hey everyone welcome back to ask
professor Dave, this is where I answer all the common questions that I get on
my channel. today I want to cover a question that I do get quite a lot and
it arises because a lot of you see sort of on the edge of my arm I have a
tattoo showing and a lot of you want to know what is that tattoo
all about, it looks kind of space-related and it is, so I wanted to take the
opportunity to give you a closer look here and explain a little bit about what
it is. so you can clearly see that it says one parsec here and that's a unit
of astronomical distance, and so this is the way that we describe distances
within our galaxy, how far away stars are within the Milky Way and so what we do
is it's quite interesting, where we we can look at where an object is in our
galaxy at a certain time and then we can look again when the earth is in another
part of the orbit around the Sun like on the other side of the Sun, that will
generate an apparent shift in the object's location so it'll appear to be
in a slightly different place in the sky. it's a very small angle but we can
measure it with with modern telescopes and so from this triangle we can see
that here's the earth and the Sun so we know the distance between the
Earth and the Sun that's called one astronomical unit, and if we can measure
this angle we can it's called the parallax method we can see how far away
the object is so par is for parallax and sec is for arcsecond, that's when this
angle is one arcsecond that's a 60th of a sixtieth of a degree so it's a very
tiny angle, when that angle is one arcsecond
this distance is one parsec so it's a standardized unit of distance, it's about
three and a quarter light-years so the closest Sun to the earth apart from our
own Sun is a little over one parsec away. so that's what my tattoo is, I don't want
to say too much else because I actually to be describing it in more detail in my
upcoming astronomy series that I'm writing so over here I do have a bunch
of books on my desk about astronomy and I'm gonna be taking about a month to to
write that astronomy content and put that out for you guys and so the
reason I got the tattoo is that astronomy inspires me, in general the
idea I mean science in general, but the idea that we have a unit of distance
for objects in space, it represents the notion that we understand space, that we
understand the universe around us. that we can look at some star and say
concretely how far away it is, it's a very powerful concept and it inspires me
and beyond that simply the fact that I would love to go to space I would
love to go anywhere in space to all the lands that I imagine that we might
colonize in the distant future and it makes me sad everyday that I probably
won't but even to just get up to orbit and look down would be enough for me so
to look at this every day and and be inspired by it and think think about how
I ought to strive for greatness in order to be able to experience great things,
it's very important to me so that's that tattoo. I also want to show you
another tattoo that maybe you can't see so well in the tutorials and that's
this one here, and so some of you may recognize that as the red mushroom
from the Mario games it's actually not the 1up mushroom it's the one that makes
Mario bigger, maybe you can see my Mario and Luigi over there and then in there
is my my old NES SNES and N64 gaming systems which probably to some of you
younger people make me sound pretty old but when I was a young person they were
state of the art absolutely the best systems, and I'll go on record saying
that I'm absolutely unbeatable in Mario Kart 64 no one can beat me, I challenge
you if you think you can, give me a shout. I've never met anyone that's better than
me, so there's that, for evidence of my Mario obsession you can
check out this this medley I made on the piano of a number of Mario themes. so on
the base level that's part of the tattoo is just that mario has always been a big
deal for me, but to go a little more into the Mario mythology
it can help elucidate why the symbol means so much to me and it is the fact
that people don't really think about Mario in this way they're just sort of
used to Mario but if you really think about the story of Mario he is a plumber
from Brooklyn so he's the everyman I mean he's the common man, he's
working-class immigrant just nothing special about him at all, and yet he is
able to go into the Mushroom Kingdom and kill a dragon and save a princess, so
these are the classic tasks reserved for knights and and heroes and things like
that so the message is that if this plumber from Brooklyn can do it it means
that anybody can do anything and so that is also very inspiring to me and and so
Mario is kind of my spirit animal so to speak or my spirit guide and not just
because I resemble him but for those reasons, you know it's inspiring to
think that he could do something like that even if it's just a video game and
so that which brings Mario strength brings me strength and that's why that
sits on my bicep right there. so those are my two those are my two tattoos and
I don't have any others at the moment although I do think that I probably will
get more maybe two or three more over my lifetime I don't really think I'll ever
be covered in tattoos but I love the two I have and I could definitely see myself
having a couple more. as for the parsec one I'll give you another look at
that, if you enjoy that kind of imagery and those kinds of concepts look
forward to the astronomy tutorials, as always if you like my content and
you want to see more of it and faster the best way to get that is to support
me on patreon because YouTube income does not support me and so I
have to take other freelance work to support myself but I would love to not
do that, I would love to just do this and so if I can get enough support on
patreon I can work at it absolutely full-time I can hire an animator to help
me out I can hire people to help me with various production related tasks so any
help on patreon would be greatly appreciated and other than that I'll see
you next time