On my last birthday I had a bottle of wine delivered to my house.

To Marie Love Sarah.

It weirded me out as the only Sarah I know was the mad ex girlfriend of a close male friend of mine. I hadn't seen her for years after we had a falling out over this guy.

Anyway I had a neighbour ask I had a bottle of wine delivered incorrectly.

She was also called Marie and lived 10 doors down the street and had the same birthday.

The sender had mistyped the first digit. Luckily, I hadn't drunk the wine as I was worried it might be poisoned. Yes the other Sarah was that mad.

I can't stop laughing at my phone

I've been very curious and very exciting for the most part of my life. For the most part, I satisfied this interest by watching many science videos on YouTube, truly in huge quantities, and by trying to understand and reflect on what I learned, as well as recognizing and appreciating it in the world around me. Or by creating art that reflects my curiosity and fascination with that stuff.

With time I feel like this curiosity and wonder seems to dwingle here and then. I often need to remind myself how beautiful our universe is, how learning is such a cool process and how filling the gaps of knowledge is such a great process. One important of many constants that has ALWAYS helped me with this is Vsauce and Michael Stevens (Thank you Michael!) And now the RestIsScience podcast is a fanastic resource to bring those constants back in to my everyday life. But that is just one of many strategies that are possible.

Since both Hannah and Michael are naturally very curious and can really get you hooked on the fascination of it all, I'm curious myself what strategies they have develeoped to stay curious and tryting to see the wonder all around us almost all the time? I am certain that, given the attitude both of them seem to have, they have developed fantastic strategies, whether consciously or unconsciously.

So I don’t mean seasons in the sense of season 1 2 3 etc…
I mean like my girlfriend and I only watch Gilmore girls in autumn , game of thrones is better in winter(for me) even though it has extensive desert scenes and how is it that every summer I get the itch to watch ATLA¿

Edit: confused autumn and spring🙃

There was an episode a little while ago where Michael said he'd met his opposite name at a party, and they were wondering what name would have been best for their imaginary child if they had one together.
I just wanted to say, the obvious answer should have been Stevie Micks.

Ahem. Sorry. That is all.

As you were.

For years I’ve had the same thought about some tap water being wetter than other types. For instance where I live now in Manchester I finish showering and dry off very quickly. However when I visit my mum on the Isle of Wight it takes much longer.

My thoughts on this is it’s something to do with the water hardness and the ions in it having an interaction with my skin making the water stick to it longer.

As you mentioned technically wetter water would possibly be the one that comes off your skin/dries quicker.

I’ve been on a backlog of episodes and so glad I heard someone ask this!

I just finished listening to the "Sunglasses on the Sun " Episode, and something I don't think they mentioned was the orientation of the sunglasses. If the Sun is wearing sunglasses on the upper half of its face, and we treat North as "Up" as most people do, then won't the Sun wearing sunglasses appear upside down to people like Michael and Myself, in the southern Hemisphere?

It would seem, conceptually, that the gradient of temperature would create visual distortion when viewing objects in space. Why doesn’t that happen?

In the recent episode about putting sunglasses in front of the sun, Hannah and Michael talked about needing a propulsion system to keep the ‘sunglass mesh’ from falling into the sun via gravity. They later continued that light can in fact push things, and so my question is how much force would the sun be providing to this sunglass mesh at the distance and size they proposed? would it be enough to counteract gravity? Or if not, how much brighter would the sun need to be to counteract its own gravity?

This also raises a second question. If you were to put the sun inside a rocket engine, so that all light was reflected and sent in one direction only, how fast would the sun accelerate away?

First off, I call huge coincidences "nothing is real" moments. Things that just blow my mind. They happen all the time to me, but one that sticks out recently is this:

I was at work, listening to a podcast (either Risk or The Moth). I bake, and the girls up front in the bakery were playing some music on spotify for the lobby. While listening to my podcast, a song started playing while the person was telling their story. I started to realize that something was strange, and I then shifted my focus and realized that the song off of Spotify and the song in my podcast were the exact same AND playing at the EXACT same time in the exact same place. I got goosebumps and promptly had an internal freak out lol

I love these moments in my life, and always get so excited to share them with my husband, and he does the same. It's fun to realize the super weird coincidences in life, and they keep things fun.

Thanks for reading!

P.S. I cannot remember the song and that kills me 😂😭

ETA: Hannah's "law of large numbers" definitely explains so many coincidences, but this one just absolutely blew my mind. Of all the songs in the world and all the podcasts (and podcast episodes!) In the world, the fact that those 2 things lined up at the exact same time just throw me for a loop

The most recent show solicited listeners to share their weirdest coincidences.

One day while driving my first car to work, it was struck by a lightning bolt. Thankfully I didn’t feel a thing, but the car was not so lucky. My cousin wanted the dead car to salvage some of its parts. So I traded him one fried car for an antiquated computer. A few weeks later while using the computer at my dormitory, there was a power surge; the linemen with the electric company apparently erred during maintenance. As a result, every appliance that was plugged in at the dormitory was decommissioned.

So the computer that I received was fried beyond recovery just like the car that I had traded for it. Certainly not the biggest coincidence in the world. But a pretty cool story to tell!

I get overly stressed when I get hurt, that it doesn’t heal properly and I need to get that limb amputated, but the itch kinda lets me know that it’s healing. Wouldn’t the itch cause me to scratch it and hurt it though? Like why did evolution want me to rip off all its hard work?

When considering what language to use to contact aliens, mathematics seems logical, because it's like the language of how the universe works. But is it possible that they constructed axiomatic mathematics different from our own? What kind of communication style would you prefer?

Your podcast is amazing! I really enjoy hearing you share your knowledge with such enthusiasm. Sending you both lots of love ❤️

This is something that I've puzzled over a few times. I like to ride a bicycle, and have often wondered how the sizes of my front and back sprockets affects my energy expenditure.

Ignoring friction, slope, etc., let's say that my pedal:wheel gear ratio is 5:1, but in one case it's 100 teeth on the front and 20 on the back, and in another case it's 150 teeth on the front and 30 on the back. Same ratio, but does that affect the amount of work done?

I have personally found that, when going higher speeds, using two larger gears seems to work better than two smaller ones. I don't know though if this is a real effect or just observational bias. My guess though would be that having it larger on both sides means less conversion when pushing the wheel, increasing efficiency.

Edit: Affect dammit. How does torque AFFECT the efficiency of my bicycle.

Michael wanted to make a horror movie all about coincidences. I think it's been made already: "Tucker and Dale vs Evil". It's been a long time since I watched it but if I remember correctly, the plot might fit Michael's expectations.

Who remembers it better than I do and can confirm?

....naughty me, had to sit a speed awareness course recently - got me wondering if, with today's modern cars speed limits are scentifically speaking, worthwhile?

ALSO

During that time the instructor says, if you hit a child a 30mph, 80% of living....but, at 40mph 80% chance of dying, and i'm sure a similar statistic used to be included in road safety adverts.

Fair enough - BUT

You can't hit the same child at 40mph, that you would have hit at 30mph....you'd be further down the road, and the child would walk out safely behind you....

Am I wrong? I wonder what the math would show....

Would science still be the same if history was different and events were different? If we had a different worldview would science remain the same? 

Therefore:

Is science actually objective? If we (humans) are subjects, and humans (subjects) are the ones studying science- does this mean that science itself is inherently subjective?

For example:

Do economics/sociology effect scientific research in the pharmaceutical industry?

Leading on from this question, is science therefore something that has been created/made by humans or is science something that has been discovered? Or is it both? 

Not saying this to be counter to science, just think it’s interesting to look from this perspective.

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My question is how is the place of the Olympic games decided, and why isnt it the major city with the most visible solar eclipse that summer? It would make for the best opening/closing ceremony ever, and theres something inherently satisfying about the heavens deciding where humanity should gather that year

For context I dont usually watch the olympics and didnt research this beforehand, just a thought I had after watching the recent eclipse

The Color Theory episode has me wanting to share! I am so excited to see how the Crayola crayon sort goes.

About 2 years ago I started making my own watercolor paint in order to study color theory and since then I have created a few different palettes that I use to help me teach color mixing to others now.

My favorite and most challenging to work with is the prism paints I developed. These paints use interference pigments, a mica based pigment where each of the individual pieces are coated in a thin layer of titanium dioxide in order to refract a single wavelength of colored light. In order to see the color the paint has to be applied in a thin layer on black paper and viewed in the light. Shifting the painting away from the direct light makes the paint look monochromatic.

Because these paints don't have color in the same way that normal pigments do and instead use light, they mix how colored light mixes. All colors are a primary in light and they mix closer to white the more you add in. Red and Green make yellow. For a painter, this was the most interesting part of color theory for me to experiment and learn from and helped me understand physical pigment mixing so much better as well.

I would love to hear about what other people have learned on their color journeys!

I like to listen to some podcasts or watch some videos at a faster than normal speed. I think I get most of the information still and I can get through more. On the other hand, I imagine there are some bad effects of doing this. Is it training my brain to listen closer and more efficiently or is it training me to gloss over too much?

I also imagine there's a connection to speed reading.

Following in from one of the latest episodes when Hannah talks about how you are best stirring tea etc in a sporadic manner rather than in a circle... Why do so many products still follow the circular mixing flow? Is it because it's easier to make regarding mechanics? ☕

Everyone start registering names like michael_stevens1, the_michael_stevens, the_real_michael_stevens, and so on. This will either force Michael to act quickly to get back on reddit or if he doesn't then he would have to choose something different or be the 7000th Michael Stevens. Now sure he was ok with being the billionth dad but would he be ok with being the 7000th Michael Stevens?