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to Know Better

A podcast of Science, Comedy and Ignorance.

Episode 77

Pale Beige Dot

( Week 3 of Sep 2014 )

Segments: Microwaving the speed of light, Midges, The colour of the universe, The Rice Experiment, Sitting by yourself, Cryptozoo Thomas the Tank Engine.
Sketches: Crocodile Pop, A Woven Blanket, Yoda Training.
Song: The Rebuttal of Schrödinger's Cat

Comments

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Greg Wah (legacy)

Co-Captain 9 years ago

A new comment section below the actual episodes! How jolly! Yay, Dan and his techno-wizardry.

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Colin (legacy)

Smartzi 9 years ago

Snazzy.

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Greg Wah (legacy)

Co-Captain 9 years ago

I strongly suggest you have a look at the Rice experiment notes sent to us by Michael Barnes. It shows a fantastic attention to detail with the scientific method and actively tests (and debunks) a fantastical claim. It's above and beyond the call of duty. Nice one Mr Barnes!

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Michael Jude Peter Barnes (legacy)

Smartzi 9 years ago

Thank you for the high praise, hopefully others will do experiments and add further data. I am loving the cleaner look to the site and the comments section with each episode makes it much easier to follow and say how brilliant each episode was.

Great work.

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Vince (legacy)

Smartzi 9 years ago

I thought the beige universe thing was from an outside perspective, not from earth, so presuming you ignore the expansion of the universe and only consider the colour of stars as they appear from close up it's beige? (By which I mean, the colour is from the age of the star and not the wavelength of the light reaching earth) I'm thinking that most of the time it's going to be red-fading-to-invisible regardless of where you are... Could be wrong though. I probably am.

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Greg Wah (legacy)

Co-Captain 9 years ago

Vince - according to the article it was the blended spectrum from light of 200000 galaxies as seen from earth at a distance up to billions of light years.

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Vince (legacy)

Smartzi 9 years ago

Thanks Greg! Really surprising it's not red... Or pinkish

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Greg Wah (legacy)

Co-Captain 9 years ago

The universe is still relatively quite young with many many star formation areas still churning out new stars. Those new stars tend to be hotter and bluer. It balances out the older redder stars that have been hanging around for billions of years. As the giga-years pass by the average colour will become redder as the stars age and star formation slows and stops

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Guido Wegener (legacy)

Smartzi 9 years ago

If Thomas is similar to a hermit crab and hermit crabs use their shells for defense, I would rather not meet the predator that hunted these steel-clad giants to cause this evolutionary development.

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Dan Beeston (legacy)

Co-Captain 9 years ago

OH! Nice continuation of the premise. Apparently they are cannibals so perhaps Thomas and his friends would all take the opportunity to smash each other and suck their innards.

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