Bak 2 Skool 03: The Internet

This episode of the very online show seems a little different!

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With Dan’s Twitch streams. He seemed to know more now

Al Gore better come up at least once.

I refuse to believe Dan legitimately asked "if I cut a data cord, would I see something moving?" I simply refuse.

@bisonhero: Oh my!

Each router a packet travels through is called a hop. You can watch where a packet travels by using something like trace route in your command line.

"tracert google.com" for example. You can see each hop that packet takes and how long it takes to go from one to another.

No one can hear you scream at Jeff.

voidburger edit's really seal in the flavor of dan's insanity

Neil Young is in fact wrong, or lying for profit. The CD format (16 bit 44.1 KHz) was designed specifically after the limitations of human hearing. There is no point in distributing content to end users in a "better" format than that. It wastes bandwidth and it wastes storage space, and in some cases sounds worse.

Here are some choice quotes from well renowned audio engineer Chris Montgomery. The original essay is unfortuntately not available anymore.

https://robert.accettura.com/blog/2012/03/16/the-case-against-24-bit-192khz-music/

If you're taking suggestions, I'd love to hear Dan try to explain how he thinks digestion works. Does he know how his taco bell turns into energy? Impossible.

Dan sounds so much like his dad being so obsessed over the part where you can't "see" the internet.

"How have you never went to jail." is a very good Dan Question

Jeff confidently saying sharks don't just chew on transatlantic cables when they totally do was funny.

@bisonhero: To be fair, with a good enough microscope you would be able to see the electrons move.

As a network engineer, I was ready to cringe a bit. That 5 minute video was good in broad strokes, but wrong in some big ways. I think this is telling me that there's a market for better explanations of this stuff.

Jeff not knowing that sound needs to travel through air was surprising to me

Ok also Dan needs to have atmosphere re-explained to him - he really seems to think it is strictly the barrier that astronauts have to penetrate to re enter earth, and thinks the air he breathes is something different.

And we gotta have a 'how computers work' episode.

Might be worth re-visiting space for a minute to explain to Dan that "the atmosphere" isn't a protective bubble in the sky around Earth, it's literally just the air.

@desktopman: Not really. The whole point of quantum physics as applied to electrons is that you can 'see' them move. You can extrapolate a trend or possibility of their movement. But if you 'see' one, the movement of that particular electron would be greatly altered by you 'looking at' it.

Here's a show suggestion: Beer.

Jeff's a craft beer guy, and Dan steals schooners from the bar. And it's deceptively simple, but when you get into what malting actually is, how starch conversion works, how microorganisms are bred and used... I think it's interesting when you look a little bit into brewing science.

@desktopman: Unfortunately, seeing electrons with the most powerful microscopes is not possible. The microscopes use electrons to bounce of the surfaces of materials to view them which is why the can be used to view atoms, in very special circumstances. Microscopes are limited by what is used to create an image, so a standard light microscope has a smaller resolution than an electron microscope because light waves are much much bigger than electrons, by about nine orders of magnitude. You would need a microscope than images with something much smaller than an electron to image electrons, and as far as science has progressed, these microscopes do not exist. Sorry.

Just from this series alone we can see how much of a total crap shoot it is when things go from visible and tangible to abstract. It continues to be harrowing and fascinating.

The secret best show is all the reactions we don't get to hear from the editors as they go through all the footage first. Also I love that Dan's hypothetical explanation of the internet to someone over 100 years ago is basically just the telegraph.

As far as subjects I know Dan has admitted plenty of times to knowing nothing about, it's cars. It would be a great way to touch thermodynamics, petroleum and emissions, transmission, and the mind boggling action of internal combustion engines. Plus a bonus link back to electricity with electric motors.

A juicy one would be "medieval times" because that subject is thick with misconceptions and myths but might get a bit too spicy if not researched properly.

We can get schooners here still, we used to refer to them as "fishbowls". They generally just give you the glass afterwards for the exact reason Dan is stating. I was always curious if t hey were just not washable.

@thundawear: This was edited by Jan, not me! I'm only on The Very Online Show, fyi!

8000000 1s and 0s in a megabyte, that's my answer

Since Dan asked,

1 Megabyte = 1,000 Kilobytes

1 Kilobyte = 1,000 Bytes

1 Byte = 8 bits

A bit is a digit. A zero or one.

So 1 Megabyte is 1,000 x 1,000 x 8 or 8,000,000 bits - that's eight million ones-and-zeroes.

Jeff's chalk microphone stand is A+, every person involved in adding it deserves a raise.

also, the submarine's saw blade spun the wrong way.

CARBON DEOXIDE!

Topic Ideas:

Pizza. Dinosaurs. Vaccines. Plastic. Bees. Money. The Water Cycle. Lasers. Music. Beer. Animation. Artificial Intelligence. Farming. Submarines.

Innernet

In terms of counting bytes for binary systems (the ones and zeroes), 1 megabyte is actually 1024 kilobytes, not 1000 as some have mentioned here.

How does bakalar not know what a megabyte is?

One day they will go into wave-particle duality and minds will be blown.

And it's probably worth going into information theory to understand how 1/0 are stored, transmitted and processed.

Jeff didn’t say where to suggest ideas for future episodes, and I doubt any staff read past the first few handful of comments (if at all), but my suggestion would be to do a “Sex Ed” episode just because that would be rife with hilarity from all possible angles!

Also, I can’t believe neither of them noticed or commented on Vint’s last name being Cerf and how we “surf” the internet…!

Oh, also, if anyone involved in the production of this does read my comments, ducking the video audio whenever Jeff or Dan speak over it is super annoying for me as a viewer; it wasn’t as bad this episode as Jeff seemed to be more proactively pausing for discussion, but it was really bad the first two episodes whenever an offhanded comment would be made.

Thanks for another brilliant episode. Having been out of education for a decade now, I feel like I am actually learning and relearning concepts I haven't really dug into for years. My favourite of the new shows by a mile, and great to have Dan back on GB where he belongs.

Dan might've been interested to know that the "ARPA" that ARPANET was named for later changed their acronym to DARPA, which he'd recognise from the documentary Metal Gear Solid.

You touched on it in this ep with the no sound in space thing, but Sound could be a good topic. I feel like the basics of sound waves are very tangible and easy to relate to things you can see (like a guitar string or a slinky stretched out), and fun to think about.

@zanny: but a mebibyte is no?

I'd say Dan knows a lot about this topic.

Jeff pulled a Dan with the no sound in space deal

I'm still annoyed by the whole renaming to kibibyte and mebibyte thing. Multiples of 2 in binary to represent how computers actually work is so much nicer than boring decimal. =[

However, my annoyance aside, the industry did officially change the definition of kilobyte to be 1000 bytes, and megabyte to be 1000^2 bytes, etc. to keep it in line with the metric system. Microsoft still uses the old way in Windows file management, but the previous poster wasn't wrong.

Officially, yes, but it hasn't caught on for everyone.

god voidburger's editing for the mcgruber bit is 10/10

@cuuniyevo:

A quick Google search before I posted did show a chart for both decimal and binary ways of counting, wasn't aware that was a recently adopted standard. Strange. Using numbers like 256, 512, 1024, etc is so ingrained in me both in what I learned years ago and using them for texture size standards, oh well. Also, haven't heard of kibibyte and mebibyte even before. I guess I learned something new today, thanks! :D

CARBON DEOXIDE! DIABITTUS!

Bubble cloud? Bumbaclot

As a working IT professional who's job it is to launch and keep websites on the internet, this episode hurt me. I'd say this episode could have benefitted from asking one of the engineers working on Giant Bomb dot com to explain in a bit more detail and answer and correct some statements.

Nice try anyway Dan and Jeff! I can't wait to here about how seeding tournament brackets work.