 This is TWIS, this week in Science Episode Number 577, recorded on Wednesday, July 27th, 2016. Space is not a taco. Hey everyone, I am Dr. Kiki and we are here once again to fill your heads with dingoes, spinning gas, and curbs, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The future is not here yet. Yes, we discovered the Higgs. Yes, we can cut, slice and program DNA and RNA. Yes, there are self-driving cars. Yes, the most powerful computer you have ever purchased fits in your pocket. Yes, the first black president of the United States served two terms, and yes, he is likely to be replaced by the first female president. But this is just the present day. The future has much more in store for us. Not all of it is positive, but so much of it is positive that we will propel ourselves into the future knowing that there are obstacles, and knowing that we are alive in the generation that overcomes them, the generation that solves hard problems, and applies easy solutions to problems that never should have stood as obstacles to begin with. The future isn't here yet, but it is about to be. Here on This Week in Science, coming up next. What's happening? What's happening? What's happening this week in science? Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And we have a guest. We do have a guest, and good science to you, Justin Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are here yet again to discuss the world of science, to learn things, lots and lots of things, and really, we're going to talk a lot about space tonight. We've got great news because we have a guest, the one, the only, the wonderful Philip Plate, the bad astronomer himself, and he'll be joining us to discuss science and space and wonderful things like that. But other than that, I have more stories about space, and then I also have stories about brains and other things. Justin, what'd you bring? I've just got oily palms. That's what I like. Yeah, but what did you bring for the show? That's what I brought for the show, oily palms. Oh, that's it. One story, oily palms. It's a big story. I was ready for more, and then there was it. Alright, Blair, what's in the animal corner tonight? Oh, I have animal cannibals. I have sloths that are sloths. And I have lichen that took a lichen to something we didn't know. I love all these things. I'm so excited to talk about all of them. But first, let's dive right into some space news. We've got some fun news coming from outer space. And, Phil, if you want to pipe in, chime in on any of these stories at any point in time, please feel free to give us your two cents, because your two cents is more like, I don't know, 10 or 20 cents. It's like 30 cents. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, don't sell them short. It's 30. Okay, so really interesting news. Researchers at Boston University Center for Space Physics have reported in Nature that they looked at Jupiter's great red spot. In fact, they actually just looked at all of Jupiter, and they're trying to figure out why the upper atmosphere of Jupiter is so hot. It's really hot, but Jupiter's really far away from the sun, so it doesn't get as much solar energy for that upper atmospheric heating. So there's got to be some kind of heat coming from down within the planet of Jupiter, all those hot gases. But somehow they're mixing upwards, and the researchers are trying to figure out how that happens. So they looked at the infrared radiation around the planet to be able to get an idea of where heat was building up. And do you know where it decided to collect? Do you have any guess on the entire planet of Jupiter where something hot spot might be? Hang on, let me guess. I only know of one spot on Jupiter. Can I guess that that's the spot? Yeah, the great red spot marks the spot. So they were looking about 500 miles higher than the cloud tops that you can see in those pretty pictures of Jupiter, looking at non-visible infrared light that was being emitted by the planet, and they found that it collected right over the great red spot. And so what they believe is happening is that the spinning of the great red spot is mixing, and it's actually allowing for an upward vortex that is taking non-solar energy of heat energy and taking it up out of the planet, out of the gas cloud, and into that upper atmosphere to heat it up. But I'm guessing that maybe this is the kind of thing that we can take a look at with Juno, as Juno is collecting information. So anyway, the implications for this that are kind of exciting are being able to look not just at Jupiter, but at other planets, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and maybe even all giant exoplanets outside of our solar system, that might have this heat transfer and that there might be mechanisms like the great red spot, a perpetual hurricane that can drag heat from one location to another. So if I got this right then, the heat near the surface of the planet must be much, much hotter. But this red spot is kicking that heat up and pushing it up into the atmosphere. It's just redirecting it or sort of pulling it, funnelling it up to that specific area. Yeah, and then it's radiating out, exactly. So yeah, it's like a heat funnel. The great red spot is like a heat funnel to the outer atmosphere of Jupiter. And is that what's keeping it going too? Like is that heat, is it like a heart hurt? Right, so is that one of the reasons that it continues? Is it because it's actually acting as part of the overall movement, a heat generator and heat engine or a heat transfer engine for the atmosphere? Don't know. Yeah, so they're going to keep looking at those kinds of questions. Additionally, moving further out, but we're taking pictures, not pictures, radio pictures, using LIGO, the LIGO-VERGO collaboration. We have spoken of several times as detecting these gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes, and it's not happened once but twice now. And this is exciting news. So researchers are kind of going to the drawing board and going, so what kinds of black holes could these be? Could LIGO have detected primordial black holes? Primordial black holes are kind of this cool class of black holes because they didn't form from the collapse of a star or a celestial body. They formed just from the collapse of a dense area of gassy space. So it was like after the Big Bang when things started cooling off and collecting into clumps and not really being big stars yet, but these primordial black holes could have formed from just the matter where there are places with lots of matter. And so they'd be the oldest black holes. And if we saw them merging and got gravitational waves from primordial black holes, that could potentially tell us interesting things about the moments shortly quote-unquote after the beginning of our universe. And when it makes sense to have, because that's what black holes are, they're massive collections of matter, and when the universe was more dense, it was easier probably to collect that matter. It was already closer by. It was easier to absorb or get the black holes started. So it's actually a bit surprising that a black hole could even form now in the sort of desperately undense regions of space as we're becoming more and more rural with our address in the universe every day. So yeah. And then go ahead. It's being done differently now. That's what Kiki was saying. You can form black holes now from the collapse of very massive stars. That's one way. There are some other little bit tougher ways. We also think they formed along with galaxies, some of these supermassive black holes that formed at the same time the galaxies did 10 or 12 billion years ago. But these primordial black holes would have formed because when the universe was moments after it was born, it was very dense, like you said. The stuff is denser, so it's easier to form a black hole. Plus the forces that were being tossed around were so huge that just a little ripple in the fabric of space and time could compress something and make it form a little tiny black hole. And that's something that can't happen now, but then there weren't stars back then either to form black holes the way they are now. So things were different and we get different kinds of black holes. And so are those primordial black holes what we would think is the foundation of like a quasar or something that's at the center of a galaxy that sort of is pulled as much matter around it as it's going to devour in one meal, I guess in a couple billion years. And now the rest of that matter that didn't quite get pulled in but didn't get yanked in somewhere else is what's forming the galaxy around that nucleus? Or do these come much later? I would say the galaxy's come much later. The galaxy's actually formed around, as we understand it, filaments and ribbons that are hundreds of millions of light years long of dark matter that actually collected after the universe cooled enough for this stuff to be able to do that. And then the normal matter basically was drawn towards that and that's what collapsed to form galaxies with these black holes in the center. The Japanese researchers who are talking about the possibility that LIGO and Virgo actually detected the merger of primordial black holes. They say the detected gravitational waves were created from a merger of two black holes 30 times the mass of the sun. It's extremely rare for such massive black holes to form in the present day universe. And after this announcement, many astrophysicists started considering how such heavy black holes were created and how such black hole binaries were formed. And so the theoretical models about the beginning of the universe are still hotly contested, they say. Some models necessarily predict the existence of primordial black holes so their discovery could help unlock important clues about the universe's early days. So what we need is more LIGO data. That's what we need. More data, more data. And then my final spacey intro story. I got all themed up because Phil was here today. Really neat study funded by NASA actually using though the European Space Agency's XMM Newton telescope. They published a paper in Astrophysical Journal looking at the hot gas halo that is around the Milky Way Galaxy. So basically looking outward from the Milky Way to determine what the gas cloud around the Milky Way is doing. Don't really have an idea. Some people have thought it's just a gas cloud sitting there around the Milky Way. Well, looking at this gas cloud with this telescope they were able to observe shifts around the sky using lines of very hot oxygen and they were looking at the shift in the wavelength of the light to be able to determine how it was moving. What they found is that the halo is spinning and it's spinning in the same direction as the Milky Way and it's spinning pretty fast. We're spinning at around 540,000 miles per hour. Oh, sorry. We're spinning. The disc of the Milky Way is about 540,000 miles per hour and the halo of gas is spinning at about 400,000 miles per hour. So we're surrounded by a hot spinning cloud of dusty gas. And what they're trying to figure out from this is how matter came out of the original gas cloud from which the Milky Way formed. So we had a gas cloud. Eventually matter started settling out. The matter settled out, turned into this flat spinning disc. The flat spinning disc kept spinning up because it mattered in acceleration and all that. And all of a sudden we have the congealing and the forming of the stars and the solar systems within the Milky Way galaxy. So now we can look at this and try and determine the future of our galaxy. What's going to happen to all the matter in the galaxy? And the spinning of the gas could maybe give us clues as to that future. The destiny of the Milky Way galaxy is within our grasp. No, maybe not. It might be reaching a little bit. There it is. I found a picture. Something you said reminded me of something. And happily, oh my gosh, I just looked this up on the web and what do I find, my own blog. Okay, now I have to figure out how to do a screen share and talk amongst yourselves. Click the little screen, there's a little green TV screen. There it is. This one, share. What are we getting? Am I screen sharing? You are screen sharing. So the picture that you're seeing is a far infrared shot of the Milky Way galaxy. You're seeing dust basically. And this is all along the disc of the galaxy. And the bottom left there is this blue bubbly thing. That is what's called a blowout. Something has happened there, either winds from stars or supernova, stars exploded or something. And that has blown out of all of this junk and is sending gas and other material out into the halo of the galaxy. So the halo of the galaxy is a lot of stuff left over from when the galaxy formed. But it's also being replenished by the galaxy itself. And the last I read, and it's been a while since I read about this, it's unclear how much of all of this is contributing to what's out there now. There are other effects too. There's these gigantic bubbles. And I mean gigantic, like 10% of the size of the galaxy getting blown out of the center of the galaxy. And nobody was really sure what was causing those. And it turns out it's stars being born. When you form millions and millions of stars, they blow out all of this material. And you get these two bubbles, one blowing out of the top and one blowing out of the bottom of the galaxy. And it's not clear if that stuff's just going to settle back down into the galaxy, fall back in like a fountain, or if it's going to go back out into the halo or not. If anybody knows the answer, go ahead and put it on Twitter. I'm not exactly up to speed with all this. It's hard to keep up with everything going on. It's so interesting also to think of us as in this disk, that we're not in some kind of ball structure. We're in a disk, and that disk is flat. And like you said, we have the... When a star is born, you have gas that blows out on either side of the disk. We're really all around it. And so you have that gas cloud that's kind of ringed around our little disk. What do we need to know? I want to know, as we leave the Milky Way Galaxy and enter all these different speeds of movement, if we sent a ship from our solar system, out of our solar system into the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy and then out of the Milky Way Galaxy, how would you deal with all of those changes in speed? So relative then. It's all relative. I don't know. It really is. How we don't really feel the speed of the planet spinning, which is in the solar system that's spinning in a galaxy that's spinning in a galaxy. I don't know what direction our galaxy is moving. How fast is the galaxy moving separate from the spin? Maybe it's in a big hub of other galaxies that are also spinning, and everything now is spinning. It's all relative, so the answer is zero. Zero. Alright, this is... Oh, he has a lot of likes, Kai. How much subscribers? Look at this little media intern over here. Social media mogul already. This is science, Justin, what you got? There is a menace that is threatening forests across four continents. It is a threat that only leads to massive deforestation, but to the species that live in them, regardless of protected status. It is rapidly destroying habitats, reducing biodiversity, and increasing greenhouse emissions at the same time as reducing the planet's ability to deal with rising carbon levels. The dangerous nature of this culprit has been detailed in the Public Library of Science Online and a new Duke University-led study. Hey, Justin, you turned into a robot. Did I really? Oh, hang on. Yeah, you're a Cylon at the moment. Okay. The chat room is now saying, oh no, he's no robots. He's gone toaster. Skin job. That's right. The menace of cyborg, Justin. And he has a plan. He'd better have a plan. He's looking... Yeah. I loved that show until the very end. Ruined. Ruined at the end. Let me hear you, Justin. Now I can't hear you at all. No. Okay, we're going to go to Blair's Animal Corner and then... You could... Nope. Nope. We're going to move ahead to Blair's Animal Corner and you restart or fix or do the things. All right. It's like he knew this was going to happen. He only brought one story. This is This Week in Science and do you know what's up next? Blair's Animal Corner. Let's talk about animals. Okay, let's do it. Yeah. So let's start with some sloths. What makes sloths so adorable? They're cute little faces. Yeah, is it their squishy face? And their long loose limbs. Yeah, is it their long limbs? Is it the fact that they hang upside down? I think it also has to do with the fact that they move... They have sharp claws. They have terrible claws. That's what makes them so adorable. Yeah, so they're kind of funny animals. They have a lot of adaptations that you don't really see anywhere else in the animal kingdom. They also fundamentally inhibit a niche that is very underutilized. And that is they are a herbivorous mammal that lives in trees and stays in trees. There's not a lot of those. So recent research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison looked at sloths and why this is such an unusual life strategy. They have so many weird adaptations that you can get them to that point where they can live in that niche. Like he was saying, they have these super elongated and reinforced bones in their arms. They have special claws that help them hold on. They have a body plan that's very weird, not to mention my personal favorite sloth fact that they only poo once a week. And they climb down from the trees and only scurry on the ground to poo and then go back up into the trees so they don't give up their position in the trees by letting it fall wherever it may. So all of that creates all these special adaptations that they have to living in this very underused area and to take these resources that not a lot of animals are using. They live in the top of the rainforest like parrots. They're not eating leaves. They eat fruits. They eat nuts. They don't eat leaves at all, really. So how are the sloths eating these leaves and why aren't other animals doing that? Well, it can all come down to looking at their metabolism. So when you look at other animals that eat leaves like moose, elk, deer, they are very large and they have very large stomachs. So they can store huge amounts of leaves in their stomachs in order to get the energy they need to survive because in order to live off of plant leaves, you have to eat a lot of them. The sloths... Right, and they have force. Many of these animals are ruminants. They have force stomachs. They have a chamber specifically for fermenting and using bacteria to help break everything down. Yeah, so let's go on with the sloths. Yeah, so in order to find out, they monitored their metabolism. They actually used isotopically labeled water to measure the daily energy expenditure of both two and three-toed sloths. And they looked at them in the actual tropical rainforest canopies. These are non-encaptivity. The three-toed sloths, which are the more specialized to their environment than the two-toed sloths, they expend around 460 kilojoules of energy a day. That is the equivalent to 110 calories. And the article likens that to the amount of calories found in a baked potato. So it's the lowest measured energetic output for any mammal. So by measuring the cost of a sloth existing for a day, they found that these sloths, they move slow and they have this kind of sedentary lifestyle because they have found a way to exist with so few nutrients and without having to find other ways to get energy besides just their leaves. The leaves have made enough as long as they can slow their body down and only use about 110 calories a day. Sounds like a panda-type problem, too. Except that these guys actually have the correct bacteria to process leaves, which gives them a huge upturn from the pandas. Because remember, the pandas have bacteria in their stomach for processing meat, so they just always have a stomach ache. But the sloths actually process leaves. Still, there's some point where you're like, that might have been an evolutionarily poor decision. Sloths are doing okay, though. They hang out in the trees and they eat their leaves and they move slowly and that's what they do. And they also... Isn't there a symbiotic relationship with a nutrient-producing fungus or bacteria that lives in their fur, as well? So to my knowledge, the algae that grows on their fur helps them to camouflage. I haven't heard much about them eating it, but I could be wrong about that. I'll check during the break. But to my knowledge, that's why, if you go out into the rainforest in Costa Rica, the likelihood of you actually seeing a sloth is extremely low because they're so well camouflaged by the algae. And they're really not moving very fast to be... Not at all. Yeah, they're just hanging out, not being seen. Yeah, so if you think about how radiation works in the evolution of species, when there's a huge adaptive radiation where a bunch of animals try to use a new space or a new niche that has not yet been used, some stick, some don't. So this was a huge niche that had a giant hole in it, but according to one of the researchers on this project, the quote is, think about it. The food sucks. It's only plant leaves. You have to exploit a very constrained niche. So because the food sucks in the top of the rainforest, you have to find a way to get along, and most species couldn't do it. So the sloth figured out a way, and by figured out, I mean that over many, many generations of adaptation, their metabolism slowed, they found ways to expend less energy, and those animals were able to survive and reproduce and thrive off of this very low energetic input. And now we can say that there was a sloth-sized hole in that ecosystem. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and for example, I think about the ground sloth that was in North America. They're huge. So even though they're eating just sucky plant material, they have a huge stomach so they can consume a lot of it. Plus, I want to remind all of our twist listeners that we found out recently that deer will eat meat. So there you go. Now we have to find out whether or not sloths would. I'm thinking no. Probably not. Yeah. Yeah, so that's sloths. Who else eats meat, though? Oh, well, you will not be surprised to hear that dingos eat meat. However, you will be surprised to hear that dingos eat dingos. Cannibalistic dingos. Yeah, so this is a story that I actually got from a twist listener. I got it from Paul Stanton on Twitter, at Wartiger, and he sent this my way last week. The dingos, they've been known to only a couple of times in the past. They've been recorded showing cannibalistic tendencies, but they were during famine. So there's lots of species of animals that have been seen to have cannibalistic tendencies in times of hardship, including humans, daughter party, right? So these things happen. But there are some species that just eat it as available food. Not a lot. One of the more famous examples are octopus. They will actually occasionally eat other cephalopods, even if there's other food nearby. But for the most part, this is not something that we see a lot. Now I wonder if this is because we're not looking for it and because it creeps us out. We're not looking for it. We're not setting camera traps for this. We're not recording these stats because we don't want to look at it. That's my soapbox moment. But you would think you would see, I mean we have enough animals in captivity that we don't have in solitude. You would think that we would have seen it enough in the zoo level. But Justin, you're forgetting something. You're forgetting that animals in zoos often don't hunt because they're fed and why would an animal hunt if they don't have to? Right, but it's like the octopus, right? There's food available, but I'm feeling like calamari. So what happened here was that in control measures in Australia they were actually starting to poison dingoes because the dingoes have really gotten out of control recently, killing livestock, native animals including wallabies and koalas, which if you recall also from previous Blair's Animal Corners, we've talked about the koala population being in a pretty steep decline and so we don't want koalas getting eaten by dingoes. That's not a great thing. The dingo populations on the other side doing very well. So they have been slowly being exterminated and there have been cameras getting set up near the traps and on one particular day, Paul Meek at the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, he was clearing out traps and had cleared out so many traps in that day, came across another dingo, said he'd come back the next day. When he came back it was pretty much gone just intestines were left and the only nocturnal predators in the area are dingoes. But there's no shortage of food because of the livestock, because of the wildlife, but also because there's a local industrial kitchen that throws out scraps right by the site. So there's no way these dingoes are starving but they ate one of their own. It was already dead. But then they started setting up more cameras and they actually found multiple cases of dingoes feasting on dead, trapped dingoes and a couple of observations of them aggressively circling still living dogs that had just been trapped. So again I want to mention that none of these were healthy dingoes that were chased down and hunted by other dingoes to eat. These were all dingoes that were either already dead or trapped, meaning they were likely to be dead later. So that's something to keep in mind as well. But it's definitely interesting and I think that overall what's to be learned about this is that the whole idea of cannibalism in animals perhaps needs to be looked at a little bit closer because I really do think that there's a lot of kind of selective blind eye turning in a lot of situations where if we took a closer look at a lot of predators there's a chance that they could be doing this more than we thought. Carrie, I don't know if it mentions that but are these dingoes in the same pack? The ones getting devoured? Because there's such an aggressive predator that I could see them seeing another pack or a non-kin dingo as not just a threat but also a fair game of food. Yeah, so according to the camera traps the way that they're set up I don't think that's something that we would be able to know based on the current data that we have. That would be interesting to see. But they do think it has to do not with the scavenging or food shortages but maybe similar to the urban bird story that we were talking about actually animal density that there are too many dingoes. Well and if you think about it if you're a predator and there's an animal caught in a trap why would you try to hunt something that is going to take a bunch of energy to hunt? The weird thing is that the food scraps are around the corner. Maybe dingoes just taste really good. Oh yeah, maybe that's what it is. You gotta go with the simple solution sometimes. Yeah, there you go, you heard it here first. Dingoes are delicious. Oh no, the dingo did not eat my baby. The dingo ate my dingo. Dingo ate my dingo. There we go. Alright, that is it for Blair's Animal Corner. Hey, I think it's about time that we took a break and when we come back I think we're going to ask Phil some questions. That sounds fantastic. Alright, stay with us. 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And we're back with more This Week in Science. Oh yeah, we are back. This is This Week in Science. Thank you so much for listening and for joining us. The second half of our show, we're joined tonight by Dr. Phillip Plate, who also is known as the Bad Astronomer. He writes Slate's Bad Astronomy blog. He's an astronomer, hence the astronomy tie in there. He's a public speaker. He is a television host. He is a science evangelizer. He's an author of a book called Death from the Skies. Because, you know, we're all going to die of various causes of things falling from the sky. Like a tree limb, maybe. I don't know. Anyway, Phillip, thank you so much for joining us tonight on TWIS. Of course, my pleasure. So I reached out to you last week, two weeks ago because the anniversary of Neil Armstrong's Moonwalk, which is the first Moonwalk ever, was last Wednesday, July 20th. Happened right over there, by the way. Right behind you, right there. Yeah, exactly. Yes, Justin. So, you're a skeptic, Phil, and you work very, very hard, tirelessly even, to debunk conspiracy theories. Where are we? Where do we stand now on the kind of moon landing conspiracy theory? Are people still bugging you a lot about that? Well, where we stand now is that things haven't changed. The moon landings were real and the moon hoax believers are still wrong. Pretty much it. You know, this idea that the moon landings are faked has been around basically since the Apollo missions. There were people even at the time who were writing editorials to newspapers back, you know, when people wrote editorials to newspapers, and they were claiming this couldn't be possible for whatever bizarre reason. So, we're standing on the background and then in the late 1990s it started to get a little bit more popular and then finally Fox TV aired a TV show called Conspiracy Theory Did We Land on the Moon? And if it had just been somebody going, well, yeah, it would have been a really short TV show. So, they presented a bunch of basically crap evidence that they gleaned from conspiracy theory websites and at that point it became huge. Radio, TV, on the web, all the stuff. It was everywhere you could look and it was everything I could do to try to put that out because it's just nonsense. And as it happens with most conspiracy theories, it died away. Basically, once television on the web and everybody's interest moved on, it went away. But I know it's always going to be out there. There are people today who obviously were born long after the moon landings were done. People born in the space shuttle era or whatever and ever since then, we've not been able to go back to the moon. So, there's a little bit of attraction to this in a lot of people's minds. But in the end, when you look at the evidence, it's just belong. I think there's got to be robots on Mars is something that we've done a few times now. So, the idea that you could leave the planet and think somewhere else can't be that, you know. I get for the first generation of people who experienced this, that could be like what? They really think we're going to believe they put somebody on the moon. Come on. But now we're leaving the planet all the time. It shouldn't seem that obscene. Is there a grain of truth, though? This is something I have to ask you. No. To one of the arguments that I've heard of why some people might have been fooled into believing it was a hoax. This idea that there was some fear that they wouldn't be able to get transmission back and that they may not be able to sort of present man on the moon as it was happening so that there was a mock-up done in a CBS studio so that they could have something to put on the screen as the actual moon landing was happening in case we couldn't get a transmission back. Is that a grain of truth? Because I've heard that some bad mock-ups of what man might look like on the moon is what contributed to the entire conspiracy theory. I've heard stuff like that. I don't know where this comes from. I don't know of any backup sets that were done. I don't think NASA would really have agreed to do this. NASA itself created basically a moon set to basically put the astronauts in space suits hoist them up on cranes basically to sort of remove their weight and try to simulate the lunar environment so that when the astronauts act well first of all to do that so that they could at least see what was going on and it's like this space suit doesn't work because you can't bend over or it's hard to do this it's hard to do that how do we improve it and also that way the astronauts are more used to being in that sort of environment. You know you don't just pick up three balls and start juggling you've got to practice first for a while until you get that muscle memory and in fact that's why NASA has a huge tank of water in Johnson Space Center in Houston so the astronauts can be underwater and it mimics being in space and so they train there so when they actually go into space they sort of have that memory that muscle memory of how to do it actually on the cover of my first book, Bad Astronomy where I have a chapter on the moon hoax on the cover we have a picture of two of the astronauts in these goofy looking suits on this terrible looking set and we did that on purpose because the joke is here is a faked picture of the moon landing but it's not really faked it's simulated because it was just one of those tests that's true they had to do a lot of simulations they're a lot of trying to figure out how to be in space without actually being in space a lot of that and also you got to realize what you're doing here is you're bringing facts to a non fact fight you can always come up with something and you got to realize too that when people buy into something like the moon landing is being faked as a pretty good example actually of the conspiracy theory it's based on sort of half knowledge you show them a picture and say why aren't the shadows parallel why aren't the shadows inky black why does this happen why does that happen and you kind of put these doubts in people's mind convince them that maybe something was going on then if somebody like me comes along it says well the shadows aren't parallel because of perspective and the shadows aren't inky black and if they've already bought into the theory right they've already removed themselves from the sort of the path of logic so I can bring all these facts to it even debunking the reasons they believed it in the first place and it doesn't matter because now they are embedded in this thing and they will find ways of rejecting the ideas I'm giving them or they accept some of the ideas but not some of the others and they say well I think they faked it anyway and then you're like okay I hope you don't want because they're all coming to it from like some might be you know hopefully there's less and less of these people but they may be flat earthers that believe that it's anti-religious conspiracy some people may think that the government does nothing to lie to them that we're living in some sort of 1984 world right there's a bunch of things that can bring people to it the one and I admit you know I will fully admit when I heard that the lunar rover was built by GM and worked I was a little like how is that possible but but but we it's good to hear that you're hearing less of that like you're getting less of those you know I know that it is still out there I hear like high school students and stuff but it's just sort of or they've given up challenging experts because this is another we used to when this show first started 10 years ago we used to get a lot of creationist emails we used to get a lot of people wanting to challenge evolution talking to us and they stopped now I don't know that people no longer believe in the creationist story but I think maybe they I think maybe over time they've sought less input or argument from outside of the bubble I think the bubble might be an issue there you know everybody is finding their own people on social media and developing their own echo chambers let's try and get away from echo chambers yeah I think that each each old each kind of controversial topic that's been around for a while at first they don't know where their people are and that's when you hear from them a lot and then yes they find their own bubble they kind of disassociate the most recent example of that that I can think of as the anti-vaccine movement that we've talked a lot about on the show too that this whole conspiracy theory of vaccines causing autism and that sort of thing is that those people at first didn't they it kind of transcended all of these other border lines that you would expect would kind of contain a lot of these types of things we certainly got some lash back from that and then eventually it's been a few years you're hearing less and less from them and that's really the question is have they gone away or have they just self-selected themselves into their own little circle or realized what they had self-selected themselves into and looked around the bubble and went okay I need to leave this bubble now no the anti-vaxxers are still out there I can absolutely guarantee that very strong in Australia the head of the Green Party right now has promoted anti-vaxx beliefs those folks are still out there the the documentary called Vaxt which is created by Andrew Wakefield who is basically the father of the modern anti-vaxx movement that was screened and he somehow got Robert De Niro to start believing in this nonsense you don't hear from people like Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey much anymore some of these mouthpieces for the anti-vaxx movement and I think when they start to get interviewed and everything that stuff rises up when you have one big figure that is promoting something awful little figures rise up there may be other places that this occurs like say politics but it certainly happens in anti-science movements so they're still out there maybe that you're not hearing about them like you said they're moving into their own bubble but they're still out there trying to find each other and we still get outbreaks of measles and pertussis and other preventable diseases because of them and I think to an extent something that in that particular instance doesn't get picked up perhaps or continued by mainstream media as much just because it results in dead children and isn't that fun a thing to get a bunch of ratings saying the moon landing might have been hoaxed and get a bunch of those people to watch when you have a real real-world consequence that's something like dying kids or elderly people it's like Sharknado all of a sudden you're worried about sharks well that's what I was thinking about too was during Sharknado particularly about how yeah so how there were these documentaries about how the moon landing was fake and in my line of work when they had the documentary about how the megalodon is still around and then I spent a year telling kids no it's not no and Sharknado is a really interesting example of this there's a lot of science stuff done on perhaps more and more so now on Shark Week where I've learned a ton about sharks from scientists researching sharks but then there'll be one where it's like does the mythical swamp shark that practices voodoo occasionally take people from swamps in Louisiana and you're like okay well they've got a target audience there that's not me and it's still under the umbrella of Shark Week but the last one episode I watched was really fascinating about you know breeding habits or migration habits of the great whites off the Pacific coast so it's a mix that draws people in but they all start on the same basis of well what if and that's where a lot of this starts where do we stand right now Phil on the space program as it stands I mean we haven't said we haven't been back to the moon in a really long time and there's I mean people are talking about it kind of is the moon that boring of a place to visit it's not not at all why haven't we gone back it's expensive it's hard to do I don't mean to be flippant but that's really true I mean the reason we haven't gone back is because we went there in the first place for the wrong reason I mean if you want to have a moon base in the future you don't spend a huge fraction of your gross domestic product and basically have an entire agency build a huge rocket that will just land you know a couple of guys there for them to walk around for a couple of days and then come back this is what we call a footprints and flags mission you go there to show you can do it and basically it's because it was a race it was the space race and I've said this many times what happens at the end of a race well you won and then you're done you go home you know I'm not going to run it again tomorrow I did it already and so they did it they beat the Soviet Union came back and it just wasn't sustainable and two of the rockets for Apollo 18 and 19 were already being built you can still see those ones in Houston ones in Florida I believe there's one of the lunar landers that wasn't used that sort of thing and now they're collecting they're literally collecting dust if you want to do this you got to do it right you got to go there you got to make it sustainable you got to understand how to make your own water and make your own air what are you going to do for food and back then that was an unreasonable thing to be able to do but now now we sent orders there to map the place out we have sent other missions to land there and look around and they found for example that in the North Pole there are these craters that have an interesting feature and I love the dichotomy here these craters are very deep since they're at the North Pole of the Moon the sunlight never reaches into these craters and so any water that gets in there from a comet or an asteroid impact or something like that stays there it's so cold it can last there for billions of years millions or even billions of tons of ice in the bottoms of these craters that can be used to create well you can melt it for water electrolyze it for air and do other things with it like that you can make fuel out of it too the other thing is that the tops of these craters the rims are up high enough that the sun never sets there so you can actually set solar panels around these things and have a continuous source of energy if you try to do this on the lunar equator you get sunlight for two weeks which is awesome but then it's nighttime for two weeks so unless you have really good batteries going to the poles is the place to go and I think that's a fine idea the orbital mechanics makes it difficult to go to the poles of the moon but we could and we don't have the rockets necessarily to do that now but in a few years we will are those rockets going to come from SpaceX or from within NASA or are we getting them? I'm glad you asked that Kiki where are they coming from? this is where we get into Phil's soapbox ranting angry old man yells at clouds time we love soapboxes oh my gosh alright NASA is a government agency and that means that every four or every eight years the administration changes sometimes they carry the mantle of the old administration sometimes they don't Congress changes every two or every six years and so these winds are blowing in all different directions and so it's very difficult for NASA to plan for something that's going to take 20 years to do unless it's something really huge that they can get Congress and the White House on board with and so basically they've been sort of aimlessly I don't want to say that so much but it's hard time finding traction on what their next big thing is going to be it's going to be an asteroid retrieval mission it's going to be a replacement for the shuttle it's going to be going to Mars and now the next big thing is going to be the space launch system which is a Saturn V scale rocket which sounds good on paper until you really look at it you realize they're only going to launch this thing once every two years it can carry a huge amount of orbit or into space but it's also going to cost like a billion dollars per launch or more and then you realize when you look at NASA's budget the way it's scaled and everything this is a rocket that is so expensive and so hard to launch that you can't afford to do anything with it it's like having a Lamborghini in your garage and you can't afford the gas because you spent 150 grand on your car I'm not a fan of SLS but the reason being that when you look at something like SpaceX which is a private company SpaceX was able to use the knowledge the legacy of NASA the legacy of the Saturn V everything we've learned in 40 to 50 years of NASA doing this and build our own rockets and with help from the government and help from NASA absolutely with a lot of their own money they've been able to make a viable business out of this launching rockets it does not have the capacity of the space launch system but it costs at worst at worst a fifth as much so you could launch five of these things for every SLS you launch so I don't care if it has half or a quarter of the payload capability launch ten of them because honestly I think when it's all said and done NASA's done building SLS Falcon Heavy is going to cost a tenth or less of what SLS was and so you can if you want to put people on the moon you can launch three habitats launch three huge things of food and you can launch a Falcon Heavy every couple of months instead of every couple of years I think that's the way to go you have a constant supply chain whenever I hear these numbers though they're just they're just ridiculous to me it would take a billion dollars to launch this rocket which means we could send two a day for a year for what we bailed out banks there's some things I'm like well we could just really be doing this instead of other things that we spend our money on but to where you started this Phil what it sounds to me what you initiated and how we got to the moon in the first place is we need an arms race we need to declare war on China and try to get to the moon and build the moon base before China does I don't think so I think point to capitalism sell time shares on the moon I don't think that'll get there that's a privatized way that might be closer in fact Justin I would say that you are exactly wrong no offense oh my god are you completely off basic no the space race is what got us into this situation in the first place we spent a ton of money on these expendable rockets and we got nothing we got a lot out of it all the technology spin-offs and everything some people have estimated anywhere between three to twenty times a return on investment for that so for every dollar we spent on NASA we got three to twenty dollars back on spin-off technology and advancements in computers, engineering and all that kind of stuff which is great but for the purpose of going to the moon we went there and came back and that was it because if you want to do it again it has to be sustainable it has to be less expensive you have to do it in such a way that you're not just going to do it to put a couple of folks there for two or three days but instead for six months or a year at a time bring them home and replace them sort of like we do with the space station well that's what I'm saying I'm saying we should invest in an interplanetary body ballistic missile system on the moon and nobody would strike first because it doesn't matter who got who first or what happened first as they take down the grid you're going to launch the nukes from the moon and therefore nobody should ever mess with you it's a horrible idea terrible idea it's also illegal before you know it what's happening on the moon the outer space treaty which has been signed by Russia and the United States and a few other countries I think it would prevent that I'd have to look at it carefully to go up weapons in space but I also don't think you're allowed to actually compare to an orbiting platform anyway then instead of 250,000 miles away it's only 250 miles away so it's much faster and cheaper to get them there but the point you're making if I back away from the specifics and go to the generals and what Blair was saying yeah make the moon a place to go make it a destination hotspot you're going there and you're creating energy for example or you're finding your mining titanium or something else there that we need on earth once you're there it becomes less expensive to do it now I'm not saying it's sustainable I'm not saying this is a sound economic project I'm saying like in 50 or 60 or 70 years maybe but for right now NASA could do this and to say and go back to again to your point Justin money people say oh my gosh it costs a billion dollars two billion dollars for a rover and Mars and all that and I'm thinking that's peanuts we spend five times five times as much money in this country on tobacco products that we do on NASA NASA's budget is roughly 18 to 19 billion dollars it fluctuates every year stop spending money on pet food funding for what they're trying to do and the military budget is more than hundreds of times that for a plane that can't fly in the rain but here's okay so here's the thing here's one of these things that I always whenever I see it in science fiction I'm like I don't think it works this way they're out and they're all the way in deep space mining asteroids or they're mining some distant planet body for some reason it's a mining planet all they do is mine on this planet I kind of go like well but you know the stuff that makes up the universe like do you really have to go to an asteroid to mine it and there could be and this is the question is there anything on the moon that is so rare on earth but so available on the moon that it would be worth mining and sending back to us that's a tough question to answer mostly because I don't know but I can extrapolate that to asteroids and say in fact if you are already in space if you already have that infrastructure mining asteroids in in many ways is much easier than mining metals on the earth to answer your question yes this stuff is everywhere but not in equal amounts an asteroid could be made of solid mostly iron it could be basically a solid chunk of metal mostly iron lots of nickel nickel is not too hard to mine on earth there are places in Canada where there are nickel mines from asteroid impacts but there's also rare earth elements that would be much easier to extract from an asteroid than they would be here on earth but that presumes that you're already in space and able to do this the sort of snaking its own tail or maybe better lifting yourself by your own bootstraps would be a better analogy is that asteroids make it easier to colonize space because asteroids have water on them a lot of it actually and you can tap that water again to make fuel and air and drinkable water bring your own food if you can figure out a way of growing food on these things that becomes your way station to create fuel and the volatiles the stuff you need and then basically you bottle that stuff you literally put it in tanks and you put these things in orbit around the earth or you put them halfway between the earth and Mars on orbits that keep them in a way that rockets to Mars for example or other places can match their velocity and then use up their fuel use up whatever their stuff is and keep going that way you don't have to bring everything with you it's like the 711 of cross country trips I really need a 400 year old hot dog it's like oh well there's one those guys back in 2072 they stuffed one of those tanks full of hot dogs we can stop there that went from a joke to an actual literal 400 year old hot dog joke it did I'm actually pretty good at this and so I think that this is all the beauty of this and Justin you said you read about this in science fiction the beauty about this is that science fiction is science fact now or in the future depending on which way you're starting science fiction now is science fact in the future we can do this stuff NASA is if we get NASA 5 billion more bucks a year and make no mistake that money can be found we waste way more money than that in the government and yet congress is constantly harping on wasted money and yet they're doing all their own pet projects NASA could easily be doing a lot more stuff with a little bit more money they're making subsistence wages now anything else they make would be gravy and they could do tons of stuff and right now we just got Juno to Jupiter and New Horizons is maybe going to continue on into the outer solar system to try and find some other bodies out beyond Pluto but we don't really have any big missions planned in the near future we've got the James Webb Space telescope that's going to be launched sometime but 2017-2018 something like that I think 2018 so it's only been delayed 9 years yeah that's a big cost 10 times the original budget that is a big project that's the successor to Hubble it's going to be a gigantic telescope it's going to be as big of a leap forward as Hubble was in its day that's a big project there are a couple of other things like a mission to Europa Jupiter's moon which we know has water under the surface but that's not being built right now though that's still in the very early stages of just thinking about it there are no really big missions to the outer planets going on Cassini which has been orbiting Saturn now for 12 years I think that's shutting down next year Juno is only going to orbit Jupiter for less than a year I think yeah New Horizons is going to pass by a couple of objects or at least one object in 2019 and if it gets a mission extension but yeah there's not a lot being planned right now most of it is Mars and stuff orbiting the Earth I would like to see us pushing to go back to the moon I think we should go back to the moon before Mars I don't think we're ready to go to Mars just the fact that it takes 6 months to go there is a big deal we can go to the moon in a few days that significantly reduces the dangers of this journey and it's just NASA NASA needs a big project and I think they're hitching their wagon to the wrong star and in this case it's the wrong wagon I think SLS is the wrong way to go and all of this stuff everything we've been talking about kind of wraps together into this thing they need more money, they need a better direction they need to do this cheaper and they need a vision and that's the problem they have this journey to Mars vision right now but if you were waking me up in the middle of the night and say what do you think about it that's the right thing to do, I think we should be going to the moon first well because like you said if we can create a base on the moon then that can be a base of operations we can launch more easily from the moon to go to Mars once we're there, so it's like once you get into space instead of foothold then that'll make it easier to go other places pretty much but beyond that so you used to work with Hubble I know that part of your work was with Hubble and Hubble still going what are you excited about recently are you excited about anything that Hubble's been focusing on I mean it keeps looking at the sky specifically with Hubble Hubble is what they call a service observatory basically it's been opened to the astronomical community to just observe whatever it can it's got a bunch of different cameras on the back end of it that look in the ultraviolet and the infrared and the visible different things it's like a shed with a bunch of different tools in it and so there's all kinds of things you can do with this and after it had done a lot of its key projects that it was built to do they started taking more chances with it doing nearer projects like the Hubble Deep Field which was originally done in the 90s was basically this ridiculous idea of just pointing it for two weeks at a blank spot in the sky and seeing what they saw and what they saw were tens of thousands of galaxies so they did it again and again and again there was the extreme deep field and the ultra deep field and they did it in the southern sky and I think these kinds of things are really cool and now they're coupling it with other big telescopes like Chandra which is an X-ray observatory and a few others and getting multi-wavelength observations of single patches of the sky and when you do that you learn much more about these galaxies you can get a better idea of their distances of how much they're actively forming stars and we're surveying the universe this way and besides all the science you get out of that that you're sort of expecting it's like well we expect to get distances to galaxies and we expect to get their star formation rate and all that stuff you also find other stuff it's like there's this object in this field like well what is this I don't know let's find out that happens all the time the beauty of these observatories especially ones that can look at either wide areas of the sky and see lots of stuff or like Hubble see very small areas of the sky very deep, get very faint objects in it is that you don't know what you're going to find and every time we do that I'm writing I was writing something actually it'll go up tomorrow about a really bizarre binary star that we've known about for decades but it had kind of weird fluctuations in its light and when they looked at it they realized that it's a white dwarf a dense star basically shooting out a beam of electrons at nearly the speed of light which is slamming into its companion star and creating all kinds of crazy stuff going on in its atmosphere and you know we've known about this thing for like 40 years but we didn't know it was doing that until somebody kind of looked at the data and went oh and they used Hubble actually and the ultraviolet to look at this and figure out what was going on with it and I love that kind of thing it's like you know everything that's out there there's a lot of weird stuff and now that we're surveying the sky and seeing millions and billions of objects one in a million type objects are starting to turn up yeah and we need to keep our eye on the sky and keep looking and trying to refine our view increase our resolution get deeper and closer magnification just to be able to find them and more wavelengths x-ray, gamma ray, radio all that stuff we find that there's a new window to the universe that we did not know even existed and that's fantastic so I have a question about more philosophical I guess light pollution light pollution here on earth is causing some big problems for people being able to see the sky at night and as more and more people move away from rural areas and into urban centers the majority of the human population is going to be in brighter and brighter areas with less and less of a view of the universe how do you think this is going to affect humanities I guess sense of self in space that's an interesting question it's hard to say if you're missing something and you've never known how do you know you're missing it there are many times when I've gone out to very dark spots and you walk outside at night it's unbelievable how many stars you see if you're not used to that I can tell you a story of people who have lived their whole lives in the suburbs of a city where they can see a reasonable number of stars there's Orion and Sagittarius and you can spot these things and then they go out to a truly dark site for the first time and these are people who are not necessarily signs of fish and atoms they're not astronomers they're just folks and they happen to be out in this spot and they see that and it's amazing how did the ancient man even come up with constellations everywhere you look there's another star you pick the brightest ones and you say that one looks like a fish do they have light pollution? what were they on? like a rubric test you could basically draw anything you want with the connected dot I have a friend an astronomer who always points out oh there's the triangle and there's another triangle everywhere triangles but in fact it's so amazing to see that for the first time it's almost kind of cool that people can't see the night sky because when they do see it it blows their brains apart they have a new appreciation for the night sky but I don't want to do that because it's not like I want to deprive everybody of this I think if everybody had that night sky it would be a lot better but then we also have that deep-spay array where you can even though you can look up in the sky and see maybe two stars light pollution on your computer screen you can pull up galaxies that are a billion light years away but it's on a computer screen as opposed to going outside and actually looking up and seeing the sky but this is the world where people live in the digital world I have an idea that's kind of a medium between those two things so I grew up in San Francisco and so I saw some stars there were many and then when I went to college it's no mistake I found out that they had an old school star projector at San Rosa Junior College and they had free planetarium shows I didn't know that I worked there for seven years oh my gosh I don't have to talk more about that but I used to go to every Wednesday they had a free planetarium show at the San Rosa Junior College it was an actual star projector and it wasn't a set show the sky and talked us through what we saw and it made it completely opened my eyes to the world out there and it was such a cool experience and there are less and less star projectors out there because everyone's moving to these video camera projectors for planetariums now and it's a very different experience and that at least was something that I wish we would move closer to as well is just here's the night sky that's a good point and I think people live in the digital world except they don't really you have to eat you have to go out and I can show you a picture I'm trying to get how risque I want to get here but there are a lot of things you can do online that aren't as good as they are in real life I'll leave it at that and there is something about seeing the stars for yourselves I mean look I don't know how many people I have done this with where you see they go outside and they look through a telescope and they see Saturn through the eyepiece with their own eyes for the first time and I can show you pictures of this from Cassini that are high resolution color balanced gorgeous draw dropping pictures when you look through a telescope and you see this little tiny but you know maybe a little fuzzy but this little planet with the rings around it doesn't look nearly as cool as Saturn through Cassini on your computer that light you know I can say that light in the sky that Saturn that light traveled for you know an hour to get to your telescope and then go into your brain through your eyeball and to see people's face when that happens I can't even tell you how many times I've seen this it is suddenly they've discovered the third dimension when they've been living in Flatland I totally agree with you I got to do this with my son we found Jupiter through a telescope and there was a whole mess of fumbling around just to find it get it, capture it, have it in the frame for him to look at it and then as he's looking at it it leaves we're on a planet spinning it out of its own it's going to keep we've got to track this thing because it's an actual planet way out there that we're looking at through this very small lens which absolutely way more impressive than me pulling up a picture of the planet on the web and being like there's a planet, that's great I think that that's something that everybody who's able to should get a chance to do in their life you know if you have the means to be able to get to a dark site and see the sky minus light pollution and to see Saturn through a telescope even just once because it is a profound experience I'm not saying it's going to change everybody's life the way it did mine but that's what made me become an astronomer was seeing Saturn when I was 5 or 6 years old through a telescope and when you ask any astronomer and most astronauts if you ask them what thing, what happened to you they're going to do this they'll say it was seeing the Apollo missions or for those that are my age or because somebody showed them the moon or Saturn through a telescope Jupiter's moons, something like that that it can change a life yeah final question how are the goats what how are your goats how are my goats you have goats I kid, no I don't kid, you kid they don't because they're hooded I have four little tiny adorable goats two pygmy goats and two dwarf did you see Blair right now she's going to die I can talk and probably pick up let me just, as I'm talking here I'll just go to my pictures basically we live out in the country here out in the burbs and we wanted to get some sort of animal that lives outside, we have a couple of dogs in the cat and all that, but we decided we were watching goat videos because goats are just so flip and adorable that we had to get we decided to get some goats for ourselves there we go let's see here hang on, screen share this one there you go that's my dirt goat picture that's Clay so we have Dr. Clayton Forrester named after the Mystery Science Theatre character Jack Burton from Big Trouble Little China Sam from one of the police procedures, I can never remember which one and who am I forgetting Batman, because he's all black, so he's the goat of the night oh my gosh, goats are amazing, they're so smart they're like the easiest to train oh my god they're fun we cut grass, warm and feed them that and they're fun to play with, I sit out with them I was having kind of a rough day today and I went out and sat and fed them sliced up apple bits and leaves and stuff and hung out with them for 20 minutes it's pretty good goat therapy, except they're really belchy and farty that is true there was a study out last week about how goats they make eye contact if they want something from you yeah, they mostly, it's mostly probably food like you mentioned in your comment in return, but I mean do you find the goats when they want you to open a gate or they need help doing something or they want food are they looking at you? are they making the eye contact? yeah, they do look right at you a lot of animals do that and then basically if I have something they want, they just start jumping on me which is super weird they're really good jumpers and it's funny because when they run, they are not the most graceful of God's creatures they look like I don't know, they just look like a steampunk machine with things going in every direction but they're really good jumpers and yeah, they'll look right at you three of them we didn't raise from babies but one of them we actually, because of the way the timing worked out he wasn't quite ready to be weaned from his mom, so we wound up goat we wound up goat feeding him we wound up bottles feeding him with goat milk and he's the cuddliest of before and so in the afternoon it's just brutally hot here because of climate change and it's been everywhere in this country but we made a little shade tarped for them so there's a little bit of shade and after their afternoon smack Clayton is the one who will just kind of stand there and he's just waiting for me to start petting him and he'll just stand there and I'll just scratch him until I have to go I would have to go cut all the goats tomorrow he got me all excited for goat time we have friends who come here if they're in town a couple of friends were just in Denver and they came up specifically to see the goats they don't run around as much as baby goats do but they're still pretty fun to hang out and look at goats are cute goats are wonderful you can make goat puns and goat jokes and enjoy the goats I've heard them all I'm sure you have at this point absolutely what are you working on right now anything that we should be excited about for the future continually the last thing I did was Crash Course Astronomy with Hank Green and those folks and that was tremendously fun the last one of those went up in January and I actually just checked they've had 19 million combined views so I'm pretty happy about that congratulations it's kind of a ridiculous number of views I've been kind of aimlessly looking for something new myself the past couple of months it's taken me a long time to get my feet back under me I've got some ideas there nothing I can really talk about because they're all sort of percolating I might be able to talk about one thing soon I'm in negotiations with something now but that's probably all I can say and hopefully if that works out that'll be a lot of fun and believe me as soon as I have anything I'll be talking about it the beauty of science communication is you kind of want to talk about the stuff you're doing I'll have more things coming up pretty soon and for people out there who might not have heard of you before where can they find you sure the best way to find me is actually on about.me slash fill plate I've got my Twitter, Facebook Instagram but basically if you look up Instagram bad astronomer, Facebook bad astronomer Twitter I'm bad astronomer you'll find me and basically Instagram is nothing but cloud pictures oh there you go thank you it's pictures of interesting clouds and goats because that's kind of the stuff I do that's fantastic clouds and goats there we go and Star Trek models and the Enterprise that's at the National Airspace Museum oh yeah they just got that though right yeah I was there last year when they were still reconstructing it and conserving it and I got to see it in pieces which was amazing and then I was at the National Airspace Museum just a couple of weeks ago for their 40th anniversary actually I guess it was about a month ago now so I got to see it all done up and pretty and oh my oh my my heart it is gorgeous oh so many goat pictures yeah I did kind of put up videos too I actually got a video of Clayton headbutting Jack and Jack makes these little like little kid noises what what oh there you go that's a lot of goat chewing noises yeah I was chewing apple slices and they I had to wear gloves because they nip at me and they're excited oh my god they're amazing but getting actually Jack to make that what what noise just slayed me I put that one up on Instagram a couple of days ago they're basically endless fun I'm glad you're having fun with your goats and enjoying their company and that's just wonderful and I'm glad that you're still writing about science and that you have projects that we will be excited to hear about very soon and thank you thank you so much for doing what you do and thank you for joining us tonight my pleasure oh and you know what since you're in San Francisco I'm in Portland now I'm in San Francisco I'm glad you're in San Francisco because I saw you at the Bad Ad Hypothesis Festival Zach Weiner Smith's made up science nonsense contest what was that last year and I'm scheduled to do that again this year I was going to say I hope to see you there cool that's part of the Bay Area Science Festival and that's going to be that Bay Area Science Festival I forgot about that yeah and that's going to be at the Castro Theater which is great last year or when I was there I guess it was a year and a half ago now Matt Inman did the sort of the plenary talk and he introduced Jibbers the Lobster Jibbers, Jibbers Craps and it was one of the funniest presentations I have ever seen Matt Inman who draws the oatmeal so you know so Zach Weiner Smith who does Saturday Morning Breakfast cereal of course knows all the big cartoonists and he had Matt come in and do the talk and oh my god I was everything I could do not to be just like in tears on stage but then I had to judge the contestants it was a lot of fun so if you're in the San Francisco area that's October ohhhh what is it it's the end of October isn't it the last week of October BAH Fest it was fun when I saw it you guys put on a great show that night yeah it was fun and if I'm in town I will definitely be checking that out yeah I haven't seen you in a couple of years it would be nice to get together again that would be wonderful film a failed skeptics pilot and see what else we can do there we go that's an inside joke that's how we met wasn't it filming a TV pilot that never got anywhere yeah I think that's what I think that is that was a long ago oh my gosh well I just looked up on your Wikipedia when you were at Sonoma State and we overlapped two years oh my gosh that was you that was you yeah I was one of those 7000 students just walking around did you ever see some old white dork on a razor scooter going across campus well let's see I was a biology major so well I was in the science building for a bit so we moved off to the side like a quarter of a mile away from the building it's just a boring walk so I actually took my daughter's scooter and used that and I actually bit the pavement once that was awesome that was hilarious for anybody seeing it yeah memories memories all right you guys we have gone on and on so just let me know all my parts it'll be fine we can keep going we just gotta get it to the after show we have a bunch of we have more science stories maybe we'll put them in the after show maybe we'll save them for next week but I think we're gonna call it for this episode of this weekend science Bill once again thank you so much for joining us tonight it's been awesome you can stick around for the after show if you would like right now I would like to say thank you to all of our Patreon sponsors it is time for me to thank those of you who have taken the time to click that Patreon link and donate to us thank you too let's see if I can see all the names Chris Clark this is always my favorite favorite rap song ready? slash acceptance speech slash state of the union right here right here is Kiki who runs this down like a master emcee just trying to stall as long as possible thank you too Chris Clark, Paul Disney, Richard Onimus, Radan Ratnaswamy Byron Lee, E. 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You have joined the post show show It's the after show of the show where we do things that don't go in the show Although it's still the show kind of We're here. Dave Freidel Welcome Hello Can you hear me okay? Yeah, we can hear you just fine It's great Dave, have you been to the conference on world affairs Did you meet Phil ever at CWA? I did not, no I didn't, but it was really cool to see him tonight I haven't been in a while It's too hard to park and actually get in to see any of the speakers anymore And now you're close to Boulder, right Phil? You're technically not allowed to be in it anymore Colorado winds aren't allowed to actually go Or at least they can't be speakers Right, yeah, I'm sorry I'm not allowed to be on a panel I do have to go unfortunately because I have to go to bed It is getting those later hours Weirdly We're wrapping up the show I'll check Twitter to see if anybody's saying anything Twitter is exploding with a large meteor-like event over western US Including Colorado Dang it, if I'd been outside I would have seen it There's actually a fire to the northwest so I probably wouldn't have been able to see it because the smoke is covering everything But it was seen over Utah and LA as well Now no meteor can actually do that very rapidly and they're not seen over that many states And I just saw a video of it It's moving very slowly and breaking apart So this is very clearly a human-made space debris Probably a rocket booster a satellite I don't know if anything from the space station was recently let go, although that stuff usually burns up over the Pacific, not always But if you go to my Twitter feed, go to Batastronomer on Twitter I just retweeted the video pretty dramatic and I'm seeing lots of new stations and everything asking that guy if they can use his video, it's really pretty cool I wonder, I know there's been talk of the Chinese space station Do you think it's big enough to be possibly the Chinese space station breaking up? I don't think so, if that were predicted to re-enter that quickly I think I would have heard something I know that they lost contact with it but they're playing it pretty close to the vest, so I'm not sure exactly what's going on with that It's due to re-enter and they probably won't be able to control it Given the size of Tiangong I'd have to think this isn't it, this is something smaller but I don't know The video, there you go It's hard to tell from this, but this is very typical of a human-made object It's moving too slowly, orbital speed is five miles per second something like that Meteors come in at three or four or ten times that fast That's why they zip across the sky really quickly Something moving this slowly has got to be coming in from orbit And the fact that it's breaking up is because it's not a single chunk of rock It's a big metal thing with pieces falling off If you watch the movie Gravity at the end of that when she comes back in and you see the debris from her re-enter vehicle breaking up, that was beautifully done It's just like that I don't know exactly what this is But I expect when I wake up in the morning people will have identified it I'm getting friends of people on Twitter pinging me about it Everybody's like Phil, have you seen this? This is right up your alley It got an ID on it Let me look this up Hang on, cz7rb Wait, replay this? I think I saw this Was this like three nights ago or something? No, this is like right now I saw something very similar to that recently that looked like fireworks These things were lighting up as it came up This was in the Davis area Well I'm looking up at the night sky calling it the Davis area It could have been over Nebraska It says re-entered Latitude 7, Longitude 81 No, that's like over the Atlantic Latitude 25 Longitude Dang it, I don't know It doesn't look to be like that's what cz7rb Rocket Booster, I guess is what that means Yeah, I don't know I have to run I apologize I'm so glad that you stayed with us so late Thank you so much for inviting me It was so nice of you It's so great to talk to you again I missed you I missed you too, it's so good to see you Yeah Maybe we can get you back on twist again We can have more fun chats The goats Clearly not into the goats Clearly not into the goats Did someone say goats? Oh Blair, you've got to be kidding me Oh Totes Totes excited for the goats Totes in the goats, say that all the time Totes in the goats Really, you can say that You could be talking about all your goats Totes in the goats Alright, I gotta run Thanks everybody Bye Bye, thank you That was so great That was fun So we get to hang out with Dave for a little while here as Yeah I don't have any goats I'm no goat Dave, now we've heard a little bit from Blair and you poking in the chat room about the fact that you've met in Colorado and did some stuff I'd like to hear from you your experience of meeting Blair and going to tour the tea factory That's right We went to the celestial seasonings factory and that was literally, there's not a lot of time when somebody's just stopping over and unfortunately Denver's airport is about, you know, 40 miles away from everything so you either have to go to Boulder or you have to go to downtown Denver or you have to go to Golden and that's pretty much your options in like 6 hours So I was like, well I've never been to this celestial seasonings tea place and it's outside of Boulder which I didn't really know so it was I was like, is she going to be creeped out that we're like driving into like farms down somebody's street and it was in this odd location but the thing I really remember about it was the mint room that was the coolest room in the whole room Cool, like cool mint Like literally they put all the mint tea in one room concrete room with a garage door and then they let you walk inside of it and it's like you're totally high on mint I bet the whole room smells like a pack of gum It's assaulting to the senses That's a good way to put it It was assaulting, it felt like you were going to pass out and they kind of ran everybody through there and then there were robots That was my favorite part, the packaging robots and then that they have this patented tea bag so the social seasonings tea bags don't have a staple in them so they use some sort of what was it, all natural glue that through a fast heating process seals the bags Yeah, they had some cool manufacturing equipment there that was pretty typical production line where it looked like it was good 30, 40 year old equipment that was doing this heat sailing like they had been using it for a very long time but then suddenly there's a robot packaging it stacking everything up, they used a robot to pack skids so the robot was just kind of going back and forth and there's people whizzing by and driving by you really walk right through the middle of the plant which was pretty cool your guide used a lot of tea puns safe tea was their priority safe tea first safe tea was their priority and guess what my signed calendar said it said I had a terrific time oh no Blair I had to oh Blair, that's fantastic so I'm afraid she didn't get to see very much of Denver it was sort of like drive to Boulder get something to eat and go to the tea factory but at least she got to see the flat irons quickly as we drove by them yeah that was great I kind of got to watch out the window that was really nice I tried to run away to Boulder when I was 17 Boulder did you make it beautiful I made it to Boulder and my goal was I was gonna go enroll myself in the Naropa Institute Jack Kerrwax School for Disembodied Poets and I was like yeah this is what I'm gonna do I'm gonna go over there I'm gonna like hang out with a bunch of other poets and write poetry all day and drink wine and get into weird philosophical arguments and have blast the question was like $10,000 a semester or something ridiculous I was like oh it's the Naropa Institute Jack Kerrwax School for Disembodied Poets who have a trust fund I'm gonna keep rolling I'm gonna keep rolling I'm gonna keep rolling I have to hit the road and have an interest which I did yeah Boulder is a place for trust we call them trustafarians which honestly some of my favorite people yeah as long as they buy the drinks right? I can't begrudge people who are living the life I would do if it wasn't for money you have to respect that they have the resources to do with whatever they would like and they've chosen something that I think is pretty awesome and they provide the money to have really good food in the area so that's a big plus yeah Boulder has great food yeah we got to see it quickly but it was good I remember meeting you Dr. Kiki in 2010 I think it was it's a while ago now that was pre-kai and I had just moved out here I only lived out here for a month oh I didn't realize that I moved here from the Boston area and I didn't even have a job yet so I was like well looking for a job that was 2010 so there were no jobs and so I was like why don't I just spend the whole week at this conference on world affairs and I think I found out about through your show and just kind of spent the whole week going to different conferences I got to meet besides from meeting you I got to meet Seth Shostak he goes to CWA I think every year it's a big thing for him yeah and he spent time it was just amazing to me how much time he spent Seth is insanely accessible and I always love listening to Seth because of the fact that he works with SETI and is the person who will crush every hope you have of us ever encountering life from another planet when he breaks down just like how tiny a glimpse or how tiny a radius of even our radar going out let alone what we could have back to planets that could potentially be civilized enough to send a message or re-send a message and then the whole time issue of well yeah we went from nothing to horse and wagon to satellite in a hundred years or less and then we'll be lucky to be around 200 years from now I got you so there's like this window of noise and oh yeah we had all that radar but now we discovered digital so we're going quiet again and we could probably destroy ourselves thanks Seth thanks a lot but really it's almost like having a skeptic of the possibility of ever contacting life from another planet being one of the guys in charge of trying to hear those signals and send those signals really must refine the tools that they're using to listen and send because you know there are no assumptions there's no glossy assumptions that Seth makes about that contact yeah he also had very good comparisons of how much the entire city budget was to other government things that's what I remember it was some ridiculous thing the wheel on the B-52 bomber costs as much as our building it's stuff like that it was like oh wow we really don't spend a lot of money looking for life in other worlds and it's not that we don't spend money on that it's that we spend that much more on the wheel for Obama the United States spends more than all the rest of the country's military budgets combined and most of those budgets combined are allies when are we when are we really doing with that money and it is always ridiculous well you know if Trump gets elected it's going to be making friends with Putin maybe settling his debts I think that that meteor was actually the 2016 election that's what's falling can somebody play that again because I swear to you I saw this in the last week I was driving this would have been probably Monday or Tuesday night it was interesting instead of being the 2016 election it could also be all of the Russian Olympic team oh that's like kind of like what I saw it looked like a messy it wasn't like one bright spot coming across it was messy like that yeah and it had that look of being one of those sparkly fireworks as it went across it might have been I don't know there's probably a website that tells what has fallen right that's the I don't know this website but I'm sure there is one it was Ted Cruz's career that's what it was oh oh after his speech the other night so I think Ted Cruz did the right thing it or much though no no listen I think Ted Cruz did uh in a way the right thing uh and that you know he can see the writing on the wall this is going to be a loser campaign uh and if he can be just like you know that's his shtick is like I'm against the thing I'm against and I'm staying against it till it makes no sense to be against it but I'll still be against it I'll spend his appeal to some portion of the party base so he'll continue to get his support and it feeds into my whole political theory of the Republicans having sort of given up on the national and it's all about local elections so that will play very well for Ted Cruz come his next local election and that's the only thing that can or will matter to them the national thing, the national game is lost the national direction of the United States is moved so far away from anything that's even being proposed by the Republican Party but all that insanity that you're like how can somebody get elected saying these ridiculous things works really well at home which is why you're going to continue to have a lot of congressional and senate seats held by Republicans you know the the other thing I learned while Blair was here was just how much she isn't interested in politics that was the other thing I got to learn because I remember I remember at one point asking her she's just polite I remember asking her about something it was something like somebody that was in the primaries and she goes yeah isn't that so and so and the person had left had quit the race like two months before and it was like this is the part of the election that I find really boring though because this is where this is I really like it when first a bunch of people are kind of battling out to figure out who's going to be the candidate right so then there's a lot of there's a pretty diverse background well diverse there's a there's a range of people yeah I just mean there's a range of perspectives range of perspectives range of perspectives within a party on within debates like the debates that have multiple like a bunch of people at them I find that very interesting it's when it's down to this like mudslinging contest that I start to lose interest so and and and I was of course a huge Bernie Sanders really what what in case that did never come through never came across there's a bunch of takes on this but I definitely think that the Sanders followers who have been out there knocking on doors and making phone calls need to jump into this and get behind Hillary and I'm saying this is somebody who probably won't vote for her but I think the organization actually needs to to stay intact there is a potential because of how far that they've they've come improving that there's a progressive voice that needs to be heard that if they stay connected to and part of this party there's a chance in four eight years that they could take it over and own it what you're seeing now is they got rid of the head of the DNC who's probably the actual Sith Lord they've replaced it with probably the person who was the mentor Dona Brazils probably the mentor of Debra Washman Schultz to begin with but this is all people who are connected to Clinton campaigns going forward or going backward throughout the history of her running for things if you fast forward this to they're not being a Clinton running for office you can see that the Sanders supporters could be in this position again four or eight years from now oh my god you double cat yay cat cat this is going to be our new clicker this is punishment this isn't even a clicker it's punishment that cat is flashing a toxoplasma gondii filled toasted churio at your end this cat is I'd like to enter one of the pointiest of cats it's rubbing a toxo on you so you'll see I'm not really petting her very much because if I pet her too much she bites and scratches well it's probably going to spray her daylight that would spray I don't know if you could see that but last night I did not sleep very well because always when I house it I like to be like oh the cat should stay with me that's why I'm here is to be with the cat and so she likes to lay right here but then she likes to put a paw right here and a paw right here after your jugular she puts pressure here and here ready to strike and I'm terrified to move or touch her or anything and I had this flash of what if she pierced my jugular while I was in bed alone at this house sitting house would I be able to dial 911 in time would I survive would I just bleed out in this bed and then she'd eat my eyeballs and so I'm like freaking out about that and then she started licking my face and rubbing herself up against my face in about 4.55 this morning and I had to give up and get up you got to get that talk so in there deep yeah I'm talking about that yeah I don't know I heard about it so much in this program I actually asked my vet about it so my vet laughed my vet laughed at it she's like you have it she's like I've never heard anybody she just said it wasn't a big deal to her she's got it this is the thing, cat loving people that's how you tell the difference people who don't think cats are good pets and think they're weird and out for themselves and maybe evil don't have toxo you know what I got to go build a cat shelter in the alley so that the stray cats have a place to breed and produce more toxo I get it, I get it this is how you become a veterinarian you're infected with toxo-blasmagonia you have guilt issues about animals you want more cats out there in the world well yeah I guess it is like one of those sci-fi episodes where you get infected like one of the Star Trek episodes I think there was a Star Trek called two episode one on that about aliens taking over the Federation from the inside you want to know one thing that doesn't cross over people who are big fans of birds and people who love cats this is one of these cats have both those things have you ever talked to me or Justin ever? this is not a big crossover this is not a big crossover people who want there to be birds in the world tend not to be huge cat enthusiasts I don't know if that's true I know lots of cat people who like birds a lot of bird people that I've met have cats unless unless they're infected with toxo-blasmagonia which is the way in the game look you are jumping to conclusions you have no data to support your claims I do not appreciate non-scientific unempirical opinions like this I've suggested before perpetuate factual the conversations I think we should take a little bit of the Patreon donations and do a 3-way toxo test I think this would be perhaps illuminating and maybe Dave maybe Dave I'm probably infected I guarantee you I'm infected I'm probably infected with tiger versions of toxo-blasmagonia it's not like the walking dead virus or something okay if you're not infected if you are infected it just seems normal to want to eat brains it's just what everybody, all my friends and neighbors go around eating brains we're zombies it's like Friday night let's go eat somebody's brains when you're not a zombie it's really obvious that there's a stark difference between those who are and are not infected have you seen this country? I mean you know what I'm saying be careful you're saying that's why this country is so crazy right now absolutely it's all toxic question, is toxo-plasmosis only in domestic cats because we found it in otters so do you know if it's in wild cats? so it probably because I have literally been inside the tiger nest box I don't know if it's about tigers but here's the thing and I'm amazed that you haven't listened to the parts of the show where I talk but it's only Justin there have been over 500 episodes I can't remember everything but I've done those 500 episodes on toxic plasma that it only completes its life cycle and reproduces in cats it's dead under everywhere else except that they found it in otters which was a story that I reported if you remember they find it in otters they find it in cattle they find it in sheep they found it in otters in an analogous state to when they find it in cats which is why they were like oh snap there's a new wrinkle to the life cycle of toxo so maybe I don't listen when you talk on the show yeah maybe you don't she told me all about that while she was here I complained about you the whole time Justin just nods when he's nodding the thing I remember was Blair you talked about when you went to New York City and he kept looking up at the buildings or something look at all the cell buildings but I did this I did this in a portion of southeast yeah southeast Manhattan that was three story buildings it was three story buildings and I did the oh my god things around here New York is huge and people are like oh my god you're being a narc no I already told this story I already told the better story recently to somebody who I just met about trying to play it cool and looking for the Statue of Liberty so pointy so pointy so we get off Statue of Liberty and we get off of the subway and all of a sudden as soon as we step off the subway exit to the Statue of Liberty everybody's like Statue of Liberty tickets over here we got your Statue of Liberty tickets who wants to see the lady come over here I got your tickets and Blair's like these are all a scam ignore everybody it looks straight ahead act like you know where you're going so we do and we're like laser marching past all these people we get out of the subway laser past another group of people and then there's like a fairy building or something it looks like it was built in the 1800s so I'm like oh camera she's like nooo and all of a sudden hey buddy Statue of Liberty over here hey come on I'm like okay okay I'm with it I was just kidding I was just kidding just messing with you she's like don't do that again follow me don't make eye contact okay I can do this so we're like we're be lining past people who are like ah tickets over here they're kind of like this is like four layers of these people in so these ones are a little like okay these are probably good and as we're walking it goes excuse me, excuse me sir not disrespect there's only two reasons you'll be standing where you're standing right now one is your commuter which you are not the other is you're looking to find the tickets to the Statue of Liberty which is why we're all out here I'm like ah yeah we got it and so he's like look I got this badge that I'm looking at and it's like it looks fake and I'm wearing this jacket and some of the letters are missing he's like the reason we're all out here is because they made us they created a vendor program so people wouldn't get scammed I'm like whatever that sounds like a scam well except that it's like look how many people are doing it this is like almost too obvious of a scam we got down every single morning if like 50 people are out here selling these fake tickets so we buy the tickets Blair buys them and I don't have the access to cash it was like 60 bucks and we got the tickets and he's like okay so you go down this and you go to Pier 2 and it's just down that way and we start walking and about halfway down we realize this is like a two mile walk and we're looking back and like we did get scammed we did get scammed there's no way, the guy's gonna be gone if we went back there and we're like oh these tickets didn't work ah it's all new faces right so we get there and then big city don't look to the left or the right follow my lead Blair is like go up to the counter find out if they're real we were like agreed together because we could have just walked to the pier and bought tickets big city Blair didn't want to be embarrassed by having bought fake tickets I was like you mister look at all the tall buildings you go ask if these are real so I go up there and I'm like okay I bought these tickets I'm not really sure if I actually bought tickets to the thing she's like oh no they're good and they were the exact same prices if you'd walked up to the thing were they tickets to the Statue of Liberty yeah no wait where did Justin go there was a boat tour that went on in a circle that went close to the Statue of Liberty that's what we were looking for but that's what we were doing we missed the last boat to the Statue oh the circle one I thought that was what we were going for I didn't realize it was a statue because I still have never I've passed her a million times that wasn't what happened it wasn't like we missed the boat it was like an extra 50 bucks a piece I always got what it was it's your money and then I was like pointing out you can't even see the Statue of Liberty if you're in the Statue of Liberty what is that I'm like that's a great place to see the Chrysler building you can't see the Empire State Building shit on the top of the Empire State Building you can see it inside the Statue is cool because I grew up there I went inside it you grew up inside the Statue of Liberty I grew up inside the porch of the Statue of Liberty it was great you do not get much more American than that I know that's more French they think they have an elevator in there they didn't when I was a kid I walked all the way up the inside and they had this double it's kind of a double spiral staircase you walked up in and it was only like a foot and a half wide and it was solid people all the way up and down and creaking probably this is like possibly a death march any minute this could fall well it's only 100 years old and go in July when it's about 150 inside the Statue this is all copper so it heats up really nice inside supposedly they've changed a lot of that and put an elevator inside it to make it more comfortable since 9-11 happened because it was closed for years after 9-11 they just didn't think they could secure it I'll tell you another really good scam because I also lived in Washington DC and there's a good one that Blair could watch out for DC is if you're on the mall people will approach you with fake credentials and tell you that you're in trouble that they're the FBI no way I would totally believe that you finally caught me because you're in front of the capital for the first time you've never been to DC the face recognition cameras of the mall is that what did it got me they're trying to sell you something telling you you have to buy it and you've now that was the one when I was in DC it was people coming up to you telling you you've violated some kind of law on the mall it was completely different for me it took a long time to get used to living in the west when I was in Denver because everybody is so friendly and genuine I almost didn't know what to do I was like I would go to Home Depot and like six people want to help you and I just thought what's their angle what are you trying to sell me Shingles what are you doing because I never had anybody help me in stores in the northeast what was the point it's like you could tell we're from California because we kept apologizing to everybody people would bump into us and we would go sorry as if it's your fault let me step on my foot oh sorry I shouldn't have my foot there it's obviously mine it takes a lot of getting used to when you're so used to having your guard up everywhere but I'm sure Blair's going to, she's in San Francisco that has like you know compared to New York I'm a softy yeah but San Francisco has it's like darker side right I mean so I feel like it did in Chinatown yeah but you know in in like the marina no it's yeah and that's the biggest tourist trap we went to a comic club marina's not tourist trap that's north beach marina is where all of the yuppie housing is okay now I'm sorry the pier the pier with 51 or whatever it is 39 whatever it's a number it's a pure number combination of things but it's like it's not very tourist trap it's expensive and it's a lot of like you know gift shops but it's not like it's not like the comedy club we went into where they didn't have a price on the drinks and then you had to pay to leave yep what was that oh the comedy seller yeah but we did see Louis CK for like an hour testing out material it was a fantastic show but I realized like yeah they never charge us for any drinks like I'm waiting for the guy to come back by and take the thing and it turned out the drinks were prohibitively expensive anybody had seen the cost ahead of time but then you had to make it through like five or six bouncers to leave the joint they had to check your receipt like five times yeah that was a trap that happened to me once in college in when Times Square used to be really seedy in college we went into a strip bar and you know there was like a $40 cover to leave or something like that and it was like some of us didn't have it and we were wanting each other money and that was the point was to get all the money out of you before you left like every dollar from your friend give me another dollar just to get out because you know you're going to get your head beat in it's over that stuff doesn't really fly California I've never encountered anything like that in California it doesn't flood nothing there's nothing like that in Denver it's because now that weeds legal everybody's just stoned everywhere so it's fine nobody goes out such a good society there's no crime suddenly no crime nobody's leaving the house you know what they did do drugs girl in the backyard who cares why leave what they did do that you won't like is they made so much money when I first moved here and they had legalized it they made so much money in tax revenue I forget how many millions of dollars they made and the part of the way they passed it was promising everybody would get a rebate if they made more than a certain amount and it was crazy money every person was going to get a couple thousand dollars or something back and they didn't give any of it back they passed a new law that said we're going to take it and put it towards the western stock show which is a big cow show in Denver and they took it all and kept it after all that well I moved here I said I was telling people here I'm like I don't know in New York you'd never get that money back you realize that some kind of oil dividend to citizens there should be a pot dividend oil dividend is going to go away that's going away the oil companies are hurting so bad that they're going to start cutting the dividend and people live on that there so that's there I'm a citizen of Alaska and that's how I live Sarah Palin yes that's going to be rough people are going to be pretty unhappy when they're not living off when they don't get that money that's going to be interesting all 25 of them are going to be upset and vote for Trump or something Blair I appreciate you staying up this lake because I know you got up at 25 or something that's correct so I do appreciate you hanging out I thought there would be other people hanging out I'm sorry I'm having fun I sent the link out to whomever would be here but just you tonight lazy people upstairs it was really cool seeing the bad astronomer and that was awesome that was really awesome I followed him for years that's awesome I'm glad you liked it he's great I've known him for a while now and he's just a wonderful person fabulous geek very into geek culture identity 4 can't usually make the hang out yeah I think we should get Phil on more often that would be good it's like every once in a while I go on an interview getting spree I'm like I need to get people on the show and then I don't my friend who did that whole monkey situation that I was telling you about with the birth control and stuff she just moved to the west coast she moved back to my hood to be able to have her on the show sitting next to me one show and now she works for the VA for women's health nice she has a presidential management fellowship nice does she have any goats no but she does have two cats that are very amazing their names are yet an Artemis oh yet means crumb French cute she's a very cute like I don't think it's a tabby she's like she's a bunch of different colors and she has like half of a mustache I don't know anyway she's very pretty and then Artemis is black and very very fluffy Artemis Ben Artemis you're explaining what yuppies are to people in the chat room that's correct I was just laughing at the link that you decided to put in the chat room it's like my favorite thing let me google that for you what's a yuppie young upwardly mobile professional is what it used to stand for that's right that was like the 80s young upwardly mobile professionals usually at a certain point if they got married then they became dinks dinks the yuppie dinks double income no kids what no I just have bros and yuppies this is all I got bros yuppies hipsters and techies that's what we have yeah I was reading it that San Francisco is becoming mostly techies they were showing pictures of some of the buildings being replaced with much bigger buildings weren't you telling me adding a third story or something to houses oh there are a lot of houses that are being rebuilt they're adding another story or people go in and buy a house for 1.5 million and then remodel it so it has another floor and then they want to sell it for 3 million and at least I didn't go the New York route because when I was in Boston Boston's neat because everything's kind of protected but it's still been renovated a lot the New York route was just knock it down they knocked down Penn Station this glorious huge train station and they put Madison Square Garden there and to this day the largest train station in the United States is underneath Madison Square Garden it's terrible Penn Station and they're figuring out it's some crazy number like 25 billion to replace it and nobody can come up with the money and I used to commute through that every day and it's a misery and it's because New York just knocked everything down and built skyscrapers everywhere so hopefully San Francisco catches itself before it starts to come to work I don't know I've heard some interesting things about San Francisco real estate recently those big tech buildings where a lot of buildings the big companies like Twitter and others will like rent space out that they don't need so that they have the potential for growth and now a lot of that kind of extra space those companies are trying to rent it out and get rid of it and get other people using it so a lot of stuff is kind of sitting vacant actually right now yeah so there's some really interesting dynamics happening as a result of that growth but then how far is it going to grow and it seems like it might be starting to stall at this point Denver has had a huge housing boom and they just raised the maximum height on buildings in Denver because of its location all the builders pulled out in the procession so when nothing was being built now everybody wants to be here and now they're building a apartment complex is everywhere Denver is like one of the fastest growing areas right now isn't it it's crazy because it's jobs here no because we that's not why that is mostly bringing homeless people believe it or not there's a huge problem with homeless they never had it before really and now suddenly downtown it's everywhere and so that makes absolute total sense because one of the reasons one of the reasons are going to find people of any socioeconomic level being heavily impacted by law enforcement while you're going to see people lower economic groups being impacted by law enforcement is because they're not smoking their weed in their backyard by their pool which is 1200 feet from the neighbors yard who can also do whatever they want with their backyard like it's because they've got to be out in public because that is their living room it's their backyard is in that alley right and so that puts them into direct contact with law enforcement who's working the streets because they don't work backyards that's not where the police are so it does make sense that in search for some sort of policing relief people would migrate people are moving people are coming here with not a lot of money to get high and then don't have a job and don't leave a lot of the homeless that are here are coming from other states and I don't know how they're getting here I don't know how for free yeah I guess on a micro version of this I know existed it used to be 20 years ago policy for the police in Davis when they encountered a homeless person to give them the offer of a bus ticket to Sacramento or an Amtrak ticket to San Francisco and this is how they handled homelessness in Davis they gave you a ride out of town one way and I have no doubt that there are people in there's law enforcement in Nevada possibly California possibly Kansas could be anywhere who are like you know what we could continue to arrest you or send patrol cars out to deal with you and this is going to run up an X amount of money or we could work over 80 bucks for a one way ticket to Denver hey they got free weed there so you should totally agree with this right I have no doubt that this is a big part of what's going to take place and it happens just don't try to don't try to get some and take it on the plane with you when you that does not work but you know that saying you can't take it with you right and don't try to that was made up in reference to weed coming out of Colorado you're right and it's also though you look at San Francisco's homeless population as being pretty intense and so I explained there's the micro version of the city to city like we're a small town that doesn't have the resources here's the Amtrak ticket to San Francisco I can totally see states being like hey look California has better unemployment welfare benefits than we have here why don't you just go there and here's your ticket or Denver or wherever so liberal based economies that are looking to create safety nets will always attract law enforcement from less progressive states to enact this sort of policy don't try to drive it out either because that's the other thing that happens don't try to come here and drive to Utah with a trunk full of weed because you got Utah on one side Kansas and Nebraska on the other side and they're just like they sit and wait at the border oh they'll take your car your property your house if you were stiff enough to buy that yeah they'll take everything with that property related to drugs avoid trafficking marijuana narcotic find something that's easily transportable don't do something that in order to make a profit you have to move hay bales of the stuff it's just it's size prohibitive if nothing else all traffic marijuana that's a t-shirt you have to have a semi-full of it to really turn a profit I'm glad Uber weed you guys Uber things like Denver is impacting California's economy it pays half what it used to to go and cure weed used to be you could be like okay I'm out of work for a couple months between jobs I'm gonna go to Chico or Humboldt I'm gonna cure weed for some folks I'll make like 360 bucks a day now you're lucky if you get like 120 it's really cut into the curing not the cultivation so much but it's the curing aspect of the it's impacting economies which is why I've always been against legalization I'm like I've got a lot of good friends in the business like it's gonna hurt their industry friends are you running for office? I told ya as a California hey I got a lot of friends in Mendocino who have their industries impacted by all these legalization efforts this is the only reason California isn't legal it's a profit center we all have friends who make a living doing this so of course we don't want it to be legalized it's gonna hurt our friends and family well interesting yeah that's there's other stuff to see in Colorado we have bears who cares there's a in the mountains in the mountains got an old train in Durango do you remember Colorado Rocky Mountains it's a lot of mountains there big area for bears there's a speeding ticket once in Eagle Colorado which nobody knows what Eagle Colorado is it's a ski resort that's just maybe one tier down from going to Aspen it's ultra-wealthy it's where Kobe Bryant got his rape case but it just happened to me it was like a great story nice to be downhill slant from the Rockies I was in an 81 civic wagon at the time and I'm cruising I was just doing a tour of like I was down in New Mexico I went to Colorado I think I went up through Utah I don't know I was the four corners so I was hitting everything anyway I get pulled over and I goes how fast were you going I'm like 85 he's like you were nowhere near 85 like well I pointed to my Spedometer there's a little pin at 85 and the needle stops moving there so I just assumed like it was at least it was at least 85 these are things to not say to a police officer there's no well actually the thing not to say to a police officer this is a textbook just an open textbook of things not to say the number one thing by the way I have the two best answers for if you're pulled over and they ask you how fast you're going one is depends how long were you following me and why did I pull you over depends how long you followed me or the other one is because you're a cop if you were a firefighter you probably wouldn't go and then you get a ticket so anyway the ticket got written at 115 miles an hour and the guy goes okay so you have two options you can pay the bond which is 400 bucks and you can continue on your way or you can spend the night in jail and he said it just exactly like that and like and then you would owe what nothing well I don't know yeah it was a weekend I was gonna have to wait until the judge was even available for it might have been two days it's like okay well let's hit the ATM machine and I'll pay the bond so we go hit the ATM machine I take out my max which is thankfully 400 bucks and we go down to the jail house and I'm looking at this jail house and I've been traveling right I've been like hitting the motels and everything I'm looking in this I I didn't realize of course going in but this is a ski resort town so the jail cells are nicer than any motel I paid money to stay that's what I was gonna say so I'm like wait a sec I got the cash in my pocket we're good there you let me stop the ATM machine I don't appreciate it but if I if I do the jail option is that where I'm staying that room over there with Bubba yes well no there's nobody else in there either and it's you know it's gonna be Chad anyway he's gonna be like oh Chad bummer like I was just like I had too much stops after a gnarly downhill and he was gonna be like whatever and I'm like is that where I'm staying and he's like yeah that's I'm like it's not jail that's nicer than the motel room I stayed in the last couple of I'm like I and you guys feed me to like you're also gonna provide a meal if I stay right like this is actually I think a better deal you made this I'm doing that I got I'm berating like the clerk and the officer like you made your jail too nice you really did you sure this is supposed to be a deterrent and you're giving me incentive to stay with you like this is that like you're in rich people jail you're in rich people jail I'm like yeah this is rich people jail I'm like okay Martha Stewart like he brings Martha Stewart in because she you know bribed somebody on the ski so I negotiated the bond on the spot I'm like look here's the thing for $400 I would rather stay there for the next two nights maybe a week how long can I possibly drag this on right this is gonna be I don't have to be anywhere for like two weeks so this is nicer than where I'm gonna be sleeping otherwise so it's not worth $400 to leave and they're kinda like I'm seeing like the deadening of their eyes like we should have pulled over a nicer car we pulled over an 81 Civic wagon that's got a happy face and crossbones painted on the hood and this guy doesn't have any money and doesn't care I'm like look here's I'll give you $100 bond to be on my way I'm not paying $400 $400 I'm staying at your hotel this is like a four star hotel and you're gonna have to feed me they went for it they said they were like okay how are you not in a Mexican prison or something right now like you know I get out of I get out of Mexican prisons all the time it's about sweet talking them and making them feel like their Mexican prison is the nicest Mexican prison you would have ever stayed at and you're happy to stay there and have them feed you and make you take up space this is like a modern day Tom Sawyer that was fantastic but they were like tell the truth you started talking about politics and they made you leave no but the disclaimer was they were like so just so you know if you don't come back to the state and I'm like I'm not I'm like this is a very long time it's only your bond counts towards your ticket so if we let you out with a $100 bond that's just less of your ticket that you pay I'm like that's fine that's fine I'll pay it later I don't care it's not about the money it's about I would rather stay in your facility for like two weeks than have to fork over any money so they let they knocked it down to $100 and I skeed out a lot of there of course you did and you don't have a autobiography or anything right you mean a you mean to write stories right yeah you should write all this down do it like one of those novels get on Oprah Life of a Salesman this was right after bailing Naropa this was like one of the first adventures leaving the Naropa Institute because they wanted 10 grand like 10 grand I could go to jail for less money have a better time like wow for the interesting life it's amazing well thank you for hanging out with me tonight I appreciate it Dave every time you're fun to hang out with thank you Blair for staying up since you've been up for 18 hours no problem I don't want you to fall asleep and get scratched to death by the cat no she's not allowed in the bedroom tonight I think after last night we like get out you cat you get out now you already got the toxo so I mean I think we all have it we need to get tested I think we need to do a test I think good night identity I have 100% sure I have it well that's the wager on it we can make side bets and do synthetic derivatives and create a new like housing crisis it's good for you it's like fluorinated water everybody should have it fluorinated water so it's controlling our minds is what you're saying yeah but that's okay I mean we probably need some for that in the country right now after this year because this has been like the year from hell 2016 can just it can go away it can just but this is also the year that Kai got kissed by a girl it is it was the cutest thing oh my goodness it was hilarious so we're at an outdoor concert last night picnic in the park kind of thing we're in a big amphitheater we realized that Kai's friend from school Dot and her family are there so of course the kids find each other and they come back to our blanket that we have out and the kids they're just having fun first dancing and then like they start wrestling they're wrestling all over the place Dot is just like manhandling my child and I'm like wow you're like a monkey and she goes a gorilla and she starts acting like a gorilla and she's like headlocking Kai and like throwing him around the next thing I know is she like has him pinned on the ground and she's like hovering over his face and I was like what is going on there and then she gets up and she's like I kissed him that's a man either I was like you did I was like Kai did she kiss you he goes yeah and I kissed her back wow here she comes I was laughing I was like oh my goodness and so then of course I had to tell her parents and so her mom is like what did we tell you about kissing Dot and they're in trouble they're in trouble she's going to have great she's going to have a great immune system they're going to be young grandparents very young grandparents no stop it my three year old latest thing is she states whatever she wants like I want a milky cupper I want my bink or whatever it is followed by or I'm out of here or I'm out of here and she's like points I want aquanauts or I'm out of here there's a cartoon or a show or something she saw that that was in there and I didn't see it myself but it's the stupid cutest thing in the world I need a milky cup where I'm out of here storm off that's it no milky cup I'm gone later old people that's hilarious until she gets to preschool it is rude she's been watching debates apparently oh yeah let me tell you something dad I need my milky cup now or you're banished wow you're really good at that you're really good at that blood scary identity 4 went to bed identity 4 went to bed I wanted to say thank you because the gem doctor asked did I miss the 10,000 plus subscriptions party well we're kind of having the party now but I said thank you in the middle of twist we made it to 10,000 yeah we made it to 10,000 everybody knows this I didn't know yeah so let me check your twitter once in a while here it is I will screen share I'm teaching myself how to use photoshop I hate it I hate photoshop but I made this thank you thank you everyone we made it to 10,000 subscribers we couldn't have done it without any of you so great and we are now up to bed says 10,090 10,090 it was 10,089 earlier today mine's 10,091 so already growing a little bit more which is very exciting so are we gonna go crash the youtube studio now? now we can yes can you really? yeah so now that we are at 10,000 we can use the la youtube space studios so we can use the new york one yeah I think 10,000 is basically the base limit to be able to use youtube facilities and they start talking to you a little bit more once you have 10,000 nice has the talking begun? yeah well I was already kind of talking to them a little bit previously hopefully there will be more talking we'll get some swag it's so cute so Kai is really into youtube and Dan the diamond mine cart the minecraft channel DanTDM is his favorite guy but he's learned about the youtube play buttons that you get when you hit certain numbers of subscribers you get a gold or diamond play button and so he's convinced he tells me today you have 10,000 subscribers he goes you're going to get a diamond play button in one year oh ok he's on it he's in the net how many are they for those the play buttons like a million I think it's like a million it's like 100,000 is one and a different level is that for plays or for subscribers 10th of the way 10th of the way we're getting there for a little award something we can put on the wall awesome I'm just so excited though I've been looking at that 10,000 number for a while and it's been a goal of mine to get there and I'm so excited that everybody got us there it's great I know and it's neat to watch look at the youtube statistics because it has kind of this little line that slowly goes up and then like the week right before we hit it it goes there was a nice little peak there and everybody was helping out at the end and it was really, really great but this is not the end no this is a story the future is still ahead of us the next chapter we've got more goals, more things we're going to do it's one thing at a time people one foot in front of the other when's that zoo video going to be plopped I was going to do it this week but I didn't so probably Monday I'll plop it on Monday when you plop it will you email me the link so that it reminds me to send it to the marketing people I'll send you the link beforehand so that you can see it and send it to them ahead of time how do you think it turned out I think it's good I think it's good I don't know I just made it you're the producer you asked the questions I edited it and then what was the other thing that I was going to say we're going to have another Patreon hangout this Friday at 3pm for the Patreon sponsors patrons so are you around Blair 3pm PST I could try to do it from my phone I'll be at work okay are you around Justin Friday 3pm I'm at work if nothing else will there be a chat room or no could just be a hangout will Blair be in the monkey pen or something really no I think I'll be in charge of high school aged volunteers at that point so the monkey pen the monkey pen hey thanks Wiz Mike more like the pigs wow I'm like their mother they like leave detritus everywhere I'm in charge of all these kids there's just like dirty dishes and trash and like they don't put things back where they belong just everywhere you are the youngest old person I know when you were here I remember driving around and you went you know these kids today they have to use a GPS as I was punching the GPS in my car to get to the t-factory these kids don't know what they're doing what they're doing I was like Blair is the youngest old person I will agree with that what get off my lawn speak up young lady yeah and that's right the woman in the the person that was taking us through the tour after we took the tour and got this whole critique of what she did wrong the tour the woman that worked at the t-factory for 25 years here's all the things she did wrong with the group ready I train tour guides for a living I go that was it was amusing I was like lousy this is what you get when you hang out with Blair oh man make me sound like a mess no that's brilliant a real wet blanket no we need more no because the kids today the kids today they're playing Pokemon and wandering around there's people on my twitter feed going I'm wandering around at three o'clock in the morning playing Pokemon on the city streets I'm like why hey come rob me please there are people like in the middle of parks here in Portland they go to Mount Tabor at three in the morning going after pokey it's a big pokey stop random people in parks in the middle of the night there's always random people in parks no but it's different now they're not doing fun illicit things they're doing fun legal things well now they're starting down they're going to start using it the tinder is picking it up both tinder and the pokemon folks are going to be using it for dating it's so weird because so many people have met through doing pokemon that tinder picked up on it right away and said we should be doing this for tinder so you can just go pokeyinder I'm sure nothing can go wrong what can go wrong hey Blair are you using pokemon at the zoo yet you should be they released an official statement about it because there were other zoos where people they didn't release an official statement and then there were unsolicited like pokemon meetups and then people were trying to cross barriers and all this kind of stuff so they went ahead and they were because they'll be like oh there's a Pikachu right over there I see it but I have to go into this employees only area and then they do it anyway so that's not good there's a Pikachu and a polar bear awesome so yeah they did release an official statement about it and they were just like oh please come check out the three gyms and all these pokey stops all these words I don't understand and then and they said be sure to check out the actual animals at the zoo as well and be sure to be aware of your surroundings and the other visitors at the zoo you know all that kind of stuff actually the Denver zoo is giving discounts to people that are using it as a pokey stop or whatever yeah I think you sent me that right so that after one o'clock or something it's only like five bucks to get in it's pretty smart because after one o'clock admissions drop pretty considerably at the zoo so it's a good idea I just say put the Pikachu's right in the tiger pen and just route the people right in there kill a couple birds with a few tigers nope not funny especially with the San Francisco zoo oh there's a story there I don't know oh yeah dead people tiger they were probably drunk or something I'm guessing the tiger hadn't been drinking I don't think so they were people taunting the tigers let's change the subject in Denver people fall off of mountains all the time and they don't do anything about it so in San Diego two people walked off a cliff playing Pokemon it's true it's true not pretty so all we're saying is natural selection still is then there's other people who've lost 20 pounds since they started playing because you have to walk around that side of things I don't hate so much about it but really the thing that kind of made me change my mind about it is that I was never into Pokemon but I read this blog post where somebody said imagine if you will a game where it tracks your GPS and your phone is like a wand and as you walk around you can collect spells cast spells be in duels be sorted into a house you can brew potions catch magical creatures and I was like yep I'm in I want that game basically that is to Harry Potter the Pokemon Go game is to Pokemon so just because you don't like Pokemon doesn't mean that you can't respect people for liking it like yeah I would play that game in a second such a nerd such a nerd I am who I am Justin not that there's anything wrong with that but such a nerd I stopped trying to pretend I wasn't a nerd many years ago good for you it was about second semester freshman year college like oh right I am what I am yeah my first semester freshman year college I was like oh I'm the only person from my school going to the school I don't know anyone here and I moved into a door room with a bunch of cool kids and I was like I'm gonna be a cool kid did not turn out great it did not take me long I think it took me like two weeks to be like oh yep no way around it you're right she is pretty awesome as a nerd you're right we wouldn't want her any other way no alright everybody we are gonna go to bed I already did I went to bed a long time ago you've been here with your eyes open I don't know what you all are saying they've been closed for a long time I'm actually sleep talking at least you're ending the show this time and Justin's here there's been a lot of shows where you end it and he's just not there he's just fine and you guys say goodnight to him like he's there oh yeah fast asleep can I Justin then there's just an empty moon the camera is actually the camera is actually mounted to the ceiling this is my bedspread I've been in bed this entire time oh my god that sounds awesome awesome alright everyone thank you so much for watching this weekend science we look forward to seeing you again next week more science news I hope everyone has a really great weekend enjoys lots of science I have so many science stories that I did not cover today I might have to do a random periscope tomorrow just to get them out because I got lots of stories that I wanted to talk about better cool but anyway I didn't even get to talk about the lichen oh man tomorrow night twisminion hangout with ed dyer and other minions scienceisland.org look for the minion hangout if you want to hang out there Dave thank you for joining us and hanging out this evening thank you super Dave you should show up to the twisminion hangout once in a while it's on really late it's the same time it's earlier than this is right now we started this a while ago so it's all about when it starts too well I appreciate Blair staying up she's been up for 29 hours now she should probably at this point say good night Blair good night Blair good night Kiki good night Dave good night minions good night everyone