Dear Everybody,
Hi! It’s me! Austin!
I have a baby! Look at it!
It likes to scream a lot.
Anyway, I’m getting my butt kicked by learning how to take care of a newborn while also getting
sleep, so to say that I’m burning the candle at both ends would be a hellacious understatement.
But that’s my life.
To that end, I thought now would be a good time to do the second installation of the
“Every Lie I’ve Ever Told To You” series and cover and correct some of the mistakes
I’ve made in past episodes.
Last time was every Fallout video, and this time any franchise is up for grabs.
Are you read?
I’m ready.
Let’s get it done!
I’m gonna start with a fun one, because it’s pretty emblematic of the kind of mistakes
I tend to make, and the incredibly small group of people that get ABSOLUTELY LIVID when I
make them.
The Overwatch video on the broken melee system video I did that explored just how powerful you’d have to punch
in order to break the scenery in Overwatch.
Easily one of my most nitpicky topics, and also easily one of the most fun to make, this
video delves into a topic that is, quite honestly, more complicated than particle physics: structural
engineering.
In my video I calculated that it would take 3.29 gigapascals of force to snap a sign.
There are a few problems with this.
First, I should’ve said 3.29 giganewtons.
But even more so, I was using the shear modulus for my calculations, when I should have been
looking at shear strength.
The problem is that there isn’t a ton of data for how to punch a signpost in half.
But ultimately it doesn’t matter, because however you apply force to a signpost that’s
in the ground, it’s always going to apply more force to the base than it does where
you’re striking it, so snapping it in half is even more unlikely.
You’d still break your fist doing it, but at best you’d just succeed in snapping the
sign at the base.
After all, if a car hitting a signpost doesn’t snap it in half, how could your fist?
Furthermore, there’s a little-known factor called the “notch effect” caused by the
holes in the signpost that, unfortunately, can’t be calculated and can only be tested.
Which nobody did.
So what did we learn from this?
Don’t punch signposts or you’ll break your fist, and DON’T piss off engineers,
because those fuckers will find you and write you long, detailed, and polite emails telling
you why you’re wrong.
Let’s see.
What else?
OH!
Here’s a good one: Mass Effect.
This is a really small one, but it’s, well.
It’s basically pissing in the face of relativistic physics, so I guess it’s not, you know,
THAT small.
But Bioware pissed in Albert Einstein's legacy first by saying that Faster-than-Light drives
“speed up the speed of light” which JUST MAKES ME SO MAD but I’m going to keep it
contained because I don’t need another video to veer off course as I rant about the speed
of light.
I predicted that, if it were possible for the Mass Effect engines to go faster than
the speed of light, anybody using them would actually end up in the PAST.
How did I figure that out?
The Lorentz factor.
The Lorentz Factor is a Big Fucking Deal in relativistic physics, and is used so frequently
in spacetime calculations that it’s simplified to a lowercase gamma.
The Lorentz factor has a lot of applications, but one of the easiest functions that even
you can use yourself at home is in calculating how much time dilation is experienced due
to velocity given known inertial frames of reference, using this formula.
Delta T is the amount of time something travels for, velocity is the speed at which it’s
traveling, and c is the speed of light.
So, what’s the problem?
Well. A few things. Or one, really.
A big one: causality.
You see, continuity is the idea that things can only travel forward in time.
Aside from creating some really problematic logical problems about a pizza arriving at
your door before you even had time to order it, the preservation of the forward movement
of time is a presumption upon which all of our understandings of who the universe works
are built upon.
You wanna prove that you can travel into the past, then you gotta upend just about every
major scientific breakthrough that’s ever existed, especially Einstein.
And the Lorentz factor actually PROVES this.
Using MATH.
Isn’t that fucking cool?
You see, by moving at high-fractions of the speed of light, it’s possible to travel
into the future.
Just look.
And when you hit c?
You can travel essentially infinitely into the future.
However, if you try to go faster than c, guess what happens?
The Lorentz factor just fucking BREAKS.
I got around this using some tricky math and presuming if, IF you were to go faster than
c, you would in fact travel into the past.
However, going faster than c is impossible-shut up yes it is, and therefore traveling back
in time is equally impossible.
But it can still be fun to fuck around with regardless.
Which brings us to pokeballs and quantum entanglement.
Quantum entanglement is a very, very real thing that definitely exists.
When the spin of 2 particles can be affected by one another regardless of how far apart they are
instantaneously. Even if they're millions of light years away if you change one particle it changes the other.
The problem is that Quantum Entanglement isn’t really a controllable phenominon, and there’s
a TON of doubt in the Scientific community about whether or not you could actually use
it to reliably send data, let alone make perfect copies of Pokemon.
Oh, speaking of which, I completely fucked up talking about density in that video.
I said that a Groudon stored in a pokeball would have a density of 2101 kilograms-per-cubic
meter, which is absolutely fucking wrong.
This is wrong because I incorrectly converted kilograms-per-cubic centimeter to cubic meters
by multiplying by 1000.
Instead, I should have multiplied it by 1 MILLION, which would make the density of a
pokeball holding the mass of a Groudon 2.1 MILLION kilograms per cubic meter HOLY FUCK.
Good luck carrying that nuclear fusion reactor around to your next pokemon battle.
That means I get to talk about zombies again!
AWESOME!
This one, actually, was a really, really good point brought up by the lot of you who pointed
out a big missing factor in my cool-as-fuck zombie infection model that I built.
You see, the model I invented would totally work when talking about a small, localized
area of zombies, like a town or city.
The problem, as many of you pointed out, was that when you start talking about countries,
continents, and the entire world, the model starts to fall apart, because it presumes
that the zombies more or less don’t have a travel speed.
Sure, there’s an infection rate, but zombies don’t travel with the breeze, yanno?
I noticed this problem early on when my early models had the entire world succumbing to
the zombie infestation in a matter of days, as opposed to weeks or months.
So what’d I fuck up?
Well, it turns out that modeling epidemics that cover a huge area can be a bit complicated
and difficult, so it’s no surprise that I missed a really important concept: geographic
spread rate.
You see, when talking about big pandemics that cover wide, wide areas, you have to factor
in a new aspect of the disease: kilometers-per-year.
This is used to determine the maximum spread distance of a disease, and this is something
I TOTALLY don’t have in my awesome-as-fuck SINZD model.
So you were right to call me out on it.
Adding this in would upend almost everything, so I didn’t have time to build a new model
this week, but maybe some day I’ll have the opportunity to make a new one.
So thank you guys for yelling at me.
And that’s essentially it.
Everything major, anyway.
Other than the fact that I can never, ever, EVER say big numbers properly.
Ever.
That’s why I just stick to scientific notation these days.
Fuckign numbers.
Pieces of shit.
Thanks for watching every video I’ve done so far this year, and look forward to a normal
SCIENCE!
Video SOON, as well as some big-as-fuck news.
Sincerely, Austin
PS
KABOOM!
An audible ad!
But you probably saw that coming, right?
I love Audible, though, and as a new parent who constantly finds themselves rooted to
one place while their child sucks down a mere two ounces of fluid at the terrifyingly slow
rate of one ounce-per-hour, I’m bored, ALL THE TIME.
And as a result, I’ve been burning through episodes of Digimon on Netflix and audiobooks
from Audible at an ALARMING RATE.
Lately I’ve been listening Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a memoire Coates
wrote to explore what it’s like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within
it in a country that has, at best, a troubled history with black people.
It’s really, really awesome, and Coates is a masterful communicator when it comes
to difficult to understand, abstract concepts.
You can listen to it too, if you want, by going to audible.com/shoddy to sign up for
a 30 day free trial that comes with one free audiobook of your choice.
If wrestling with the complex mores of race in america isn’t exactly your thing, no
worries, there’s other stuff, like the Subtle Art of Not Giving A...wait, can I swear in
Adspots?
I mean, the cover is kinda censored, too.
Ah well.
You can see it.
Judge for yourself!
Don’t forget: audible.com/shoddy gets you 30 days for free.
Do it!
DO IIIIIIIIIIT.