Good evening, Kibitzers, and a happy Passover to those celebrating! (We know you can’t be here, but perhaps you’ll wander through later.)
Here’s a little Earth-Day-related thing that’s going on all week: as a fundraiser for the National Park Foundation, and promotion for themselves, obv, Paramount Plus is offering a daily local-sunrise-to-sunset livestream of a view in one of the parks. Monday, which I’m looking at as I write, is Yosemite from the Tunnel View overlook, and Tuesday is the Blue Ridge Parkway. You can play those completed livestreams at the bolded links.
The remaining schedule is: Wednesday: Bighorn Canyon, MT; Thursday: New River Gorge, WV; Friday: Everglades, FL; Saturday: Death Valley, CA; Sunday: Zion, UT.
This is the point where I’d normally introduce the main subject of the diary, but I still have another belated Earth Day thing involving a YouTube video, and I never embed those above the fold. This is from Yo-Yo Ma. He’s taken himself to a very atmospheric site in Alaska to play an Earth Day cello piece. (Links in his quote below are added by me.) [4:16]
He says: Bach's Prélude from Suite No. 2, amidst the melting permafrost on Lower Tanana Dene lands in Fairbanks, Alaska, where I was brought by Princess Daazhraii Johnson. She writes this:
Our relationship to our birch relatives, our salmon relatives, and all the beings of Alaska are sacred. Our traditional stories tell us that at one point we all spoke the same language ... we still do. If we find the time to truly listen, we might recognize ourselves in the melting permafrost or the fallen birch, but we might also recognize ourselves in the songs of the birds or the freshness of the Arctic breeze. There is still hope when we experience life. We should all fall in love with the places we live and let this love drive our determination to protect the waters, the salmon, the caribou, and all our plant relatives so that future generations may also experience such joy and sustenance.
So! I was really sure I’d done an xkcd diary before, but it turns out, all I had was a years-old draft with only the “Stand back — I’m going to try science” meme in it. (When I started today’s draft, the current comic was this eclipse map, which made me snort. Be careful, because once you start “previous-ing” through, it’s addictive and there are several thousand by now. Don’t forget the hovers.)
Anyway, xkcd characterizes itself as “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” and it is written/drawn by engineer/physicist/cartoonist Randall Munroe. The name xkcd doesn’t stand for anything; it’s a random string he used to use as a screen name. You can also find the comics on Twitter at @xkcd.
At this point, Munroe has written several books, and one of them, What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, has a fairly new YouTube channel, and that’s what drew me back around to my abandoned topic.
I think this video is a pretty good introduction to the concept. Someone submits a hypothetical question, some sillier than others, and Munroe does the research and calculations and gives an accurate, although possibly not very serious, answer. (Don’t forget the “sarcasm” part of the comic’s subtitle!) In this case, the question is the old “What if everyone in the world jumped at once?”, and his answer is a FULL AND COMPLETE answer. [3:51]
In this one, we consider a baseball pitched at 90% of the speed of light. Again, the implications turn out to be rather startling. [3:14]
In which we consider earthquakes of various magnitudes. [3:05]
If you had an auto race with no rules, what’s the absolute fastest time in which 200 laps could be completed? (Considered with, and without, the driver surviving.) [4:29]
What if the earth stopped spinning, but the atmosphere did not? [4:34]
How well would a submarine work as a spaceship? [4:22]
Straying away from the What If channel, we find a couple of Minute Physics episodes that Munroe collaborated on when two of his other books came out.
This one represents Thing Explainer, a book that uses only drawings plus the thousand most common English words (or “ten hundred”, in the language of the book) to… explain how things work. This is How To Go To Space. [2:57]
This episode marks the publication of How To, which Amazon describes this way: “For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally complex, excessive, and inadvisable that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach.” This episode discusses how to build a lava moat around your house. (ycalif, pay attention.) [2:57]
We really can’t leave Randall Munroe without giving you a chance to hear from him, so here is an entertaining Conan segment in which he describes how Serena Williams and astronaut Chris Hadfield helped him with How To. [10:18]
To close today, I have a few good political parodies!
First, Rocky Mountain Mike is in his element with a fake K-Tel commercial (kids, ask the old folks in the comments) for the fictitious album “Courthouse Gas”, that lets him string together short parody song clips in a relentlessly rude manner. Because admit it, you’re not too mature to snicker at a tfg fart joke. [1:11]
Next, a superb offering from Patrick Fitzgerald, Rainbow Connection as sung by a frog with a suspicious-looking combover. [3:06]
And finally, some really outstanding work from The Parody Project — they have made good use of Harry Chapin’s Cat’s in the Cradle for Rats Who Enable. [4:01]