or could I make you forget where your fingers are? Only if I cut out a lot of your brain. Because memories aren't just stored in one relationship, they're stored all over the brain. The events leading up to your first kiss are stored in one network, the way it felt to the way it smelled in different networks, all added up together making what you call the memory of your first kiss.
How many memories can you fit inside your head? What is the storage capacity of the human brain? The best we can do is a rough estimate, but given the number of neurons in the brain involved with memory and the number of different connections a single neuron can make Paul Reber at Northwestern University estimated that we can store the digital equivalent of about 2.5 petabytes of information. That's the equivalent of recording a TV channel continuously for 300 years. That's a lot of information. That is a lot of information about skills you can do and facts and people you've met, things in the real world. The world is real, right? How do you know?
It's a difficult question, but it's not rocket science. Instead, it is asking whether or not rocket scientists even exist in the first place. The theory that the Sun moved around the earth worked great. It predicted that the Sun would rise every morning and it did. It wasn't until later that we realized what we thought was true might not be. So, do we or will we ever know true reality or are we stuck in a world where the best we can do is be approximately true? Discovering more and more useful theories every day but never actually reaching true objective actual reality. Can science or reason ever prove convincingly that your friends and YouTube videos and your fingers actually exist beyond your mind? That you don't just live in the matrix?
No. Your mind is all that you have, even if you use instruments, like a telescope or particle accelerators. The final stop for all of that information is ultimately you. You are alone in your own brain, which technically makes it impossible to prove that anything else exists. It's called the egocentric predicament. Everything you know about the world out there depends on and is created inside your brain. This mattered so much to Charles Sanders Peirce that he drew a line between reality, the way the universe truly is, and what he called the phaneron, the world as filtered through our senses and bodies, the only information we can get. If you want to speak with certainty you live in, that is you react to and remember and experience your phaneron, not reality. The belief that only you exist and everything else, food, the universe, your friends are all figments of your mind is called solipsism. There is no way to convince a solipsist that the outside world is real. And there is no way to convince someone who doubts that the universe wasn't created just three seconds ago along with all of our memories. It's a frightening realization that we don't always know how to deal with. There's even The Matrix defense.
In 2002 Tonda Lynn Ansley shot and killed her landlady. She argued that she believed she was in the matrix, that her crimes weren't real. By using the matrix defense, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity, because the opposite view is just way healthier and common. It's called realism. Realism is the belief that the outside world exists independently of your own phaneron. Rocks and stars and Thora Birch would continue to exist even if you weren't around to experience them. But you cannot know realism is true. All you can do is believe.
Martin Gardner, a great source for math magic tricks, explained that he is not a solipsist because realism is just way more convenient and healthy and it works. As to whether it bothered him that he could never know realism was true, he wrote, "If you ask me to tell you anything about the nature of what lies beyond the phaneron, my answer is how should I know? I'm not dismayed by ultimate mysteries, I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph." Humble stuff. What strikes me is the cat.
Cats do not understand keyboards, but they know the keyboards are a fun place to be. It's a great way to get the attention of a human, they're warm and exciting, surrounded by noises and flashing lights plus cats love to get their scent on whatever they can, a mark of their existence. We aren't that much different, except instead of keyboards we have the mysteries of the universe. We will never be able to understand all of them.