Hello!

My video today is about some good news (the eclipse was amazing) and some bad news (Journey to the Microcosmos is ending). Microcosmos has been a little light in my life ever since we started making videos in 2019. I’m so grateful to all of the people who have worked so hard to make it such a wonderful and beautiful thing. Something I keep reminding myself of is that the videos we made are still there to be appreciated and enjoyed and will be for as long as YouTube remains a thing. Just because something ends does not make it tragic. Four years is a long time to make a thing! Lots of TV shows don’t have that kind of life, and Microcosmos made a video almost every week that whole time!! It’s a really beautiful body of work and I am so glad we made it.

Thanks so much to everybody who loves it. Feel free to check out some of our best videos, like this one about death and this one about tardigrades. 

Also, here’s a picture I took of the eclipse!

Hank

This Week in Stuff

• Hank and John committed to the bit. You can’t go home again, but you can go to Rax.

• In 1978, a science teacher promised his students they’d watch the 2024 eclipse together. The watch party actually happened, and over 100 former students showed up.

• An adorable panda named Meng Er went viral for grimacing while breaking bamboo. She is thought to be mimicking the humans who raised her, who have a way harder time snapping bamboo than she does.

• You can help others experience the awe of a solar eclipse by donating your eclipse glasses.

• The Royal Society invited John to look at priceless books. When asked which book he wished he could take home, John chose Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), which has been fully digitized. Warning: It’s amazing and might take up your whole day.

Please send us stuff you think we should feature to [email protected]

Depths of Wikipedia: Famous people with no names

Annie Rauwerda

I hope your day is going well. Or at least okay. Or at least better than July 12, 1890 went for Lewis. Lewis, whose full name is lost to time, pitched one single game of Major League Baseball after trying out for the gig that same day. It was, unfortunately for Lewis, a disaster. His pitches were so bad that the opposing team racked up 28 runs by the end of the game. Twenty eight! The final score, 28–16, set a record for highest scoring MLB game — a record that wasn’t broken for more than thirty years — and newspapers around the country described Lewis as a “failure” (New York Tribune), “disastrous experiment” (Pittsburgh Press) and “a much disgusted ball tosser” (Sporting Life). But you know what the newspapers didn’t write? His full name! All he will ever be is “Lewis” (Just like that one Jack-O-Lantern from Target, lol).

For years, Wikipedia had an article about him called “Lewis (baseball)”, putting him in the small and exclusive club of people who have Wikipedia articles but no known full name. His company included the Stone Age king whose article is titled (..)ibra and the fifth-century Mayan ruler who is nicknamed “Casper” because his signature resembles a ghost and his real name remains undeciphered. What an odd speedbump on the road to oblivion! We’ve forgotten their most basic identifiers but we have just enough information to know that they mattered.

Lewis, for what it’s worth doesn’t have his own standalone article anymore — “There's nothing about the player himself other than that he was born in Brooklyn and was a bad pitcher,” one Wikipedian wrote in a discussion about Lewis’s notability — but his story is documented in the 1890 Buffalo Bisons season article and his name is one of the thirty-three on the list of nineteenth-century Major League Baseball players with unidentified given names.

One of life’s great bummers is that you’re inevitably going to fail at things, sometimes in ways that are public, sometimes in ways that are mortifying. That is scary! I’ve gotten a little better at failing, but I’ll never totally quell the fear of falling short. Luckily, there’s always a chance that everyone forgets your blunder. And even if people don’t forget, even if your failure is printed in newspapers far and wide, even if the papers of record are calling you a “disastrous experiment”, there’s always a chance — a tiny one, but a real one — that no one even remembers to write down your name.

^{Annie Rauwerda is a Wikipedia enthusiast in New York. She created the Depths of Wikipedia social media accounts to share her favorite Wikipedia pages. She's busy writing a book about her favorite website that will be published by Little, Brown in 2025ish. In the meantime, you can find her on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Mastodon.}  

Oil spills from tankers have fallen by more than 90% since the 1970s

Hannah Ritchie

In the 1970s, oil spills from tankers — container ships transporting oil — were common. Between 70 and 100 spills occurred per year. That’s one or two spills every week.

This number has fallen by more than 90% since then. In the last decade, no year has had more than eight oil spills, as shown in the chart.

The quantity of oil spilled from tankers has also fallen dramatically. Over the last decade, the average is less than 10,000 tonnes per year, compared to over 300,000 tonnes in the 1970s.

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.

This Week at Complexly

How do magnets work? Why do we feed them to cows?! SciShow answers these questions and many more in The 16 Most Asked Questions About Magnets.

The first episode of Crash Course Art History is LIVE! Our host Sarah Urist Green explains how interpreting artwork reveals connections among all of us, across cultures and across time.

Some Games to Play!

Nerdy Connections (by Complexly)

SpellCheck.xyc (by Answer in Progress.)

If you post your results on social media, we’d love it if you post a link for folks to subscribe to “We’re Here” (https://werehere.beehiiv.com/subscribe)

And that’s the end of the newsletter!

That’s it! We’ll be back next week. If you want, you can draw a tree and send it to us! We’d love to see your tree.