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In 8 BC, the Roman senate passed a resolution renaming the month of Sextillis to August to honor the emperor Augustus. 

They chose Sextillis, which was the sixth month in the calendar because it was the month that he conquered Egypt.

Fast forward several centuries and August had a permanent place on the calendar. 

With that, prepare yourself for the August installment of Questions and Answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Let’s jump right into this month’s questions. 

The first comes from Brian Faulkner, who asks, “The name of your podcast is quite similar to a very successful movie… Was there any fallout (positive or negative) from the publicity during and following the buildup, premier, and theatrical run?”

For the record, Brian, I began using the phrase Everything Everywhere back in 2005, well before the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once was ever conceived. 

As anyone can verify by doing a WhoIS search, I registered the domain name Everything-Everywhere.com on April 17, 2005. I had previously decided to sell my house to travel around the world, and I knew I was going to have a website associated with the trip. I came up with the name while I was in my car, thinking of possible names to use. 

Once I came up with Everything Everywhere, I knew instantly that it was the name I was going to use. What I didn’t do, which I now regret, was register the domain name without a dash. It would have cost me $2000 to get it, which seemed like a lot, but I had no idea I’d still be using the name almost 20 years later.

I decided to stick with the name when I made this podcast. 

The movie wasn’t the first time some other entity used the name. In 2010, T-Mobile and Orange Mobile merged in the UK, and the name of their new company was Everything Everywhere. They eventually stopped using the name and now just go be EE Mobile. 

I had a lawyer look into what options I had, and basically, there was nothing I could do to them and nothing they could do to me. We were completely different business in different countries, so there was no confusion as to the name. 

As for the movie, I’d say it was almost entirely positive. A few people I know discovered the podcast when searching for the movie.

The only downside is that some people, not knowing the history, think I took the name of the podcast from the movie, which is not the case. 

Matt Bitner asks I’ve been enjoying your other podcast, Respecting the Beer. What is your go-to type of beer?

For those of you who don’t know, I am hosting another podcast with my friend and astrophysicist-turned-brewer, Bobby Fleshman, called Respecting the Beer. The podcast covers the science, history, and culture of beer and brewing. 

Bobby is a truly fantastic brewer, and he makes a wide variety of beers in every style you can imagine. Stouts, ales, lagers, pilsners, sours, cask beers, nitro beers, and many many others. His brewpub will usually have about 20 different beers on tap, with other beers rotating throughout the year. 

My favorite beer is usually something that changes throughout the year. Right now, I’ve been having gose. Gose is a slightly sour, lemony beer with a low alcohol content. It is great to have in the summer.

In the fall, I’ll probably shift to the Oktoberfest beers that come out that time of year. 

I am a big fan of barrel-aged beers, which I never really had until relatively recently. These are beers that are usually aged for about a year in used bourbon barrels. I can’t really drink more than about 7 oz and it is more for sipping.

Along those lines, my absolute favorite is Eisbock. Eisbock is a barrel-aged doppelbock that is stored outside and frozen in the winter. It is made in very limited quantities and is very rare.

The reason why it is so hard to find in the United States is that, legally, letting beer free is considered freeze-distillation, which requires a distilling license, not a brewing license, even though it requires absolutely no distilling equipment. 

However, if you import Eisbock, it is imported as a beer, not a spirit. 

Tim DeLong asks,  You often mention the NFL. As an avid fan of auto racing, I’d like to know if you’ve ever been to an auto race, either in the US or abroad? Road America, in Elk Heart Lake, Wisconsin, is a stunning venue. However, I’m partial to the Mid-Ohio Sports Car course. 

Well, Tim, I wouldn’t consider myself to be an auto racing fan per se. I don’t really follow the support other than occasionally checking a few times a year to see who is leading the Formula One or NASCAR standings. 

That being said, I have attended several races. Growing up, my dad used to take me to the Wisconsin International Raceway, which is where the great Dick Trickle used to race. 

In the course of my travels, I’ve attended two races. I attended the Grand Prix of Europe in Valencia, Spain, in 2011 where I had the opportunity to ride in an actual Formula One car that was retrofitted to allow passengers to sit between the wheels. 

I also attended a Formula E event in Riyad, Saudi Arabia, in 2018. 

For both events, I was accredited as media, so I had access to the paddocks and I was able to see how everything worked behind the scenes. 

Believe it or not, I’ve never been to Road America, even though I don’t live that far away. For those who don’t know what it is, Road America is probably the top road racing track in North America, and it hosts multiple racing events throughout the year. 

TwoBuck Howie asks,  All my life, I was told that there is nothing that can go faster than the speed of light. Then I heard a physicist say that galaxies are moving away from each other faster and faster until one day, they will be moving away from each other faster than the speed of light. Then I see online that a different physicist claims 4 things that are faster than the speed of light. Is there anything that moves faster than light? Is Einstein’s theory incorrect?

As far as we know, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. As say, “as far as we know” because you always have to leave open the possibility of some future discovery. 

When we say nothing can go faster than the speed of light, we are referring to a fixed starting point. If you turned on a flashlight in space, the photons from the flashlight would move at the speed of light from the flashlight. 

Now, let’s say the flashlight could shoot light in opposite directions at the same time. The photons from each end would travel from the flashlight at the speed of light. 

However, the photons would travel away from each other at two times the speed of light. Neither photon is traveling faster than the speed of light relative to their starting position in the flashlight. 

The fastest the space between two moving objects can increase is two times the speed of light. 

In the example you gave of galaxies, there is another wrinkle. In that case, space itself is expanding between the galaxies, which I confess is a very difficult thing to get your head around.

This is a much bigger subject that I can answer on a Q&A episode, but suffice it to say no object or energy can go faster than light, but that doesn’t hold for space between objects. 

Larry Slavens asks, Since I was slow in asking last month… Did you attend concerts in your younger days in Wisconsin and Minnesota? Favorite or notable shows? Did you attend concerts on your world travels, and if so, were they US/international acts, or did you seek out local acts?

This answer is going to make me very unpopular, and I know that I am in the minority in this subject, but the truth is, I really do not like live music or attending concerts. 

I have been to some concerts, and I did not enjoy the experience. I hate large crowds, and I hate loud noise. 

I had a friend take me to see Prince when he opened up his Lovesexy tour in 1988 at the Met Center in Minnesota. I went to see Guns and Roses at the Target Center in 1992. 

I’m not into bands and performers like other people are. I am the opposite personality type of a person who might be a passionate Taylor Swift fan today. 

That being said, if it was a very small venue and if the sound wasn’t amplified, I’d have no problem attending. This would be something like a jazz club or an orchestra hall. 

The great Canadian classical pianist Glen Gloud held the belief that the advent of high-quality recordings basically made live performances obsolete. I’m sympathetic to the idea, although I understand the appeal of a live performance. 

For me, it boils down to disliking large crowds and loud music. 

Jesus Chan asks,  Hello again from Laredo, Texas Gary and you’ll be glad to know that this question does not involve aliens. Do thoughts, ideas, dreams, and memories have physical weight or mass? If not, then how are they, like memories able to persist or exist for an entire lifetime?

That is a fair question, Jesus. Information doesn’t require mass. It requires energy. 

When you put data on a hard drive, the hard drive doesn’t get heavier. You are using energy to organize the magnetic bits on the drive, assuming its a magnetic drive, in such a way that the information can be read. 

If you write something down on paper with a pen, the total mass of the pen/paper system is the same. What you are doing is providing energy to provide order to the ink to store information. 

Think about it if you have a collection of letters for a letter board. What is required to turn those letters from a random collection into something legible is the energy to put the letters into some sort of order. No mass has to be added to the letters. 

The same process goes on in your brain.  Your brain uses a tremendous amount of energy. Your brain uses energy to build new circuits and connections between neurons, which is how memories are stored.  

So, memories do not have mass any more than the data on a hard drive has mass. It uses energy to provide order to previously existing bits of matter. 

Jana Elsea asks When you travel, do you prefer hard side or soft side bags? Checked or carry on, Rolling or carry? Also, how many passport stamps/additional passport pages do you have? 

During the entirety of my travels, I used a soft-sided bag. My primary bag for much of that time was an Eagle Creek Gear Warrior. I always checked that bag when I flew. 

The reason why I checked a bag is because I had to. I lived on the road, and I couldn’t fit everything into a single carry-on. My tripod also made it impossible to have a smaller bag that I could fit in an overhead bin.

The only times I’ve had problems with my checked bag, I could count on one hand. Three of those incidents involved Air Canada.  

I have no idea how many stamps I have. I have used three passports in the course of my travels, and my second passport has three extra sets of pages, which is something you can’t do anymore. 

Nikcap, from over on the Discord sever asks, your episode on statistics got me thinking why do we have to learn advanced math in school.  When will I ever need to know what a sine or cosine is, or what the quadratic equation is used for.  These are grips I hear from high school students and their parents, but I don’t really know what the good arguments are to support the learning of high school mathematics.

There are several things I’d say:

First, you don’t know what career you will have when you are in school. It is easy to look backward and say, “I don’t need to know that.” However, it is impossible to look forward and know what you will need to know. 

If you don’t study math, or science, or history, or anything for that matter, you are basically locking yourself out of a host of possible careers before you ever get a chance even to make that choice. 

If you use the “I don’t use that knowledge” as the basis for what to learn, then for most people, you don’t have to learn anything beyond basic arithmetic and literacy. We could go back to not having to get anything beyond a 6th-grade education. 

The second thing is that it is worthwhile to learn some things because they teach you a system of thinking. Mathematics teaches you how to think rigorously. I’ve gotten value from almost everything I’ve ever studied, not because I use it every day but because it is a way to think about the world. 

I’ve talked to many adults who feel that they are “not good at math.” This is almost entirely based on their experience in high school because. I always suggest they go back and try learning it again as an adult. Try learning it without the pressure of getting grades or taking a test. There are plenty of resources online to help you do this.

There are free courses at Khan Academy, for example, which will take you from 1+1=2 all the way through college-level mathematics. If you don’t understand something, you can find other sources online to explain it in a different way. 

Finally, I do think that we should change how we teach mathematics. I’m very open to the idea that we should put a higher priority on statistics, which most people do encounter every day, rather than calculus. 

That concludes questions and answers for this month. If you would like to submit a question next month just join the Facebook group or the Discord server, links to both of which are in the show notes.