Particle Data Platform
Dear Hank & John

437: Mouse Relay Intercept

1/14/202637 min

What would you want your clickbait title to be? What is a face? Why is an MRI so loud? Could Rome actually be built in a day? What is going on with the design of traffic lights? …Hank and John Green have answers!

If you're in need of dubious advice, email us at hankandjohn@gmail.com.

Join us for monthly livestreams at patreon.com/dearhankandjohn.

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Clips

Is the Self a Story?
Our Ridiculous Clickbait Honorifics
Therapist Realizes John’s Fame

Transcript preview

First 90 seconds

  1. Hank Green· Host0:00

    [upbeat music] You're listening to a Complexly podcast. [upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to Dear Hank and John.

  2. John Green· Host0:12

    Or as I prefer to think of it, Dear John and Hank.

  3. Hank Green· Host0:14

    It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you dubious advice, and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, why is your foot never twelve inches?

  4. John Green· Host0:25

    Um, why?

  5. Hank Green· Host0:27

    Because twelve inches is infinitely precise. It's a rigidly defined length, while a human foot is a soft, deformable, biological object with no uniquely defined endpoints. There's no canonical measurement protocol, and it is a length that varies with posture, load, temperature, time of day, and measurement error. Any real measurement has uncertainty. The boundary of the foot is fuzzy at the atomic scale, and for a continuously varying quantity, the probability of matching one exact value is zero. So a foot can be measured or described as twelve inches long, but in the mathematical and metrological sense, it can never be exactly twelve inches long.

  6. John Green· Host1:03

    Did you ask ChatGPT for a dad joke?

  7. Hank Green· Host1:05

    No, no, that was me.

  8. John Green· Host1:07

    [laughing] [laughing] Okay. [laughing] Okay.

  9. Hank Green· Host1:11

    I had- I, I, I went to Reddit looking for a dad joke, and there was- Yeah ... one. It says, "Why is a hand never twelve inches long? Because then that would be a foot." And then I thought to myself: "Well, what if a foot- Yeah ... was exactly twelve inches long? Actually, that would be impossible."

  10. John Green· Host1:24

    Okay.

  11. Hank Green· Host1:25

    And then I, then I wrote that.

  12. John Green· Host1:26

    Okay. Yeah, no, it's good. It's good writing. It's so good that

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