Give Away, Book club, Children's show?--chat

It's too late to turn this around now, embrace the weird

Went to look for the audiobook and it has the super old fashioned British voices I can't stand. So sad. Ruins any book by making it feel like Winnie the pooh.

please no one does indignant better than Dr. C. imagine getting home from work to find a take down of JD Vance edition!!! side note, peeps are correct, 3rd-4th grade.

Off topic. But when are we going to discuss Navier-Stokes and ChatGPT

This so much!!!!! I've been waiting for you to do a live stream!! Especially with physics but everything else you suggested would be amazing!

“What happens when the sun runs out of energy” is a nice lead in to the lifecycle of stars and nuclear energy (or whatever you call it). A story of X through the lens of energy would be neat, and you’ve already covered a lot of starting points. how does digestion work to give your body energy? how do sunlight and CO2 make plants grow. pick a few interesting chemical reactions that aren’t fire based (elephant toothpaste gets hot, or winter hand warmers, or reusable ice packs). weather as energy with climate change making more energy available for bigger storms and how lightning gets made. satellites from an energy perspective and how they eventually burn up in the atmosphere. how a microwave works compared to an electric kettle compared to a pot on the stove for cooking/heating. Sorry, those are just ideas.

I won't show her unless you say it's cool, but my 4th grade daughter would absolutely love that rough cut. If you want a test audience, she'd probably love to see the idea.

I think the energy video is probably grade 5 or less because of the delivery. Thermodynamics and Newton's Law on the conservation of energy might be lost on that grade range. If they can grasp all of that, I'd end on a cheerier note than the heat death of the solar system.

The hard thing about embarrasment is you have to risk it and get embarrased to know if the thing is embarrasing. If you are asking if this entire Patreon/YouTube thing is some sort of Cruel Intentions type fake out, then I'm not sure what to advise. You could make really bad things on purpose to see if people accept them. I think that might be a waste of your talents, but your smart and could keep a list of suspects in memory for use as retirement hobby. Not really an enjoyable passtime in my opinion. But if your scientific mind really needs an answer it might be worth considering.

I have read Babel and have a review on my YouTube. I'll listen to the audio book for book club. If you want to skate on the Science Communication conference just send them the comments about spectrum to prove you are not a science communicator.

About that grammer thing, diversity of speech gives people character - especially with book characters. Imagine if everyone in moby dick spoke in the same exact, cold and devoid of soul ai manner. This boom would be like 70% less interesting

So in Oklahoma, it is not uncommon to hear people trim things up even more and deliver "I have a lot of pants that need fixed, so I am learning basic mending". Sharing in case the temptation to bait the corrector becomes irrepressible. The secret project is very exciting! Popcorn is a fun example in this area too, especially since you get to ask "why does the un-popped kernel weigh more"? Looking at the recommended age ranges of some shows I am familiar with convinced me I don't have the background to comment there, however, I do remember doing the egg drop and various paper airplane experiments in fifth grade. I liked how you defined terms with context.

I love looking at other people's book shelves! There's always something to recognise, something to be inspired by to have a look at. Seeing your Graeber collection, I liked 'Debt' a lot, it's not unlike 'The dawn of everything' in volume and depth, and less airport-book shop compatible than 'Bullshit jobs'.

I think that was later elementary school, like 4th and 5th grade. very cool. Have you ever read about Dr. John Snow and the Broad Street pump? I would love to see what you do with it along with Bradford Hill causality. (I thought of this because of your interest in The Hot Zone, I sometimes have to explain causality in a public health context as a lawyer and I lean into the Broad Street pump sometimes).

As the great Ramsey Dewey once stated, "correcting errors is the lowest form of coaching", because at the end of the day your strengths sell you and what people consider weaknesses are very frequently two-edged swords. It's also safe to say every scientifically minded person should embrace language errors, because that's how languages change and grow, that's how the boundaries are getting tested until they cease to exist - and not just in other people, if you are getting embarrassed by your own errors, they sicken weaken you and you cannot utilize their true power. That is a big part of the maxim of "know yourself", that's also how you learn about life and universe. So the game of the grammar Nazis is a losing game, however I'm agreeing with them in two minor points. First, if I am entitled to err, then my fellow men are entitled to err too, even if they do it in a rude way. Second, life is finite, so everyone is entitled to say "I don't have time for your gibberish, please, be succinct, accurate, straight to the point, crystal clear", at the bottom of that mindset can be something like "please, respect me". I think that can be a valid demand, although very frequently that's just about positions in the hierarchy and that's a somehow dark thing, because language is a perfect tool for signaling the status. Just from a couple sentences and from your pronunciation I learn a lot of your history. Nevertheless, I always feel whenever you are getting upset about this it is in the way of your own development, so once you intuitively understood all of this and you forgave everybody including yourself you should move forward to live up to your potential as a free person. (Even if you are naturally doomed to pronounce things badly.) Another thing I wanted to share with you is I found a passage in Emanuele Tesauro's magnum opus which perfectly suits Moby Dick, just to add fuel to the growing Moby Dick obsession: "And furthermore, you perceive profound insights regarding doctrine, politics, ethics, economics, and even Christian piety; thus, through the honey of poetry that is both delightful and steeped in the classical tradition, you imbibe a tonic that heals all ailments of the soul." This is a quote to write on the first blank page.

It's a departure from the Tolkien theme, but if you're interested in Beowulf stuff, you might check out Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith. Bea Wolf is a brilliantly illustrated Beowulf story, but the stakes are way higher, since the characters face a fate worse than death: being turned into adults. Weinersmith and Boulet previously did Augie and the Green Knight.

I'm sitting next to a pile of pants that need fixing, so I grabbed a pair to start working on them.

If you do the Walden video and want another reference point, my friend loved Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard which is Ms. Dilliard trying to do a modern-ish version of what Thoreau did.

I just have to say that you are one of the most clear and concise communicators of science ive heard in my life. I think its ok you dont identify being one even though .....you STILL are probably one of the best. Also hand knit items is one of the most sought after things. that is pure human labor. the best commodity of all.

Adding "Is it weird?" to the list of Angela catch phrases...

The pbs draft looks great. However i could imagine kids wondering more about the specifics of what happens to the used energy and why you cant get it back

I lived the secret project. My read was that it has a band of grade levels: second grade will understand car on ramp go down and there is more than one type of energy. 4-5 grade could use it to kick of discussion of “yes but how? How to exactly does potential energy become kinetic energy? Could chemical energy become kinetic energy? How much?”

I have an English degree, and probably one of the most interesting, and paradigm-shifting classes I took to get my degree was Intro to Linguistics. People learn English grammar in school and because they're taught that these are rules they must follow to get the good grades, they think this is the only way English must function. But Intro to Linguistics was basically entirely about how language is fully a social construct, arbitrary, and will change naturally over time as people express themselves differently. The undercurrent in all of language is - can what you said or wrote be understood by another speaker/reader? If so, then it's not incorrect. It might be less formal or not conform to specific prescribed rules for certain settings, but it's not incorrect. For example, the whole rule about not ending sentences with prepositions is a complete fiction. It is FINE to end English sentences with prepositions. The person who introduced that rule was used to writing academic documents in Latin, and ending sentences with prepositions in Latin ends up being confusing and bad, to the point where it's not readable. But the rule does not matter in English. There is no functional difficulty in reading sentences like that in English. It doesn't produce something fundamentally confusing.

Shout out for talking about people's weird attitudes toward rectitude wrt grammar. Huge pet peeve of mine. Language is a tool, and it's in constant flux! If we understand each other, it's working correctly! Don't try to erase or flatten regional culture! I'd love to see you do a video about Appalachian culture. I don't think just doing a takedown of Vance would be that interesting on its own though. I think I'd get more out of complementing it with discussion and celebration of what Appalachian culture is rather than focusing on what he gets wrong. Rejection of a thing only gets us so far; gotta have something to cheer on. The rough cut was fun! Don't know what that content normally looks like for comparison, but I thought it was fine. I don't know that the candle demo is the best way to convince a young mind that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but you already indicated that was on your mind. It's sort of in the wrong direction, right? It doesn't teach you that energy is conserved itself, but you can (partially) reason about what's happening if you already believe it's true. My intuition is that using a demo that leans on any amount of chemistry also invites a lot of additional questions an elementary school teacher probably would not want to deal with.

You're using "energy is conserved" as shorthand for "neither created nor destroyed" a few times, with an emphasis on created. I think that could do with an introduction - "not destroyed" is the plain meaning of conserved, but "not created" is a bit of a leap. Relatedly, "transferred to the earth" doesn't seem like a satisfying answer for "where did the energy go/why can't we get it back?"

Your secret project seems like something 'we' need. The age vibe I got was 4th or 5th grade ( don't know chrono years for that ). But it sort of slid around a bit, slightly younger with older spikes ( Thermodynamics ). Getting the science conversation started in the classroom can really open some minds up.

Also please please do the little pig man (Jamelle Bouie’s moniker for JD) & Daria videos. Please. You have clout.

I send postcards to voters to encourage others so I would love one of those to come to me! I’ll follow up on dm. I have too many scarves so another person deserves the beautiful scarf. Finally, yay Babel!

Oh, I had the Letters of Father Christmas by Tolkien in minibook form as a gift years ago, unfortunately, I have no clue what happened to it, I lost it. I've been meaning to read it again one of these Xmas seasons. I should just buy it again for myself.

You're so thoughtful! I would love to get a memento, but I don't want to have to deal with the hassle of customs for international shipping. Your generosity is appreciated.

I should be voting this week actually. We got our absentee ballots and we'll spend some evening researching all the candidates and filling them out then take them down to the courthouse. Good way to avoid ICE at the poling stations.

I also wanted to float the idea of a possible public live stream on my general YouTube channel? I wanted to do a charity stream for Donor's Choose (which gives school supplies and things to underfund public schools.) Does anyone have thoughts? I was thinking a 4-6 hour live stream where each hour was an activity. Like HR 1: Solving some physics problems, HR 2: binding of Isaac, HR 3: Ai complaints, etc. I dont know. I am thinking November.