Learn about some of the weirdest types of lightning; why nobody’s been able to solve the traveling salesman problem; and why it’s easier to spot a lie on a podcast or radio show than it is in other media. Please support our sponsors! Get two months of unlimited access to over 25,000 classes on Skillshare — for free. To sign up, go to skillshare.com/curiosity. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: 5 of the Weirdest Types of Lightning — https://curiosity.im/2RibX4m Why Fake News Spreads, Positive Lightning, and the Habitable Trinity [Past Curiosity Daily Episode] — https://curiosity.im/2KkZwEg The Traveling Salesman Problem Has Been Unsolved for Nearly 200 Years — https://curiosity.im/2JZPuIs It's Easier to Spot a Lie on the Radio Than on TV — https://curiosity.im/2JZPvw0 If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about some of the weirdest types of lightning; why nobody’s been able to solve the traveling salesman problem; and why it’s easier to spot a lie on a podcast or radio show than it is in other media.
Please support our sponsors! Get two months of unlimited access to over 25,000 classes on Skillshare — for free. To sign up, go to skillshare.com/curiosity.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/weirdest-types-of-lightning-spotting-audio-lies-easily-and-the-traveling-salesman-problem
CODY: Hi! We’re here from curiosity-dot-com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about some of the weirdest types of lightning; why nobody’s been able to solve the traveling salesman problem; and why it’s easier to spot a lie on a podcast or radio show than it is in other media.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
5 of the Weirdest Types of Lightning — https://curiosity.im/2RibX4m (Both)
ASHLEY: Around this time last year, we talked about positive lightning, which is a rare, super-powerful type of lightning. We’ll put a link to that episode in today’s show notes if you want to check it out, but today we wanted to talk about some other weird types of lightning and how they work.
CODY: I LOVE rain and thunderstorms. As long as I’m inside, obviously — or at least staying relatively dry, somehow. But these are types of lightning you do not want to mess with. Starting with dark lightning. It’s a weird form of lightning that doesn’t produce much visible light at all. Regular lightning is made up of relatively slow electrons that carry currents through clouds or towards the ground, but DARK lightning is made up of high-energy electrons that collide with air particles to produce dangerous gamma rays.
ASHLEY: Yeah. Gamma rays. According to NASA, their terrestrial gamma ray flashes are among the highest-energy light that naturally occurs on Earth. They can blind satellite sensors hundreds of miles away. Don’t worry, though: they’re incredibly rare, and scientists think they pose minimal radiation risk if you’re on an airplane.
CODY: Another super-powerful, super-weird form of lightning is ball lightning. For centuries, people have reported sightings of slowly rotating balls of light, usually about the size of a grapefruit, floating above the ground during electrical storms. Sometimes the ball passes through a closed window or appears in the middle of a room, but almost always, it blinks out of existence after about 10 seconds.
ASHLEY: We only captured ball lightning on camera for the first time in 2012, and since then, lots of theories have tried to explain it. One idea is that the spherical shell is full of highly compressed air, which makes white light rotate in all directions, like a ball rolling in the sky. And the intensity of this rare lightning is almost a billion times greater than lightning that moves in a straight line. So look, but do NOT touch.
CODY: The final weird-but-not-nearly-as-terrifying forms of lightning are called sprites and elves. Like many names in science, they're creative acronyms: "sprite" stands for "Stratospheric/Mesospheric Perturbations Resulting from Intense Thunderstorm Electrification" and "elve" stands for "Emissions of Light and VLF perturbations from EMP events." We’re just gonna stick with the shorthand, thanks.
ASHLEY: Sprites are red, jellyfish-shaped bursts of electricity that dance above thunderstorms. They seem to be caused by lightning shooting out below stormclouds, which create an imbalance of charges above them. Elves are similar to sprites, but instead of dancing balls, elves appear as VERY LARGE rings or halos — “large” as in up to 185 miles, or 300 kilometers, wide. Blink and you’ll miss them, because they only last about 10 milliseconds.
CODY: Now THAT gives new meaning to the term “lightning fast.” [optional ad lib]
The Traveling Salesman Problem Has Been Unsolved for Nearly 200 Years — https://curiosity.im/2JZPuIs (Ashley)
You know how last week, we told you it took more than 300 years for a mathematician to solve Fermat’s last theorem? Well there’s another problem that’s been unsolved for nearly 200 years, and you might be surprised to hear what it is. It’s called the traveling salesman problem, and it has huge implications for your travel plans. If you've ever been on a cross-country road trip, the traveling salesman problem should feel familiar: If you have a given number of cities, what's the most efficient route you can take to visit each city and land back where you started? That may sound like an easy problem to solve, especially if you have a computer. Just check the distance of every round-trip route possible, and the shortest one is your answer. Right? But think about it: If you're only dealing with, say, five cities, that's 12 round trips to check. Once you add more cities, those round trips skyrocket. A trip between 10 cities has more than 180-THOUSAND routes; a trip between 15 cities has more than 43 billion. With enough cities, the number of routes to check could easily overwork the most powerful computers. That way of solving the problem is known as the naive solution, for perhaps obvious reasons. In the 1970s, mathematician Richard Karp published a paper calling the problem NP-hard, which means there will never be an algorithm to solve it. A few algorithms have been developed or proposed to figure out which routes are more efficient than others, but not to solve for the single most efficient one. This nearly two-century-old problem still has plenty of mystery for experts to uncover. Just another example of a deceptively difficult problem. [optional ad lib]
[SKILLSHARE]
CODY: Today’s episode is sponsored by Skillshare, an online learning community for creators. Skillshare offers more than 25,000 classes in design, business, and more, to help YOU find new ways to fuel your curiosity, creativity, and career.
ASHLEY: You can take classes in social media marketing, mobile photography, creative writing, illustration… maybe even a math class to help you solve the traveling salesman problem! Or you can do what I’m doing and take something that’s just for fun: a class on cocktails! The one I’m taking is taught by the owner of a Brooklyn cocktail bar, and I like it because it goes beyond basic recipes to teach you the underlying rules that every cocktail is based on. Once you know those rules, you don’t need to Google recipes — you can create totally original drinks using your own imagination!
CODY: And ALL of Skillshare’s classes are taught by real experts in their field or public motivational speakers. Whether you’re looking to discover a new passion, start a side hustle, or gain new professional skills, or just hold a killer party with delicious cocktails, Skillshare is there to keep you learning and thriving.
ASHLEY: Today, YOU can join the millions of students already learning on Skillshare with a special offer just for Curiosity Daily listeners: Get two months of Skillshare for free.
CODY: That’s right, Skillshare is offering Curiosity Daily listeners two months of unlimited access to over 25,000 classes for free. To sign up, go to Skillshare dot com slash CURIOSITY. Again, go to Skillshare dot com slash CURIOSITY to start your two months now.
ASHLEY: One more time, that’s Skillshare dot com slash CURIOSITY.
It's Easier to Spot a Lie on the Radio Than on TV — https://curiosity.im/2JZPvw0 (Cody)
You know Ashley and I would never lie to you, right? Well that could be in part because you’d probably know it if we did. I’m not talking about fact-checking the things we say; I’m talking about research showing that it’s easier to spot a lie on a podcast or radio show than it is on TV. And that’s not the only thing that makes audio different from other media. So let’s get meta and talk podcast psychology in this psychology segment of our podcast. In 1995, one of the U.K.'s largest-ever psychology experiments found that audio-only listeners were able to tell when a host lied more than 73 percent of the time, versus 64.2 percent for newspaper readers and 51.8 percent for television viewers. One idea for why this is the case comes from Alex Blumberg, the CEO and co-founder of Gimlet Media. During his keynote at Podcast Movement 2016, he said, quote, “When you listen to somebody, it is a very intimate bond that is formed. You're hearing my actual words, but you don't see me. And so you do what humans do, which is you create a version of me in the brain to say those words to you. Because you're listening to me but also creating me as you listen, I quite literally become a small part of you. And that enables you to hear what I'm saying with more empathy. I think this is the greatest power of audio,” unquote. He said that you can detect a lie because when all you have is your ears and all you’re doing is listening, you’re able to hear emotional truth. But because of these bonds, it’s important to be particularly skeptical of what you hear, so you don’t fall prey to your own biases. Researchers have pointed to the connective power of radio as a major reason for the spread of propaganda that led to an increase in violence during the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and radio was also lauded as the most important instrument of mass influence by the propaganda minister of Nazi Germany. Fortunately, Blumberg said in his keynote that because audio has the power to promote the rise of hatred and intolerance, it also has the power to fight those things and help with empathy — maybe more than any other medium. So choose your podcasts wisely, because what you let into your ears can have a bigger impact than you might’ve thought.
ASHLEY: You can read about today’s stories and more on curiosity-dot-com!
CODY: Today’s episode was brought to you in part by our Patrons. Special thanks to Eddy Yeung, Katrina Constantine, Stay-FAN Crate, Hayden Fossey, Ben Urick, and Luke Chapman for supporting our show. You can also support Curiosity Daily at patreon-dot-com-slash-curiosity-dot-com, all spelled out.
ASHLEY: Join us again tomorrow for the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I’m [NAME] and I’m [NAME]. Stay curious!