Are There More Raindrops In Clouds Or Data In THE Cloud?

15:26Michael Stevens:To data. Yeah. How do you measure data? That is the big question. Should I use bytes or bits? I've done both. So I could just share both.

15:35Hannah Fry:Go on. Yeah.

15:36Michael Stevens:The difference, of course, is that a bit, I prefer the bit answer because that also seems like the smallest piece of information. It's just on or off, a one or a zero. When you start talking about bytes, you're talking about 8 bits. But then again, if we're going to talk about bits or bytes, should we talk about raindrops or water molecules, right? Like things can get – anyway, let's just continue on and then we can do some more like corrections at the end. So right now, it's estimated that there are 240 zettabytes of information stored in the cloud.

16:15Hannah Fry:Wait, hang on. How many zeros is that?

16:17Michael Stevens:It looks like it's going to be 2.4 times 10 to the 22. Not much different to the number of raindrops. No. 24 sextillion bytes, which is equal to about 190 sextillion bits. I hope people can correct me on this math. You'll see how I'm just, I'm literally taking the number of bytes and multiplying it by eight to get the bits. So, 190 sextillion bits are stored in the cloud. but 238 septillion droplets are just in clouds alone. Now, how do these numbers work? Because we're getting into some really big words. A sextillion is smaller than a septillion. Sext means six, sept means seven.

17:03Hannah Fry:Well, sext means something different if you're from my neck of the woods, but carry on.

17:07Michael Stevens:I've never heard of it, but there are more little droplets of water just in the clouds alone. I'm not even talking about raindrops. than there are bits of information in the cloud, which is pretty incredible. And it's especially incredible when you consider the fact that we are talking about bits of information. You can't get smaller than that. And we're comparing them to droplets in a cloud. And you can make a droplet smaller. A raindrop, for example, contains septillions of molecules. So like, Mother Nature is still beating us. Just when it comes to water.

17:42Hannah Fry:I mean, we've got nothing, nothing on the clouds, which in turn have got nothing on the atmosphere. You know, that does put it in perspective, isn't it? Everyone getting all caught up about the size of data centers.

17:56Michael Stevens:It's nothing. It's nothing, you guys. It's nothing. There's more wetness in the atmosphere than there are ideas in the cloud. And by the way, the cloud is like really cluttered with crud. Some might even say crap from the Internet of Things. It's just like my oven is connected to the internet and it's responsible for some of this stuff that's in the cloud. Whereas the water in the clouds, I love it all. It's all pretty important.

18:21Hannah Fry:Yeah, I think there's quite a lot of my old emails from approximately 2001 currently in the cloud that's clogging up a lot of space. And frankly, water would do a lot more good, a lot more good for everybody. Right.

18:35Michael Stevens:So basically, bottom line is, I might be off by a degree of magnitude one way or the other, or even a couple. And yet, I still think it's quite undeniably true that there are more drops of water in the clouds at any given time than there is data in terms of bits in the cloud.

18:54Hannah Fry:Okay, we've got a conclusion for you, Arlene. A firm winner there, being Water. Okay, next question. I absolutely love this one. This is from Bricky Wes and the Boys. Here's what Bricky Wes has to say. I'm reaching out regarding an observation from construction sites in the north of England that has sparked a debate among the crew. One of the lads claims that over a 15-year career across various regional sites, the high frequency of blue-eyed workers has been a consistent pattern rather than an anomaly. On our current scaffolding project, we have six brickies and five out of the six have blue eyes.

19:34Hannah Fry:Are we looking at a genuine demographic trend within UK trades or just a fascinating trick of geography and human psychology? Okay, I'm going to tell you, I like this question so much that I think next time I teach hypothesis testings to my students, I'm going to use this example because it's absolutely brilliant. Okay, right. So obviously I've run the numbers on this, Wes, for you. One thing to say, first off, is how common are blue eyes? So around the world, it's not that common at all. Actually, brown eyes dominate. So 70 to 80 % of people around the world have brown eyes. blue eyes only about 10 however in the uk it's much higher so uh there's lots and lots of data on this especially from dna studies that say that roughly 48 of the uk population overall have blue eyes me being one yours are yours are quite blue as well yeah my my eyes are pretty blue yeah they are very blue in the right light um is this maybe we should both be brickies maybe that's the big conclusion that we can make from this.

20:40Hannah Fry:I know, I'm starting to think.

20:41Michael Stevens:How do you describe your eyes? Mine? Yeah. Blue. Can you get really close? The bluey green. You're much more blue-green. I am very blue-gray.

20:51Hannah Fry:There he is. That's our cover photo right there. Okay, so this variation, 48 % across the UK, is slightly different in different regions. So when you go further north, the concentration increases. So it's around about 50 % when you're further up north. Okay. um now if you've got a hypothesis that like this but there is something fishy going on with blue eyed brickies um then there is like a formal way that you can test this so what you can do is you can say okay what we're going to assume we're going to assume that there's nothing suspicious going on we're going to assume that there's no magical connection between blue eyes and brickiness and then that's going to be our hypothesis and we're going to test the alternative We're going to follow that logic through and see if it breaks at some point.

21:36Hannah Fry:See if that logic ends up breaking. Because the evidence here is that five out of six brickies are blue eyes. And we're going to say, what are the chances of seeing this or a more extreme result? So it feels like if you were just kind of like randomly walking into different construction sites, what are the chances that you would see at least five, if not six, of the brickies having blue eyes, given that the background rate is 50%. Okay, so I've worked it out, basically. The chance of having exactly five is about 9.4%. The chance of getting six is one and a half percent. So in total, the chance of getting this or a more extreme result is about 10.9%.

22:18Hannah Fry:Okay, there's been a lot of numbers in this episode. But if you are following the rules of scientific hypothesis testing, 10 % chance of seeing this effect is not enough to be statistically significant. It means that if you went round to 10 different construction sites, you would expect this result in at least one of them. It's unusual, but it's not crazy. It's not scientifically crazy. So I also reckon your mate who has noticed this over a 15-year period, it's possible that there's a little bit of confirmation bias going on here. there's possible that he's noticed the trend once and then only noticed it when it appears really strongly that could be the case it could be that he is selectively remembering that the blue-eyed lads just because of confirmation bias or or and i will allow room for this possibility it could be that you are on to the greatest physiological discovery in the history of uk construction okay and uh but science demands rigor wes so um in between all your trial work if you could just fire up Microsoft Excel for me, collect some data and come back to me when you've got a sample of at least 400 northern brickies.

23:31Hannah Fry:That's what I'm looking for.

23:32Michael Stevens:Is that how many we'll need to be able to find a significant difference?

23:35Hannah Fry:I mean, yeah, I reckon that's about what we're talking. Wow. Hold on, Michael, you look confused every time I use the word brickie. Is this not an

23:42Michael Stevens:American word? I don't look confused. I think I figured it out. A brickie is a person who is a bricklayer by trade.

23:51Hannah Fry:What about a chippy?

23:52Michael Stevens:A chippy is a person who fries up French fries as a living.

23:57Hannah Fry:It's a carpenter.

23:58Michael Stevens:A carpenter is called a chippy. Wow, I see. I hadn't heard that. A sparky. A sparky works on cars? No, an electrician. I was thinking spark plugs.

24:08Hannah Fry:It never even occurred to me that that was British slang.

24:10Michael Stevens:It's a lovely phrase, isn't it? Well, every time you said it, I thought, oh, I should probably ask for clarification. But then I thought, no, I'm going to act like, oh, yeah, he knows too. honorary Brit.

24:20Hannah Fry:Yeah, sometimes actually, I've got to be honest, sometimes I spend hours watching bricklaying videos on YouTube, that and plastering. I find it so relaxing. I mean, I imagine it's not relaxing to do as a job, especially when you're having to lug the bricks around.

24:33Michael Stevens:It's such a combination of everything. Like it's labor, it's craft, but then you watch some of these videos and you're like, this is an art form too, man. Wow. Very much so.

24:43Hannah Fry:There you go, birds.

24:44Michael Stevens:Thank you. We're going to talk about some artistic things and some labor after the break. I'm going to show off some of our latest inventions from the Curiosity Box and my mind.

25:14Hannah Fry:about four in 10 people taking EBCLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.

25:23Michael Stevens:EBCLIS, LibriKizumab LBKZ, a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EBCLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if If you're allergic to EBCLIS, allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems.

25:51Michael Stevens:You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBCLIS. Before starting EBCLIS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection.

25:56Hannah Fry:Ask your doctor about EBCLIS and visit ebglis.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979.

26:12Hannah Fry:Okay, the time has come. We're going to take down the periodic table in its original form, and Mendev is going to be crying in his grave. Michael, over to you.

26:24Michael Stevens:Well, look, I love Mendeleev, right? Like, on a deep level. But at the same time, I don't get it. Like, why do we have the lanthanides and the actinides like pulled out into their own little block?

26:39Hannah Fry:Hold on a second, right? My chemistry knowledge is, I'm going to be honest with you, limited. The original periodic table, right? What's the argument in favor of it first?

26:49Michael Stevens:Well, I can only tell you so much because I'm really here to talk about the shape in general. But I'll tell you this. I love Mendeleev, okay? He's got an element named after him, all right? However, take a look at the periodic table, or if you have it in your mind, you can kind of think, or if you're watching, we'll put one up on the screen. It's cool in that the thing is a list of every possible element, all right, arranged in a table that you can read from right to left, top to bottom. And as you read, you're reading the name of an element that is different because it's got one more proton in its nucleus.

27:33Michael Stevens:The vertical columns tell us something about the physical properties of the chemical element. So we've got hydrogen over in this column with lithium, sodium, potassium, and so on. Helium winds up getting put all the way over to the right so that it lines up with all the other noble gases, helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and so on.

27:55Hannah Fry:But then, of course, if you go down those columns, I mean, the alkaline, the first column, it's like they're all going to react with water, you know, lithium, potassium, and so on.

28:05Michael Stevens:And on the right hand side, they're all really in it. And that's why it's called the periodic table, because as you start filling in the table, you periodically see certain characteristics repeat. Okay. You do potassium and you're like, oh, wow, potassium behaves in a certain way chemically. And then calcium is different in scandium. You go all the way across to krypton and you go back down to rubidium and you're like, hey, this is kind of like potassium. So we'll start again right underneath. It's pretty neat. But if you keep going, you get yourself up to 55, 56, 57. Element 57 is lanthanum. And then you move one step to the right and you're on hafnium, which is element 72.

28:46Michael Stevens:We jump from 57 to 72. So 58 to 71 are like a little satellite table, the kids table. They don't get to be part of it. I should be clear that sometimes people do put them in and they just make the periodic table much longer. But we rarely see that version in chemistry classrooms or in books or on T-shirts or any posters, anything. Usually, the lanthanides are put down below, and that's what we call elements 58 to 71. What are the lanthanides like? What do they do? Well, they just are boring. Look, I don't know, but I do know that I read my daughter Theodore Gray's entire elements book, and when you hit the lanthanides and the actinides, you're just like slogging through.

29:35Michael Stevens:You're like, okay. And yet again, we have a silvery metallic element that is useful in optics sometimes, but not really ever. It's kind of like America has the era of forgettable presidents. This kid's table is the era of forgettable elements. You're like, okay, so we've got europium, gandolinium, terbium, dysprosium. They're the elements that no one ever names when they try to name all the elements they can think of. What about the actinides? It's that more interesting. That's right. The actinides are, they're still separate because if you keep them in, like the pattern of the table above gets kind of thrown off.

30:13Michael Stevens:But you're right. It contains some really big stars. I would say thorium. Ever heard of uranium, plutonium, americium, right? We've got them in our smoke detectors. But still, to keep the table nice and tight, they've been removed because they kind of break the periodicity that you've got in everything from the 50s and down, meaning back down to hydrogen. So we don't have to organize elements in this way. And back in the swinging 60s, Otto Theodore Benfie came up with a beautiful arrangement, which where the heck did I put this thing?

30:49Hannah Fry:The thing that I really like about this is that you've got the kids table, or actually it's just the boring party guest table where they're all sat there looking the same, not doing anything. And then in amongst them, you've got the stuff that you need for an atomic bomb. I know. I'll be honest. I want to sit at that table. I think that table sounds way more fun than being over there with boring lithium and potassium.

31:13Michael Stevens:Yeah, you're right. The periodic table is kind of like you've done a seating chart for a wedding and you've had to put like all the people you barely know at the same table as all the really violent people and you feel bad. But you're watching them from the front being like, hey, how's it going down there? You guys are so important to us. Don't sit next to us, though. All right. So in the swinging 60s, Otto Theodore Benfie comes up with this arrangement that is not only more psychedelically fun, but also doesn't require a separate table. And it's this one right here known as the periodic snail that's got all the elements, but they begin in the middle here.

31:53Michael Stevens:They're swirling around. Swirling around like a snail shell. The elements increase in number of protons. We go from hydrogen to helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, and so on. But then after going around enough times, it breaks off into this little, I don't know what we should call that, like a little detour almost. A little detour that breaks off the spiral and comes straight out and makes a rectangle. And that is the lanthanides. And then beyond them, the actinides. We come back and we start spinning around in this purple area on the pin, which is the transition metals. These are all those metals in the middle in between the two larger columns on the table.

32:37Michael Stevens:And the transition metals are pretty well known. We've got copper, nickel, chromium, titanium, gold, silver. They're all in here. but then this spiral arrangement still preserves a lot of the chemical properties in columns i mean in fact it does in the same way that the mendeleev's does because we've got the let's see it's hard for me to see i'll turn it and look at it we've got all the noble gases in a line so here they are okay i'm pointing to them helium uh neon argon and so on we've got the alkaline metals the alkaline earth metals they're all still lined up in the same way but you just wind up taking these detours for the transition metals and the lanthanides and the actinides.

33:19Michael Stevens:And then there's even a little third leg coming off of the spiral for the still sort of undiscovered superactinides, which we believe should exist out beyond the elements we currently have been able to find or manufacture.

33:33Hannah Fry:These are the ones that would be bigger than uranium, plutonium, etc.

33:37Michael Stevens:Exactly. The stuff way beyond there. I think this particular one I'm holding, it goes all the way up to organisin, element 118. That's a big boy. That's a big boy. I mean, we're past Livermorium, we're past Moscovium, but there's the last one, OG. Wow. There at the end. But you can keep going. I guess you could fill this in as we discover more.

34:00Hannah Fry:These are ones that haven't been found in a stable form at all.

34:04Michael Stevens:They're just like theorized to exist. Theoretically, you can just keep adding a proton to a nucleus and make a new element again and again and again. Visosium. Visosium. Sure, I'll take it. As we've said in previous episodes, though, I really want a John Quincy-um. Not because I love John Quincy Adams, the very early president in American history, but because the letters J and Q are just not used in the periodic table in English still. But John Quincy-um, bam. It's a person's name, and you'd knock both of those letters out at once. So anyway, I love talking about the periodic table and how to organize stuff and taxonomies, you know.

34:47Michael Stevens:So we made this. The thing I've been holding up is a pin with a little magnetic clasp on the back. See, I've turned it around and I'm pulling off a little metal bar that has magnets in it. So you can put this on your shirt, put the magnet bar underneath and wear it like a pin without having to stick holes through your shirt, which a lot of big pins would normally do. See, look at me. Now I'm fashionable. I've got the periodic snail on my shirt, my backpack, wherever, and I'm feeling good.

35:17Hannah Fry:Now you'll get invited to parties, Michael. Finally.

35:21Michael Stevens:So this is like one of my other jobs, and I love this. I love being like, look, I want to celebrate other periodic tables, alternatives to Mendeleev's arrangement. I'm not against Mendeleev, obviously, But I just think that if you play around and you show people the different ways we can organize elements, the more I and they get to think about why we organize them, what makes them different, and what's beyond what we've already found. So this is in the new curiosity box. We have subscribers who, like every season, four times a year, get this giant box like this is the new one full of all the wacky stuff we've invented because of their support.

36:00Michael Stevens:So the box, by the way, that I'm holding up is, I don't know, it's like a big shoebox size, but it's covered in black and white lines, which if you're a World War I history buff is dazzle camouflage. Dazzle camouflage. It makes it very hard to see what the shape and velocity of the box is with your eyes alone. Radar can beat this. but if you don't have radar it can be hard to know how something's moving and where its corners and edges are if it's covered in this like zebra stripe pattern so um we just decided there's literally there's never a theme to the box it's like whatever we happen to have ready in time so we're like all right dazzle paint box periodic table pen fine and you know what else how about a stuffed animal i've shown this to hannah before so she doesn't have to act like really shocked and surprised, but we're all probably pretty familiar with the old rabbit duck optical illusion.

36:56Michael Stevens:It's unknown who came up with this first, but its first known publication was in 1899, turn of the two centuries ago. And it's a drawing of a duck, but maybe also a rabbit. It depends on how you look at it. The two ears of the rabbit could just as well be the two halves of the bill of a duck. And so it's an ambiguous illusion that shows a lot about how our brain works and how taking different perspectives means we interpret things differently. Well, we created a stuffed animal version of that illusion. Here's a bunny rabbit, right? Or is it a duck? Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack. And it's cute and cuddly.

37:39Michael Stevens:And kids love that it can be both. And us illusion nerds love that we can finally sleep with optical illusions. Amazing. The bunny rabbit's tail becomes the webbed feet of the duck, right? And this began as us trying to figure out how to do a rubber ducky for the bathtub. And I said, here's what we should do. It should be that rabbit duck illusion, but as a bath toy. Problem is we couldn't figure out how to make it float in both orientations. Oh, we could figure out how to make it stand up in both orientations as a stuffed animal.

38:18Hannah Fry:Oh, that's a shame. Did you try putting like a movable weight in it?

38:24Michael Stevens:No, we didn't. And it's mainly because that might work. But at a certain point, we have to just make a decision. And it was like, look, let's just do stuffed animal. I feel like maybe a stuffed animal would be more popular than a bath toy. But I can show you back on my wall. I've got one of the prototypes for a smaller solid rabbit duck.

38:43Hannah Fry:Go on, grab it, grab it, grab it.

38:44Michael Stevens:So here is like a prototype, a 3D printed prototype of the rabbit as a duck as well.

38:51Hannah Fry:Oh wow, that works so well.

38:53Michael Stevens:It works, yeah, it works really well.

38:55Hannah Fry:Amazing. I can see how that might be very difficult to make it float in that orientation.

38:59Michael Stevens:It's hard to get it to float in this very vertical rabbit position, but you're right. What if there was just like a giant glob of mercury in it? I think that's absolutely perfect for a child's bath toy. And you move it this way. Now it's really weighted here. It's really weighted here as a duck. But yeah, you can see how we, this took us quite a while to prototype and then, you know, find a factory that could make a stuffed animal version to our specifications. But I'm very proud of it.

39:32Hannah Fry:I'm not surprised. It's very fun.

39:33Michael Stevens:Yeah. And you know, this t-shirt is also in the box. We always come up with apparel. And so this one is, it's our take on a spring break t-shirt. It's not senior frogs. It's senior inks. Woo, party time. And it's got a recipe on it for party punch, which on a lot of these shirts, it's like a margarita recipe. But this is actually a recipe for how to take uranium ore and process it into yellow cake. And that's only half the recipe. The other half tells you how to then enrich that uranium. You haven't included that half now? We've included that half because there's like no risk. Enriching uranium is not something that a hobbyist can just do at home because their shirt told them how to.

40:14Michael Stevens:You need access to centrifuges that only state governments have the information about and the money to build and the experts to run. And today they don't even really use centrifuges. They use lasers. and this is the old-fashioned recipe. But I just love making things that force people to go, oh, what's that shirt? And you're like, oh yeah, it's got this recipe for party punch. And then they read it and they go, wait, that's not a cocktail. Well, it sort of is a cocktail in a way.

40:43Hannah Fry:It's just a kind of more atomically potent cocktail.

40:49Michael Stevens:Well, yeah. I mean, yellow cake is not like more radioactive than the uranium ore that came out of the ground. You haven't enriched it at all. It's still, you know, 99.3 % uranium-238. But it's easier to transport because it weighs less. It is more concentrated in the sense that the rock contains dozen of elements, but the yellow cake only contains two, uranium and oxygen. And of course, once you've got the yellow cake, you can more easily start enriching the uranium. And, you know, the process, again, it feels weird to share how it's done, but no one can really do this. I think you shoot the yellow cake with fluorine gas, which is really reactive.

41:35Michael Stevens:And it rips the uranium off and probably burns the oxygen. And then you're left with uranium hexafluoride. And that's a gas that you can spin in a centrifuge. And then you can separate the different uranium atoms by their weight because some of them are lighter than others and some are heavier because of how many neutrons are in them. And you want to then pick out just the most unstable radioactive uranium-235 ones. Now it's enriched and what's left is called depleted uranium.

42:07Hannah Fry:And this is the point when the American government are onto you.

42:11Michael Stevens:Exactly. Exactly. Any kind of enrichment is against the law in the United States, even though you only need to enrich to like 3 % uranium-235 to have something for a nuclear power plant. You need to go higher for nuclear submarine or battleship engines, not battleship aircraft carriers. But you need to go up even higher to get into the weapons grade area. and it doesn't matter because any amount of enrichment, you're breaking the law. So, you know, don't even try. However, it exists as an idea and knowledge is power and knowledge allows us to be wiser. So you can wear the shirt in case you ever forget.

42:54Michael Stevens:And you're like, oh, shoot, exactly how much hydrogen peroxide do I need to use? What's the target pH for precipitating out yellow cake?

43:01Hannah Fry:Now, you know, now, you know, now, you know, now, you know.

43:05Michael Stevens:Yeah, basically. So that's a taste of the kinds of things that I get to do. And I love it. I love it. And I love that there are so many people out there who also find this kind of stuff exciting, because I don't think anyone else was going to make a periodic snail pin or a shirt that shows you how to process uranium ore. I couldn't find one.

43:23Hannah Fry:No, I think you really definitely identified a gap in the market, Michael. And goodness knows the market is glad you exist. I quite want one. Where's mine? I want one in the post.

43:32Michael Stevens:Well, yeah, you know what? I'll sign you up. I'll just get you a subscription. Send me where you want me to send it, and we'll get you one every season. Why not? I mean, you do wind up with a lot of shirts, you know? After five years, you're like, dang, I've got 20 shirts. So that's the only kind of shirt I wear.

43:50Hannah Fry:There's no need to ever buy clothes anymore. I'm here for it.

43:53Michael Stevens:That's what I say. We did do a Mobius scarf last season instead of a shirt, which was a scarf that had that twist so you could unzip the scarf and it didn't become two

44:04Hannah Fry:scarves it became one larger scarf amazing okay well that that i think concludes our podcast expedition for today into the a little a little dip into the designer mind of uh of michael seaman's um if you have any questions that you would like us to answer or anything else that you want us to send in any suggestions for other borderline illegal recipes that michael can have printed onto shirts, then you can send them in to us, the rest is science at goalhanger.com.

44:30Michael Stevens:And you can join our newsletter at the rest is dot com slash science.

44:35Hannah Fry:We are going to be back next Wednesday slash Thursday, depending on what country you live in with another edition of Field Notes and on Monday slash Tuesday with our normal episode.

44:47Michael Stevens:We'll see you then.

44:48Hannah Fry:We need to simplify that message, I think, somehow, don't we?

44:51Michael Stevens:I think so. I think we just say like next time. I don't know.

44:53Hannah Fry:Next time. Next time.

44:54Michael Stevens:Yeah. Good idea. see you later specifically when it's up to you right you're free you're free to make yellow cake you're free to listen to us on friday if you want the point of podcasting isn't it really

45:05Hannah Fry:ultimately yeah