Vsauce!
I’m Jake and it is good to see ya.
I’ve been living here in the Vsauce office for months.
There’s no shower or baths here but I did find lots of stuff!
Here, excuse me Nic Cage. Let me show you some of my stuff.
I got some taco bell hot sauce packets that I’ve been living off of.
Oh, and I found a dime, a nickel, and this.
In the United States we commonly refer to this piece of currency as a penny.
However, in the US, there is no legal currency called a penny.
So what do we call this amount of money that si equal to one cent? ..well...1 cent.
It’s even written on the back.
The term penny comes from the British coin 1p or 1 penny.
And the monetary plural term for pennies is pence.
However, that terminology hasn’t become common here in the states.
Lemme show you some more stuff.
While searching through the office I found a book from the 1970s called The Dictionary
of Misinformation by Tom Burnam.
And it is full of stuff.
Stuff that I was misinformed on or had misconceptions about.
For example…
SOS.
I always assumed it stood for Save Our Ship or Save Our Souls, when actually it is an
abbreviation for nothing.
SOS was chosen as a maritime distress signal because it was easy to remember and easy to
transmit through morse code.
Three dots, three dashes, three dots.
And speaking of maritime distress...what is this thing called?
A life preserver right?
No!
They’re original name was ring buoy whereas life preserver referred to what we now call
a life jacket.
Since we are on the topic of names over time taking over the original name of an object
or item…
The game you play with paddles, a small white plastic ball and a table that has a net going
across its width in the center.
You know what I’m talking about.
Do you refer to this game as table tennis, ping pong or whiff whaff?
If you said whiff whaff then congratulations, you are most likely a time traveller from
the early 1900s.
If you said ping-pong you are kind of correct and if you said table tennis then you are
leaning more into the correct territory.
Here’s why...
Ping Pong is a brand name.
Similar to how one might call an adhesive bandage a band-aid, tissue kleenex, a personal
watercraft a Jetski, air bubble packing Bubble Wrap, ice pop PopSicle, cotton swabs q-tips,
inline skates rollerblades, hook and loop fasteners velcro, a large trash receptacle
a dumpster, expanded polystyrene Styrofoam, a flying disc a frisbee, or an internet search
as our overlords Google, Ping Pong is a specific brand name for the game table tennis.
When I said earlier that if you call it ping pong that you are kind of correct, what I
mean by that is the game was originally referred to as Ping Pong before the company Jaques
& Son trademarked it in 1901.
Then the US rights were bought by Parker Brothers and they heavily enforced their trademark
so everyone playing the game not with the trademarked version called it Table Tennis
which is the official name of the sport today.
So it’s not, technically, ping pong unless you bought it from the Parker Brothers.
Woah, I have a lot of facial hair...I haven’t seen a mirror in a while...my sideburns are
probably not very
Civil...War….general Ambrose E. Burnside is who sideburns are named after because of
his distinct facial hair.
Wow.
And at some point over the course of time the syllables were switched from burnside
to sideburn.
I wonder if he was upset by that?
We might never know.
He could have been fine with the name change or been so angry that his ears shot out
Steam...is invisible.
Specifically it is an invisible gas.
When you boil water in a kettle the space between the spout and the mist, that’s steam.
Mist, steam, kettle.
Also this is my twitch set-up.
Since I haven’t seen a human being in months, this is how I’ve communicated with other
living creatures.
Link to my twitch channel at the top of the description and if you’re watching this
video right when it was released, I’m actually live on twitch right now.
I’m so lonely.
Bananas.
I have at least one a day and it is one of my favorite fruits.
Except it’s not the kind of fruit you might think.
Botanically speaking it’s a berry and bananas don’t grow on trees, they grow on herbaceous
plants.
We generally don’t use the term herbaceous very often, instead we say herb or herb.
So bananas are a berry that grow on large herbs, in fact, the banana plant is considered
the largest herbaceous plant.
And since we are on the topic of food:
Black Eyed Peas are actually beans.
Coffee beans are the pit of a fruit.
And while some might tell you that a brown shelled egg is more nutritious than a white
shelled egged, they are exactly the same in regards to nutritional content.
This misconception comes from the fact that, generally, brown eggs are more expensive to
buy.
They cost more because they cost more to produce.
The kinds of chickens that lay brown eggs require more feed than ones that lay white
eggs.
If anything, it is marketing magic.
And speaking of magic…
The magic 8 ball wasn’t made to be just a toy or distraction...it was originally created
as a spirit writing device because the inventor was inspired by his mother who was a clairvoyant.
In fact, the first version was called a syco-slate, the pocket fortune teller.
Now, this version of a magic 8-ball looks nothing like the original or the one we commonly
see today.
No, this space helmet one we made ourselves here at Vsauce.
We spent over a year designing and manufacturing it and you can get your own in our summer
Curiosity Box right now along with puzzles, physics toys, games, a book and a t-shirt.
It’s not only a great way to support your brain, but others brains because we donate
a portion of the proceeds to Alzheimer’s research.
Ok, I need to start my twitch stream so I’m going to go back from whence I came….. except
when you say “from whence” you’re saying from from where because whence means “from
where” so the additional “from” isn’t necessary.
Like calling an ATM an ATM machine.
Let’s see what the 8-ball thinks.
“Heisenberg says maybe”.
Good enough, and, as always, thanks for watching.