Let's Learn Everything!

• The Best of Everything 2025

  Listeners voted for their favorites topics of the past year, so join us as we chat and relearn the best of everything!Support us with a Max Fun Membership!Join our Discord!The best awards in podcasting that feature hosts named Tom, Ella and Caroline, the best cohost award is a tie (for Charlie and Teddy) actually introducing ourselves again, Tom is the hot one and the funny one, everyone loves dinosaurs, satisfying questions I never thought to ask, no one at the Igs knows Tom, the nuanced story of the propoganda of the propaganda, hey they happen to be some great topics we’re talking about, I had to put jokes about how bad we are so that we could compliment each other later, you can go back and discover Ella’s, we love an experimental episode as well as a classic episode, we love the quirky younger sibling of things, the World Games are coming up soon - get hype! 

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• 86: Eyevolution 2 Eyelectric Boogeyeloo & Digital Piracy w/ Sabrina Cruz

  How many eyes do these animals have, and more importantly what are they doing with them? And how long has copyright piracy been around, and would YOU download a car? Also Ella finally drops her fake british accent.Images we Talk About:Bullfrog Parietal EyeBumble Bee OcelliScallop EyesScallop Eye MirrorsThe Home Taping is Killing Music LogoTimestamps:(00:00:00) Intro(00:04:01) Eyevolution II(00:56:16) Digital Piracy(01:45:06) OutroSupport us with a Max Fun Membership!Join our Discord!We also learn about: How many jingles does this man have up his sleeve?? 2 eyes or not 2 eyes, what do you need glasses for - to see boobs? why have an odd number of eyes when it’s a BOGO deal developmentally, even more amazing than his eye of agamoto - Dr Strange has 2 camera eyes, “I grow fearful of the untrue eye”, bull frogs can’t doom scroll, the pineal eye is a skylight to the pineal gland, ommatidia means little eye, each compound eye only sees one image from the thousand of ommatidia, this is Caroline’s first eyevolution rodeo - we can’t answer all the questions, now you can be annoying correcting people about bug vision, ocelli are also called little eyes, triangular ocelli flight stabilization, Robobee, ocelli are useful because they’re auxiliary, they’re a fast different readout, there are so many more interesting sci fi choices for eyes, maybe they evolved ocelli to not crash when they see a sexy bug, having zero eyes would be going to far, oh wait nevermind, where we’re going we don’t need eyes, “not the implications”, well I’ll answer one of those questions, what do you need eyes for looking at boobs? YEAH I DO ACTUALLY, he complex eyes like a telescope of scallops, THEY DON’T EVEN HAVE A BRAIN, have we gone too far? the living square mirrors in scallop eyes, no one believed scallop TV would work, fair use and fair dealings, early book sellers were book copiers, authors did not make profits on early copies, Martial was the first person to be reposted on 9gag, the library of alexandria operated like OpenAI, book publishers after the printing press were like Universal Music Group - concerned over their rights - not artists, crown approved ABC books, the mid 1600s is the first use of piracy of intellectual property, ruining vinyl records with the cassette tape skull and crossbones, the 2013 Hugh Jackman Oscars performance, Napster’s origins and Metallica’s not so metal killing of it, Piracy was a technical and social phenomenon, YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A FONT, video game antipiracy that reminds you of the creative mind behind the product, none of this is legal advice, the cost of piracy is easy to calculate but the benefit is impossible to measure.Sources:The Parietal EyeCompound EyesHolger Krapp's Fantastic Paper on Ocelli2022 Paper on OcelliOtacilia KhezuThe Scallop's EyesScallop TVEd Yong on Scallop EyesPiracy sources coming soon! Apologies, but thanks for actually going through the sources! You get a gold star ⭐

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• Vote for the Best Of Everything 2025!

  Vote for your favorite topics at LetsLearnEverything.com/bestof before Sunday June 8th!!!

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• 85: David Bennett & Why Humans Like Harmony in Music

  What is it about harmonies in music that just sounds so good? Can science (and our amazing musical guest David Bennet) help us get to the bottom of it?Timestamps:(00:00:00) Intro(00:06:24) Why do we like Harmony?(00:56:10) Our Music Theory Questions(01:24:04) OutroSupport us with a Max Fun Membership!Join our Discord!We also learn about: Listening to Carly Rae Jepsen academically, the musical expert said Caroline has good music taste, I’m down hereeeeee, harmony is just the interaction of any two notes, Tom thinks about high school choir harmony all the time, even babies like harmony, even the oldest flutes have the same holes in them, octaves are so similar we call them the same note, watchmojo ranking of intervals, Carly Rae Jepsen - It Has Many Notes!, a spicy dissonant interval can be good in moderation - like a spicy seasoning in food, Tom is just grinning getting to ask these music questions, we invited you as a guest and you bring this dissonance to our home?? the messy sounding tones match to messy looking ratios, why can we even distinguish pitch? we use pitch in communication so much, animal sounds are the only things that make pitch, animals can recognize intervals, we call bird song song - but to them it’s probably more like language, it sounds cheesy - but in every human voice there’s a harmony, we’re asking the question backwards - we needed to understand harmony to be able to decipher a pitch, hearing the difference between notes IN YOUR HEAD, what we hear in our head is different than the world around us, harmonies are audio cheesecake - something we evolved to enjoy pumped to the max, “we can make cheesecake with our mouths”, cheesecake is just molecules, did you not have to learn human evolution in music school? oh my guilty pleasures are Tchaikovsky’s later works, Ella humble bragging about her spotify wrapped, this is going to come off as hostile but hasn’t enough already been said about the Beatles, how different generations experience the Beatles, more like DavidLegoStopMotion, it took 5 years after a dissertation on how to have a career as a musician on youtube, try song ideas and listen to them later, music theory is Descriptive not Prescriptive, liking technical music, the only way you’ll practice is if you enjoy it, the dopamine hit from the cheesecake of practice, can you send that advice to my mom 10 years ago, but you did practice… yeah, teenagers are good at learning instruments because they have free time, start learning music with the music that you love, learning sheet music at the same time as playing is like learning to write as you’re learning to speak, you learn to write after you’ve practiced speaking for years, you’re full of good ideas David who knew.

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• 84: Tree Talk & Trading Card Art

  Can trees talk to each other? And how does that personifying metaphor square with the actual science behind it? And what can we learn from the stories of art on trading cards throughout history?Images we Talk About:  Trade Cards3 Modern Trading CardsYuka Morii's CardsTerrorHyalopterus LemurePreposterous ProportionsTimestamps:(00:00:00) Intro(00:02:08) Tree Talk(00:52:16) Trading Card Art(01:33:47) OutroSupport us with a Max Fun Membership!Join our Discord!The answer is yes maybe sometimes and no, talking tree folklore, communication as transferring information, The Secret Life of Trees, Caroline WAS vegan, plants feel pain - GOOD, tree self defense, secondary metabollites, you got me AND Ella to write that down, tannin defense mechanism, volatile organic compounds, giraffes avoiding nearby leaves after eating, maybe trees are eavesdropping, mycorrhizal networks, could it be diffusion or a baby tree suckling on its mother, do a stanford prisoner experiment for trees, that tree is giving mother, mother trees - altruistic fungi - and the perils of plant personification, literally talking to trees, your first priority shouldn’t be to not be boring - maybe second, respect for the organisms that are fundamentally unlike us - their unfathomable lives, the modern boom of trading cards, trade cards, mass produced color images were cool and novel, how many credits for that chromo?  absurd advertising from the 1800s, anthropomorphic fruits and veggies were all the rage, trade cards were a microcosm of marketing-invention-and collecting, Ella’s baseball impression, looking at a mainstream sport through the nerdiest lens imaginable, cigarette baseball cards, Doug McWilliams photographed 8% of all major league baseball players, oh right photography is an art, and so is building relationships with players, cards began to stand on their own, Richard Garfield wanted baseball cards for nerds, Magic and Pokemon credit their artists - but YuGiOh does not, Yuka Morii’s sculpture cards, Adam Rex’s Terror, Richard Thomas’ Hyalopterous Lemure, Julie Baroh flipping off her classmates, companies screwing over artists, it’s still art in spite of being a piece of cardboard.Sources:2010 Paper: Explaining evolution of plant communication by airborne signalsNew York Times: The Social Life of ForestsBook: The Secret Life Of PlantsNational Geographic: Plants can talk. Yes, really. Here’s how.2025 Pape: Shrub anti-herbivore defenses exhibit non-linear and varied responses to increased herbivore density1990 Paper: Acacia Tree Kills AntelopeBook: Ethylene in Plant BiologyBBC News: Plants send SOS signal to insectsTED ED: Can Plants Talk to Each Other?2015 Paper: Inter-plant communication through mycorrhizal networks mediates complex adaptive behaviour in plant communities1997 Paper: Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field2008 Paper: Hydraulic redistribution of water from Pinus ponderosa trees to seedlings: evidence for an ectomycorrhizal pathwayScientific America: Do Trees Really Support Each Other through a Network of Fungi?2023 Paper: Positive citation bias and overinterpreted results lead to misinformation on common mycorrhizal networks in forests2024 Paper: Mother trees, Altruistic Fungi, and the Perils of Plant PersonificationFacts or Fairy Tales? Peter Wohlleben and the Hidden Life of TreesVideo: Project gives 200-year-old Dublin tree ‘a voice’[Scientific America: The Idea That Trees Talk to Cooperate Is Misleading](The Idea That Trees Talk to Cooperate Is Misleading | Scientific American)Article: The World’s First Talking Tree Helps Young People Reconnect with NatureSmithsonian: Do Trees Talk to Each Other?---Cornell University on History of Trade CardsHistory of ChromolithographyAmerican Antiquarian Society on Trade CardsPBS on Trade CardsBaseball Card Photography HistoryDoug McWilliams via Baseball Hall of FameDoug McWilliams Interview with SABRDoug McWilliams NYTimes InterviewRichard Garfield on Magic's CreationYuka Morii's Pokemon Card ArtMagic Artist Julie Baroh's InterviewMagic Artist Donato Giancola's Points Against Artist PoliciesMagic Artist Melissa Benson's Artist Advice

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