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Immortality and Knitting Socks
Hank Green & Payton Mitchell
June 14, 2024
Hello!
This week, I am on the second episode of a new YouTube channel that I think is a truly fascinating idea. We live in a world that is chock-full of information. This is a wonderful solution to a lot of problems. But, as with all solutions, it creates some new problems. Here are two:
1. When there is TONS of information, it's easy to pull bits from here and there to tell misleading or false stories
2. When we DON'T have access to information, it feels incorrect and wrong, as if someone must be hiding something.
This is what being on the second-ever episode of Howtown made me think about. Howtown is a channel from two of the absolute best in the business, Joss Fong and Adam Cole, where they ask HOW WE KNOW THINGS!!! The question I asked was "How do we know how many people have died of COVID?" This question suffers from both of the above problems. First, it is easy to pull little pieces of data out to make it look like the numbers we have are wrong or fudged in whatever way best serves a narrative. And second, there's plenty of information we do not have access to, especially globally, where COVID deaths have been vastly (and sometimes intentionally) under-counted.
But what Howtown does in this quite brief episode is show how we (in the US) really do know fairly precisely how many people died of COVID (vs /with/ COVID) and also the extent to which we probably under-counted that number early in the pandemic before there were tests.
Two things become very clear in the episode. First, the techniques we used to count COVID deaths in the US make sense and are accurate. Second, global data remains incomplete because the systems many countries use to keep track of data just aren't available everywhere for some really fascinating and particular reasons. Obviously, I think you should check it out!
Hank
P.S. THANK YOU SO MUCH to everyone who got a Crash Course Coin this year! The entire team is so grateful to have your support so that we can keep doing this work.
To everyone who purchased a coin, who supports on Patreon, or who watches our videos and shares them with others: THANK YOU! Crash Course wouldn't exist without you.
— CrashCourse (@TheCrashCourse)
Jun 10, 2024
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This Week in Stuff
A group of geese went viral on TikTok for being loyal to their friend who was afraid to cross a busy road.
John will be live on Vlogbrothers tomorrow, June 15th, from 12:00-2:00 pm EST to talk about Partners In Health.
Annabeth, a knitter on Instagram, is making socks based on her daily NYT Connections results.
There is a new street art exhibition in Paris! It’s free to the public and it’s called We Are Here. (Great name!)
Hello Future Me posted a video about immortality in media and what it might mean about us.
Hank shared some behind-the-scenes footage of his new comedy special. Pissing Out Cancer comes out June 21st on Dropout!
Please send us stuff you think we should feature to [email protected]
The price of lighting has dropped over 99.9% since 1700
Esteban Ortiz-Ospina
In the last two centuries, the price of lighting has decreased drastically.
You can see this in the chart, which plots historical data from Roger Fouquet and Peter Pearson. To allow for comparisons over time, the data is adjusted for inflation and expressed in prices for the year 2000.
In the 1300s, one million lumen-hours — a standard lighting measure — would have cost around £40,800 in 2000 prices. By 2006, this had fallen to £2.90, a 14,000-fold decline.
Innovations in lighting appliances, fuels, infrastructures, and institutions during the 19th and 20th centuries made this progress possible.
To put this in perspective, consider that a standard 100-watt incandescent light bulb today can emit about 1,700 lumens. Therefore, running one such bulb for 24 hours would produce about 50,000 lumen-hours. That means that 1 million lumen-hours today would require continuously keeping a standard 100-watt incandescent bulb on for about 25 days. Achieving the same amount of light with candles would require burning more than 100 candles every day for that period.
Most people today take the ability to switch on a light at night for granted. But those who live or have lived without artificial light can appreciate how important it is.
Our World in Data is a UK-based non-profit organization that publishes research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems. You can find more of their data insights here.
Demystifying Death with Hospice Nurse Julie
Julie McFadden, RN
After witnessing death day in and day out for the better part of two decades, I don't fear it anymore; it's not because of my spiritual beliefs, and it's not because I've become numb. The reason I no longer fear death is because I know for a fact we do not need to suffer if we'd only open our hearts to what the body is trying to do for us. You see, our bodies are built to die. They make accommodation for death. Our bodies have developed mechanisms to help us through death, and the more we honor those mechanisms, the more we listen to our bodies, the better it usually goes.
Specifically, towards the end of life, a dying person naturally starts to feel increasingly tired, sleeping more and more. The body turns off the hunger instinct, and they will want less and less to eat. This cue triggers a reduction in thirst. Reduction in fluid intake now causes a calcium increase, which triggers more tiredness. And this cycle continues to reinforce itself the closer we come to death. This is the natural dying process.
Eventually, the dying person will sleep more than they wake. Eating and drinking will trickle down to nearly nothing. In fact, forcing food or liquids at this stage could have the opposite effect and actually cause suffering. The body begins to release endorphins, a type of neurotransmitter, which creates a sense of euphoria.
The body guides us. How does it know how to do this? I have no idea. But I've experienced it time and time again. It happens, and it works, and it's beautiful. When I do see suffering during death, it's almost invariably because these messages were ignored, but when they are honored, death is beautiful, death is painless, and there is no reason to fear it at all.
This Week at Complexly
Answer in Progress joined Tangents this week to answer everything they could about bananas!
Crash Course Biology explains what really happens when you step on a lego in Episode 46: The Endocrine and Nervous Systems.
Some Games to Play!
Nerdy Connections (by Complexly)
SpellCheck.xyc (by Answer in Progress.)
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Not So Secret Talents
We thought you’d have weird and fun secret talents and we were right! Thanks to everyone who submitted a talent.
I can move my eyes independently of each other, so my fun little party trick is trying to make them move like a Newton's cradle, knocking each other to the side and crossing in the middle. Usually people just think it's weird. :)
This is absolutely a rogue one, but as a child I could accurately determine my friends laundry detergent every time by…chewing their school cardigan sleeves…
My party trick is that I can lick my elbow! And my invisible talents are that I can flex my tympanic membrane (eardrum) and bring my eyes in and out of focus on command. Flexing my tympanic membrane makes a rumbling noise that helps me drown out unpleasant sounds a little, and I have been using it when there is violence on TV since I was little!
My newest party trick is that I can recite the entire text of the picture book Kuinkas sitten kävikään? (eng. trans. The Story About Moomintroll, Mymble and Little My) by Tove Jansson by heart. This is not a good party trick and as of yet no one has asked to hear it. I’m going to hang out with my 10-month-old godchild next week, though, so I have high hopes for that.
Last year I became the third best Pokemon Pinball (Ruby & Sapphire version) in the world. I had 7 lives left at this point but I was getting really bored and wasn’t sure I could keep saving on my Steam Deck while playing other games, so I purposely lost at 34.5 billion points.
(Image below)
If you saw the number art earlier in the newsletter and were a bit confused by its meaning, W is the 23rd letter of the alphabet and H is the 8th. We’d love to see more “23 8” We’re Here art!
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