In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com — and talk to theoretical astrophysicist Katie Mack about dark matter — to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: How Many Digits of Pi Do We Actually Need? Spite Houses Are Buildings Designed to Annoy the Neighbors The Grit Scale Measures Your Passion and Perseverance More from Dr. Katherine “Katie” Mack, theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist: Katie Mack's official website Research website Blog: The Universe, in Theory YouTube series "Pint in the Sky" "Pint in the Sky" podcast Want to support our show?Register for the 2018 Podcast Awards and nominate Curiosity Daily to win for People’s Choice, Education, and Science & Medicine. Just register at the link and select Curiosity Daily from the drop-down menus (no need to pick nominees in every category):https://curiosity.im/podcast-awards-2018 Learn about these topics and more onCuriosity.com, and download our5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation onFacebook,Twitter, andInstagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable ourAlexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com — and talk to theoretical astrophysicist Katie Mack about dark matter — to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
More from Dr. Katherine “Katie” Mack, theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist:
Want to support our show? Register for the 2018 Podcast Awards and nominate Curiosity Daily to win for People’s Choice, Education, and Science & Medicine. Just register at the link and select Curiosity Daily from the drop-down menus (no need to pick nominees in every category): https://curiosity.im/podcast-awards-2018
Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/dark-matter-spite-houses-digits-of-pi-needed-and-measuring-your-passion-and-perseverance
SPEAKER 1: Hey we've got three stories from curiosity.com plus a special guest to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
SPEAKER 2: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn about spite houses that were built just to annoy the neighbors. How many digits of pi we actually need? And how to measure your passion and perseverance using the grit scale?
SPEAKER 1: We'll top off today's sun episode with a sprinkle of curiosity, where Ashley digs into a question from an awesome listener like you. So this question comes from Kim on Twitter.
SPEAKER 2: Kim had some questions about dark matter. And I happened to be at a conference last week with some experts on the subject. Today, you'll get some answers from Katie Mack, a theoretical astrophysicist who knows a lot about dark matter.
SPEAKER 1: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
SPEAKER 2: Cody, how many digits of pi do you know off the top of your head?
SPEAKER 1: Is it 3.14175962?
SPEAKER 2: You're getting all the right numbers, but they're in the wrong order. 3.141592653. There's no seven- in there.
SPEAKER 1: 92653? I feel like I've been lied to. What have I memorized my entire childhood?
SPEAKER 2: Oh, I don't know.
SPEAKER 1: I'm disappointed. Do you have any of it memorized past the 14?
SPEAKER 2: I think now that I have it in front of me. But I think I could have said 3.14159. I think that's about as far as I go. It doesn't matter because today we're going to answer the question how many digits of pi do we actually need?
Pi is an irrational number. So it has an infinite number of digits. So the key here is need. NASA's scientists keep the Space Station up and running with only 15 digits of pi. Here's some perspective on that.
The Voyager 1 spacecraft is about 12 and one half billion miles away. Let's say we have a circle with a radius of exactly that size. And let's say we want to calculate the circumference of that circle. If we use pi rounded to the 15th decimal, the circumference comes out to about 78 billion miles.
According to NASA, by cutting off pi at the 15th decimal, that circumference would be wrong by about an inch and a half Yes, the calculation of 78 billion miles would be off by an inch and a half. Not bad right?
Now the radius of the universe is about $46 billion light years. So what if we needed to run some numbers against that? According to NASA, we'd only need 39 or 40 decimal places to come up with a circumference that's so accurate it's within the margin of error about the size of a hydrogen atom. That's pretty accurate.
SPEAKER 1: That's pretty accurate.
SPEAKER 2: The big takeaway is if you want to impress your friends by memorizing pi, then you might want to stop at 40. Anything past that might be a little unnecessary. But hey, we don't judge.
SPEAKER 1: No judgment here. Ashley, have you ever done anything to spite your neighbors?
SPEAKER 2: No, because I'm a saxophone player. And anything I can do to get in their good graces so that I can practice without them complaining is a good thing.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah, that's fair. Being a musician in the city has got to be tough.
SPEAKER 2: It is.
SPEAKER 1: Well, some people have gotten really far to spite their neighbors. We wrote about this today, and this is a real thing. And it's my new favorite thing I've had never heard of.
SPEAKER 2: Me too.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah. Maybe you've seen one, and you didn't even realize it, but there's a thing called a spite house. And it's literally a building someone puts up just to annoy the neighbors. You can read the stories and see pictures in our full write up today. But my favorite one is nicknamed The Grudge in Beirut. So here's one example.
Picture this, two brothers inherited a plot of land. One brother built a decent sized apartment complex on his plot of land. That's a pretty good investment. Well, the other brother's plot of land was truncated by a passing road. So because of the way it was shaped, he couldn't really do anything with it, and that sucks.
So despite his brother, he built an absurdly skinny structure in 1954. The building is so skinny it tapers off at one point to where it's only 23 inches wide or 60 centimeters. He literally built it just to block the view from his brother's apartment complex. What are you going to do with a building that's 23 inches wide?
If you see the picture, it looks like, basically, a three-storey wall painted pink. I don't even see how you could walk inside of it. To me, it looks like you could kick it over to knock it down. It's ridiculous. So that's one example.
And we also wrote about a less extreme example of a spite house in London. It's called the Candy Cane House. A woman bought the house for several million pounds. And she wanted to tear it down and build on the property. Well, her neighbors weren't really keen on that idea, so they made it hard for her to get the right permits to do that.
Well, in the meantime, she decided to paint her house with this hideous candy cane stripe pattern like literally bright red and white stripes to make the whole block look ridiculous. So spite houses are definitely a thing. There are some really great stories. And you can find them all today in our full write up on Curiosity. Isn't that happening in the movie Up?
SPEAKER 2: Yes. And actually in this story, we mention the house that that's based on which is technically a spite house but not really.
SPEAKER 1: Oh.
SPEAKER 2: Yeah. Well, you'll have to read the story to find out why.
SPEAKER 1: We get a listener question about dark matter, and Ashley got an answer from an expert at Nexus in New York. But before we dive into this listener question about dark matter, how was the conference last weekend?
SPEAKER 2: It was amazing I talked to so many cool people. I got to meet some people who I've been a big fan of for a long time that I've never met. And I just-- it was great just hearing about science all weekend. It was amazing.
SPEAKER 1: Did you get to talk to Bill Nye?
SPEAKER 2: I did get to talk to Bill Nye.
SPEAKER 1: Are you serious?
SPEAKER 2: Yeah. Wait, did we don't talk about this?
SPEAKER 1: No.
SPEAKER 2: I hung out with Bill Nye. I had drinks with Bill Nye.
SPEAKER 1: What?
SPEAKER 2: Yeah. It was great.
SPEAKER 1: You are moving up.
[LAUGHTER]
SPEAKER 2: No.
SPEAKER 1: Wow.
SPEAKER 2: He-- he knew my name that night, but I don't think he'll remember my name if I meet him again.
SPEAKER 1: Never say never. He could be a guest on the show someday.
SPEAKER 2: Hey, someday.
SPEAKER 1: Wow. That's cool. I'm glad you had a good time. And we'll probably hear from some more of those experts you talk to on future episodes of this show, so.
SPEAKER 2: Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER 1: Good for that listener.
SPEAKER 2: But let's get down to it. Here's the question from Kim on Twitter. Is dark matter bad for us? And if we barely know if dark matter exists, how do we know it's there?
For the answers, I talked to Dr. Katherine Mack also known as Katie Mack on Twitter. She's a theoretical astrophysicist and assistant professor of physics at North Carolina State University. And here's how our conversation went.
SPEAKER 3: Dark matter is-- if it is what we think it is, if it's some particle that doesn't have pressure and doesn't interact with light, it is passing through us right now and has been forever. And it's here. It doesn't interact with people in any way that we can tell in terms of the individual particles.
It does hold the galaxy together which might be a good thing. It's good for us in the sense that if dark matter wasn't there or if there wasn't some other weird thing happening, our galaxy wouldn't have formed when it did, and we wouldn't be in this nice, beautiful galaxy that we have. So it's kind of-- it's helpful. It kind of pulls the matter together and allows it to form galaxies and structure in the universe.
So it's hard to find a way that it's bad. It's frustrating sometimes, because I don't know what it is. But it does-- it can't hurt you.
SPEAKER 2: And I think maybe the reason that she's wondering if it's bad is because of the word dark.
SPEAKER 3: Yeah, so the dark thing is a misnomer. It's not dark. It's not-- it's invisible. But it's not dark. It's not like black, and it's not like ominous. It's just invisible. So I think dark matter is kind of a misnomer.
It's the same with dark energy dark energy is and dark either. We just don't know what it is and we can't see it. Our
SPEAKER 2: Knowledge of it is dark.
SPEAKER 3: Yeah.
SPEAKER 2: It's dark. If dark matter is passing through us all the time, does it only really have a big gravitational effect when it's a bunch of it together?
SPEAKER 3: Yeah, when there's a lot of it. Yeah, so the density of dark matter like in this room is based on the current measurements. It's about a third the mass of a proton per cubic centimeter.
SPEAKER 2: Wow.
SPEAKER 3: So if you think of how many protons are in a cubic centimeter of regular air, it's a lot. So it's a very small amount that's right here right now. And mostly, I say it's passing through us. We're passing through it. The earth is orbiting the sun, and the sun is orbiting the galaxy. So we're zooming through it at something like a few hundred kilometers per second. And we just-- it doesn't matter too much on the scales that we think about in terms of a solar system. On mass in a galaxy, it's the most important thing.
SPEAKER 2: Right. Thanks for your question, Kim. Remember, you can find a link to follow Cody and me on Twitter in the show notes of every podcast we post. Feel free to follow and ask us questions on there or email us at podcast at curiosity.com, and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.
SPEAKER 1: We're going to wrap up today with a quick talk about grit. What is grit exactly? Well, the scientific definition of grit is perseverance and passion for long term goals, according to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Grit can help you reach your goals, sure, but how do you know how gritty you are? If you don't have a lot of grit, then you might want to rethink how you approach your goals and whether your mindset is helping or hurting you. But how do you quantify your grit? How do you even know if you don't have enough?
Well, today, we'll help you with that. You can use the grit scale. You can figure out where you fall on the grit scale by taking a quick 10-question survey on the website of researcher Angela Duckworth. The survey is the result of scientific research that came from Duckworth a little over a decade ago when her team found a consistent way to measure grit.
Do you laugh in the face of adversity? Do you push through to reach your goals even when others would give up? Do you keep a laser focus on anything you set your mind to? Here's your chance to quantify it.
You can find a link to the survey in our write up today on curiosity.com and on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS. And when you're done, you'll see your grit ranked on a scale from 0 to 5. And you'll also see how you compare to other American adults in our recent study.
As always, take it with a grain of salt, because it's an online thing. But again, if you get a low score, then maybe it's time to take a second look at how you approach things. Read about these stories and more today on curiosity.com.
SPEAKER 2: Join us again tomorrow for the Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Ashley Hamer.
SPEAKER 1: And I'm Cody Gough.
SPEAKER 2: Stay curious.
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SPEAKER 4: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.