Hey, Vsauce.
Michael here. The title of this video is misspelled
in honour of mistakes. Mistakes are
everywhere, they surround us like air
To err is human. Faults, flaws, faux pas, fumbles
and fallacies are as much a part of who we are today
as the stuff we've gotten right. For instance,
if a knight knocked your knuckle or knifed your knee,
why would there be so many "k"s?
Well, the "k"s are silent by mistake.
The original old English forms of these words were pronounced with "k"
sounds.
K-nife, k-night, k-nee.
But that's a bit of a mouthful to say and because reading and writing weren't as
common hundreds of years ago,
people just pronounced words the way they want to do, regardless of spelling.
Spelling is fun. Warren G knows what I'm talking about. In the fourth
verse of his "What's Next", he asks what's next.
What's next, what's N-X-E-T
Spelling isn't the only thing
we get wrong. The history of science is a graveyard
of dead an abandoned ideas. Fritz Machlup coined the phrase
"Half-life of knowledge". The amount of time it takes for half of the knowledge
within a field
to be superseded by new, better ideas or to simply be shown
untrue. Donald Hebb famously
estimated that the half-life of knowledge in psychology
is just five years.
Humans are awesome, don't get me wrong, but we tend to believe that what we currently
think we know about the universe
is reasonably correct, even though statistics
aren't on our side. Previous generations
incorrectly thought the exact same thing about what they used to think was true.
My favourite examples of the ubiquity of mistakes are production
errors in popular songs. They're like
humbling Easter eggs, just waiting to be found. For instance,
Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth".
26 second in the "be" in the lyric
"beware" is clipped, as is the "p"
in "people" at 1:24 minute. Once you hear the mistake,
it's tough to unhear it. In "Hey Jude"
Paul McCartney misses a cord. And if you listen closely you can clearly hear him
say
"F***ing h*ll". Seriously, it's in the actual song.
Go listen to it. In fact, there's an entire website that chronicles
mistakes in Beatles' songs. Take a look at this
700-year-old prayer book. A monk
wrote it on fresh, clean paper.
I'm kidding, of course. He scraped the ink off an older manuscript, cut the pages and
rotated them before
writing all over them. A mistake? Well,
kind of. Recent multispectral images
of the prayer book have revealed that the old manuscript he
erased was a previously unknown copy of a work
by Archimedes. It was called "The Method"
and laid out the heart of calculus thousands of years
before Newton and Leibniz. If that one monk
hadn't erased that one book, would we be
hundreds, thousands of years mathematically and technologically more
advanced today
than we currently are? It's hard to say.
All that is certain is that we would continue to make ridiculous mistakes,
like
the Mars Climate Orbiter. This 327.6 million dollar expedition
burned up in the red planet's atmosphere because
when calculating flight manoeuvres NASA used the agreed-upon metric units
while Lockheed Martin used the imperial system.
This is Neil Armstrong taking humankind's first steps
on the Moon. It's about the best footage
we have. The original tapes containing the highest quality recording
of that moment have been lost. They were probably
recorded over by later test missions. Ten years ago
Sergio Martinez became lost in the woods while
hunting outside of San Diego. Hoping to attract the attention of
rescuers, he lit a small fire.
But that fire quickly got out of control and became a giant Cedar Fire.
It destroyed 300,000 acres of land,
2,322 homes and killed
15 people.
The man carrying a wounded soldier in this painting, based on a photograph
taken during World War I,
is Henry Tandey, an English recipient of the Victoria Cross.
Four years after the event in this image Tandey caught a wounded
German soldier in his gun sights. But rather than kill the man,
Tandey took pity on his wounded state and spared his life.
The German he allowed to live was
this man. Later the man whose life he spared wore his mustache
shorter but still had the same name,
Adolf Hitler. In 1918
did Henry Tandey miss a chance to kill Hitler? Detailed researchers found that
the exact
days their units were in the same location don't quite match up.
The story is apocryphal but what is known
is that Hitler owned a copy of the painting
of Tandey, and in 1938,
when meeting with Neville Chamberlain, Hitler pointed to Tandey
and told Chamberlain: "That man came so close to killing me
in 1918 that I thought I should never see Germany
again." So, who's wrong?
Maybe Hitler confirmed the story
merely because he hoped to make up extra evidence that providence had kept him
alive to pursue his goals.
Either way, someone
is mistaken. Missed opportunities
are a bummer. Obsessing over them is not healthy but regret
is a powerful emotion. How do you deal
with regret, with guilt?
Can you? In the early morning hours on a bench outside a hotel in Anaheim this
summer
Ze Frank told me something I am going to paraphrase.
I love this metaphor. Stuff in your past
is like a carving on the bark of sapling. Over time,
the scar, the carving won't go away.
Because of the way trees grow it won't go up or down much either, it'll just
stay right where it began. It might even get darker.
But it won't get bigger. You, however,
can. You can keep growing, doing more things, more branches,
being more things. The wound won't get smaller but you can make it a smaller
part
of who you are. Maybe regrets
are like that. They stick around forever
like arborglyphs. Or maybe they make like a tree
and leaf.
A red or purple leaf in the autumn. As days get shorter
and chlorophyll production decreases, the yellow
and orange carotenoids, which are always in leaves,
appear as the green fades. But red and purple leaves
are the interesting ones. As winter approaches it would seem to be a good
time for trees to conserve energy but some trees
do the opposite. Instead of giving up, they spend
extra energy producing anthocyanins
to turn their leaves red and purple hues.
These colours protect their leaves from sun damage before their nutrients can
all be
used and may also be a defence against insects looking for
a parasitic home. A way for the tree to tell the insects: "Yes,
I am in part dying but not without a fight.
I am still very much vital."
Drought and even turn a kit applied by man
can bring about these colors prematurely. When you look at beautiful
autumn colours, you are looking at stress.
But the bigger the fight the trees put up, the more energy
they put into their defences at the very end, the more brilliant
their colours will be. Winter
will eventually come. But scientifically,
the brightest, deepest, most remarkable colours
come from not giving up too easily
or quickly.
And as always,
thanks for watching.