Subscribe
Apple | Spotify | Amazon | iHeart Radio | Player.FM | TuneIn
Castbox | Podurama | Podcast Republic | RSS | Patreon

Podcast Transcript

Thirty days hath September, and on 29 of those days, I’ll run normal episodes.

But for one day, I will turn the microphone over to you and answer your questions…..and that day is today. 

So stay tuned for another episode of Questions and Answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Let’s jump right into the questions. 

The first question comes from Patricia Kemmer, who asks,
“Why do lithium-ion batteries catch fire?  Love your podcast.”

First, lithium-ion batteries catching fire is rare, but it can happen. It is due to something known as thermal runaway. 

It starts when there is some sort of damage to the battery. This could be physical damage, such as a cut in the outer skin of the battery. It could also come up with a manufacturing defect or an internal short circuit.

These defects can cause a localized temperature increase where the damage occurs. The temperature increase can cause defects to occur in adjacent parts of the batter, which can then cause more defects, more temperature increases, and so on.

This is how it becomes a runaway effect. This can be made worse if as the temperatures increase, the gasses which are produced are trapped inside the enclosed battery increasing pressure. 

This is one of the many reasons why researchers are trying to develop solid-state batteries that don’t have a liquid or gel electrolyte. In addition to having higher energy density, they would also be much safer. 

This is also why you should never use a damaged lithium-ion battery. 

Again, this is a pretty rare phenomenon and, for the most part, easy to avoid.

Davan Woolley asks, Hadrian’s wall is 73 miles long what would that be in Roman miles? What’s the difference?

Good question, Davan.

A Roman mile is close to the imperial mile that we still use in the US and the UK. In fact, the imperial mile was based on the Roman mile. 

The Roman mile was called a mille. In Latin, mille is just the world for one thousand. 

The Roman mille came from the fact that it was measured to be 1000 paces. The Romans measured a pace by the number of times your left foot was set down. We might measure a pace as one step, but the Romans would have measured it with two steps. 

As you can probably guess, this was a very inaccurate method of measurement. The length of the mille was based on the length of a pace, which depended on the person’s stride. 

Agrippa, the number two guy to Augustus on whom I’ve done a previous podcast, standardized the Roman foot to….his foot. He also defined a pace as five feet, which made the Roman mile 5000 Roman feet. 

It is believed, based on distances between Roman mile markers, that the Roman mile was 91.9% of an imperial mile.  So, Hadrians Wall would be 79.4 Roman miles. 

In England, the old mile was based on 5000 feet, but they had a different definition of a foot.

Under Queen Elizabeth I they modified the mile to being eight furlongs which ended up being 5,280 feet. The change was made for tax reasons. 

The origin of Imperial Units should probably be its own episode because all of the units have such a bizarre origin.

Megan Sandmann asks, I assume tasting the local cuisine and photographing major attractions are of top priority when you are traveling. Is there anything else you prioritize doing at all the locations you visit?

One of the big things I did when traveling was visit UNESCO World Heritage Sites. There current 1223 World Heritage sites and I’ve visited a 412. Some are very easy to visit and some are incredibly hard. 

Most UNESCO Sites have some sort of cultural or natural significance, and that is what usually draws me to visit somewhere. 

Food isn’t nearly as big of an attraction as most people think it is. You can eat many types of cuisine and many different places, and much of it is quite good. For example, Chinese and Indian restaurants can be found everywhere around the world, as can sushi. 

That is not to say you can’t have good culinary experiences in certain places, but food is something that can be transported easily. Cultural, historic, and natural sites cannot.

Susan K Emerson writes,  Hi Gary Arndt long time listeners here, Eliza (11) Nellie (8) and mom. We are wondering if you could go back in time to when you were a kid what would be the place you would most want to travel and why.

If you were ask me when I was 8 or 11, I probably would have wanted to go to Disney World. 

If you asked me when I was 13 or 14, I would have definitely said Cape Canaveral to see a space shuttle launch. 

I should add that my family didn’t travel very much so both of those things were never really options.  

Now, however, as an adult, if I could retroactively fund some sort of travel for my younger self, I would have tried to go to someplace that doesn’t exist anymore. Perhaps go visit West Berlin before the wall fell down.

Mike Varoz asks Gary, have you ever visited or crossed the Boundary Waters connecting Minnesota and Canada? Is there an episode on the area? Your library is getting vast – is there a better way to search than asking in Q&A?

To answer the first part of your question, I have been to the boundary waters. I visited Vouyagers National Park and I did one of their boat tours that go into the park. There are sectionis of the tour where you actually, technically cross into Canada in the middle of the lake, but there is no one around the check. 

The Kettle Falls Hotel Bar is one of the most interesting places in the park and very hard to get to.

As for searching past episodes, If you go to my website Everything-Everywhere.com, I have a page with all 1500 episodes on a single page. It is easy to search by title. 

There is also a search function which lets you search the script of every episode. 

I will confess that the search functionality isn’t great. I had an AI tool that would read all of my scripts and answer questions on the Discord server, but it no longer works.

I’m looking at putting in a similar AI search functionality on the website because I too find my current search setup very frustrating when I want to look for something. 

Right now there are a ton of AI search tools available and I just need to find a good one that works well.

Derrin Brown asks How do you combat and filter miss information? aka fake news?

This is one of the most important skills that someone can learn and it isn’t easy to do. It takes constant practice and diligence. 

The first step is to be skeptical of everything. Don’t just blindly accept anything you read or hear.

One good start is to start applying Betteridge’s law of headlines to articles you read. Betteridge’s law of headlines states that any headline that is a question can be answered with “no.”  That is because if it were true, they wouldn’t need to phrase it as a question. 

Don’t assume that someone you agree with generally is always right and that someone you disagree with is always wrong. They might be wrong for reasons that are true, but they draw the wrong conclusions. 

By the same token, someone might be right for the wrong reasons. 

Sometimes, it can be hard to know if something is right. Even if you think something is right, I would never accept it 100%. I’d always accept the possibility that it might be wrong. 

One of the things I try to do is to have a working hypothesis rather than an opinion. Once people develop an opinion, they have a natural tendency to stick to it nad defenend it, even in the face of evidence which might be contrary.

However, if you hold something as a hypothesis, then you are much more likely to be willing to modify your position and would be less willing to defend it to the death. 

Finally, sublty and nuance is important. There is always a desire to make things black and white, but the truth is usually not so simple.

Randy Ryan What motivates you to keep pumping the fantastic podcasts out day after day? Can’t be the money, or can it?

Well, the podcast is my livelihood at this point, and that certainly is a motivation. 

However, I’m in a fortunate position to be doing something I think i’m well suited for and something I enjoy. That is something that few people can say. 

It is a lot of work, I can’t deny that, but there are a lot of people out there who go to work every day and put in just as much time under much worse conditions than me. 

Angela Acuna asks, Do you play any video games? If so, what do you play?

The game I spent the most time playing, by far, is World of Warcraft Classic. I am in the top horde raiding guild on the Mankrik server, and my primary character is an undead priest. 

I also play turned based or real time strategy games. Age of Empiers II, Rome Total War, and Civilization V. All of those games are pretty old I realize, but they are also, I think the best version of those games. 

Jesus Chan asks Gary, greetings from Laredo, Texas, the once capital of the Republic of the Rio Grande! With all the excitement around human space exploration and the prospects of traveling to the Moon and Mars, what do you believe is the most critical issue we must address to ensure success? Is it a medical advancement to protect the human body in space, the development of a revolutionary propulsion system, the creation of artificial gravity, or something entirely different?

That is a very good question. There is a lot that we don’t know about making such a trip.

For starters, we have only sent 18 humans beyond low earth orbit. All 18 were part of the Apollo program and they spent a very limited amount of time beyond low Earth orbit. 

This is important because the further away you get from Earth and our protective magnetic field, the more radiation you will experience in the form of solar wind and cosmic rays. We have zero experience of human beings in interplanetary space. 

The second problem is gravity. We’ve had many people now who have spent extended periods in zero gravity. While they can survive in that environment it isn’t ideal. Extended time in zero gravity results in bone loss, muscle atrophy, and a host of other problem. 

Artificial gravity seems like an easy solution, but we’ve never actually tried it before. At some point, we are going to need some sort of revolving space station with artificial gravity if nothing more than as a proof of concept. 

Finally, in terms of propulsion, if you remember back to my episode on the subject, nuclear rockets could dramatically reduce the time it takes to get to Mars. If we had a nuclear rocket, the first trip there might be a quick there and back to plant the flag and declare victory. 

However, in the long run, you’d probably need to send supplies up beforehand for an extended stay base. Something close to the movie The Martian with Matt Damon…although the dust storms in the movie were highly exaggerated. The air pressure is too low to do that much damage.

In terms of the moon, because it has no atmosphere, you’d probably want to put a base either in a lava tube or at least cover it with lunar soil to protect it from radiation. 

Stephen Hultgren asks What is the most interesting or unique sporting event you’ve seen while traveling?

That is easy. I got to witness a Buzkashi game on the shores of Song-Kul up in the Tien Shan Mountains of Kyrgyzstan.

Buzkashi is a traditional Central Asian sport where horse-mounted players compete to grab and place a goat or sheep carcass in a goal. 

I’ve also watched people playing sepak takraw in Bangkok. Sepak takraw is basically like volleyball, except you can’t use your hands. 

My last question comes from Abdelrahman Wael asks, Hey Gary, love the show. I have two questions: why do you make more episodes on ancient Rome than on ancient Greece, and who do you think was more influential in the history of human civilization?

There are more episodes about Rome than Greece simply because there is more writing that has been preserved, and there is more drama and stories that come from Rome.

Rome was a unified empire with powerful rules that lasted centuries. Greece was, save for the very short period of Macedonian rule, a collection of city-states. 

Rome was heavily influenced by Greece, but that was mostly cultural. Most wealthy Romans had Greek tutors for their children. Most of the influence that ancient Greece had on the world was through and because of the Romans who they influenced.

Also, Christianity arose during the Roman period, and that alone had a lasting legacy that we often forget. Latin was the lingua franca for centuries in Europe in a way that Greek never was. 

That concludes this month’s questions and answers.

I just want to notify everyone that for the first time since I’ve started this podcast, I’m going to go on an actual vacation. I’m taking a week off and going to get in my car and travel somewhere up in the north woods. I’m not attending a conference or anything else work-related that I normally do when I have to take a week off.

My goal is to catch up on sleep, which I’ve been seriously lacking, as well as explore some places I haven’t been in a long time.

So with that, the next week will be encore episodes. I’ve taken a poll over the Facebook group and I’ll be running some of the episodes that people have. 

I will be back with brand new episodes on September 9.